Thank you Mike for supplying the link that I should have in my first comment!
Mike’s example from the Bolton site is for site-wide searches – in the next month or two we are will be adding a collections database.
This won’t be particularly groundbreaking in itself (it will be a basic keyword search, thumbnail galleries etc.) but as I’ve mentioned above you can easily add cut and paste dynamic content to your pages using RSS, a bit of html/css and services like Feedburner. So there may be applications for the resulting feeds that I haven’t thought of yet.
Examples can be found on any of the “What’s on” pages on the Bolton site; e.g.
http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/whatson/facetofaceexhibition17may
In this example the generated content can be seen below the Google map on the right-hand side.
If you scroll down to the bottom of that page you will see “feed keywords” which is my DIY tagging system.
After adding keywords to selected pages I did a site-wide search for them, copied the resulting feed into a Feedburner account and using a feature called Buzzboost generated some code that can be pasted onto any page relevant to that feed.
This method also works for external services: there is a Bolton-centric feed from the Portable Antiquities Service on the following page:
http://www.boltonmuseums.org.uk/whatson/archaeological-finds17apr
Probably a bit too primitive to count as a mash-up but hopefully this will give people an idea about the potential of having search feeds on their sites.
Perry