Nice one, Dan and Mike!

Some random thoughts while I wait for a compile to finish…

Which museums? I know one was the Museum of London, but what are the others, and how were they chosen?

Randomly, I’m working on a personal project that might require finding resources (images, authority records) about particular people, events and groups from many different museums and other websites and working out how to collect cohesive ‘pages’ about them so they can be further annotated and written about. I’m still at the stage of thinking about whether to display these resources within the page or link to them, so I’ll probably have a play with the scraped data soon.

One issue I’ll probably run into is that repositories or other defined single points of access might be more stable data sources (less liable to URIs changing than exhibition microsites or catalogue pages etc) but there aren’t many around, so we’re stuck with these ad hoc methods. I’ll let you know how it works for me if I get a chance to play with it before the mashed museum day.

One of my questions about this kind of stuff generally is about the stability and permanence of the data. And what about updates (additions or corrections) made to the original online record back on the museum site? Another argument for APIs for museum collections, I guess.

It would be lovely if these kinds of demonstrations led to a better understanding of the possibilities of re-usable digital data. Have you had much feedback from non-technical people – the curators, educators, researchers, general visitors, etc?