Mia, thanks for the comment.

You can see which museums we chose (and the number of objects currently spidered from each) at http://feeds.boxuk.com/museums/

As for ‘method for choosing them’, well, that was more a case of just looking through some of the major museum sites, and seeing if their collections data was available online in a suitable format (a common template, not hidden behind session-dependencies or form POSTs).

Re:updates; this is just a prototype at the moment, but there’s no reason we couldn’t re-spider pages (in the same way Google does) checking for changes to the data, and updating as necessary. Though I don’t have plans to do that quite yet… But yes, this is definitely a ‘workaround’ for APIs, rather than a better alternative.

Haven’t had much feedback from non-techies yet, but then we’ve only just announced it, so we’ll see!