Bi-weekly GLAMtech links, February 11 2018
Twitter and Medium are the online spaces where I follow the latest in how digital impacts museums, libraries and other GLAMs. So I thought I’d regularly share some of the most interesting and useful links and briefly comment on why I think they are just that. The intended reader is my team and colleagues working with digital transformation of museums in Sweden (and the wider world — I’m writing this in English). Another reader is myself, a sort of a links collection to return to when Delicious is long dead and gone.
This first post covers the last two weeks, give or take a day or two. Topics range from analytics to linked data, chatbots to API best practices, and aggregator front-ends to data visualisation, so I hope you find something that piques your interests!
How the Victoria & Albert Museum uses digital analytics to help improve their site
Eva Liparova, Product Manager at the V&A, interviews Chris Unitt, on how he’s worked with customising Google Analytics tracking to catch not the metrics that are easy to catch, but the ones that are useful. This is for you who have mastered web analytics 101 and are looking to advance.
The Emoji Museum — a chatbot experiment
Swedish #musetech colleague Aron from the Nordic Museum shares his work and code on a museum chatbot. It’s sadly quite rare in Sweden for museums to share experiments and prototype results in the open so this sets a good precedent. Yesterday a colleague of mine remarked on how when he’s waiting for the bus and feeling bored he cheershimself up with the help of the Emoji Museum Twitterbot.
The source code for the new in-beta front-end of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The DPLA beta is a pure JasvaScript front-end. It’s main data source is the DPLA API so I would think/guess/hope that it would be fairly easy to plug in another cultural heritage API that spits out JSON-LD. Worth a try at least if you’re thinking of redoing your own search service and don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. This would inlude my own team the National Heritage Board where one of the services we offer is the Swedish Open Cultural Heritage platform.
A comparison of cultural heritage APIs and lessons learned from them
There’s a lot written on API design, API developer outreach and API documenation. But not so much on those offered by the GLAM-sector. This Master’s Thesis from Jolan Wuyts is based on his internship at my former work place Europeana and should be useful to anyone working with APIs at their GLAM workplace.
American Art Collaborative (AAC). Linked Open Data (LOD) Initiative, Overview and Recommendations for Good Practices
This good practices document (PDF), written by Eleanor E Fink, describes how the AAC went about setting up their Linked Open Data Initiative. It’s thorough and clear and can also serve as a general introduction to anyone in the GLAM-sector on what Linked Open Data is and how it can be implemented.
A data visualisation overview table from the Financial Times
My own team is currently in the phase of analysing the outcomes of a round of surveying and interviewing Swedish museums on their practices when it comes to using digital technology in collections publishing, exhibitions and learning and how that fits into the larger strategy. So these may come in handy. When it comes to publishing visualised statistics on the web I tend to look towards Datawrapper.