You can download PTMs of all fragments thanks to the HP Labs Antikythera Mechanism website.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Every year many thousands of objects are discovered, many of these by metal-detector users, but also by people whilst out walking, gardening or going about their daily work. Such discoveries offer an important source for understanding our past.

This website provides background information on the Portable Antiquities Scheme, news articles, events listings and access to our database of objects and images.

The new PAS website is just fantastic. Built by Dan Pett, ICT Advisor for the Scheme, upon Open Source technologies, it is everything a modern heritage data repository/provider could be. Data is enhanced through the use of 3rd party services and frameworks such as OpenCalais and Yahoo GeoPlanet.

The new website now holds a substantial number of artefact details which can allow for critical analysis on a large scale.

The database allows detailed numismatic searches as well as general searches, and provides results with XML, RSS, Atom, JSON, and CSV representations. Large photos of individual object, where available, are viewable in a lightbox directly from the results list. Data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, encouraging its reuse.

On individual artefact record pages, which are neatly laid-out, is the option to view a zoomable high resolution photograph of the object. Photos can also be downloaded. An interesting feature is the facility to leave comments on database records, which could be used for identifying objects, debating provenance, etc.

Other features include bibliographies, vocabularies, maps, conservation guides and a lot more. A lot of thought has gone into what kind of features people would find useful.

Visit the Portable Antiquities Scheme website and have an explore. If you use any PAS data for any research, be sure to let them know so they can collect statistics – the more using their data for research, the better.

A big well done to Dan for raising the bar in heritage data representation and access.

Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It produces images that can be lit from any direction, as if you had the real object in front of you. It is an excellent technique for analysing fine details on surfaces, something that has particular utility in archaeology.

The full text will be available online after the next edition of BA comes out.

The photo above is of the PTM illumination dome which I designed and built at Wessex Archaeology. You can see more details about the dome in my building a PTM illumination dome Flickr set. I have much more to say about PTM, so stay tuned.

Find out more about the Wessex Archaeology PTM rig and see interactive examples.

An increasing amount of information is only published online, and as web pages change or are deleted, we are losing an important record of our history and culture.

Head over to the Guardian to read more.

The story on Reuters claims that 14,000 photos of the artefacts will be published online in early 2010.

“I can think of no better use of our time and our resources to make the images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginning of time, available to a billion people worldwide,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a news conference at the Baghdad museum.

“Most American companies are not yet operating in Iraq, and we would like to show that it’s possible to do business in Iraq, that Iraq is an important market that will grow quickly, that it’s sufficiently stable,” he added.

Ah, so the latter quote shows some of the politics involved, but recording, cataloguing and making freely available such an important collection is surely a good thing.

The questions that arise from this news are numerous, and, just to add to the speculation, ReadWriteWeb quote Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt as saying that there will be “a few surprises“.

Will Google be releasing the raw data? Will it be structured? Are Google going to release a collections management system? Will they work closely with other museums?

Definitely one to watch.

The Wiltshire Heritage Museum library has just gone online with a digital library created in just 5 months using the controversial Google Books service.

The Library has been collecting books about the history, environment and archaeology of Wiltshire for over 150 years, and has many rare and important books in its collection of over 8000 volumes. Until now, the idea of getting the library online has been only a dream for librarian Dr Lorna Haycock. Without Google, it would have cost tens of thousands of pounds, buying a computer system, exhaustive data entry and only a few of the books could have been scanned electronically.

Museum Director, David Dawson explained that the controversial Google Books service has a ‘My Library’ facility, where you can simply click on a book that you have found on Google Books, and then add it to your own digital library. Work began in May this year to catalogue the entire library, using Google Books, and over 5,000 books have now been recorded. Many of them have already been digitised, and the full text of many can be searched online. He commented “as far as we know, we are the first library in the world to have created a digital library using the Google Books service. As an independent charity, we simply couldn’t afford to get our library online until Google Books gave us this fantastic opportunity to enable people to carry out their research online.”

The digital library has now been launched through the museum website – www.wiltshireheritage.org.uk. Everyone can now browse and search the library online – finding books that contain detailed information about where they live, or about the history of their family. Director David Dawson explains “people can then visit our library to read the real books, discovering the wealth of material that we have in our fantastic library”.

While they have not digitised the text from their books, this is a fantastic start, and clever thinking. Most of their titles can now be searched, and thanks to the Google Books digitisation programme (the ‘controversial‘ part) the content of many out-of-copyright titles can be searched or downloaded as part of the Google Books Library Project.

Visit the Wiltshire Heritage Museum Library to find out more.

And as an aside, I ought to mention the Wiltshire Heritage Museum’s YouTube channel, which, at the time of writing, does not have many views on its videos. Their short films are of excellent quality, professionally produced, and really watchable – just the right length, and many of them featuring Wiltshire’s most famous archaeologist – Time Team/Wessex Archaeology‘s Phil Harding, who is no stranger to being in front of the camera. Go there at once, and watch some of them! Or better still, visit the museum – something I’ve shamefully yet to do myself!

(note to self, visit Wiltshire Heritage Museum!)

By sourcing images and applying the principles of photogrammetry and distributed computing, the results are very impressive. They aren’t going to rival laser scanners just yet, but the animations on the Building Rome in a Day project website are impressive, and show the huge potential of this approach.

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

This particular project aims to create “sparse point clouds” to give a 3D overview of the layout of a city, and has interesting potential for interacting with and exploring a place virtually. They are running a parallel project investigating dense point clouds which looks promising, but probably won’t see any popular use for a long time due to the massive amount of processing and data storage involved (dense 3D point clouds and meshes are huge datasets).

The University of Washington project is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth project. But the difference is that with Photosynth, users have to manually create “synths” by uploading photos of a particular place. Photosynth does not allow users to tap into the millions of other images out there, which moves me to my next point.

What about the copyright implications of crowd-sourced photos? Even if just using Creative Commons licensed images, imagine what the “attribution” page would look like if hundreds of thousands of images have been used from potentially tens of thousands of photographers. I’ll be interested to see how they deal with that side of things.

But overall, this is an exciting development. There is huge potential for cultural heritage applications, especially in the areas of survey and interpretation. I will be following this project very closely.

Read more about the Museum of Computing reopening on Culture24 or their own press release for more background on the museum.

Friday 23rd May 2009 – We are delighted to announce that the Museum will be reopening in July 2009 in Swindon town centre. Our volunteers are now hard at working transforming what was previously retail units into one of the most exciting and original venues in Swindon. The museum will be located at 6-7 Theatre Square, an section of the town that has been designated a cultural area in Swindons regeneration plan. We are very grateful to Swindon Borough Council for making these premises available and to all the people who have worked so hard to make this happen.

Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

Despite the criticism from some of the more vocal members of the museum technology community, I stand by my previous post in that I can’t help but like the idea of the Creative Spaces project.

Why will people like it?

I think people (i.e. ‘normal’ users, not museums professionals per se) will like it because:

• It encourages users to interact with the museum spaces and objects within
• It fosters a sense of connection with the museum, which, in my unscientific experience, people like
• It is an online space endorsed by the museums and galleries themselves, so it’s ‘safe’
• You are free to do what you like on the site – sign up to groups, create notebooks about things you find interesting, comment on other notebooks and items within, etc.

It will, of course, only ‘work’ if a genuine community builds up around and within the website. Getting people to use it shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know the exact visitor numbers for the nine museums involved with the pilot, but it’s certainly in the millions. Something as simplistic as a sign reading “Interact with this museum online. Share your experiences on Creative Spaces.”, displayed in prominent physical as well as virtual spaces ought to do the job. Maybe a place to have an experiment with QR codes too.

Homepage

Much of the criticism (e.g. Mike Ellis, New Curator) about Creative Spaces is that people have, when faced with the homepage for the first time, not known what to do, or how it will benefit them. This is generally true. It’s hard to design the perfect homepage (believe me, I know!), but I can suggest some improvements.

Firstly, we need people to know immediately what the site is all about. Currently we have: “Connecting with your favourite Museums! Creative Spaces connects you with nine UK national museums and galleries allowing you to explore their collections, find like-minded people and create your own content.”

Maybe it could be ““Interact with museums and galleries. Upload your own experiences. Search the collections of 9 museums. Connect with like-minded people. Expand your visit online.” This explains why I might want to create an account and get involved – I don’t want to “create my own content”, I want to upload my stuff to share!

Those big buttons could do with a very short description (click to see a larger version):

(as I write this, Frankie has written echoed some of my ideas, and had some great new ones)

Should Notebooks be called Notebooks? They’re more like your own collection. Whichever way it is done, I do think that it could be a tad clearer.

URLs

However, on the sign, you would have to display a URL. It would make sense to make this a single, memorable URL. I confess to being somewhat confused as to why there are so many URLs – one for each participating insitution:

 The only difference I can see when looking at these sites is the “Popular collection items” display. Perhaps a gateway page with a single URL would be an option, say at creativespaces.info (which is available, and easy to remember)? You could select which museum you wanted to see popular items from. There are many ways of doing this – I hope the stakeholders explore some of them.

Search

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I did find the search facility to be somewhat lacking. It’s great for casually browsing objects by keyword, but like many people, once you can see the power of a cross-collection search that previously (to the best of my knowledge) didn’t exist, I want more.

I found it very hard to locate objects that have an Iron Age date, for example. If I was to use this in an educational context I’d like to see a few more options in the search, such as provenance, period, and location.

In the search results, clicking “View larger image” opens a new browser window showing the result from the institution’s own website, which in turn often requires another click to view a larger version. If this could be integrated in a better way, that would be great (but it’s a start). Maybe using a “lightbox” style effect (using jQuery, for example) to float the detail page over Creative Spaces might make it seem slightly better integrated?

RSS

I’d like to see personalised RSS feeds for notebooks and groups. This would allow me, as a slightly more tech-savvy user, to display my Creative Spaces content elsewhere, such as here on Past Thinking, or even in Facebook.

Beta & User Help Forums

If the site is going to be in “beta”, it ought to be described somewhere on the site what this means in layman’s terms. Frankie Roberto suggested needs to be some kind of help forum (like GetSatisfaction). This should be separate from the “Groups” (as it wouldn’t be about museum/gallery content, but about the website itself), that is looked after by the Creative Spaces staff. They can listen to suggestions, and inform people of forthcoming changes. Communication needs to work both ways if there is a community involved.

Conclusion

Creative Spaces is in beta. Things will change as more people use the service, and those who designed it learn how it is used, and where its limitations lie. Any amount of user testing is no match for thousands of people trying to actually use it. It’s the approach Flickr took, and some radical changes have occurred there too over the years (for good or for bad – you can’t please everybody). They listened to their users.

With a better homepage, I think this could really work. Once that is improved, and people can see straight away why they would want to use Creative Spaces, it will gain more users, and begin the evolution of the beta site into a strong, vibrant community of, as the BBC put it “Museum lovers”.

Here’s to its success!

[Update] Mike Ellis’s post on his Electronic Museum blog has a really good conversation going on in the comments. It’s really worth heading over there to catch up on who’s saying what.