Noah's Ark from Marxchivist

My interest in the debate really did not spring from a desire to tell others what I thought of the decision to award a quality badge to an organisation such as Noah’s Ark but to raise the issue of what we as learners and educators (particularly in museum settings) consider to be good learning and education and the problems we have in over-categorising learning, for example, separating Science and Non-Science (e.g. Creationism belongs in Religious Education not Science). To avoid repeating myself, I have posted my contribution to this debate below but it can also be read in the list archives here.

This debate has also reminded me that long ago I promised some posts on museums as sacred spaces, and as such I have thought an awful lot about it but not yet blogged about it. This might be considered a prelude, then. Can museums cope with presenting Knowledge as Belief as well as Belief as Knowledge?

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Message sent Thursday 29 July 2010.

Dear all,

I have read this debate with an enormous amount of interest, not for the points about whether Noah’s Ark is a good or bad thing (however you decide to decide this) but for the problem it has raised over how we go about categorising our information into science and non-science. I have very many scientist friends and family, most of them always questioning what exactly it is we _know_ from empirical measurement and observation and what exactly it is we don’t know and just estimate or guess at. And yet the uncertainties of modern western science are not always presented to the public in whatever forum (and we don’t really question this).

Where subjects like creationism (yet another -ism many learning providers deal poorly with of whatever persuasion) ‘fit in’, is to me a non-issue. Fora should exist where scientific, evolutionary elements of human and earth history are discussed with creationisms, beyond the nutsy approach taken by Noah’s Ark. I am sure they have existed in some places, why don’t we see or hear more of them so sites like Noah’s Ark can be shown up for what they really are? We don’t need to patronise all members of the public, young or old, by worrying that they are going to be misled even if they read misleading information.

Where we came from is a fundamental question we have all asked, particularly as children. Empirical science does not know everything and there is no capacity to know what you don’t know. All those unknown unknowns. Similarly, the kind of biblical creationism we most often hear about in the media is only one (and often skewed) interpretation of a world view held by people past and present; what about all the other creation stories (see Sumerian for example), some of which echo has later been discovered through the theory of evolution, or theories of evolution, should that be?

Learning and education quality marks are subjective, no matter how many guidelines and parameters you set, as the subject matter is inescapable. I cannot see how you can be neutral about the subject of learning. If one was to give the cliched example of, ‘what about if the BNP had an education programme’… etc… what would those respondents who said that the assessment of learning quality should be neutral think then? Why do we have to think so mechanically about learning and its categories? Surely learning outside the classroom should break out of the constraints of the National Curriculum which itself has been shown to be a more than imperfect way of teaching in many subjects, overly compartmentalised, and lacking the encouragement of individual thought and analysis in some areas.

In short, what this debate so far has shown me is that what really needs discussing is not whether creationism as science is a wolf in sheep’s clothing but whether as learners and educators ourselves we have stopped to question our massive assumptions about both.

I suspect this is a gauntlet that no one will pick up ;-)

Press release issued by the University of Glasgow on 24th March 2010

New conservation centre preserves the fabric of the nation

Preserving the fabric of the nation’s treasures for future generations, a new textile conservation centre is to be established at the University of Glasgow.

The Textile Conservation Centre Foundation (TCCF) and the University of Glasgow have agreed to found the new teaching and research facility – the only resource of its kind in the UK – in the University’s Robertson Building.

Professor Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute for Art History and Head of the Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow, said: “This is a tremendous opportunity both for the University and also for the conservation profession in Scotland, the UK and internationally. Expertise, facilities and the wealth of the collections make Glasgow the ideal place for the kind of interdisciplinary research and study which the centre will promote.”

Peter Longman, Deputy Chairman of the Textile Conservation Centre Foundation said: “There was such concern over the closure of the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester that over the last 18 months we have been approached by several institutions anxious to work with us to continue aspects of its work. We have considered a number of options, but the combination of Glasgow with its world class University and History of Art Department and the unrivalled collections in and around the City proved an irresistible location.

“This is a unique opportunity to build on the UK’s reputation in textile conservation training and related research; we look forward to contributing to its future success in Glasgow.”

The new centre for Textile Conservation, History and Technical Art History will focus on multidisciplinary object-based teaching and research that encompasses conservation and the physical sciences as well as art history, dress and textile history. It will be the first time that conservation training has been undertaken in Scotland and, combined with the University’s recent developments in technical art history, the new centre will have national and international impact.

The new Centre will inherit existing library intellectual property and analytical equipment from the TCCF, so that staff and future students will be able to draw on the key physical and intellectual assets built up over more than 30 years. Students will also have the opportunity to work with some of the best textile collections in the world held by Glasgow Museums, the National Museums of Scotland and the University’s own Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery. New academic posts will be created and the Centre will work closely with the Foundation to establish a global research network in textile conservation, textile and dress history and technical art history.

The first student intake is planned for September 2010 offering a 2-year Masters in Textile Conservation and a 1-year Masters in Dress and Textile History as well as opportunities for doctoral research. These new courses will join the existing Masters programme in Technical Art History, Making and Meaning, as part of the Centre. The Foundation is also offering a limited number of bursaries in the first years of the textile conservation programme and a fundraising campaign is already underway to raise further funds for the new development including additional studentships and new research projects. Potential students who would like to receive updates on the development and course details should email Ailsa Boyd at the University of Glasgow at: a.boyd@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk or t.mccabe@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

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.

It is good to see that online methods of communication will keep some essence of this excellent institution alive.

I concur with your thoughts. I don’t think Wikimedia is, however, anything other than extremely naive not to have thought things through a bit better. That they couldn’t even respond promptly (allegedly) to original complaints by NPG is highly unprofessional and this in itself has lowered them in my esteem.

By and large I think the NPG’s response is balanced and correct. We should all be well aware by now that someone has to foot the bill for this quality of digitisation and delivery. It occurs to me that the ‘free, free’ mob is just as naive as WM in this regard.

Perhaps Wikimedia Foundation Inc could do what they did for Wikipedia last year and have a high profile campaign to raise money, but specifically for organisations to digitise and make available some of their content by way of return? I also don’t see any reason why WM needs to host such high res images; a decent image doesn’t have to be art catalogue quality and a link to the zoomify image on the organisation’s own website would surely suffice in the bid to ‘open up access’.

There is an active discussion going on on the Museum Computer Group and also the Museum Copyright Group which some have lamented as indicative of the lack of cohesion inherent in the museum/heritage/cultural sector on issues of access vs. the need for income to fund projects.

Some have said, well as they are publicly funded, they should make all this available for free. But who should pay? The very people who advocate this radical stance must enjoy taking their wage packets home at the end of the month and are not, as far as I can see, willing to give up their jobs for the greater good?

And in any case should we now question the motives of Wikimedia administrators who say they are doing this for the greater good of providing the sum of human wisdom to the world for free?

Whatever the legal rights and wrongs of all this two things are clear: in all acts, even ones purporting to be for the greater good need to be honourable and this one clearly was not, whether through naivity or not. Secondly, those who campaign for absolute open access to everything for free really need to start coming up with new arguments for how this could be made possible, assuming for now that the State is not going to suddenly decide that this is more important to support than propping up corrupt banks and over-bloated businesses.

Edit: I have just received an email from an anonymous person from Wikipedia Belgium wishing to point out the exact difference between Wikimedia Foundation Inc who ‘own’ (is this the right word?) Wikipedia and other projects like Wikimedia Commons. I have slightly adjusted the phrasing of the paragraph above regarding fundraising to clarify. I had appreciated the difference but had not expressed it clearly enough before so I hope this helps.

I was rather disappointed to have received this response to my post privately, which itself misunderstood what I was suggesting, as it means I cannot publish it here with my response, but I can say that I hope this anonymous individual will maintain a correspondence to make very clear a) what his/her opinion is and b) how projects like Wikimedia Commons can work more openly _with_ organisations like NPG so conflict like this doesn’t have to arise again. I can say, however, that the individual cited the Bridgeman Art Library vs Corel case in the US in his/her response, to which I replied that the ruling does not apply as a UK precedent as many of us who have been involved in collections digitisation realised a long time ago.

…
I have since received a further response and will be respecting the individual’s privacy as one can understand that in the current circumstances they would prefer it this way. I would, however, like to thank him/her for expressing their own personal thoughts about this case. I have been reminded that the nebulous network of people like Wikimedians don’t always in themselves agree about the best way to do things and there has been disappointment amongst other uses in the way the NPG images were reused, which were contrary to the terms and conditions NPG applied to their content. There is also a genuine desire to work more closely with organisations to make their content available through such initiatives as WM Commons and there have been examples of this, e.g. Wikipedia Loves Art and Wiki Loves Art. While content is usually sought on a gratis basis, there have been instances where illustrations have been paid for, and these are supported by the Philip Greenspun project.

So it’s been good to get some of these things aired. Wikimedia Inc has challenged the way we present our information in all its projects and it is perhaps not a bad thing that this conflict, which we all hope can be resolved amicably and quickly, has happened as it will at least give people and organisations pause for thought when undertaking digitisation projects, asking perhaps more obviously, who are we doing this for, why, and is this the best way?
Edit

I have recently contributed two reviews, and added them to two groups I run. The first is a short response to Shah ‘Abbas at the British Museum and the second is in response to Byzantium at the Royal Academy.

Read response to Shah Abbas in the Iran and Persian Culture group.

Read response to Byzantium in the Medieval and Byzantine Objects group.

Please note: For some reason my paragraphing is not preserved and so the Byzantium review might be a little hard-going. If you happen to read it and would prefer to read it in a more sensible format, please leave a comment here, or on Creative Spaces.

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

Creative Spaces does. No poking, no sheep throwing, no nonsense.

The two posts below and the several comments are enough to set out the different views of Creative Spaces, or the National Museums Online Learning Project. I am not going to respond to the various criticisms leveled at the project as they do a good job of speaking for themselves. This is about my experience so far, over the last two weeks or so of actually using the site. Many of the buggy features have already been pointed out by Tom and by and large I agree with those (strange URLs and registering procedure, the lack of a big fat button to JOIN and the lack of an advanced search are probably my immediate problems).


.What have I created?

My first Group is the Medieval and Byzantine Objects group. It currently has four members including myself and the premise behind it is to build up a network of people, collections and objects who take an interest in medieval and byzantine artefacts and the history they can provide. My next plan with it is to begin commenting on objects in the group and inviting dialogue with others, whoever they may be.

My first Notebook is the Travels around Italy notebook. Another passion of mine, both personal and professional, I wanted to find out how widely ‘Italy’ existed across the 9 collections represented in Creative Spaces so far. So many of our national museums’ foundation collections derived from world exploration and also the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries that I wonder how much our feelings and attitudes towards Italy and Italians have been conditioned by this aspect of British history. Indeed, it was the subject of my MA dissertation, and there remains a lot of work to be done on how early collecting, particularly deriving from Italy, have shaped British museums. As well as adding images and descriptions of objects to my notebook, I have also added a link to my flickr collection of photographs of my travels in Italy, and a blog post (‘note’) about what ideas we have about travel in Italy, including the stories that are brought back.

My second Notebook is called The Corrupting Sea notebook, inspired by the modern classic study of pre-modern Mediterranean history by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, (Oxford, 2000, pbk 2005). This is my ‘play-thing’ notebook. I want to be able to act out some of my ideas about the significance of the Mediterranean as a state of mind, an ideology, a way of breaking down unnecessary barriers. Much of this has been inspired by my own research on a comparative history of medieval southern Italy as well as the work by Horden and Purcell, Fernand Braudel and other scholars who have used the Mediterranean rather than political or national boundaries to frame their work. I would very much like anyone with a feel for the Mediterranean to contribute to this notebook, whether from the point of view as tourist, sun-seeker, scholar, curator or scientist.

.Why I like Creative Spaces

Everything that I have described above, I have wanted to do for ages. I have thought about setting up different blogs, forums or utilising existing networks such as facebook or flickr but none of these options enabled me to have the direct contact with collections that I craved. Granted I am a specialist in museum collections and how they are documented and interpreted, but that does not make me any less of a user than someone simply interested in finding out more, and wanting to talk about something they are interested in, whether over a long period of time, or just as a one-off. None of them provided a good space in which I could also get in touch with like-minded people.

Creative Spaces does. No poking, no sheep throwing, no nonsense.

I didn’t actually know I wanted something like Creative Spaces until it was announced. I had a sense of the immense value many people hold in being able to understand museum collections across the boundaries of institutions from my own work on a digitisation project (Hantsphere) which formed part of a small network of other sites (Sense of Place South East) with online collections. It was this that excited the ‘silver surfers’ I trained in basic web skills the most.

The current limitations and gaps notwithstanding, the design is clean, suited to the content and makes me want to come back on a regular basis. A simple bookmark in my browser’s toolbar allows to me login without any extraneous effort and I intend to do so.

.What will I do with Creative Spaces?

Apart from my own personal interest, learning and amusement, I would use Creative Spaces for teaching projects (particularly for distance learners), for creating networks of enthusiasts and academics in areas which are not served well by existing groups and societies and to follow up museum visits. Granted, only a minute proportion of collections from these institutions are represented here but as their documentation and digitisation projects continue, this can only improve. Similarly, I should very much like to see other museums examine their collections management databases and see if they too could one day participate. There is no room for exclusivity here.

.Why it has come at the right time

Because, for all the hot air often expelled by my cultural technologist colleagues (including myself at times) something’s finally happened, Reg.

I would like to see the relationship develop more as that between supporter/donor and custodian, rather than just producer and consumer.

In response, Collections Trust made an interim response. And here is a summary my response to the interim response. I attempted to take the long view, looking back at my own experiences with digitised collections and other content. My full reply and Nick Poole’s (CEO Collections Trust) response can be read in the list archives of jiscmail’s Museum Computer Group list.

The report is to be highly commended, in my view. It conveys most of the must crucial problems that cultural organisations have faced in the 7-8 years of digitisation, of whatever form, but particularly collections, of museum, library and archive content. However, this is a positive report which also brings to inescapable attention the strength of digital culture in the UK and the fundamental role Culture has to play in a Digital Britain.

While I have significant problems with the way in which the language of cultural politics, for want of a better term, is so severely entrenched in economics, these are more philosophical than practical. If we are to be understanding our work as part of a ‘Digital Economy’ then we need to be very clear about a) what economy means and b) what is the quid pro quo?

However, I do admire the persistence in using the kind of language that the current government seems to understand to the exclusion of all else. In other words, to make them listen, one has to speak in their own tongue.

Nevertheless, I hope there remains a strong sentiment within the sectors concerned that cultural heritage is important for the ‘well-being’ (alas, another buzz-term which is just about to be abused in the Education sector) of a civilised society for its own sake particularly in relation to promoting cultural organisations as ‘safe spaces’ within which to better understand social and political issues. As collections-holding institutions were themselves born out of a desire to conserve the sum of human knowledge through papers, artefacts and books, what better raison d’etre in the Digital Age.

My few specific points of criticism and questions are:

.Use of case-studies

I hope a fuller report might highlight more non-national projects, and also be more open about the legacy of, for example, the content creation side of People’s Network and what is being done to remedy this. So much fantastic information was digitised which still remains online but difficult to access in any meaningful way. However, I do know that in their localities especially, these resources are being used in the kind of digital skills training that is referred to in the report. It was certainly something I started up immediately after the launch of the Hantsphere project (a New Opportunities Fund project), itself part of, an albeit loose, alliance of projects across South East England (http://www.sopse.org.uk/). There are so many other examples.

.Digital rights, income, access

This, for me, was the most important part of the report. The plea for a more balanced approach is essential, indeed it is fundamental to creating the kind of digital content that is meaningful and has high impact, particularly in the light of then creating APIs and using other methods of exposing content to WWW more efficiently.

I would like to see overt and practical support for small to large organisations to adopt micro-donations as a way of providing an income. See what it did for Wikipedia and the US Presidential Election of Barack Obama.

I think this will not only provide more income than many current IP and reproduction protocols (which themselves need review) but will also improve and strengthen the relationship between users and organisations.

I would like to see the relationship develop more as that between supporter/donor and custodian, rather than just producer and consumer.

.More practical grass-roots support for smaller organisations

All organisations, particularly smaller ones need practical help, both in person and online if they are to succeed (not just survive) in the so-called Digital Economy. Yes, strategy and consultations are important. Yes they often get unfairly demonised as wastes of time. However, if strategy is more visible than action, no one will take their roles and responsibilities as seriously as they perhaps should.

Particularly with regard to the legacy problems of early digitisation projects, where organisations did not sustain staff or other resources to maintain a resource, this kind of support for the ‘core staff’ who are left holding the baby is really very important.

If standards and a good /brand/ are so important then the best way to achieve these is to provide the requisite support at a national level.

ICOMOS-UK’s new website, based around a blog, is now live. After a marathon month of literally pulling up the hand-break on this web project and changing direction, a completely new and different approach was taken to help the organisation make the most of the web and its audience: quickly and all on a shoe-string [note: what on earth are 'shoe-strings' in this sense?] Without going into too much detail about the background to this, the original plan for a redeveloped website, overseen and directed by me, especially the creation of new content, but technically put together by a company who had promised to sponsor the project, fell through.

I was left with two choices: persevere with the old site: static, of its time, impossible to edit by office staff and members, rigid templates; or start from scratch and grab every useful Web 2.0 and social networking tool going to create something genuinely new and original. As my own reputation was on the line, there was no way I wasn’t going to rise to the second challenge.

It is worth saying at this point that I am much more interested and knowledgeable about web content and how it is composed, than I am in web design (though have very particular ideas about how this should be done, I like other people to do it) so the latter was not something I was looking forward to. So this post doesn’t become an onary read, I am presenting my maverick’s attempt at getting this site together as a recipe. A few generalities first:

The aim of the project was to a) raise the profile of ICOMOS-UK in the wider world, particularly among audiences within and without heritage and conservation, who had not heard of it, or who thought of it as a lofty and cliquey orgnisation; b) to establish an easy-to-update international news service and c) encourage more people to join ICOMOS through the UK committee and get these members to contribute.

My personal aims were to a) create a content-driven website, i.e. content dictates navigation and design and not the other way around and b) to create something that is sustainable for at least the next 1-2 years and editble by non-specialists who work for the Secretariat or volunteer members. One of the things I did not have time to implement were individual user logins but tried to ensure individual’s names were included in posts where relevant. Patrick Steel’s recent article in Museums Journal (August 2008, p. 28) cited the head of the Guardian’s blogging team on the importance of the personal touch in blogging, on p. 31:

“The focus on the individual’s point of view can benefit organisations, says Kevin Anderson, head of bloggin and interaction at the Guardian. “People don’t engage with institutions,” he says.
“They engage with other people.” And he warns: “Dry, press-release-style posts are diametrically opposed to blogging. The benefit is in putting out a human face and being less institutional. The biggest challenge is not that you will be overwhelmed by negative comments, but that you will feel lonely.”

Most of the current content was authored by me on behalf of ICOMOS-UK and I hope that I have managed to convey a personal element in my writing and use of illustrations (thank you also to all those flickr community members who allowed their Creative Commons photos to be used). I included the contributor’s name prominently in stuff they submitted, see for example: Barry Joyce’s Book Review on the diary of an Indian conservationist and Leonor Medeiros’ Student Work Placement report on Mining Heritage in the UK and Portugal.

Owing to the tight schedule, putting this together took me right up to the wire (31 July) no evaluation work can take place as yet. WordPress.com use Google Analytics to provide statistics. Apart from external feedback this will have to do for now. I have a summary of usage of the old site up to last week for comparison. I will be keeping an eye on how things go.

At this stage, I would very warmly like to thank ICOMOS-UK’s web hosts, ICUK, whose patient help and assistance made the transition from the old site to the new one, hosted at WordPress.com but requiring clever redirection, happen. They are quite honestly some of the most helpful web tech people I have worked with. I would also like to thank Tom Goskar, who co-writes this blog, whose superior knowledge about such things as .htaccess files made me ask the right questions at the right time!

Ingredients

Content (from ICOMOS-UK members, UK representatives of International Scientific Committees – like foreign correspondents, news on World Heritage and from the other national ICOMOS Committees, event and publication reviews, consultations, campaigns)

Blog (WordPress.com: it had to be a hosted solution to ensure some form of sustainability after I left; WordPress’s updates are frequent and some ‘themes’ need rebuilding every time; it had to be easy for non-specialists to use)

Photo-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Flickr.com: see a first attempt at using Flickr’s geo-referencing facility in the London Views Project)

Document-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Scribd.com: all ICOMOS-UK public documents are, and hopefully more older ones will be, made available via Scribd; the latest document is made available via an RSS widget on the home page)

Presentation-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on SlidesShare.net: see some examples which make up the Summary Proceedings of the Action on Skills Training and Education for the Historic Environment Conference)

Video-sharing (ICOMOS-UK on Vimeo.com: only one film at the moment but hopefully future opportunities might bring more, see the Norwich: People and Places feature; I also used Vodpod to highlight latest films/videos of interest or made by/for ICOMOS-UK)

Navigation, RSS and other widgets (A well-desgined WordPress.com theme: I customised Neo-Sapien by Small Potato, can display a number of widgets in the side bars)

Sidebar 1:

Latest stories (5 most recent blog posts)
ICOMOS Documentation Centre RSS (Latest post)
World Heritage Centre News RSS (Latest post)

Sidebar 2:

Categories (I rephrased this to ‘I’m looking for‘; categories on this blog class the type of story being posted: the first part of content-driven design and navigation, see Features & Reviews category; some stories occupy more than one category making it more discoverable than ‘standard’ navigation would allow)

Tag cloud (I rephrased this to ‘Browse theme‘; each story carries a set of tags, again allowing multiple methods of discovery, see World Heritage tag or urban tag)

Archives (Standard WordPress offering, browse by month, funnily enough July 2008 has been the busiest month for new posts!)

Sidebar 3:

Search box
Latest document from Scribd (RSS)
Latest film on Vodpod
Links (One category of links: Our supporters)

Static content navigation

I wanted to keep static content to a minimum and therefore reserved it for long-term information such as what the organisation does (e.g. Our Work, Who We Are and Membership). In addition I have created an index page to in-depth features to which many of the blog posts lead (In Focus) as a sop to those who prefer ‘traditional’ navigation.

In sum, for a web project with high aspirations but lacking the appropriate resources at the moment, this was an experiment in creativity more than technical know-how. Comments I have received so far include:

This all looks very good and I am optimistic that this will receive positive feedback. It should make a huge contribution to ICOMOS-UK’s vision of being a global hub for conservation work.

“I’m impressed – just what we need! There’s a lot more inforamtion, and it all looks much more friendly and accessible… a website set up by somebody who is actually interested in the subject matter is a great deal more appealing.