[Update] I’ve had some more thoughts on Creative Spaces. Feel free to follow this post with my first follow-up.
The National Museums Online Learning Project “Creative Spaces” is a social media project that links 9 major UK museums and galleries. Currently in beta, participating institutions include the Natural History Museum, The V&A, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Royal Armouries, The Wallace Collection and the Imperial War Museum.
Explore the beta of Creative Spaces.
Creative Spaces encourages visitor interaction:
The site allows you to search all the collections at once, tag and store items in notebooks and groups, and upload your own images, videos and notes to share creative inspiration with others. This is a nonprofit, public sector project, and it’s the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way.
Visitors can create a Creative Spaces account and make “notebooks” of their favourite objects by browsing the federated collections of the nine museums, and clicking “Save to” next to the object description. I was able to, for example, create a Notebook which I called “Iron Age goodies” and quickly add a few objects to it. Objects can be tagged, which is nice. If you don’t want to add an item to a group, you can simply add it to your favourites, perhaps to add to a notebook later.
One of the nice things about Creative Spaces notebooks is the ability to add your own content.
This is the important bit for me. The ability to augment the museum-supplied content with my own photos, videos, links etc from my own visits is just lovely. A quick (but important) look in the site’s Terms & Conditions reveals that all copyright of contributed material remains with the creator, so no worries there. I will certainly contribute some of the photos and videos that I’ve taken, and I hope that many others do too. A nice touch is that your notebook page contains a social bookmarking widget allowing you or visitors to your notebook to easily add it to their bookmarking/social service of choice.
Groups allow people to join special interest groups which can be public, public but with a membership approval process, or private. Anyone can create a group. It will be interesting to see how these are used, but at the time of writing it seems as if every group wants me to request an invitation to join, regardless if membership is open or not. But still, this is a beta, so I’m sure it will take a while to iron those bugs out (as a web developer myself, I know how tricky this can be).
The site also contains videos produced by participating museums, so you can also see ‘official’ videos on different themes.
Creative Spaces has a huge amount of potential, and it’s one of the few recent developments in the heritage sector that genuinely excites me. It has potential to allow people to interact with museums in a central place, and share the experiences they had during their visit. The federated search opens up the collections, and can even help to plan a visit, or conduct research from a distance. The notebook functionality can even be used to add links if users prefer to post content to their own sites. It’s a really good idea.
Where could there be improvements? Having only used the site for a short while, here are a few suggestions:
- Incorporate OpenID. I have so many accounts with websites, I don’t really want yet another username/password combination!
- Create an advanced search form. Searching for Iron Age objects was hard.
- Give me a nice URL for my page (http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/?page=profile&uid=211). I’d like http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/tomgoskar, for example.
- Create a feed of status updates – it seems as if only the latest one is displayed.
- Let us know if Museum staff will interact back with us. Or is the site going to be just for visitors to interact with each other? Will our content be accessioned back into the collections databases in any way?
- Can I have an RSS feed for my notebook please :-)
- It would be great to allow other users to add tags to my notebook entries.
I also think that it is a great idea to provide this kind of experience for many museums in one place. Too many duplicate sites will mean too much dilution. I hope that other museums can come on board and add their collections as funding permits.
All in all, it’s a great idea, well executed for a first version. It heralds a further change in the way that museums are perceived, opening them up, making them less stuffy, and allowing us mortals to engage and interact with their collections (and each other). All we need now is for the Creative Spaces website (when they are ready) to be widely publicised, as every social networking site needs an audience.
I for one will be participating. See you on there.
Pete NewCurator 4:01 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
My criticism wasn’t that people wouldn’t know what to do, it’s that there’s nothing to it. You reasons for why people would like it could be done on the each of the museum’s own website and any bookmarking tool.
In fact, I think this could be knocked up in ning.com in an afternoon.
Alright, it’s still in Beta. But Beta is supposed to show a rough version with bugs to iron out. Not something so thin it’s not going to tell you where it’s going.
When something worth mentioning happens on Creative Spaces, I’ll talk about it. But think about the fanfare this has got. This has been released far too early.
Tom Goskar 4:17 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
Hi Pete,
Thanks for your comment.
It’s true that each museum could do the same on their own sites, but that’s limiting when you want to view collections beyond the bounds of a single institution. Many people may also visit a number of museums in one day, or over time, and want to aggregate stuff together. Not just saving favourite objects, but photos, text, whatever. A more reflexive approach, as it where. That’s how I see it anyway.
True – much of the functionality could be created in Ning in a few hours. But who has control over that data? How safe would it be with Ning? How could you get data back out in a useable, controlled form? How can you control how well it will perform if the service gets very popular? You couldn’t do the federated search in Ning.
There are a lot of improvements to be made, that’s for sure. I’ve just uploaded some images into a Notebook and it looks rather ugly (especially how it shows the larger image). But I expect that kind of thing to change from user feedback. Or at least, I hope it will ;-)
I do think that it’s newsworthy, as it is a start. I haven’t seen anything directly museum/gallery-related like this before. I only hope that there is some of the £1.5m left to make improvements, and that some of the constructive criticism levied by members of the museum community (and indeed, early users) will be taken onboard.
We will have to, as they say, watch this Creative Space (har, har).
Mia 4:24 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
I think it’s a tough gig for the staff on Creative Spaces – I suspect a lot of the criticism actually relates to the project structures they inherited, not the implementation choices open to them. But the people who write those project bids aren’t around in these museum tech spaces to hear the comments – so who’s left to take responsibility for them?
‘beta’ as final bug fixes is a slightly outdated idea that doesn’t allow for open iterations – having a beta like this is a step closer to an agile model that allows for deep change, not just a thin layer of beta testing that can only poke around on the surface or fix bugs.
I dunno, I’m still thinking through it all. Museum projects need to be more user-centred, and this is both a step forward (even if the geeks have trouble imagining it being useful for other people) and a step backwards (because it’s the same old top-heavy, old-fashioned project structure based around institutional needs).
Pete NewCurator 6:53 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
“limiting when you want to view collections beyond the bounds of a single institution.”
As I proved, you could do it all on Google.
http://newcurator.com/2009/03/how-to-make-creative-spaces-in-5-minutes/
Andrew Larcombe 7:57 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
‘fraid I’m with Pete on this one.
It doesn’t actually appear to *do* much apart from provide some social bookmarking features. Any ideas as to how this budget was spent? In terms of actual functionality, £150k seems generous for a site like this.
Frankie Roberto 11:25 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink
The URL thing is COMPLETELY baffling. I can only suspect that there is some insane political reason behind it, with the people making the decision having no idea as to how the web works.
I wonder which URL Google will consider the canonical one…