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.

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.

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.