Museum Lives

“The longer you’re here, the thing you realise is that these are not just objects, they’re peoples’ lives.”

Nadja Noel – Natural History Museum

Ben Sullivan – KE Software

The Museum

Project partners… collaboration

The Project… knowledge is leaving the NHM

• Within five years, 24 staff are due to retire• 775 years of experience• Knowledge transfer• World leaders in their scientific fields• Global coverage of expertise• Different collection areas and disciplines• Passion

Stories… Human interest not just science

• Weird and wonderful exhibition displays• Working at the NHM• Key scientific discoveries• Ollie Crimmen and his Speedos• River Thames whale stranding• London Blitz

Timeline and goals… project plan

• Archive-research for humanities academics.• Enriching collections data in EMu• Online resource• Public offer

Approaches… not just oral history

• Oral history-best practise• Mixture of methodologies

Project delivery… the steps we took

• What worked?• What didn’t work?

Structural overview

• Site needed users to browse by individual people, or by theme

• People are related to different themes• Themes are related to different people• NHM extended Narratives to allow multiple children• Allows hierarchies with multiple roots

Publishing the interviews… publishing the knowledge of our experts

Managing the narrative content… what is the content?

Objects

Places

Events &Time

People

Managing the narrative content… linking the data

NarrativeNarrative

PeoplePeople

Locations/ SitesLocations/ Sites

EventsEvents

Collection EventsCollection Events CatalogueCatalogue

MultimediaMultimedia

Structure of the digital assets… managing the media created

Video (Digital Master - sdv)

High res Quicktime MOV (Derivative)

Audio (Digital Master - wav)

Text transcript PDF (Digital Master)

Text transcript PDF Edit (Derivative)

High res MOV Edit (Digital Original)

Compressed Flash F4V (Derivative)

Low res JPG Edit (Derivative)

Documentation workflows… where do I start?

• Rights• Interview scheduling• Editing• Content authorisation• Asset management• Web publication• Review

Why was EMu used?… because it was there

• Repository for interpretation• No dept-centric boundaries• Familiarity with interface• Close association with specimen/collections

information• Integrated digital asset support

Sustainable documentation… what is created and left behind

• Align project with current procedures• Training• Don’t add a burden for future users• Communicate with technical partners• What happens when things break?• Abstraction between data & presentation

Challenges

• Difficulties of extracting tacit knowledge• Production standards• Managing digital assets-costs!

New possibilities

• The collections database• Public Offer• Legacy

Contact details

• Nadja Noel - n.noel@nhm.ac.ukNatural History Museum

• Alex Fell – Alex.fell@kesoftware.comKE Software