These are tough time for museums, but often that's when the really innovative ideas happen – That was the flavour of the day at the Museum Computer Group annual conference, that @Gavssandwiches Mallory and I attended last week. There was an abundance of ideas and energy bouncing around the Imperial War Museum where it was held, which was the perfect venue for it not least because we could leave the conference space to be inspired by real users of a museum, alive in their native habitat. 

Keynote

Mark O'Neil from the Government Digital Service has the weighty task of being responsible for user experience on government web sites. He compared museum's collections with the Ikea website to highlight the differences in approach. The exercise served its purpose of provoking a debate around the ambiguity of users' goals on museum sites: Where Ikea wants sales, Museums want [Challenge: find a single word that fits here].  

Yet another approach is required for Government sites, where the user is generally there to complete a specific and compulsory task. Mark congratulated the museum world on providing a generally good user experience, even though its users are unfocussed. He puts that down partly to our ability to learn from each other, which he encouraged us to do from both our mistakes and successes.

Be brave IWM, your users love you!

I'm so excited to see the result of IWM's Social Interpretation project: they've got digital users on websites, on kiosks and on mobile, and in the era of Facebook they now expect to be able to have a voice themselves, rather than just to be educated at.

The Museum is going to give them that ability, through a huge undertaking enabling users to give un-moderated feedback on the collection. Comments will be post-moderated by the community, but that's not going to stop someone writing 'Berlin is a city in Vietnam', for all the world to see. Comments are comments, not authoritative information, but even so having text like that on the official IWM web site is enough to make most curators shudder.

It's a massive step for a cultural institution of this size, and personally I think it's going to be a huge success, through improving user engagement and even drawing a new crowd. Since social media came along, it's one of those things where someone had to try it at some point. Kudos to IWM for having the balls to go ahead with it.

Let’s Get Real 

This is just a must-read document for cultural institutions looking to leverage digital. It's an accessible piece of un-biased research into what works and what doesn't for users, backed up by loads of hard evidence. Nice one Culture24 and co.

Lives of the Great War

@Luke_F_Smith and @givp got a hearty and well-deserved applause for their project (slides here), which will collate data about servicemen from WW1 into a single, comprehensive resource. It will combine data from a large number of disparate sources, many of which are currently behind pay walls, and enhance it with crowd sourcing. It will include photography, and data about the country's thousands of war memorials. 

Lots of authoritative data in one place can only be a good thing, and will undoubtedly allow it to be presented, interrogated and analysed in new ways. Fingers crossed that this results in other datasets following suit.

What is IIPImage?

Joe Padfield from the National Gallery answered this question very well, and there was a definite sense at the end of the day that this won the award for 'the technology that the audience would most like to master'. It's a powerful, open source tool for dealing with massive images. I've been hugely impressed with Seadragon recently, and I haven't yet done a proper feature comparison, but here are some abilities that most other sites can only dream of:

• Super high-res images being accessible on non-super-computers (Ok, Seadragon can do that really well 

• Presenting multiple versions of the image on the same split-window screen for comparison (pretty neat)

• Clicking between different scans of the image: Infrared, X-Ray etc., all in high res (wow)

• Seeing cross-sections of the painting to examine different layers of paint, all still in high-res (spontaneous applause in audience)

• Linking to different parts of the painting and at different zoom levels

• Annotating the painting at different zoom level

The Gallery's idea was to create an image-interogation tools for scientists and preservators, and then let the public play with it as well on their site. This isn't fully rolled-out yet, but you can see the direction it's heading in here. Maybe one day all our clever tools will be shared like this.