The Brooklyn Museum recently opened an API for their online collection. In and of itself this is impressive and awesome but the collection was just put online a mere six months ago.
Allowing access to all of the collection data is a huge achievement for researchers, individuals and countries of origin. First, researchers get a wealth of information from afar without the need to travel. Secondly, individuals get to casually peruse the collection for fun, school research, and socially. Finally and I believe the most import is virtually repatriating pieces in collections. For example a museum in Cameroon can now connect with the Brooklyn Museum API and use a piece from their collection to help illustrate and show an example of a Guardian Figure. This is cool and all that educators and researchers have access to this from afar but it is even more important that the piece is not even on public display in Brooklyn. Now this educator in Cameroon is using information garnered from a huge distance away on a piece not even on display and allowing another level of information that would not have been possible without this API going online.
It is now up to more museums to take the steps forward and release API hooks so researchers and the public can begin to start connecting our collective history in a more robust and meaningful way.
Last night was the March installment of Refresh Philly. It was a good time which started out with pitches from some projects born out of BarCamp Philly such as HealthCampPhiladelphia, BarCamp NewsInnovation, and HigherEdCamp. Its great to see more niche programs and projects grow out of social media using the available technology and its potential for good rather than just monetization.
Luke Crawford, CTO of muxtape, gave an overview of muxtape past, present, future. What i got most out of his presentation is picking the right tech for the project. It is such a simple idea that gets overlooked for ease and what is the norm. Sometimes PHP isn’t the right language to use to implement a certain idea. And its always cool to get a behind the scenes look at a project you admire and use.
Todd Zaki Warfel from message first was up next speaking on Rapid Design. The idea of getting a diverse group in a room and forcing quick, dirty design and implementation ideas intrigues me. Coming from a place with little to no cross departmental interaction and a long track record of not sharing information I can see a huge potential to break down barriers and get things done. It is so easy to butt heads and keep a stalemate in educational/institutional settings that this cuts through the vested interests and gets to the heart of an issue. I can see myself implementing this in the near future.
Most notable of the evening initially occured in the backchannel and that was throw out by @saturdave: “is waiting for when RefreshPhilly starts talking about how to make Philly better.” I agree wholeheartedly, the talent and energy in that room could totally take on something that we see as a problem and make a huge dent in something perceived as a problem. I have a few ideas brewing that im going to start hashing out a bit on these pages.
Last night I attended The Junto at P’unk Ave in South Philadelphia where the topic was ‘Rethinking The Library’. The topic of the library as a whole in Philadelphia conjurs up intense debate as many of our branches were set to close due to budgetary issues. Last night a panel discussion was held focusing how we look at the library system. Much of the discussion was looking forward and and pointing out what the library was lacking for those in attendance, which was made up of mostly middle class well to do folk. I agree that the library needs to be changed but it needs to change in a way that focuses on the majority of constituents it serves. This means there is no easy umbrella answer. Each branch in the library system is different and the community they serve are equally as different. It is great fun to have these great discussions about how things should be if they revolved around you but unfortunately that is not the case. Getting the community involved and give their input is no easy task …
However, a small side discussion that occurred within the framework of the future of the library discussion was how the hands of the library system are somewhat tied in reference to upgrading the online services of the system as far as privacy goes. This conundrum might be for something like Refresh Philly to undertake. The idea of creating a side project tied into the library system where users can opt-into things that the library itself can not provide. There are many projects out there that would lend themselves to this and take away the need to build something from scratch from the ground up. The need to buy into or build a custom system in many instances is overkill and a waste of resources. Rethinking the Library and the way it serves I believe is one of those times where applying a solid foundation based on new media services could go a long way and save a bit of money by creating a public partnership program to build them.
