Date: 13 May 08
Museum Memories
We've recently been working with the Science Museum to help produce the ObjectWiki. It's described as :
"The Science Museum 'Object Wiki' is a website with information about some of the objects within the Science Museum's collections. To help improve the information, we've opened up the pages so that anyone can edit them."
It's been quite an interesting project and we've even seen it used as a reference site on ebay which demonstrates the strength of the Science Museum as a trusted brand and also shows you can never predict how this kind of information is going to be used once it's opened up and made accessible outside of the museum.
The Science Museum are working on a number of approaches to make the data as available as possible, including licensing the content under a creative commons license and attempting to link the wiki to other sources such as Wikipedia. They have also opened up the mediawiki api allowing developers to build services against the WIki.
As a (small) demonstration of the kinds of things you can do using this, I've created a ruby script that posts the latest memories submitted by people from the wiki to a twitter account, allowing people to browse old submitted memories and get notifications as new ones come through. You can view/follow it at museummemories, let us know if you find it enjoyable ...