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• Half it in size. Then half it again.

  I’m sitting looking at my inbox. It’s a bit full – I’ve been away for a week. I’ve done a bunch of culling but in there are three newsletters catching my eye, all from museums or museum related people. Out of interest, I just pasted each one into http://wordcounttools.com. They average 1,400 words each. Here’s my mental […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • October 16, 2015
  • no responses

• Getting your collections online

  I was recently asked to present a session at the SW Digital Champions Forum on how to get your collections online. I wanted to do something which was practical but which also asked those bigger picture questions. I divided the talk into three sections: 1. Online Collections – strategy Too often the answer to the why are we […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • April 23, 2015
  • no responses

• Keeping track of content in WordPress

  Recently, we launched Waterloo 200 (see http://www.nam.ac.uk/waterloo200/ for the live site) and as part of the project the team needed to gather together rich museum object data and other content from a range of sources. The site is a reasonably complex WordPress build, with a number of custom post types to support the rich content on the site. For […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • March 19, 2015
  • no responses

• Just because your museum objects are online doesn’t make them interesting

  I was asked by Claire Ross and Jane Audas to talk about objects online at a conference day (Show Us Your Assets) held at Mima last week. There’s a tendency for museums to “just get our collections database online” without actually thinking about why they’re doing it, how to do it better and who they’re doing it for. I decided […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • March 11, 2015
  • no responses

• How best to cut down on the distraction of email?

  I’m pondering making a change to the way I work by cutting down on the time I’m being distracted by email. My natural tendancy is probably the same as most people which is to have email open all the time and then find I’m periodically checking it, responding to stuff and otherwise being distracted by things […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • November 3, 2014
  • 6 responses

• Five (slightly provocative) thoughts

  1) Users and user testing is everything – but thinking about why is as important as thinking about who. > Know what success is and how you’re going to measure it. “Visits” isn’t enough. Engagement, newsletter signups, downloads, time on site, registrations – think about what makes a difference for you and your organisation, and […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • October 31, 2014
  • no responses

• The “tech literacy” gap

  I’ve been pondering “tech literacy” a lot recently. For one thing, it’s a central part of quite a lot of the conversation that hung off Museum Next this year, what with Koven’s talk about “authentic digital” and various other discussions about digital strategy, whether you need a “head of digital” or the use of the […]

  • Posted by Rachel
  • July 12, 2014
  • one response