 Okay having played computer shuffle. Thank you very much for having me here. I always love coming to NDF. I've been a number of times now and it's such a great conference so I always really enjoy it. So anyway let's dive in. So today we're going to be talking about linking. Telling stories and facilitating research by using our very rich resources in the best way possible. And this seems to be a really emerging theme for me in this conference. Many other talks have been talking about linking. Many people and organisations seem to be looking and considering this at the moment. So we've all got collections and we spend a good deal of our professional lives carefully documenting them, housing them, studying them, writing about them, exhibiting them and more recently well sort of if you're thinking in museum time digitising and databaseing them. And now we're all very enthusiastically putting them online. And by putting our collections online we hope to achieve something like this. So this slide is from a recent talk that was given by Gavin Mallory at MCN in New Orleans just a few weeks ago. And it's definitely worth going back and having a watch of it because it's really great talk. And he starts with the question what's the point of a museum collection online? And then he goes to some deep, dark places and ends up with a kind of every museum, everywhere mission statement. And that's what this is. So for him, the every museum, everywhere mission is to deliver, museums deliver their collection to educate and inspire people about the world. So he encourages the audience to amplify their museum's mission with inspiring and educational online collections. And so we do that. We put our collections online with great enthusiasm and we've all got them. And they're everywhere if you go looking. If you do a search for museum online collections, which admittedly not very many people would do, you'll get a whole bunch of museum online collections. And they're all sitting in their own kind of little museum-y bubble. But we've got plenty in common. You can think of any topic you like. And you'll get results to a search on any of these museum collections. So I like bicycles, for example. And a search in a few random places, a few random collections kind of makes my point. So at Tapapa, I found a silly bicycle. At Museum Victoria, I found a winning bicycle. Over at the Met, I found a bicycle as art. Well, most of a bicycle as art. And at the British Museum, I found a toy bike. And actually, you know, I've picked out a few examples, but I could have found silly bikes. I could have shown you just silly bikes from all of those collections, or winning bikes from all of those collections. We've all got lots of very similar stuff. So if I'm doing research on bicycles, and I happen to know to go looking in museum collections, and that's a big if, then I can find lots and lots of stuff that might be relevant to the research that I'm doing. And maybe that's how I like to do my research. Maybe I like to just go and visit, visit sites, do some Google searches, pick out a bunch of stuff, make the connections myself. But maybe I also, maybe it would really help me out, because I'm trying to do some research to actually get some assistance. And to get, when I get to one place, where's the next point that I might consider going? So help comes in various forms. There are, of course, aggregators, like the Google Cultural Institute, or the Google Arts and Culture website, where you can get results from many different organisations. And where particularly keen users can do things like make their own collection, or in the, which is in the Google Arts and Culture website is called their own gallery. Similarly, digital NZ, close at home. Again, searching for bicycles gives me lots and lots of results. And I can use the sets feature, again, to make my own collections. And the sets feature is currently being improved, and will soon come out, or is in the beta version of Digital NZ as the stories feature. So that's certainly one way that you can do it. But that's still limited to those particular aggregation sites. Ultimately, all of these bicycles that I've found are kind of a bit random. And they just sort of reflect what I've been able to find a bit randomly on different collection sites. And this randomness might suit a small group of people, but I'm really not convinced that it suits everybody. Some research that we've done on our museum's website shows that 78% of visitors to our, to our museum's website identify themselves as knowledge seekers. So that is people who are there doing research in a topic that they have a personal interest in, sometimes have a professional interest in, but often it's a personal, it's a personal research for a personal hobby or interest. And that includes about 20% of people who are there for educational reasons at all levels from primary school right through to, to university. So they're not there just to kind of do random stuff. They're there to find an answer to a question or to seek information about a topic that they're interested in. So what can we do to help those people? Can we, can we provide them with the next steps on their journey so that they spend more time finding information that is useful to them and less time getting distracted by some of the seriously weird things that you can find in your collection if you happen to go looking. I'll just leave that, that image with you just for a second there. So you can really enjoy it. I was going to look for a cat picture, but then I found that and thought, oh no, I've got to use that one instead. So this very mysterious looking slide is from a, a talk given recently at our museum by an academic archivist called Mike Jones and he's, you can kind of, it might be a bit too bright on the stage, but you can kind of see him lurking in the shadows there. So in his talk he was quoting an academic called Ian Hodder who is interested in, in thinness and he was asking the questions about, also asking the questions about whether we can give users stepping stones either around our own collection or between collections, give them some help. And so this academic is writing about thinness and connectedness and as he says, things assemble. We've seen that things are not isolated, it's in their connections and in their flows into other forms that their thinness resides. And Mike, who I've had many, had the chance to have many good conversations with, in his own work challenges me often to, to think about this connectedness as well. And challenges us to say, okay, so it's all very well to have all these things in our collection, but every time you just have a thing in your collection and it's not connected anywhere, you're not giving the next person any sort of help. So everybody has to start their research from the same point. Is there a way that we can provide somebody with a trace of what we've already found so that they can start with the next step rather than just having to go back to the first point to get in? So there are some programmatic attempts at doing all this connecting and we've probably all sat in conference talks and heard about linked open data. And I could start to draw you some entity relationship diagrams and talk about RDF and that would of course all end up with saying that the results of all this effort is a sparkle end point. But if you want to really impressive talk about linked open data, I'm afraid I'm not going to be the one to give it to you. But I would suggest when the video comes out to go back and have a look at Adam Moriarty's talk from yesterday because that was one of the best linked open data talks that I've ever heard and he's sitting down there in the front. So well done Adam. This slide full of Gough is a linked open data representation of Museum Victoria's collections which was made by a gun programmer called Connell Tuey. Instead of talking to you about linked open data I'm going to refer you again to another one of the MCN Ignite talks, this time by David Newbury. In that talk, so David Newbury is a programmer and in that talks he says linked open data is confusing, it's difficult and it's advocated by shaggy developers of which he says he's proudly won. Now Adam's not very shaggy so I'm not sure about the shaggy developer bit. But he goes on to show a sentence which is you know something that many people would not have any clue about and he says he knows that he's one of those shaggy developers because not only can he understand this sentence and write it but he's actually tried to do it. That bug really is annoying isn't it? It's very big, well now it's on the microphone, good. So what he goes out, what David Newbury goes on to say is that people care about people and museum people are not normal people. Normal people care about themselves and normal people want to know how the things in their museum relate to the things in their life and I'll add that they're interested in finding out not only the things that relate to their lives but the things that they're particularly interested in. And again Richard Foy gave us a very, gave us the perfect example of his in his talk yesterday about finding the image of his grandmother in an archival photograph. So we need to talk about the link part rather than the data part. The other thing you notice in museum collections online is that just searching in the museum collections locks you into a kind of museum-y sort of bubble. It's definitely cool stuff but what about the cool stuff in libraries? What about the cool stuff in the archives and in the newspaper, the digitized newspapers? So if I'm actually doing a research about a topic that I'm interested in that I don't want to find a bunch of random things. I want things that connect together. And the sources for the story I'm looking to tell might be all over the place. So instead what I'd like to talk to you now about and for the rest of the talk is the networked artifact. The artifact that's bolstered by the story that can be told if you go looking in all sorts of other places. And this quote is from a piece that was published recently in Medium by a guy called William Owen who writes under the under the tag of made by many and the article title is The Open Source Museum. Again very worth going and having a look at. And so what he says is that we really should be able to take and link things. The 21st century museum needs no longer to be a locked cabinet or a discrete physical space marked by a singular collection policy. So I'll also use an example from the Cooper Hewitt. So they tried to do some of this linking using something that turned that they called concordances and they tried to make programmatic links by person. That's also the the approach that many linked open data projects have taken because people people and relationships are easy to build. So worth going and having a look at what they what the Cooper Hewitt managed to do. Closer to home at Museum Victoria we're also trying to turn our objects into networked artifacts. And at the moment what we're trying to do is a bit more clunky. It's not as cool. We're just trying to bring objects to life by including links to the research that we've been doing into our collections online so that other people might also be able to follow that research. We've been working particularly with specimens. We've got many specimens in our collections and something like this animal is just a snake in a jar until you start having a look at what the story behind it is. This specimen turns out to be particularly interesting because it's the very first type hand that was milked for its venom. And it's got a sad tale that belongs to it which is that the guy who caught it originally was actually bitten by the snake as he caught it and he subsequently died. But the snake was transported alive down to from Cairns down to Melbourne was milked and the very first anti-venin was created from that snake. And so it died subsequently a few weeks later in Melbourne Zoo and was given to the museum. So we've been able to find that story by looking in our version of papers past the digitised newspapers in Trove and we have other parts of our collection which also tell the story coming from the Commonwealth serum laboratories. And so that's a pretty cool story that links up bits of our collection and tells us more about one of the specimens. And it's also something that's interesting is that it's this is relatively new in sciences but is totally the bread and butter of humanities research. So in addition to finding out interesting historical stories there's very good reasons for scientists to want to link things up. In 1858 our first director Frederick McCoy was the first he was the first director of the National Museum of Victoria and he started on a project to publish a book called The Prodromes which means first descriptions of every animal known in Victoria. And he engaged some of the best artists in the colony to do drawings of these animals that he was going to put in his book. And our museum collection has this fantastic trove of those illustrations going from original sketches more detailed sketches of specific parts of the animals through to handwritten notes and finally to the final lithographic plates. But what we also have is the original specimens. Now granted this one's not looking too great but we've still got him. And he turns out to be very interesting because he was the this specimen this possum specimen is this specimen that was figured in those plates that I just showed you quickly and you'll get an opportunity to see them again. He was the very first he was the one that was depicted in the very first description of the Leadbeater's possum which appeared in the annals and magazines of natural history in 1867. This is the sketch from which that plate in the annals and magazine was originally made. And here it is. Here's the sketches that finally appeared in the publication. You can see if I just go back he was a bit droopy to start with and now he's looking quite jaunty. So there was a little bit of artistic license that went on I particularly like the little waving hand the little jazz hand that he's got. Now the where I'm showing you this the the website that this plate can be found is the biodiversity heritage library website and Siobhan Leachman talked about a bit about the biodiversity heritage library yesterday and I'll talk a bit more about it as well but suffice to say for the moment it's a project a worldwide project to digitize and make freely accessible and available biological material. Here also is the first description the text of the first description in a different page of the annals and magazine. So 20 years later McCoy included a reworked drawing of this same specimen in his prodromas. By the time it went into the prodromas though it looked a bit different. It's still got it hasn't quite got the same jazz hands which is a bit sad and it's reversed because now it's a lithographic print so in that printing production he's now facing the other way and this publication has also been fully digitized and is in the Biodiversity Heritage Library so we can link straight from our collection site out to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. So this little animal changed quite a bit in how it was drawn but in the 20 years between the first description and being published in the annals and magazines of natural in the prodromas. So that might not be very much interest maybe to scientists but it might be of great interest to scientific artwork historians and so this is one example where linking even between things in our own collection is worthwhile and for museums like ours that have got both sciences and humanities collections linking the different disciplines gives you really rich opportunities for more interest. In the case of this specimen we'll just go off on a little specimen tangent for a moment and that very last link is there to the online zoological collections of Australian museums which is Australia's data aggregator. So the linking to literature is a very rich way of providing more information. Linking out to the online zoological collections of Australian museums or OSCAM is a way for scientists to really investigate, visualize and look at the data but I'm not going to go very that's all you're going to see of OSCAM today. You can do mapping and you can do all sorts of things if you're interested in the specimen data. Why I'm mentioning it is because we have another data aggregator of which OSCAM is a part, the specimen based part and that's called the Atlas of Living Australia. If we go to the species page for the Leadbeater's possum we can see that that very same illustration we can see the very same illustration that we've been looking at and here it is. So to tell the next piece of the story let's have a change of animal. Here's another animal featured in McCoy's prodromas which is a very fancy tasseled anglerfish. Again we have the original illustrations in the collections and here it is in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. As Siobhan mentioned yesterday we take those illustrations and we put them into Flickr albums. We really we do this because again to make it findable for the people who are looking so people who are interested in images and artwork might well go looking in Flickr they may well never find something like a digitized library. Once it's in Flickr we've got a link back to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and then we start tagging them and again Siobhan talked about this yesterday and most importantly we machine tag them. Now machine tagging is tagging by a person so a machine can read it not tagging by a machine and that's where the linking comes in. When we machine tag it with a scientific name that image is then available to be harvested by another aggregator worldwide aggregator called the Encyclopedia of Life and information and pictures of all species known to science gathered everywhere gathered together and made available to everyone. The original tagline for that website was a web page for every species. So here's our tasseled angelfish now in an Encyclopedia of Life species page again with links back to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and into Flickr. Going back to our Flickr album if we also tag the image with a geolocation in this case for Australia it'll get back here it'll also be available for harvesting back into the Atlas of Living Australia and again so here's our tasseled angelfish now appearing linked up and in the Atlas of Living Australia again with its Flickr pointer and its Biodiversity Heritage Library pointer so that makes so tagging things makes them discoverable and makes them able to be shared around between these different aggregators and much more findable. At this point a quick aside about tagging because as I've said machine tags are tags applied by people not tags applied by machines. Here's another example of a Flickr album this one for a handwritten diary that we put up. When we put it up we said can you help tag the species in our field diaries? Which led to a long discussion between some of the amazing volunteers that we have out in our community who are willing to do just this work led to a huge conversation about how best to do it what should we do let's get going and huge acknowledgement to Siobhan and Michelle and some of the other taggers Siobhan might be here in the room there she is so huge hat tip and acknowledgement to the volunteers or the volunteers who do that work because without them we could never get this volume of work done and get these links made oftentimes it seems that within minutes of us putting up these Flickr albums bang they're tagged and it's just really amazes us every single time so for all the promise of things happening automagically we're certainly finding that the most outstanding outstanding results actually come from people doing the work so I did promise as a last little thing to talk about meteorites in the mid 1800s a shower of meteorites fell in the line in an area of Australia subsequently called Cranburne and the biggest of these weighed in at three and a half thousand kilos it's huge it's an iron meteorite so it's really really heavy and the photograph shows the meteorite roped up and ready to be pulled out of the ground but if you've got an eagle eye you'll say that's not our image it's in our museum Victoria's collections online but it's not our image it's actually the image an image from the state library of Victoria they very generously and correctly tag this image as being in the public domain which allows us to share it across now we don't actually have a photograph of the whole meteorite because we don't have the whole meteorite in our collection any longer so this was one way of being able to actually show what the whole meteorite looked like when it was in the ground there was a long drawn-out battle about this meteorite and about a number there was actually 12 meteorites in all that were that fell and there was a long drawn-out battle about who was who was going to own these meteorites the original one that first one was actually sold and it was sold to the British Museum who wanted to who didn't think the you know the colonists could really be trusted with such an important scientific find and so they wanted to take it back to the British Museum where it could be properly looked after and this plays out so this whole argument plays out in these very heated letters to the editor of the Argus it goes backwards and forwards there were submissions to Parliament there were submissions by the Royal Society of Victoria and in the end Frederick McCoy, our director and a few others who were trying to promote the meteorite staying in Australia lost the battle and it was shipped back off to Britain but we can see the whole story through looking at the looking through the archives and so here's the Natural History Museum in London which now owns the meteorite and there's the record you can see it in their data portal but there's a little bit of a twist to this particular tale a little ignominious twist so the Natural History Museum are refurbishing their minerals galleries at the moment and as I said this meteorite weighs three and a half thousand kilos it's very very heavy so when they started to refurbish their galleries they realised that they actually couldn't move the meteorite and so instead of moving it they did what you do they built a shop around it and so here is our meteorite sitting in the Cranburn boutique of the Natural History Museum in London and I think that poor old Mr McCoy would probably turn in his grave if he knew that his meteorite that he fought so hard to keep in Australia was now in a shop in London not for sale of course but in a shop so what we've done here is being able to tell a whole story a whole tale and there's so many other tales that we can tell in our collections my very final comment is about a certain horse at the at the risk of being you know making us a very unpopular um the obvious play so it's very obvious that one on one side of the ditch is the skeleton on the other side of the ditch is the stuffed version with no skeleton in it and there's so many stories to tell about farlap it's interesting for example that in both our institutions farlap is registered as a horse which is a very sciencey sort of thing to do just go oh yeah it's just a horse no biggie whereas to everybody else to all the normal people out there you go but it's a race horse it's got all those stories to tell and in fact the story and the connection and the stories that people want to tell about these this very famous horse to which many people have and a really amazing attachment to and really feel very personally connected to they want to tell in their own scrapbook their academic research paper or school project but at the moment you can't get from one collection online to see that the stuffed horse might be might have another part of it somewhere else in a different a different museum so I think that's that's possibly where we can start with linking between collections across and around the world is with a horse and that's allows but would might allow people to find out the stories that they're really interested in and so let's start helping them out let's make some of the links so that the next person doesn't have to and so that they can go on and forge the next step thank you