Whilst I was galavanting about at Museums and the Web and Museum Next one of our projects that we have been working on launched!

Say hello to UCL Museums Dashboard!

The idea from the Museums Dashboard came from UCL CASA’s  brilliant City Dashboard and some of the fatastic museum dashboards that are already up and running.  Have a look at the IMA’s dashbaord for an excellent example.  We wanted to explore how live data and data visualisations can create a more transparent, open place that involves students, staff and the public in all aspects of UCL Museums.  So immediately thought a real time dashboard would be a quick and convenient way of displaying all that info in one place.

During the design and scoping of the Museums Dashboard, there was some great  feedback from some of the UCL curators, who were more than up for taking part and having fitbits to measure how many paces they do a day going from collection to collection.  We also talked about real time visitor counts, temperature, humidity, number of objects in collection, number of objects on loan, accessions and deaccessions, how many objects are currently being conserved…The list goes on and on.   However we were on a tight budget so some of the ideas had to be pared down to make a viable dashboard in the couple of months we had available.  The dashboard pulls in data from a variety feeds (Social Media, weather, online collection images, museum temperature), developing our research view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live interactive view of museums.

My favourite data feed is the museum sensors measuring live temperature at 5 key UCL Museum spaces. So right now the Grant Museum Elephant is 20.8C the Art Museum is a bit hotter at 23.4C and poor old Jeremy Bentham is currently shut up in the pitch black of his box with a illuminance of 0.

Its in Beta, we would love to build on it, if we get the chance!  It has been developed by  CASA), (UCLDH),and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.  It is part of the bigger CityDashboard project, this Museum special version shows data from, or relevant to, UCL Museums and Collections. It is part of the NeISS project and was jointly funded by JISC and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.