Resources > how to do it: technical advice and standards
| standards | advisory | websites | projects | accessibility | digital preservation |
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- The organisation that makes the web, basically. Watch the web develop, contribute your views, use the excellent guidelines, advice and definitions in how you use the web so that it stays a resource for all of us, not restricted to certain browsers.
- ICOM-CIDOC
- ICOM-CIDOC is a voluntary international committee of ICOM - as the online museum community, it develops and promulgates standards for museum information
- Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN)
- CHIN, the MDA and the Getty Information Institute all work to develop standards nationally: they thus contribute to the international standards of CIDOC
- The Getty Institute - data standards and guidelines
- The Getty Institute has developed thesaurii and lists of terms that are the standard for museum use. Other standards resources include an Introduction to metadata, an Introduction to imaging (tip: the book seems to be online, you don't have to order it) and other invaluable information sources.
- UKOLN (UK online) Good Practice Guide
- Very practical, evolved and developed during a large UK lottery funded programme involving museum and other partner organisations large and small.
- Museum Documentation Association (mda)
- The MDA is the UK museum standards body. It has particularly developed SPECTRUM, the museum data standard
Standards
Advice and advisory services
- CHIN (the Canadian Heritage Information Network)
- The CHIN website has to be top of the list for comprehensive information and advice on everything from best practice in website construction, intellectual property management for museums ... oh, just everything, in a well written and accessible form. And don't forget to try out Artefacts Canada.
- UKOLN the UK national centre for digital information management
- Technical advice and standards especially for the New Opportunities Fund projects - very understandable and generally applicable best practice
- Guides to good practice, from AHDS: the Arts & Humanities Data Service.
- Useful, understandable and informative guides: including Creating digital resources (including copyright); Using digital resources in teaching and learning; Creating and using virtual reality
- HEDS: the Higher Education Digitisation Service
- Advice, consultancy and production service for digitisation, for higher education, public libraries, museums, archives and other non-profit making organisations. Online advice includes how to cost a digitisation project; the digitisation process; strategy and project planning.
- TASI: The Technical Advisory Service for Images
- TASI has been set up to provide advice and guidance, targetted at the FE and HE communities, on the issues of creating, delivering and using digital images together with managing digitisation projects.
Website practicalities
- Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen's Column on Web Usability
- Practical and authoritative advice on Web site design and general interface usability. Includes Web Design and Usability Hotlist
- Writing for the Web
- On Jakob Nielsen's Usability website, excellent advice on how best to write for the Web.
- Webmonkey
- Tutorials and advice from Lycos on HTML, website design, how to keep page sizes small, etc. Prone to rambling 'funny' introductions but has some very useful stuff, particilarly the simple explanation of XML.
- Tutorial on information architecture
- Excellent advice from Webmonkey on laying the foundation for your website.
- The web developer's virtual library
- Advice and tutorials on website creation. As well as links this website has very clear and easy to follow advice on all sorts of web building matters that are often very obscure.
Projects and project management
- The Read Codes
- An employee of the National Health Service developed standard codes for treatment, copyrighted them, and now charges the NHS millions of pounds to use them.
- Macromedia: resources: techniques
- This is an excellent guide to the stages in understanding the objectives and purposes of a website, and to the various stages of creating it.
- Reviews of Carnegie Trust UK grants to museums
- Want to know how museums have got on with ICT projects in real life? Read these self-assessments of their projects by a variety of UK museums. (The MDA website is currently being rebuilt - July 2005).
- Crash!
- Highly recommended book: a riveting read on famous IT project dramas
Accessibility
- Jonathan Bowen: websites and disabled access
- Presentations and workshop notes from Museums and the Web and other conferences
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Getting Started: making a website accessible - truly accessible advice, checklists and tools for achieving this. Means not just for disabled users but for everyone.
Digital preservation
- Now you see it, now you won't
- A beginner's guide to the issues and solutions to digital preservation - web demo from a Museums & the Web conference.
- The cost of digital image preservation
- The Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution and Usage of Image Data. By Howard Besser & Robert Yamashita. Report funded by the Mellon Foundation, published 1998. School of Information Management & Systems, UC Berkeley.
- PADI: Preserving Access to Digital Information
- Subject gateway from the National Library of Australia, including to digital preservation resources.
- The Digital Preservation Coalition
- Hosted by JISC, the DPC is a partnership of major information organisations in the UK, including the British Library, the Public Record Office, University Research Libraries, and many other similar organisations.
