1. Museum Lives “The longer you’re here, the thing you realise is that these are not just objects, they’re peoples’ lives.” Nadja Noel – Natural History Museum Ben Sullivan – KE Software

2. The Museum

3. Project partners … collaboration

4. The Project … knowledge is leaving the NHM Within five years, 24 staff are due to retire 775 years of experience Knowledge transfer World leaders in their scientific fields Global coverage of expertise Different collection areas and disciplines Passion

5. Stories … Human interest not just science Weird and wonderful exhibition displays Working at the NHM Key scientific discoveries Ollie Crimmen and his Speedos River Thames whale stranding London Blitz

6. Timeline and goals … project plan Archive-research for humanities academics. Enriching collections data in EMu Online resource Public offer Year 1 Planning Training Copyright Year 2 Interviews Editing Web design Year 3 Interviews Short films Web dev

7. Approaches … not just oral history Oral history-best practise Mixture of methodologies

8. Project delivery … the steps we took What worked? What didn’t work?

9. Structural overview Site needed users to browse by individual people, or by theme People are related to different themes Themes are related to different people NHM extended Narratives to allow multiple children Allows hierarchies with multiple roots

10. Publishing the interviews … publishing the knowledge of our experts

11. Managing the narrative content … what is the content? Objects Places Events &Time People

12. Managing the narrative content … linking the data Narrative People Locations/ Sites Events Collection Events Catalogue Multimedia

13. Structure of the digital assets … managing the media created Video (Digital Master - sdv) High res Quicktime MOV (Derivative) Audio (Digital Master - wav) Text transcript PDF (Digital Master) Text transcript PDF Edit (Derivative) High res MOV Edit (Digital Original) Compressed Flash F4V (Derivative) Low res JPG Edit (Derivative)

14. Documentation workflows … where do I start? Rights Interview scheduling Editing Content authorisation Asset management Web publication Review

15. Why was EMu used? … because it was there Repository for interpretation No dept-centric boundaries Familiarity with interface Close association with specimen/collections information Integrated digital asset support

16. Sustainable documentation … what is created and left behind Align project with current procedures Training Don’t add a burden for future users Communicate with technical partners What happens when things break? Abstraction between data & presentation

17. Challenges Difficulties of extracting tacit knowledge Production standards Managing digital assets-costs!

18. New possibilities The collections database Public Offer Legacy

19. Contact details Nadja Noel - n.noel@nhm.ac.uk Natural History Museum Alex Fell – Alex.fell@kesoftware.com KE Software