This post is inspired by the Pharaoh exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne, Australia. This is a beautifully displayed exhibition of objects from the British Museum, London. It has all the trappings of a modern exhibition, beautiful lighting, a custom sound track, and lots of social media coverage. But I found it immensely frustrating to visit.
The reason for my frustration is the missed opportunity to provide visitors with the means to learn more from each object than a few cursory sentences on a display card. Take, for example, the “Lintel of King Amenemhat III”, for which we learn:
This lintel was originally placed in a temple erected by Amenemhat III. The carving reflects the harmonious symmetry followed inside an Egyptian temple. At the centre is a cartouche enclosing the king’s birth name. This is surrounded by inscriptions that radiate from the centre to the sides of the lintel. Names of the king face references to Sobek, the god of the temple, who is depicted as a crocodile seated on a shrine.
That is all that we are told. Yet on this display card is a cryptic code “EA1072”, which to most visitors is likely to be no less obscure than the hieroglyphs on the object itself. EA1072 is the number of this object in the British Museum collection. Each code can be converted into a URL by appending it to https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_, i.e., https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA1072. If we click on that URL we get a wealth of additional information, including a more detailed description, a bibliography, even an explanatory YouTube video.
So, for each object it would have been trivial for the NGV to include a QR code that would take the visitor to the British Museum’s web site to discover more information about that object, to put the object in context, and learn more about both the object and those who discovered and interpreted it. I’m guessing that most, if not all visitors, had a mobile phone that could read the code and access the internet.
If taking the visitor to the British Museum rather than the NGV’s web site is a problem, why not do the smart thing and reuse the BM’s codes as “slugs” on the end of an NGV URL (much as the BBC did with Wikipedia, see EOL, the BBC, and Wikipedia)? Even better, get the underlying data (does the BM have an API, or a machine-readable version of their web pages) and provide the same information in multiple languages. Melbourne is a modern multicultural city, here was a chance to engage with visitors in languages other than English.
This exhibition seems like an ideal case for the use of persistent identifiers for museums and other collections, something projects such as Towards a National Collection - HeritagePIDs was working towards (see also Persistent Identifiers: A demo and a rant). If we have persistent identifiers, especially if they resolve to machine-readable data, it becomes easy to convert static text into entry points to a much larger digital world of knowledge. Instead we seem happy to give simple snippets of information in one language, and hope the viewer’s interest hasn’t faded away by the time they exit via the gift shop.
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