Bletchley Park Text

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Bletchley Park Text

• Paul Mulholland
• Knowledge Media Institute
• The Open University

2
Overview

• Bletchley Park
• The post-visit experience
• Communities of interest
• Expressing interests via SMS
• Spotlight browsing of archives
• Information foraging
• RFID at Eco-Park

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Bletchley Park

• Bletchley Park
• Wartime code-breakingcentre
• Workplace of Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers
• Development of Bombe, Colossus
• Museum since early 1990s

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Post-visit experience

• Museum technology is often for virtual or
  augmented visits
• Why cater for the post-visit?
• Most visitors do website follow-up
• Avoid visit disruption/overload
• Provide access to further resources better suited
  to post visitor and/or not appropriate for
  exhibition
• Encourage return and school visits

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Overall approach

• Use of SMS to record interests
• Visitors own device
• Texting as choosing/bookmarking
• Access to additional content (interviews,
  historical accounts)
• Use of metadata and template structures to select
  and organise content for exploration

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Community of interest

• Bletchley Park Tour Guides
• Approximately 30 volunteers
• Actively research the domain
• Private forum for tour guides
• News and announcements
• Content collection and management
• CIDOC CRM based indexing scheme

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Spotlight browsing
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Expressing interests via SMS

• Terms suggested on leaflets, posters, exhibits,
  and buildings
• Thesaurus maps SMS terms to metadata description
  of the resources

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Retrieving the collection

• Thesaurus
• Resource annotation

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Presenting the collection

• Newspaper style presentation

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Presenting the collection

• Differentorganisationsemphasisingdifferentaspe
  cts

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Changing the collection

• Choosing a new set of subjects

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Web form access to content

• School groups who do not have mobile phones or
  need to do preparatory work

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Use statistics

• Supplement observational/ interview studies
• Focus on web site use
• Server log 24 Jan to 27 Sept 2007
• 1154 queries by 777 visitors
• 20.4 of visits produced multi-query interaction
  episodes, having 13.02 mean page impressions

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Information foraging

• People as informavores
• feeding and patches
• Two distinct types of BP Text user
• Risky No term overlap, queries many and small,
  distant terms, use of stories to acclimatize
• Cautious Term overlap, queries few and large,
  close terms, of use newspaper structure to
  acclimatize

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Eco-Park

• Outdoor ecology oriented science centre
• Opened 2007 in Milton Keynes
• School and family visits
• Follow park narrative and avoid head down
  interaction

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Overall Eco-Park approach

• RFID readers/writers at non-networked activity
  locations
• Visitor takes RFID tag on entry
• Tag collects interests, decisions, data
• At end tag exchanged for postcard with URL
• Resources, structures and tag content create web
  presentation

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Conclusions

• Mobile technology can support post visit use of
  resources without disrupting the visit
• Different technologies available SMS, RFID
• Need to scaffold resource use beyond a list of
  search results
• Different kinds of information use