Thursday, July 10, 2008

Seb Chan and "leveraging" "knowledge management"


Recently I saw Seb chan speak in the Metcalf Auditorium about what he and his colleagues had been doing with their web site at the Powerhouse Museum. The museum has been using various forms of links to “bridge the semantic gap” so that even if you don’t know what the exhibit in the Museum is called you will be directed to it anyway.

They are also getting into client tagging of the Museum’s catalogue, “harnessing user energy” as Seb put it, to add value to the information they already have on their web site. Clients put on free form descriptions of the items and add meaning to the record on the web.

Seb drew our attention to all the pictures of exhibits in the Museum that the clients put on Flickr and all the hits that the Museum gets on its web site for things that they think are interesting. I liked this because it answered the question I keep on wondering about, “how do you know what the client wants?” The full-on knowledge management trip.

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