I got an email the other day about the new Creative Spaces Beta site because of my twitter send about the museum lovers social network. (It was actually a blog post and apparently quite a few people got the same email, but I digress)
Creative Spaces throws open the collections of: The V&A, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Royal Armouries, The Wallace Collection and the Imperial War Museum
It allows you to search all the collections at once, tag and store items in notebooks and groups, and upload your own images, videos and notes to share creative inspiration with others. This is a nonprofit, public sector project, and it’s the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way.
Okay, so it was PR disguised as a personal email. No matter, these jobs need to be done and word needs to get out considering how the BBC report failed to give an actual link. So I signed up.
I see four things. (1) Start a notebook (2) Start a group (3) watch a video (4) Search the collections.
Wait a minute. Notebooks? I’m guessing doing research and gathering links from the site could be useful, but there’s Google Notebooks and Zoho which do this better. “Tagging and storing” could be done with delicious.com. So what is the point of a (2) group? A collaborative notebook? Why isn’t this a function within notebooks? The video section has 27 videos in total… from Vimeo. I had problems trying to watch most of them.
Now, on to a major MAJOR issue. Try this experiment for me
- On Creative Spaces, type in “monkey” into search. You’ll get about 117 results from all nine collections
- Click on the “Victoria & Albert Museum (35)” link on the right. You’ll get the V&A’s list.
- The second one down is “Mechanical Monkey”
- Click on “view larger image”, you’ll get taken to the V&A’s collection site.
- Now go to Google and search “site:collections.vam.ac.uk monkey”
- What’s the top result?
So, “throwing open the collections” and “the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way” means reskinning a set of Google searches. Can someone tell me how much money was spent on this?
This isn’t a Beta release. This is barely an Alpha release. Hell, there isn’t anything to warrant this as a “social network”. There is no new content here.
You want to see how to do a Beta release, look at ArtBabble.
I agree! I wasn’t too impressed, there was little to no description as to even what a “notebook” was, and the groups left much to be desired or shared. Hell, there was even an entire group dedicated to Adolf Hitler, which…don’t get me wrong, is fairly fascinating, but come on…Adolf? I spent about 10 minutes on it, and I really don’t intend on going back! ArtBabble.org FTW!
I agree, and have posted my thoughts here. Ditto, I agree about ArtBabble – great site, well produced, beautifully designed – and with a real, genuine sense of community.
While I sympathise with the team (I know the way this project worked), the search /resutsl experience is so poor / broken and unlike the origianl visionings that they are likely to kill off the site before it gains much momentum. Real shame but I wish it luck. Herding cats on crack (either) does not _begin_ to describe the challenge.