Hello!

Another month has passed, and we’ve been busy updating infrastructure and making plans for the next version of TMP. Here’s a little sample of what we’ve been making, and some intriguing things that have crossed our desktops. 

Enjoy! And as always, if you have any questions or suggestions…  drop us a line!

Doing it in the gallery

For a change this month, here’s a website we’ve developed that you can’t look at online, because it’s a gallery kiosk. We’ve been working with Bristol Museums to use TMP as the content source for four kiosks in MShed, and we’ve got plans for more.

It’s an itch we’ve been wanting to scratch for a long time. TMP isn’t just a platform for the public web. It can also drive a whole range of museum channels including kiosks, signage, mobile audio tours and more.

We’ve had a lot of fun working with Bristol’s team, who have some amazing content, and we’ve built a backend in Go to pull it all together. If you’re interested in exploring how TMP can work to deliver your on-gallery digital content, give us a shout.

In the works: Fixing the image jigsaw

This one’s already here: we now have a brand new IIIF server, dishing up your zoomable images, boosting the infrastructure on which all your sites run. Both Elasticsearch (for your data) and Cantaloupe (for your zooms) now have their own servers, with more than twice the resources. 

As we wrote in January, we’ve done a lot to try and block unfriendly bots, and this is another important part of the jigsaw that will prevent them from overwhelming our servers. Money well spent, we think.

Telling tales: City of trip-hop

We’re back to Bristol. The city has always been suffused with sound, from jangling guitars to psychedelic rock, through jazz and folk to jungle. Here, Bristol Museums tell the story of one of the city’s greatest bands: Massive Attack, and how it emerged from hip-hop crew The Wild Bunch.

This one is taking Jeremy back to his student days, when Blue Lines came out, and trip-hop ruled the nation’s airwaves.

In our inboxes: HAIL

If you’re on the Museums Computer Group mailing list (and if not, why not?) you might have caught the invitation to join a new mailing list looking at Heritage, Artificial Intelligence and Law (HAIL for short, naturally). With millions of online heritage images potentially feeding AI image generators, this is an interesting and important space.

Sometimes the early decisions and patterns of behaviour about new technology have long-lasting effects, so it makes sense to get involved now if you want to be informed or have your say.

A thing we like: NocoDB

This one’s strictly for the spreadsheet and data nerds among you, or maybe you just like playing with big chunks of data? NocoDB is like Airtable, in the cloud, but open source. You can build forms, sheets and databases through an intuitive graphic interface. “Super easy to use and insanely powerful,” says Mike. Let us know if you get up to anything interesting with it.

From the collections: Search for the sculpture inside yourself

Michelangelo talked about setting his sculptures free from the marble that contained them. On a much smaller scale, the artist of this tiny cameo bust has done something similar: the banded colours of the agate from which it is carved reveal the face and bare shoulders of a woman.

This lovely object belongs to Limerick’s Hunt Museum, where TMP’s collections plugin fits neatly into a beautiful site by New Graphic.

Until next time!

Thanks for sticking around to the end of the newsletter. Next month’s will be here soon enough but we’d love to know what you thought of any of the content in this one, or just to hear where you’d like to go next with TMP. 

Until next time,

Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.