Hello!
It’s June, and we’re as busy as ever as we start to put the finishing touches on version 5. Here are some improvements we’ve been making to TMP, some objects we’ve found, some features we’re working on and some thoughts on AI.
Happy reading! As always, if there’s anything here you want to chat about… drop us a line!
🖼️ Manifesting IIIF
Screenshot: Wellcome Library
TMP has always supported IIIF, the international heritage image standard, using its image API, that allows you to display and zoom images on your own website.
Now we’re starting to support core parts of its presentation API. This means that where your object records have images, you can provide a ‘manifest’ to viewers like Mirador or Universal Viewer, or cool narrative tools like Liiive and Storiiies, and do much more with your images.
We’re rolling this out to clients who are interested. If that’s you, let us know!
🏆 Manchester Museum: European Museum Of The Year
Screenshot: Manchester Museum
Huge congratulations to the team at the Manchester Museum, which recently won the European Museum of the Year Award. We’re extremely proud to be associated with the museum. It is a magnificent collection, curated with diligence and sensitivity.
🕵️♂️ In the pipeline: User collections
Screenshot: Manchester Libraries
We know how many of you are itching to allow your users and visitors to collect and curate their own selection of objects from your collections. We’ve been working on a few things that bring this a lot nearer.
So far, we’ve got a couple of examples of how we do this: on the Estonian E-Varamu site you can create a profile to save your own searches and lists from over 30 million records (give it a go, there’s an English-language version). On our Manchester Images site you can share albums without even logging in, using a combination of browser storage and anonymous links.
Our development roadmap now includes a central store for user data to do this sort of thing. You’ll see it in action soon on South West Collections Explorer, and we’ll keep you posted here. Let us know how you think we could use this on your site.
📣 Mike’s soapbox: AI in museums
Does the A in AI really stand for Average? In a new post, Mike picks apart some of the uses to which museums can put AI, and maybe some of the uses that they shouldn’t, if they want to deliver a more-than standard issue experience for their users and visitors.
🚩 From the collections: A red (and white and yellow and blue) flag
Image © P&O Heritage Collection
If you look closely at this earliest known painting of a P&O ship, you might recognise the colours of the P&O flag. If you look even closer, you’ll notice that the yellow and white are the wrong way round. The flag didn’t take its canonical shape and orientation until a few years later.
It’s one of many fascinating objects illustrating the history of the P&O brand in a new story that makes excellent use of our timeline block.
Screenshot: Manchester Museum
Thank you!
Thanks for reading to the very end. We’re taking a break from the newsletter in July, but we’ll be back again with more news and updates in August.
In the meantime, if you want to let us know about anything that inspired you in this one, or just want to chat about what more TMP can do for you, then get in touch!
Until then,
Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.