The working life of Museum of London

We’re still ramping up our blogging efforts and this blog isn’t really live yet, so for the moment most of the content is from the IT point of view - you will see more interesting content soon! In the meantime, another post from me.

People often look puzzled and ask why a museum needs computer programmers when I tell them that my job title is ‘Database Developer’ and that I work for a museum, so I thought I’d explain some of the things my job involves. One of the purposes of this blog is to give you an idea of the range of careers and activities possible in a museum. You might be surprised at how diverse they are.

Museums often have IT staff who can work with databases, because often they have big ‘Collections Management’ databases that record everything about their objects - for example, where the object came from, where it is, what conservation work has been carried out, whether it’s on loan or on display, and which collection it belongs to. The collections management application might also store research on the object, captions for websites or exhibitions, and other specialist information.

The Museum of London is unusual because it also has an Archaeology Service (MoLAS), which runs a big database of excavation (field), finds and environmental data, as well as geomatics and mapping services data. MoLAS have specialist forms so archaeologists and specialists can record and analyse their data. Part of my job is to update and maintain these applications, as well as working with people to understand their requirements then design and create new applications.

I also create special scripts (in a language called SQL) to pull records out of the different databases so they can be used in websites. Sometimes I help create the websites too.

My job is very varied, and what I do each day depends on which projects I’m working on, and what kinds of requests come through our internal helpdesk system.

For example, this week I have been reviewing graphic designs for a website on Roman London, and I’ve been working with Angela, a Finds specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology Service, to start a blog about her Roman Glass research. She’s written some text and put together some images, we’ve worked out how we’ll deal with crediting different photographers, and it’s all coming together. I’ll link to it when it goes live, hopefully next Friday.

I also did some work on our new forums, answered some helpdesk queries, and did some research into an appropriately lightweight solution so we can provide dynamic access to a repository of metadata about collection objects, using a standard called OAI-PMH (the ‘Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting’). Finally, I have been trying to find the time to plan an database migration so we can move our archaeology databases to a new, bigger server with a new version of the database software we use (a database application called Oracle) on it.