Tag: collections

Sharing made easy

Chris has been busy putting together a collection of 3D items that he is using in workshops with schools. The collection demonstrates a range of uses for additive manufacturing. He has curated a collection of items that are all CC-BY, which refers to the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to share, adapt, and reuse their work, even commercially, as long as they attribute the original creator. You can find out more about Creative Commons licenses here.

Not all the items on the Heart platform are CC-BY but many are, we welcome people to share their 3D scans, images and audio by attributing it to CC-BY, so everyone can add them to their collections.

Enlightening others audiences with your new collection
It is be possible for one Museum to share its collection with any other Heart User, be they a school down the road or a Museum across the world.

Having the ability to share your own items worldwide, not only empowers the sharing organisations by extending the reach of their collection, it is also a great advocacy tool by allowing people to “visit” the item before they have even stepped through the contributing organisations door.

Already now, this takes place in a small way with the British Library or Royal Mint Museum’s collections, which they use on more than one box. In the formers case the boxes are distributed around the UK to Libraries, but each with the same standard collection on it. Find out more about The British Library’s Unearthed project.

Chris’s Utilization of STL files

3D Printed Construction Image is CC-BY. If you would like to download the STL file for this 3D print then you can go here for the details on Heart plus you can utilize the audio which is also CC-BY licensed.

All of Chris’s objects in the collection are available here. https://heart.museuminabox.org/view_collection/3501

If you have purchased a box you should have access to Heart and have the ability to upload 3D prints as an STL file.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer
Image license: CC-BY-NC-SA

This is an example of a 3D print created by user @ecoleStAndre a small rural primary school in the French Alps.

Visit this item on Heart or download the STL file for this print

STL files explained: An STL file is the most widely available format used for 3D printing. STL officially stands for stereolithography. It’s essentially just a file format that describes 3d objects.

How do you create 3D objects?

If you are looking to create a replica of an existing object you will need to make a 3d scan. Professional services are available to create high resolution models of objects through Photogrammetry or digital scanning. If you want to do it yourself good results can be achieved with available Photogrammetry software. We’ll go into more details about this in a future blog.

Alternatively if you are looking to create an new object to illustrate your collection, like Chris’s imagined moon 3d printer, you can with freely available software. Naturally we favour Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) so our recommendations are Blender and FreeCAD.

Both of these allow you to export your finalized 3D image as an STL file.

Depending on your make of 3D printer you may need to use their recommended slicer software to obtain a good final print.

3D printing is building up layers of plastic to form a 3 dimensional model.

3D scanning refers to the process of collecting data about a real world object, this is often a process undertaken by experts. This data is then pieced together often using specialist software to recreate a 3D representation of the object on screen. 3D scanning uses elements of Photogrammetry

The process of scanning and printing replica objects is becoming increasingly more accessible due to ease of access to the software and hardware tools needed.

We hope to feature more pubic collections that are based on Creative Commons licenses very soon.

Tags 3D, 3D printing, collections, Creative Commons, Heart

sludge

2024 and counting

It’s just past Christmas and right now it is all about numbers, as we countdown to the new year.

On the theme of counting we have been doing some analysis of the Boops that appear on the Heart Network – a Boop occurs when an object is placed on your Museum in a Box and if your Box is connected, even occasionally to the network then these totalised Boops are uploaded and added to your total for that object.

We ran some reports on the number of recorded Boops across all the collections private and public, throughout 2024 and the results are in. There have been a massive 20,218 Boops this year. With our top Five collections belonging to The Hunt Museum, The Royal Mint Museum, Museum in a Box HQ (these are the cards and objects we send out with the boxes), next up is the fabulous project from the British Library – Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music and finally the Big objects in the British Museum’s collection.

But storming away in the charts for 2024 were The Hunt Museum who have the top three objects in the top 5 Boops. With a wooden Mether, the god Thoth as a baboon and Ceramic hand as their top 3 items. At Number 4 in our object chart is the Apollo 11 launch try me card, from our own collection as it goes out with every box. And at No. 5 is a herpetologist’s delight, the Gray Tree Frog from the Smithsonian Museum.

If you have a Box, then you can update the statistics (the number of Boops) you have gathered on your collection by using the update card. You will need to connect your Box to the internet to do this. Both the Update and Connect to Wifi cards will have been sent to you with your Box. You can see the cards at the top of this post.

Then the next time someone asks you what kind of interactions your box has been receiving then you can simple get them to visit your collection on Heart.

Hope you have a great New Year. Boop!

Tags analysis, British Library, collections, Hunt Museum, Living Knowledge Network

exhibition myomb

People are Making Their Own

Post author By George Oates
Post date May 13, 2020
No Comments on People are Making Their Own

Guest post by Rob Sherman about how people are using their Make Your Own kit. Thanks, Rob!

It’s safe to say that all of us have a lot more time on our hands, at the moment, than we did two months ago. Long-neglected musical instruments are being dusted off and plucked or parped, and a lot of slightly-disappointing sourdough is being baked. In the midst of a grim global situation, people are trying to keep themselves busy, learn something new, and be as creative as possible.

Unsurprisingly, the Museum in a Box community has been turning out hundreds of collections on every subject under the sun. Some of these collections, created by museum professionals, reveal the secrets of the objects in their care: others catalogue the world around their authors in meticulous, loving detail. Under our current, constrained circumstances, the Museum in a Box is coming into its own as a study tool, personal diary and storytelling device; and we wanted to highlight some of the strangest, sweetest and more scintillating collections available on the platform at the moment.

Ancient Worlds by AHR

Holly, eleven years old, won’t let a little lockdown get in the way of her interest in ancient history. Each object in her collection, Ancient Worlds, focuses on a different object from Greek or Roman history, accompanied by Holly’s evocative storytelling. Listen to her own version of the story of Herakles and the Hydra, and a very convincing impression of a Roman toothache.

A Box Of Noises by renata

Trapped in our homes and twiddling our thumbs, some of us are starting to pay long-overdue attention to the little details of our surroundings, finding beauty and complexity wherever we can. Renata’s collection, A Box Of Noises, takes simple domestic sounds and turns them into something close to music. Paired with her delicate line illustrations, you’ll be surprised that a piece called Faucet in Three Acts could be so captivating.

Climate Change Effects by IES A Basella

Produced by students at the IES A Basella secondary school in Galicia, Spain, these cards helped classes to categorise and understand the interwoven consequences of climate change over the past century. When you place the stark images of flooded streets and raging wildfires on a Box, you hear the students tell you, in their own words, what awaits our planet if things do not change for the better. There is a version of this collection in both English and Spanish, and the collection is still being used in the school to help new classes understand the Museum in a Box format, and produce their own collections.

Listening to the Earth by Hannah Turner

This is the final exhibit and online repository for the course, LIBR 588: Theory and Practice of Oral History, in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia. The title of this exhibit, “Listening to the Earth” is a call to answer the question: “How might we preserve stories about organisms for future generations?”. Students in the course interviewed nine experts and scientists and asked them about their favourite organisms.

Hiragana by Takako Copeland

Despite the lure of Netflix and the fridge, some of us want to try and use these idle months a little more constructively. If you’re looking to learn a new language in an accessible and manageable way, Takako Copeland’s collection provides a satisfying and tactile method for learning the hiragana syllabary, a major component of written Japanese. Each card in the collection, illustrated with a hiragana character and an object whose name in Japanese includes that character, is paired with Takako speaking the character and the word aloud. With the cards spread out in front of you or held in your hands, and guided by Takako’s patient voice, there is not a better introduction to the Japanese language out there.

Great Bums Of History by George Oates

With most of the great works of art furloughed behind the closed doors of the big galleries, Museum in a Box’s own George Oates has selflessly created a collection that allows you to experience some of the very greatest up close, and from surprising new angles. Some might say a little too close, and from entirely unnecessary angles, but let it not be said that we aren’t doing our bit for home education. We won’t spoil this collection’s surprise, but it’s safe to say that it is a… multi-sensory experience.

Tags collections, fun

company news competition museum

WE WANT YOU!

Thank you for your interest. Registration has now closed.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, our work feels unexpectedly relevant. Parents, educators and housebound individuals across the globe are looking for new and exciting ways to engage with cultural heritage from home.

We want to work with cultural institutions both small and large to open up their collections, and find novel ways to engage with their audiences (and create new ones!) during these ‘strange times’.

In particular, we are seeking UK museum partners to apply with us to the Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund. This fund, of up to £30,000 and due 26th May 2020, is for innovative projects that ‘think about experimental or innovative interventions with collections online’.

(This is where the link to the registration form was, but we’ve now closed registration.)

Our proposal is to help you make a Museum in a Box collection that can live digitally on our web platform, and also offer the option to make a physical version of it that people can have delivered to their homes (with a Box). We hope to work with a wide range of UK institutions.

What’s the plan?

Ok. You’re interested. Great! You must be wondering what will happen next.

How would I make a collection?

It’s easy! Museum in a Box lives digitally on our web platform, which we call Heart. Initially designed and built as a tool for managing collections and objects and audio, it’s transforming into a place where people can also consume those collections.

For the purposes of being a collection maker and partner on the Esmee bid, Heart is where you would create a new collection, give it a simple description, and add your photos, hi-res files, and audio stories.

Elements of a Museum in a Box collection

Your collection is made of three main elements:

The collection outline or description;
The objects;
Each object’s content assets: this includes the audio track for the object, a photograph for the web platform, and the assets that will be used to make the physical object itself: this could be a PDF of a postcard design, or a 3D model.

There is no limit to how many collections you can create, but we do have some recommendations about size and scope, based on our experience.

We recommend:

Nine objects in a collection (but they can be 3D, 2D or a mix of both);
Audio stories that are about a minute long (that’s about 150 written words).

We’ve designed these recommendations to help you hold people’s attention, making collections easy to consume in one sitting. We also think it’s really beneficial to have such a tight constraint on scope. That way, you really have to think carefully about which objects tell the right story, and what you have to cull from your story so that it’s concise and compelling.

Licensing

You can assign a license to each individual element of a collection: for example, you could use an image from an online repository like The Met, which has placed their digital image assets in the public domain, and create your own audio story. You can attach that same public domain mark to your image (and attribute it with a credit line and a link back to the source, although you don’t have to), and then mark your own audio track with a separate license.

When you sign up for an account on Heart, you should know that you’re taking full responsibility for the content you upload, and ensuring you have the right to use it.

Publishing

We would love to help distribute your collection to the network of Boxes across the world. We have a Box on every continent except Antarctica now, and the network is always growing.

You have four options for publishing your collection, once it’s on Heart:

Set your licenses to anything other than full copyright. Then the collection can be consumed digitally, via the website, by anyone. Lots of our “Make Your Own” collections already fall into this category, like Vaguely Mystical Objects I Have at Home.

Mark your content as copyrighted. People will be able to see that the collection exists, but only you will be able to hear the audio stories, and only you will be able to add them to your Box, if you have one. You may want to do this if your collection isn’t quite ready for public consumption, or you are just tinkering around for the moment.

Work with us to create a physical version of your collection for sale. If you mark your content as copyrighted (as above), you can speak to us about creating a version of your collection that people can buy from our online shop. Firstly, we’ll send you a royalty agreement, and if we all agree on the terms, we’ll work with you to get the physical version designed and ready to distribution! You will be paid the agreed percentage of any sales on a quarterly basis.

Donate your collection. If you follow the steps in (2) and (3), but choose to forgo the royalty arrangement, we will be able to offer your collection in our shop, for digital and physical distribution, at a much lower cost to Box owners all over the world.

While there are many collections on Heart made by ordinary people, for free, all around the world, we have also produced our own collection with professional voice actors and sound effects, to help you see the potential of the platform. Using public domain images from the Rijksmuseum collection, we’ve produced a collection called Greek Gods & Goddesses, where each Olympian god will tell you their own story in their own words. The cards also work as ‘Top Trumps’, allowing you to pit the different characters against each other.

Interested? And you’re working at a UK Museum?

(This is where the link to the registration form was, but we’ve now closed registration.)

Tags collections, Esmee Fairbairn, funding, make your own, partnership