OOKL – love culture

There are lots of new features to talk about and get your feedback on:

- A lite version of OOKL is now available on Android phones. Basic venue detail and events are now accessible by all Android users. The venue guide will be coming before summer 2011.

- We’re busy working on bulk uploading of objects and events, geo-location of objects and other improvements to the CMS – these should be out in the next week.

- Over the next couple of months, the development team will be concentrating on improving the experience for visitors on the website – we want to encourage users to become friends with venues and receive automatic updates about events plus give them tools to comment and rate venues, objects and events. There will also be more options to integrate your flickr feed, facebook updates and tweets so that visitors can see all of your social media in one place.

- We are integrating OOKL into other services (starting with Layar) so that more people will discover and engage with your venue.

- We are always interested in hearing your thoughts about what improvements you’d like to see. Please send us your ‘I wish OOKL did this’ and we promise to consider it carefully. Of particular interest are things that will appeal to most cultural venues or most visitors – either on the web or mobile. Send your ideas to support@ooklnet.com

We have released some major improvements to the app. Here are the highlights:

- geolocation of all venues listed on the site (there are now more than 5500)
- increase in marketing information relating to venues (events, education programmes etc)
- map
- addition of trails (now venues can link objects into a narrative)

Following the principle of less is more in mobile apps, we have removed some functionality that was getting in the way. We removed user registration and the ability to upload content to the OOKL website (take pictures, record sounds, add comments). What’s the reason? Research indicated that users wanted quick access to the content and didn’t want to take the time to register – which was a required step in order to blog. We’re now looking at adding blogging as an option with updates to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

For more information click here

Her Majesty The Queen meets members of the Estate Crew youth group who have taken part in the Discovering D-Day project, during her visit to the D-Day Museum. Read more here

We’re thrilled to release some new functionality this week that helps users follow trails around a space. Venues can now create trails online – just specify a starting point, choose up to 20 objects from your object storeroom and add some supplementary commentary.

Users can follow these trails on the website and on OOKL’s iphone app v2, which will go live in Aug/Sept. Trails will be downloaded to the iPhone so that the experience won’t be dependent on a strong mobile signal throughout the experience. We expect the service to be of particular interest to outdoor spaces that find it difficult to provide interpretive information.

We’ve added an event listing section to the website. Let your marketing department know that there’s a new tool to promote your events to thousands of visitors every day. Best of all, it’s free and they will also appear on the next version of the iPhone app which will be released very soon.

Watch this space for a digital shop…

They lasted a long time and are loved and hated in equal measure by people in the museum world. But with the mass market adoption of the iPhone which can deliver high quality content and has an inbuilt payment mechanism (iTunes), it’s hard to see how a model dependent on dedicated hardware can survive. When Android, Blackberry and every other fruit achieve a user experience on par with Apple’s iPhone then audioguides will have a new place in the museum – in a case.

If you’ve made it this far you’ve probably noticed that the site has been redesigned. Why the redesign? Partly fashion – what looked good on a website 4 years ago was starting to look a bit dated. Partly change in strategy – we have repositioned the service to address the needs of adult visitors in addition to students/families – so it needed to become 10 years older, or less child-like. Let us know what you think?

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful resource for the world if every zoo, botanic garden, museum, art gallery, historic house, archaeological site, sporting venue, library and religious site published information about 8 important objects in their collection.

Why 8? because it’s few enough that it will take no more than a morning for someone working in a venue to accomplish – but large enough, when aggregated, to be a valuable resource for every learner.

Register NOW and upload 8 objects today.  The world wants to LOOK at your collection.

Please share this message with every venue you know.

After 2 months of design and 3 months of development across several continents, 32,923 cups of coffee, 72 swearing contests, Britain taking the first gold medal in an individual winter sport since time began, meltdown of the ice caps – the OOKL iPhone application is now live on iTunes.

The good news doesn’t stop there. It’s FREE to download. Set up an account on OOKL and you can blog away for free. If you use OOKL at a participating venue to learn about their collection then a fee might apply.

Download it from iTunes app store and let us know what you think! If you don’t have an iPhone you can see what it looks like here.

OOKL is pleased to announce it’s involvement in two separate university projects:

The Out There and In Here (OTIH) project has been awarded funding from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme under the ‘Research in the Wild’ call. The project team, led by Dr Anne Adams, will develop the use of mobile technologies and interactive tabletop displays to support collaborative group work between field and lab based geology students.

The Museum Studies department of Leicester University is also running a project using OOKL. This initiative is led by Dr. Giasemi Vavoula who has a particular interest in the application of new learning technologies in a museum context.