WORK IN PROGRESS – DERIVED INFORMATION PRODUCTS
THE WORK IN PROGRESS POSITION PAPER ON THE DERIVED INFORMATION PRODUCTS OF THE MUSEUM
PREPARED 9 November 2000, by John D. Hughes Dip. App. Chem. T.T.T.C. GDAIE
Last updated 13 April 2001
Uploaded to this website 15 April 2001
Summary
This position paper is to assist friends of the Geological Museum @ Upwey penetrate and comprehend the nature of the work of this private Museum.
At the same time it seeks to elucidate the economic and qualitative impacts of the provision, non-provision or alternative provision of the derived information products from this work.
Our website will carry the derived information products.
The rationale for the Museum web site is that it must transfer robust information at affordable cost.
The mass appeal of computers has undergone significant changes as they have become more powerful, cheaper and sturdier.
Today delivery of computer information is preferred for economic as well as technical reasons.
It is hard for persons nowadays to know how the Founder of the Museum became inspired with an essentially academic curiosity in the fertile field of geology by looking at the static display and browsing through the geology and fossil specimens frozen in time in a classical Victorian Museum.
Try to imagine the sense of awe that came to this intelligent youth musing and staring alone at the mute specimens from near and far, his only tutor his reading of the ancient hand written labels penned in clear cursive script. In some cases, the chemical formulae was disclosed and without a visible tutor of any kind, he resolved to study chemistry.
For all he knew, he might just as well have wished to study alchemy.
Today, many educated young persons could not duplicate the experience merely because they cannot read the ancient cursive scripts.
Many can only taught to write and read other scripts, such as Times Roman, because these are used on the computers and in their textbooks at their schools?
There was imperial love of English calligraphy that whoever gathered and identified those specimens displayed in the ancient glass cases seemed to assume mythic proportions at the Victorian Museum in Swanston Street, Melbourne.
When John D. Hughes started active Australian research into what appeared to be the lack of a future for an old specialised institution, the geological Museum, it appeared to him that a potential non-specialist user who just wanted to browse had no chance of finding such a place.
To achieve this critically and imaginatively from the website suggests:
It is manageable when specimens can move from the supply chain to a work flow chain with a minimum of fuss.
It must be professionally managed to produce literature that is useful and can be trusted. A theory of trusts seems to be an intractable problem because it seems to be conceptually impractical to find to what extent echoes or resemblance's of sets of trusts occurring in dynamic work cultures are actually existing at present.
One segment of our target audience to be supplied is those adults who plan to be around for a few more years before they experience functional impairment. They ought to have the opportunity to be conditioned to our website choices in output that hold for later life
This discussion of output choice does not mean we have a compulsion to provide a complete matrix of alternative approaches has wider appeal than most persons may think.
For example, a perfectly healthy person driving a car could prefer a verbal rendition of the geological features of a section of Victoria rather than visual maps showing the same information because he or she must keep their eyes on the road.
His or her travel companions passengers could not only hear the commentary but also view photographs of rock specimens taken from the area they are driving through from an output device in the rear seat.
Estimates are that 14% of persons who are younger than 65 years have some kind of functional impairment, compared to 50% of those older than 65 years.
Many wheelchair users need no special considerations at all when browsing the web.
Our website ought to be designed that can cater for minor impairments (for example, reduced hearing).
Text-to-speech conversion for blind users works much better for on line
text than for print.
Another segment suffering from work induced stresses who look for a hobby.
Another segment is to introduce gifted children to academic interests such that it prevents them from falling into a kind of existential despair because they are not challenged. This segment is, say, 3% of the children in Australia.
It gives encouragement for the helpers to explore new technology.
Helpers learn to use the digital camera that is owned by John D. Hughes.
Photographs of specimens are taken in natural bright sunlight whenever possible.
The provision of an online specimen photograph will give the public visible access to the museum’s catalogue. By being able to browse freely among the accumulated specimens the value of the museum’s work will become clear to visitors.
John has assessed the level of technical performance he will need to create suitable impacts on the users of the derived information products.
Some of his preliminary work on the information products was intuitive.
Due to budget limitations, the measurement of likely stakeholder satisfaction for the quality and relevance of the derived information product proposed was more qualitative than quantitative.
In doing this, suppositions were made about stakeholder perceptions of value and satisfaction as a measure of the underlying efficacy in meeting the objectives of the Museum as a host organisation.
According to Ahituv and Neumann (1982), such unstructured decision-making involves heuristics, trial and error approach, intuition, and common sense in addition to logic.
The relevant factors and outcomes are somewhat vague and tend to be more qualitative than quantitative; decisions are ad hoc and seldom replicate previous decisions; their time horizon is long; they are not programmable.
There are three good approaches to for evaluating derived information products.
The first approach assumes all factors are measurable.
These conditions can rarely be meet and in the case of the present Museum project measurements were not attempted on this scale because of the time needed.
The second approach seeks to directly measure the impact of information access. It may mean that measurements are taken before and after the introduction of the new information service.
Again, this is rarely feasible and could not be done on the Museum project at this stage because we do not know the names or our users.
Eason (1988) has emphasised that as the focus of evaluation moves from technical performance to organisational impacts the importance of perceptions and judgements increases.
Using first order thought for measurement, we find that a judgement cannot be made as to whether the system serves the purposes for which it was created.
Using second order thought as measurement, users evaluate the quality of the services obtained from the information system.
At the third order thought, precision increases as the objective is to assess the impact on INDIVIDUAL users in terms of their work performance.
Easton suggested that the most useful approach was seeking the PERCEPTION of users of the changes that had taken place in the way they worked and their assessment of whether these changes had been beneficial or detrimental.
Some complications in depiction of cost-benefit analysis for derived information products.
Initially, we explain our decisions in terms of balancing cost displacement/avoidance with a quadrant analysis of priority/ performance.
In some ways, our approach to decision making could be compared to aspects of cost benefit analysis developed from the economic justification of public works.
Traditional accounting approaches do not acknowledge certain factors in strategic or infrastructure investments such as archival maintenance of the specimens that allows the production of the derived products.
Accounting figures are fluid because the value of the specimens photographed may increase in market value because of their exposure to a global audience.
It is sobering to remember that, at the end of the day, costs and benefits must be stated in a form that management finds appropriate.
It is accepted that, sooner rather than later, we ought to undertake the distribution of questionnaires and discussion of the interpretation of results in a systematic manner.
When this is attempted in the future, we think the results may cause us to question and modify the delivery processes used in our present supply chain management.
But, to begin, we must have something concrete to inspire our helpers to get them to agree about our approach to the nature and measurement of costs and benefits.
While we agree that information costing and valuing remains “difficult” for us, we must take a firm position otherwise we may get “paralysis by analysis” and never get the derided information products into performance.
As Sassons (1988) neatly summaries this situation: "at any time, the prominence of cost justification is proportional to its difficulty”.
To break the nexus with something affordable with some cognitive effort, we selected the use a quadrant-based decisions about changing priorities as an activity-promoting device.
The “success” quadrant indicates areas where both priority and performance are high.
The “waste” quadrant is where performance is high but the area is of less importance.
“OK” indicates the intersection of low priority and performance; and “killer” is the area of greatest vulnerability where priority is high but performance low.
These presentations have to be interpreted with a good understanding of the specific organisational context of the Museum.
Naturally, John and his helpers are interested in the challenges of promoting some measurement of costs and benefits of the derived information products of the Museum.
The costs and benefits do not usually occur within a comparable timeframe (Parker 1982). Costs are often immediate and tangible, while benefits are frequently long term, uncertain and intangible (Sassone 1988).
For this reason, although all the viewpoints of the Founder of the Geological Museum @ Upwey may not be shared with all users, many persons could enter into the elite enjoyment that comes from viewing the photographs of rare specimens on our website.
Cost benefits comparison of alternative delivery methods.
Cost benefit expressed in simple terms is the extent to which the benefits of the derived information on products outweigh the cost of alternative methods of delivery of the same amenity.
There are both real and virtual holdings for the Museum.
These are described as:
Real Depot Holdings (RDH) - delivered from a display case
Virtual Museum Holdings (VMH) - delivered from the Website
(Note: VMH are not disassembled like RDH)
The first steps are to use the RDH from his own resources to give VMH, as product will develop the information product planned by John D. Hughes.
Costs arise because there are only two glass display cabinets. One display cabinet must then be disassembled to make room for other displays. This cost of this is set at $400.
The cost formula we use to value specimens is to work out the costs of selecting, labelling and preparing one safe display case containing 100 specimens and say that their value is three times their mounting costs.
Using our cost formulae, we calculate that mounting a 100 specimen real display for one person to view attracts a cost of $400.
The display (assumed unphotographed) cost of each labelled specimen is $4.00 to $12.00. The cost for the display of 100 specimens is then calculated at $1200.
The cost formula for an attendant to service one person’s visit for one hour at the physical depot is $100 per hour. This includes pro rata rates, insurance, indemnity, heat, light, gas, power and refreshments.
The cost formula for a supervisor preparing the 100 specimen display is $100 per hour for three hours = $300.
Combining the two cost formulae gives a total labour service and preparation cost of $100 (attendant service cost) and $300 (display preparation including labelling) = $400 (for one person for one half-hour visit).
The sample cost formulae for 100 samples is three times this cost = $1200
i.e. each specimen value is calculated at $12.
Therefore, total display cost at the physical depot is $400 + $1200 = $1600.
However, since the previous display is disassembled to mount a new display, the $400 value of the previous labour and specimen display time is destroyed in the process.
The accounting cost of doing business is $1600 (new cost outlay) plus $400 (old cost destroyed) = $2000.
Suppose a visitor spends half an hour inspecting the samples.
By contrast, the cost formula we use for a one-page presentation on our website is $200 (half an hour of webmaster’s time).
A visitor may browse 10 pages at one half-hour session. This represents $2000 of preparation cost.
Internet page presentations are not disassembled after viewing by a series of visitors and can be viewed again and again by many visitors and downloaded repeatedly without significant cost to the Museum.
However, if there were two visitors to the website at the same time, the cost for one visitor is then $1000 per person.
For 100 visitors a week viewing at the same time, the cost is $20 per person per visit.
After two weeks at 100 per week = $10 per person per visit and so on.
Unlike our Museum depot, a website is available to visit 24 hour a day, 7 days a week.
In evaluating the trends for interaction between visits by users and management, the present decision is to limit the range of visitor activities for the depot.
Every psychological theory incorporates certain far-reaching assumptions about the nature of human nature.
There are several ways of constructing rationality.
Regarding person’s ability to order their lives rationally, theorists have disagreed sharply.
Much rests on the modes of thought that are considered correct and useful for society in the sense of being efficient.
This practical view sets limits on intellect skill resting on linguistic structure and intellectual tradition because Western scholars seem to believe they have found that skilled thinkers must conjure up thoughts into consciousness segment by segment.
When the situation is ambiguous or when several thoughts appear all of which seem formally correct, current concerns are likely to have a predominant role in reaching a conclusion.
Thus, they exert a non-rational influence on the course of the thinking in the same way as if the thinker becomes fatigued, drugged or emotionally disturbed.
Persons are unlikely to note that the extent of their thought is limited by the language used and the culture of education in which the thinking takes place.
Perhaps too much stress in Western culture is being placed on the need for abstract goals such as “self-actualisation”.
Why is giving up a goal felt as being effectively noxious?
Religious or social service goals can be affectively powerful.
With this in mind, John seek helpers who will not give into ideological despotism and but hold the notion that a principled liberal education as a current concern is the best way to present geological insights.
It is a mistake to think role theory can separate something from the rest of a person’s life – as a special compartment of activity necessary “to placate the busybodies” as Erik Klinger (1977) put it.
We link the religious motivation of our helpers that they wish to act in ways that improve the objective living standards of local citizens.
The prime source of local wealth in the State of Victoria, Australia continues to be based on the development of its earth resources through its extractive, mineral and petroleum industries.
These three major industries directly contribute $3.5 billion annually to our economy.
The abundant sand, clay and stone resources that surround Melbourne ensure our infrastructure costs are highly competitive both nationally and internationally.
Brown coal fuels most of Victoria’s electricity generation.
The key challenge for the Geological Survey branch within the Minerals and Petroleum Division is to drive sustainable development this century.
The Geological Survey of Victoria (GSV) has been providing geological information to the community since 1852.
GSV are the custodian of key Victorian earth science databases including rock, drill core and cuttings collections.
Our networking needs to include GSV and Monash University crustal sciences institute.
The way forward for the Museum is to take on a role where we increase our public relations skills as the basis of our ability to deliver high quality motivational material from our website.
Bill Gates of Microsoft has great confidence that the Internet is going to change education as fundamentally as it changed when we had printed books.
The educational material that we will produce can arouse affect about geology as a desirable subject to study because computers can reduce learning time for certain types of knowledge by 30per cent.
Benefits include improved computer literacy skills, networking and information gathering skills.
In a world where performance doubles every 18 months, even relatively mature technologies may have limited life spans.
We have been building a series of websites and these are quality systems. Whilst having a quality system is a marketing advantage today, not having a quality system will be a disadvantage in a few years time. In 1996, we were scanning our early newsletters and early Buddha Dhyana Dana Reviews so that they could be machine-readable.
In those days, our computer processors were 80286s and our calculated CPU speed was 12 megahertz, low base memory was 640 kilobytes and expansion memory was 384 kilobytes. The computer systems operated the MS DOS version 5.00. Today, we have Pentium based computers running Windows 95 with a data storage capacity of up to 2.7 gigabytes.
We have gone up about three and a half generations in four years.
We have many workstations linked together on a Local Area Network (LAN) enabling our knowledge workers to exchange information and collaborate on projects. The present Local Area Network is a 10 megabits per second (Mbs) Ethernet.
The next LAN that we are building is Gigabit Ethernet capable of delivering information 100 times faster, that is at 1000 Megabits per second. This fast network is designed to comfortably accommodate the bandwidth for voice and data communication.
Our next LAN web and database server will deliver the colour photographs of the Museum’s specimens to our local users for matching for cataloguing into our database.
We feel comfortable in operating a faster Gigabit Ethernet network delivering rich colourful multimedia content as our regular system.
Over the last four years, John changed his information technology culture and made adjustments to his supply chain.
When John developed other websites to provide content to persons, he avoided certain technologies.
He avoided network technologies such as newsgroups because although they may induce in users a feeling of some sort of power, over time they do become aware of being coerced when the incentives that maintain a role are predominantly negative rather than positive.
It may be that a person’s sense of being free depends not on the amount of control they are actually subject to but on the relative balance of positive versus negative incentives that maintain them in their roles.
Roles always involve interactions between two or more individuals, they are defined in relation to one another.
Since, at the psychological level, persons are most basically pursuing incentives rather than filling roles, there is nothing mechanical about their role behaviour.
Role systems are the resultants of a continuous tug-of-war among the members of the group, each ready to adjust his or her role so as to provide the greatest possible return.
Testing the limits of the role is reflected in the countless minor irritations, squabbles and discontents that crop up even in placid interpersonal relationships.
Just as an incentive view of role systems leads to interesting insights, Barnard (1938) pointed out that persons join organisations when a particular organisation offers to help them more effectively than alternative organisations.
Lack of incisiveness may be because incentive theory is still in the stages of early development.
John has a strong model of incentive theory that starts from the information age data that someone is usually committed to doing something about almost every conceivable problem.
Persons may not be aware of the shortfalls until they raise their awareness that a commitment to improvement in certain areas may not be affordable in the real world.
Some operating costs are affordable with difficulty at the moment but are put on the table of the “wish list” for the Museum.
In the supply chain, we do not have the resources to view ourselves as a general store committed to supply all things on request to all comers.
Our foundation helpers are drawn from another self-help organisation set up by John Hughes decades ago. They enjoy one another’s sharing of experiences, can work together, enjoy breaking new ground, and some feel benefited by one another’s help.
On the “self-help” model, one person does something another wishes in exchange for approval, money, goods or work.
This system of exchange is implicitly or explicitly, the subject matter of all social sciences. When the incentives exchanged are material goods and services, it forms the subject of economics. The present reality of the economics of incentive-related processes being in place means the Museum can muster quite a series of resources from its helpers. Some of its helpers have found that the intensity of the activity of refurbishment of the freshly painted buildings and office space that will store the specimens and from which the hobby museum will be administered act as incentives.
The visible improvement in plant and equipment gives a feeling of prosperity to the helpers and this brings them a relative optimism and euphoria.
Under these conditions, helpers raise their goals even those difficult to obtain and their new commitments acts as stimuli to helper’s buying plans so they appear immediate enough to play a significant part in online education.
But in time, persons involved have to be taught and understand that true “self-help” works only when one group of persons comes from have power over another group’s incentives.
Some helpers who resent authority figures may feel uncomfortable when we talk in the open about the “irrational” power we use to call the shots.
It is necessary to protect this “irrational” power over time because activity slows if the incentives are over satisfied. Management must program the timing call for feedback loops needed for next after next stages. Over enthusiasm in reporting current activities means “time-off” to celebrate is called for is just as bad as underreporting the plans for the next change needed.
O, H & S means the Museum is firm in not recruiting as helpers of two types that seem to have “action tendency” but lack the ability to give gentler forms of “drive” and “need” to the work in hand.
Thus, a helper with a high “need to achieve” must not be placed to work with the Museum because he or she would have no constraints on forcing others to work beyond their comfort zone even if it meant “burn out” for them.
Other apparent achievers cannot work well unpaid with the Museum because they work for their organisations with high achievement for the money, not because of the need to achieve.
We use e-mail to communicate between helpers but must watch the style to avoid displays indicative of these two types of persons are present.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) allows dialogue to take place in real time is limited in its ability to filter, archive and structure it’s content. Therefore, the IRC is not a suitable option for the Geological Museum because we need a very effective way of structuring and archiving the data.
The Museum is a privately owned organisation and does not have to satisfy everybody’s needs. We will give our e-mail address to selected persons only in order to ensure high quality standard and to save time.
We are training the next generation of Museum helpers into our culture.
To attract a few hours of the time from a best mix of the best helpers, the Museum blends knowledge, experience, innovation and enthusiasm to achieve the desired result.
We recognise that seemingly perceptual barriers exist for some persons who cannot or will not cognate the reasons why geology mapping and research and the development of local earth resources is vital to the sustainable wealth of Australia in general and Victoria in particular.
When we talk viewpoints held by persons, it is well to remind ourselves that affective reactions not only signal their evaluation along a dimension of good or bad but they also communicate several varieties of good or bad and suggest certain rudimentary ways to react.
Neither affects nor current concerns of a person are dispensable constructs.
Although affects are clearly over-simplification devices of some situations part of Museum policy is treat and recognise affect as many human’s ultimate arbiter of value.
Because of the operation of affects, all persons do not agree upon universal values.
HENCE, our website policy is not to establish the superior value we place in browsing among the real specimens displayed in a classical geological Museum.
This is because John has insufficient hobby funds to build extended Museum facilities and does not intend to borrow money for this purpose.
His present concern is to select persons who are motivated enough to handle the preservation of his original specimens within the present site storage constraints.
In the future, increased exposure of the original specimens for promotional purposes stemming from the hyper-energisation of a few helpers, the Museum expects it will gain economic access mature enough to give either a second display site or a touring exhibition or both.
The time span for satisfying this economic concern may range from a year to a decade or longer to actualise.
Unlike this concept of incentive value that can be controlled by skill, a real loan geared against John’s personal assets would not be prudent because of his age.
He does not lack “repressers” or “inhibitors” that are needed to avoid the risk of imprudent gearing of debt.
To recap, we do not apologise for presenting them with cues to inspire affects that invite them to do more than passively view photographic representations of the Museum specimens on our website.
From the notion of affect as a guiding force refer to Mowrer (1960).
But for the time being we commit ourselves to the unattractive task of getting them to accept the economic reasons we cannot invite most of them to view the original specimens at our site.
But the supply-and-demand proposition of the future promise that our helpers work though the pleasant hobby activity of bringing some of the real specimens on a touring exhibition to be near to the website viewers.
We believe we are justified in cueing the website viewers to believe that sooner, rather than later, were they to make the effort and engage in more hobby vigour, they could mount exhibitions.
It is important that persons become genuinely committed to something in order for obstacles to increase in value.
When this happens, a form of internal synergy forms within.
By this means, they could be encouraged and induced to fund a display of their own specimens with those they had gathered with their friends.
Initially, the Museum would concentrate such efforts in the State of Victoria so that organisers could meet with us.
If the event was tactically crafted as Museum public relations for the display in the State of Victoria and included tourists, the Museum could loan part of its collection for display.
By this way, new suitable interstate and overseas friends of the Museum could form “self-help” hobby groups and we could benefit many by local action to overcome the scarcity of opportunity to see other and our original specimens in joint display.
Our website policy could follow a process suggesting our originals are in short supply.
There is an experiment held in 1995 that suggested that when a commodity (chocolate chip cookies) were made to appear in short supply, subjects (college women) liked them better, especially when they were led to believe that the scarcity resulted from a high demand from other participants, rather than by accident, and especially when the scarcity increased during the experiment (Worrchel, Lee and Adewole 1975).
As we start our website we will do our best not to work by reducing the enormous flow of cues that we can use to increase incentives, each for himself or herself, to wish to find the incentive to view the original specimens one day under good conditions.
The scarcity must be supplied to generate a form of “consummatory force” to overcome satiation which represents decreasing satisfaction with the seeing on screen and hold up to build a hobby force established in geology.
Incentives are not the only things that need to be clarified because values need attention. If we suggest attachment is what we want we have been misunderstood.
As mentioned again and again, “value” is without meaning in this context and it is interesting that Buddha Dhamma stresses that attachment to matter can be a cause of suffering.
We must be understood as saying we the tactics we intend to use to operate the Museum are on a wider frame than mere attachment and use a much smaller number of critical considerations than are usual in most of living.
We will take care to avoid emotive words, such as the “digital divide” or “unfair”, to suggest we have values that determine the exclusion approach we take as to who can view the complete set of original specimens on location and who could not.
As more and more persons access Internet, the number of depressed viewers can be predicted to rise.
Their sensory pleasures that have lost value through habituation can be revived to some extent by consciously focusing attention on them after they have become automatised.
Nearly half (47%) of Americans with Internet access in the lower socio-economic status have obtained this experience only since the beginning of 1999.
The same direction is being followed in the State of Victoria as Government policy.
For some this access can give cultural shock because operant thinking is most likely to be disrupted under certain specifiable conditions.
The thinker may fear the loss of something or be depressed about something other than the problem in hand.
At other times, the prospect of a different goal than the one he or she is working at present may excite the thinker.
For instance, a student is most likely to have trouble writing an essay while deeply anxious about the possibility of failing or depressed about a broken love relationship.
We must remember we are dealing with real persons.
Other possibilities include being excited about a vacation due to start on the following day, or being fed up with essay writing but unwilling to give up the life of a college student.
For example, although organisms come equipped with tendencies to react to certain kinds of situations with some nature of the range of ideas that such persons are exposed to good and bad views of the world.
The very credibility of what we intend to do arises from noteworthy planning differences showing the real cost of inviting live visitors to the depot soon becomes unacceptable.
The owner of the Museum understands what has become evident between the cost of Real Depot Holding (RDH) for the specimens and the cost of Virtual Museum Holding (VMH) at the website.
At this point, John can make educated guesses about how some persons view our project costs by examining critical operational factors such as, for example, the relative costs of changing the Museum display case specimens?
We accept that some persons may disagree with our economic perspective.
Other than the allocation of critical success factors that can be dreamed up to place in the different quadrants of the methodology outlined, management has no similar method that is as easy to understand the focus on setting up the interrelationship (if any) between RDH and VMH.
What do we tell our helpers to position them within the Museum?
We wish our helpers to see themselves as privileged persons who can attack some of the subsets of dissatisfaction that constitute alienation. They are told to work with the idea that alienation is reversible.
As a first step, we introduce the term that we will refer to geology as the grand hobby.
As a second step, we get persons to seek identification with successful hobbyists they appear to meet on the website.
The type of information the Museum suggests is slanted about the mythic qualities our helper persons generate with their grand hobby.
We have helper persons who can write reports and edit well.
These reporters can raise the profile of friends of the Museum who know how about geology, because they have word skills and good will enough to write small training modules.
These modules would be training packets to share with other helpers to build their hobby knowledge. A Company that could hold copyright of such packets is the one that holds the Museum’s trading name.
There is no legal reason why the Museum could not share the training packets from our website to save publication costs.
By such methods, a form of hobby publication of reports is used.
Sometimes, this is the only means we can see to avoid the additional cost of external publication in paper form for material that contains detailed technical information that is only of interest to a few hobbyists.
Every three months, there is a need to track that the hobby Museum mental image held is more likely than less likely to continue its key role of hobby propagation that will be sustainable and remembered in the future.
By the early 1990’s the global potential of new information and communications technologies in education was becoming apparent to Monash University in Victoria.
The promise of the new technologies was flexibility of time and location.
They made possible a variety of alternatives to traditional face-to-face teaching.
By implementing these breakthroughs, users could be encouraged to see the Museum not so much as an induction into the mysteries of didactic knowledge but as a set of tools for that user’s own hobby.
At present, as far as we are aware, the Museum has no real competition for online delivery for the type of hobby information planned.
Distance education is well developed in Australia due to the nation have a small population (19 million) in a vast continent.
The first stage was correspondence courses conducted by post. The second stage radio and TV broadcasts, and multimedia such as audiotapes and videotapes were used to supplement the printed materials.
With the advent of the third stage of distance education online meant the education providers had the potential for interactivity and student-directed learning emerged.
John D. Hughes has been involved in many capacities in the three stages. His informed opinion is that students have taken to the new technologies more quickly than some of the University staff.
From 1994 the Commonwealth of Australia abandoned the policy of supporting a small number of distance education Centres, instead favouring the development of mixed mode delivery for all institutions.
Open learning evolved in Australia as a particular form of distance education that was characterised by the use of broadcast media and designed to provide open access to in tertiary education.
University communications switched from journalism mode to marketing mode.
Although John has recruited most of his Museum helpers from another organisation he founded and they are used to working with him and have skills sufficient to bring the Museum specimens on line.
They are infused with the social purpose of the Museum, that of the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.
Many persons should know of how the economics arising from the history of geological discoveries changed the world.
Madame Curie discovered radium by repeated extraction of materials found in pitchblende (uranium ore).
But this discovery could not have happened if a geologist had not been able to tell her where the pitchblende could be found.
We are preparing to increase the storage space needed within the first two months.
At the starting stages, it is not prudent to increase alternatives of viewing specimens. Thumbnails can be clicked on to view a full shot of the specimen.
We will show some use of evidence that free access to second or third order knowledge or higher was found useful for longer-term Museum planning.
We wish persons to learn about the scientific method behind geology.
The Museum excludes the notion that we put too much effort into becoming a training centre.
One way of presentation to get this level of analysis across is to introduce a non-qualification course in geology.
These are some of the qualities we say become part of these mythic qualities.
The Museum story negates a number of tactical alternatives leading to commercial charging for website use.
Direct charging will not be considered by the Museum even in the medium term.
There are other values that could arise from the way we cost labour as an administrative convenience.
At present, we know that the prime functions of database cataloguing software for specimens and research software can be performed by software that is available at no charge to non profit organisations, such as the Museum.
Thought must been given to the weak position that might arise with going along the free software path.
How could we prepare for the even bet possibility that were the future Museum website to become popular, pressures could build by unpaid staff to want to handle a cultural shift by switching to commercialisation.
What happens at some future time when helpers become greedy there is a less even chance that the derived information products carried by the free software move outside the terms and conditions of non-commercial use.
We hope this adds stress to those who want wealth from the Museum and can no longer use the software free because some of the product is deemed to be commercialised for profit.
Our Helpers have many other professional interests and duties to attend to for the Museum over the next two years apart from talking to visitors.
Our Founder thinks that the best policy is to have VIP visitors by appointment only. His helpers add more value in prospecting for additional material to add to the collection.
His experience in the content building of web sites proves we can write material of such powerful appeal that visitors are willing to spend up to one hour or more of their time reading his sites and downloading his material.
Another resource is that that gives cost displacement by use of the “higher order effects” that arise from his series of network of friends and benefactors who can give help in preparation of the product.
Mental health of the population is becoming an issue for governments.
We will encourage persons to dare to assess the monetary value at its true economic value.
The accumulation of local traditional values that come with the territory by lifelong residency in fixed real estate no longer holds so much social importance for a person who flies in and flies out to work in a mobile workforce. At the best, the local culture is seen as “quaint” values; at their worst, they are parochial.
The notion of claiming of lifelong real estate territory in such cases may turn sour and cease to satisfy persons when their local workplace closes.
Yet this is the most likely case in the global economy is where to get high value added from a factory worker is more and more the pace and style of recent experience in the mature post-industrial countries.
Our Museum would like to develop a good thesaurus online as both a thesaurus creation project and as a maintenance tool.
We are exploring an approach where we get more development of our papers by script writing coupled with searches through ISYS software.
The first version of a Conceptual Solution for the Museum was produced on 29 October 1999.
The official founding date of the Museum was 21 January 2000.
Over the year, steady progress has been made on further development of the Conceptual Solution. Version 6.0 of the Conceptual Solution makes it obvious how to arrange suitable private space at Brooking Street for housing the Museum’s collection.
Details of Progress in Stage 1 Plans of the Museum
Improvements resulting in the Conceptual Plan Version 6.0 and working papers prepared by John D. Hughes lead to the notion of a 10-stage process of development.
This year’s report on progress might imply there is a difference between the “administrative” and “technical” elements in the make-up of the operations of the Museum.
There are three functions that are recognised in the general classification of specimens through each of the geographical areas of interest.
These functions are producing, routing (or “order of work”) and inspecting.
Ideally, we would like to wait until after an inspection had verified all the data about a given specimen before we turned that data with a suitable level of photographs of the specimen over to our webmaster as being ready to place onto our website.
But we anticipate that co-operation of helpers would soon be stifled if they cannot be rewarded by viewing the grand sum of their labours if we cannot get a fast response to our website.
What chart and compass are to the captain of a ship, so speed of delivery of content with effective cost management is to the curator of the Museum.
To say that the story of education and training for management of a Geological Museum @ Upwey is now complete would be the antithesis of the truth.
We use the term geology to make brand recognition more widespread.
Why the Website Specification was clarified to become an actualiser of Costello’s (1966) Five Steps of Familiarisation, Analysis, Identification, Evaluation and Description
Development of a website is the most affordable way we know to expose this data. It is a suitable actualiser to assist those who share in the fun of this topic as a hobby or career.
John’s wide experience in setting up special interest websites gives him an edge in mapping out studies of “conducive” things that persons can do week by week to live with more ease in a faster-paced society.
The work stations to be set up for the Museum will go digital all the way, because with this technology, helpers can access state of the art working at anytime.
The possibility of seamless processes that supply helpers with education on a need-to-know basis could, in time, be transferred to the website.
John needs to consolidate data captured in topics of his specialised interest.
Some specialised topics arise from John’s recent interest in building special garden walls using granite in the Museum grounds.
These were off-cuts of polished granite obtained from Melbourne suppliers. (Refer to the website for photographic close-ups.)
WHEN THESE ARE FOUND, WE SOMEHOW FEEL WE BELONG.
Compare this feeling and its ease of belonging in a place we know with the alternative of a know-nothing person who is baffled by the alien stones of city buildings.
The latter person can be overcome by feeling, with an impression that a golden age in the city has gone leaving him or her nothing but unfulfilled responses.
We say we all have a need for types of information.
If our website is developed in this manner, school excursions and tour guides could find such geological information.
We might sow seeds to entice visitors to inquire when they look elsewhere at the geology products that were used to build cities and towns in their local areas.
For the time being, we do see ourselves developing one or two such special projects on our website.
Outcome Spaces Sought by 10-Stage Development of the Private Geological Museum@Upwey
Tay Vaughan, a multimedia pioneer, reminds us that a classic physical anthropology law (Leibig’s Law of Minimums) proposes that the evolution of eyesight, locomotor speed, sense of smell, or any other species trait will cease when that trait becomes sufficiently adequate to meet the survival requirements of the competitive environment.
If the trait is good enough, the organism expends no more effort improving it.
Vaughan’s Law of Multimedia Minimums states there is an acceptable level of adequacy that will satisfy the audience, even when that level may not be the best that technology, money or time and effort can buy.
This Law is considered as part of our project plan.
There is no getting away from that fact that however strong and experienced the present curator of a Museum might be, by himself he could do little if not ably and sympathetically supported by his or her co-workers.
We are fortunate that as the cogitative work has been done over the last year we have found references that look at the limitations of conventional Boolean retrieval.
A well-known measure is the co-ordination-level match, which ranks documents according to the number of items in common between a query Q = ( q1, q2,……qt) and document Di = (wi1,wi2,……wit).
Note that this similarity measure can be expressed as:
t
Sim (Qi Di) = å q j t f ij
J=1
In this case q j is 1 if term tj is present in the query and 0 otherwise.
Documents with the most terms in common with the query are thus ranked highest.
According to RMIT researchers (1991), ranking algorithms based on probabilistic theory have been proposed to overcome the deficiencies of Boolean retrieval for full text documents.
It can be argued that this matching process of the above formula is closest to an unmodified AND search in a Boolean environment.
Refer to the paper by Ross Wilkinson et al. Automatic Indexing and searching of full Text Databases: A Pilot Study. In Victorian Association for Library Automation OPEC AND BEYOND 6th Biennial Conference and Exhibition Melbourne 11 to 13 November 1991
We have started to develop amazing clear perceptions of what might be the Museum’s catalytic significance in the improvement of a person’s mental health and the line along which it has to advance.
Whatever of the 10 stages appears to them worthwhile, we must ensure that we give them longer term encouragement to become involved in doing it.
The ultimate competitive advantage is said to be the ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly.
Traditional societies often rely on one or two persons to remember the group’s history and traditions, but modern organisations need a better way to record and pass on their folklore.
Ideas such as this come from experience and by way of an introduction to our concepts and ideas on designing information architecture you may read in the chapters prepared by John D. Hughes in his book: “The library you are looking for”.
If you enjoy reading about the history of how ideas drove us to our viewpoint that the user matters and wish to understand our historical cognitive approaches, please view the chapters of John’s book about information handling he has placed on this website.
From browsing in the store we had benefits arise without the need “ to get stuff fully indexed before putting it on display on the shelf”.
A classic librarian may not feel comfortable with our action but once we did it this process became an enabler to give us instant benefits.
Analogous thought about browsing on the website could remove the delay caused by insisting we index every one of the Collection’s specimens before it can be shown on the Internet.
A photograph with a simple reference number allows browsing.
Our modus operandi will place photographs of many specimens on this website as quickly as possible to allow visitors to browse just for the sheer pleasure of looking.
LATER (as co-operative expertise permits) we will fill in our index with many refined details.
A bonus of this approach is that we can invite helpers to identify the specimen and e-mail us with details to speed up our indexing stage.
We have found as we plan to move from description to explanation, we raise our expectations of how knowledge can be used.
Stage 1: This stage will draw together tourism literature and geological structures of interest in the State of Victoria that are accessible to safe inspection by laypersons to establish the guidelines for a new discipline tentatively called “Geosophy Exploration in Victorian Tourism”.
Outcome sought: Fifty thousand users donate $5 to the projects. The Geology Museum is set up as a Victorian tourist destination.
Stage 2: The second stage will draw together tourism literature and geological structures of interest in the State of Tasmania and how common ecology in the geological sense is shown in the State of Victoria.
Outcome sought: Geology Museum of Tasmania set up as a tourist
destination.
Stage 3: The third stage will review the success of tourism, promoting within geosophy exploration guidelines in Victorian and Tasmanian tourism.
Outcome sought: Strategic alliance between the two State Museums.
Stage 4: The fourth stage will promote the need for review within Australia to provide a national database for geosophy tourist exploration in Australia.
Outcome sought: Federation of tourist body.
End game: A national geology museum will be set up as a tourist attraction within 10 years funded by new users who list on our website.
To load the website with good information:
PHOTOLAN will be built for internal use
Specimens will be photographed in a form suitable to put on PHOTOLAN.
Some members have offered to photograph specimens with their digital cameras. New material will be loaded regularly to PHOTOLAN and labelled.
The Website will be loaded from PHOTOLAN
From time to time PHOTOLAN material will be edited till it is approved for publication. Then, it will be copied and loaded to the Museum Website.
The Museum ought to double the specimens held within one year
Key Performance Indicators
Key Performance Indicator (Tmin) of the Museum is to GENERATE A 100% INCREASE IN SPECIMENS HELD OVER THE NEXT YEAR.
By 2001, we would like to get the INTERNET WEBSITE to hold 5,000 entries on line.
Financial Indicators
Financial KPI’s are understandable because the benefits of internal funding for a hobby that gives a perspective development framework of the MUSEUM that builds up reserves means low risk.
JDH wants the MUSEUM to stay internally funded so that financial decisions on this project cannot place the owner or friends of the collection in debt.
The KPI financial ratios for building & infrastructure cost Vs maintenance costs Vs operating capacity costs of the Geological Museum @ Upwey have been set by JDH.
What are the cultural changes we will promote in behaviour?
Like Ch’an, involvement in Museum operations will help persons reduce the greed and confusions spread by Mara in the Dhamma Ending AGE.
The Dragon KING as the patron of the GEOLICICAL MUSEUM @ UPWEY allows FRIENDS OF THE MUSEUM to gather blessings and healing under the Teachings.
The Dragon King is a great Bodhisattva.
This year’s budget is tentative.
The MUSEUM budget includes:
$40 a week to electric power over three sites = $2000 p.a.
(10 friends of the Museum who are also Members of the Centre pay $5 a week levee to the Centre to cover this use.)
$100 a week for LAN use and PHOTOLAN use = $5000 p.a. (Jointly developed as an intranet)
$30 a week to telephone = $1,500 p.a.
$50 a week to public relations & printing = $2,500
These costs are covered by the Centre, which has joint use of these facilities.
$50 a week to display units (fixed and mobile) = $2,500
Total $13,500
The $4,000 cost figures to bring the needed capacity Surplus $12,000 will go into reserves.
Earlier, pre November 2000, JDH funded the Suite 4 and Suite 12 building costs and fit out costs in the first year (2000).
The Museum is the hobby of John D. Hughes and privately funded.
The estimated capital value of the present Museum buildings, including cost of wiring of electric power, are:
Suite 4 ($4,000) and Suite 12 ($25,000).
The full cost of $29,000 for Suite 4 and Suite 12 is treated as a Museum capital cost.
Suite 10 has an estimated capital cost of $8,000 when wired for electric power.
Building & shelving total $40,000.
In the future, it is intended to wire Suite 12 & Suite 10 To Suite 11 at a cost of $1,000.
Metal shelving to hold specimens and references has cost about $3,000.
The capital and fit out on buildings at $40,000 houses the display of an estimated 10,000 specimens.
The present holding cost per specimen to display is $4.00 to $ 12.00.
We have learnt that unanalysed experience and intuition, chance or guess work can reduce our exercise of professionalism of display.
If we had asked ourselves, were the two glass cases we had satisfactory we would have replied they were because at the back of our minds we thought they were a professional design. However, by professionalisation of our thought on display we came to the conclusion they were an ergometric disaster because a person would have to squat down to see the specimens on the lower shelf.
What is sobering is that it took us two years to realise the inadequacies of our display cases. Now we have discovered the flaw, we will raise the selling display in the glass case of the foyer of our Centre on a 1 metre high dais to bring the product offered for sale to a comfortable eye level for the potential customer.
The beauty of a dais is that extra stock can be stored in it in an orderly and secure manner.
We do not feel comfortable with our two existing glass display cases. The reason for this is labels on the specimens are will below eye level and cannot be read with ease. The difficulty with them is that it is very difficult to read labels on the bottom shelf because the displays are below eye level. We have redesigned these glass display cases to be supported on a 1 metre high dais.
The ideal is that the full collection could be viewed at the same time would mean the available display space should be over 20m2. This will be the minimum target for the Philip Island display area.
Investment evaluations suggest that if the museum buildings are to be increased to cater for more than 100 live viewers, the project could run into parking problems.
Car Parking will be needed at Philip Island.
Given the notion of an ideal area where one hundred tourists a day visit the museum, the parking area needed should have 30 cars and 3 bus spaces. Car parking such a project would suggest that the new capital outlays of up to $1 million would be required.
Prima facie, without this in Philip Island the project would be an instant white elephant because tourists will not walk any distance, they want drive in access.
If a benefactor donated a suitable rural property on several hectares of land and buildings worth one million dollars, it would be accepted, because derivatives could cover running costs.
All costs and externalities must be included to make a balanced judgement on such a project.
Forming a consortium with a government body is unlikely because of the vulnerability of payback of capital if government policy changed.