I’m absolutely delighted (and only slightly scared) to announce that I’ve been commissioned to write a book for Facet Publishing.
Ever since I started working with museums online, I’ve felt that there is a need for strategic advice to help managers of cultural heritage web presences. There are of course hundreds of thousands of resources if you’ve got technical questions, but not many places where you can ask things like “how should I build my web team and structure my budget?” or “how do I write a strategy or business plan?”.
Facet approached me in July asking whether I’d be interested in authoring something for them, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to try and answer some of these questions.
My (draft) synposis is as follows:
This book will provide a guide for anyone looking to build or maintain a cultural heritage web presence. It will aim to cater both to those who are single-handedly trying to keep their site running on limited budget and time as well as those who have big teams, large budgets and time to spend.
As well as describing the strategic approaches which are required to develop a successful online presence, the book will contain data and case studies on current practice from large and small cultural heritage institutions. This research will help give the reader an insight into how these institutions manage their websites as well as providing hints and tips on best practice. It will have an accompanying web presence which will provide template downloads and other up-to-date information including links and white papers.
As you’ll see, I have no intention of trying to do this all by myself – over the coming year I’m going to be on the phone to many of you (hide now!) asking how you do what you do, and compiling this into what I hope will be a useful guide.
If you have any ideas about what I should include, or the questions I should be asking – please do get in touch either via this blog or on Twitter at @m1ke_ellis!
My 
electronic museum 
Annelies Termeer
November 13, 2009
Nice Mike! Congratulations. Nothing like an actual printed book to bring all this web knowledge together ;). No seriously, I’m sure the book will be great. Looking forward to it.
Mike
November 15, 2009
@Annelies – ha ha! Good point, which is why I intend to produce it using the web and with web as research output and resource.. 🙂 But thanks – appreciated
Martin Greaney
December 4, 2009
Hi Mike,
This is just the kind of thing we need! We’ve been great at introducing ourselves and (possibly non-techy) colleagues to these new things in an instructional sense (what, why, how), so hopefully your book will fill that gap of how to do it in a project sense.
Martin
Mike
December 4, 2009
Thanks Martin – I’m getting the feeling talking to a lot of people that this might be useful to them, which is definitely a good thing!