Merry Christmas! (Or how I Learned to Love The Bomb)

Christmas from our collections - the woman on the left scares me a little. (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205196818)

I thought that I’d post a quick Merry Christmas (or just happy holidays if you’d like) to everyone.

…

But then couldn’t resist a quick post. Because while searching for Christmas in our collections, the disturbing image below appeared reasonably high in the results:

... because nothing so perfectly embodies the holiday spirit than the test of a nuclear weapon. BRITISH HYDROGEN BOMB TESTS AT CHRISTMAS ISLAND (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205191187)

An aim of this project is to encourage deeper engagement with out collections, leading to increased spread and advocacy. Out favoured technique for this is through ‘related objects’ – those that we think audiences will be interested in, based on the seed object they’re looking at.

But, with results like the one above, it remains a challenge for us to work out exactly how to serve appropriate objects. Here are a few options:

• Simple search based on object meta-data
• Web-analytics data (people who looked at this also looked at these…)
• Social-data (people who collected this also collected these…)
• Curatorial decision