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Productivity Apps for Note Taking
behind the scenes from the multimedia sausage factory [Ted Forbes] - Mon, 2010-03-15 11:51
I’m currently at South by Southwest – wonderful and exciting conference, but there is a TON of material to grok. I’m a good note taker, but in a perfect world I want my notes digitized so I can have easy digital access to them later.
I’ve used the “Notes” app that comes on the iPhone/iPod Touch and found it to be a piece of junk. From the stupid looking felt tip font and the yellow notepad background to the odd syncing into Mail.app on my computer – it simply doesn’t work for me.
However I’ve tried a new combination at SXSW that has worked beautifully. I bounce back and forth between my laptop and iPhone all day so sync is fairly important to me.
This technique requires 2 apps, both are free.
On the iPhone/iPod Touch side there’s an app called SimpleNote. You sign up for a free account and it will sync all notes to their server. So you could actually stop here considering you can access your notes from a web browser. The app is wonderfully minimal and clean. You are still using the iPhone keyboard, but its the best I’ve used. No frills – it launches quickly and you can get your data written down. If typing is still tough – there’s some great cut and paste apps that I’ll talk about in another post.
On the Mac side you can either use the SimpleNote website to get your apps, or you can use a desktop app that will sync with the service. Notational Velocity works great and its free… same simple, no frills interface – its all about collecting data and this is exactly what I’m looking for when taking notes. You want to collect data, not miss data while you’re fooling around with options.
So the result is amazing. You add text to your notes (or create new ones). Both apps sync automatically to the SimpleNote server – you don’t even have to save. I just open the note on whichever platform I’m on and append to what I was working on earlier. Completely seamless and smooth.
Notational Velocity:
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
In Support of Idiosyncrasy
Museum 2.0 [Nina Simon] - Mon, 2010-03-15 09:56
People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I don't like to give a list. I've only visited about 0.01% of the institutions out there and I suspect that the other 99.99% includes some real gems. But when I really think about it, all my favorites (so far) have one thing in common. It's not the extent to which they are participatory. It's not their size or type or subject matter. It's the extent to which they are distinctive, and more precisely, idiosyncratic.
I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. The institutions that stick with me are the ones that have a peculiar individuality. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Other institutions are idiosyncratic in their relationship to their environment, like the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, or to their community, like the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St. Louis, whereas others are august stalwarts like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. While most of my favorites are small (idiosyncrasy is easier to maintain without too many committees), some are quite large--places like the Exploratorium where a singular ethos infuses a massive facility.
Idiosyncratic institutions aren't just quirky and weird. They are usually staffed by people who feel incredibly passionate about their particular focus. These institutions are often more connected to their specific, local communities than more generic institutions. They are akin to local news organizations and charities. They reflect the soul of the community and can be responsive to its unique interests and needs. They are places that people point to with pride and say, "that's our place."
Even the business world is getting wise to the power of idiosyncrasy. The 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea shop (shown at right) is not a small community-owned place. It's a Starbucks. Over the last year, Starbucks has been opening stores in a few cities with a very different look--one that emulates the handmade, community vibe of locally-owned coffee shops. Whether you think this is a brilliant move or a corporate swindle, it demonstrates that even a large company with a highly branded, consistent image sees the benefit of individualizing offerings to different markets. Starbucks can't be a small funky startup, but it can try to look like one.
Why are museums going in the other direction, trying to become more consistent rather than celebrating their idiosyncrasies? To some extent, it's externally-driven. Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions. But that's only part of the story. Mostly, institutions move away from idiosyncrasy on their own accord. I see three significant internal reasons for homogenization in museums:
- As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are "proven" by other institutions' successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.
- Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms' projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.
- Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.
- The audience cycles frequently as families "age out." Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.
- The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.
- These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.
I understand why retail establishments benefit from becoming bigger, more homogeneous, and more distributed. People like to buy from chains because they know what they are going to get. But consistency should not be the number one value when it comes to providing visitors with educational, aesthetic, social, and hopefully transformative experiences. I'd argue that one of the top reasons people DON'T visit museums is that they think they already know what they are going to get. Especially when it comes to small museums with limited collections, a distinctive personality is often the best thing the institution has to offer. Trying to cover it up or smooth it out in favor of "best practices" does a disservice to the museum and the audience. It creates another forgettable museum.
Do you share my love of idiosyncratic institutions? How can you cultivate idiosyncrasy in your own work and museum?
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Women’s Work
Musematic (MCN) - Sun, 2010-03-14 13:02
We’re deep in an application selection process for a fairly significant piece of software, so I’m enjoying myself immensely because its vendor demo time. I love vendor demos, they’re fascinating. When I attend successive demos for a particular application I increasingly focus less on the product and more on the people who have been selected to present it. I often ponder on the choice of person that a company has made. Its obvious to me that some companies obviously haven’t pondered very long, for some its obvious that they paid absolutely no attention to it whatsoever. The demos I particularly enjoy are the ones where the company CEO or President turns up, who thinks he is best qualified to present their flagship application.
Love it.
You know that at some point he’s going to mess it up and the most junior person there, y’know the one that actually knows the product, has to step in and save his arse. The easiest way to upset a demo is to ask questions that are off-script. That’s when you know how well the presenter knows the product and this is where I see a huge difference between men and women.
We all know that men can’t do two things at once. For us, talking and operating an application are mutually exclusive. Its very difficult, particularly if some client wants to deviate from the well-rehearsed script: talking stops while the application is manipulated; confusion ensues while the shift is made; suddenly the product looks clunky and difficult to work with.
Not so if a women is presenting: there’s an effortless shift; no break in narration; question answered; back on script; wow, this is a slick and easy product.
Face it guys, vendor demos should be women’s work.
A few years ago we went through a rather lengthy selection process for a significant software purchase, it came down to two products and it was a difficult decision. I remember that we made the decision at the end of the day and I called up the CEO of the company who was not going to get our business, to give them the tough news. She wasn’t there, so I left a voicemail.
When I came in the next morning, I had about half-a-dozen voicemails from her. They were virtually indistinguishable from a dumped girlfriend’s. It was freaky but hysterical. Naturally, in respect for a fellow professional’s lapse in judgment, I deleted them…
After everyone had time to learn them verbatim… I know in my heart that this was a relationship that would have worked… Etc, etc. There were definitely tears on the third or fourth call.
Disclaimer: Similarity to any vendor demo currently living or dying at my institution is purely coincidental.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Happy Pi Day
Musematic (MCN) - Sun, 2010-03-14 04:03
I have just learned that today, March 14, is Pi Day. (And Einstein’s birthday, while we’re at it.) Never knew this particular treat existed. And I love odd holidays.
Yet another excuse to celebrate! Others may eat pie (apparently an authorized celebratory food), but I intend to have 3.14 beers.
Lots of stuff at the Exploratorium site, and pictures of Pi pies on Wikipedia.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Chrome Trailer
Musematic (MCN) - Sat, 2010-03-13 18:23
I have to share this “low tech” trailer for Chrome, just in case you haven’t seen it:
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
There’s an App for that
Musematic (MCN) - Sat, 2010-03-13 14:13
I’m a U.S. immigrant – legal I might add. Currently I’m a permanent resident and if my wife has her way I’ll be a citizen in the not-too-distant future. My mum has a different opinion, something about “over her dead body”. Although there is a distinct twang to it, I think I still have a British accent, but most people think I’m Australian. For the record I’m British, raised on Beer and Chips (the French Fries kind). Its not clear whether people think I’m Australian because of my hybrid accent, or because they’re confusing me with our Australian Director – well, that shouldn’t happen anymore . Our acting director is British and he decidedly has no twang. We’re both trying to promote a rigorous application of the Queen’s English.
I lost the accent battle with my two girls long ago: I say “tomarto”, you say “tomaydo”, etc, etc. They also say “like” way too “offen” and they say “way” way too “offen”. Totally. I live too close to The Valley to fight that battle. My attempts to sustain the Queen’s English in the Honeysett household fail miserably, although they both do an exceptional impression of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins – “Gor blimey ‘guv, you’re a toff and make no mistake”. As digital natives, they have no digital accent but they’re no longer as cute as this digital native: Abbey. They were fascinated to learn where the word “dial” comes from, as in “dial this number” – the acid test for a digital native and I’m pleased to report that they are fluent in vinyl and turntables.
Despite my youthful looks, I don’t qualify for digital native status. I like to think I have no digital accent, although keeping up with my girls is increasingly a challenge. They’re constantly txting, yes they have phone, and with my mum which is astounding if you knew my mum – she is most assuredly a digital immigrant, to the extent of being a digital tourist (thanks Titus – love this phrase). On the txting front, I need help translating.
As the modern-day equivalent of the jive xnsl8r there’s an app for that (http://www.lingo2word.com/translate.php) which takes your compressed txt msgs and xpndz thm to smtng u cn undstnd.
It occurred to me that we have something similar for our website search. Its an assisted search that uses a controlled vocabulary of artist names’ to help you find what you’re looking for, if you happen to be searching by artist name. We refer to the process as a query expansion. This name is a classic example of the technology influencing the name, because really its performing a query refinement, in that its helping you refine your search. But the background process involves polling the vocabulary app and returning with a larger data set, thus the search query has been “expanded”.
Brueghel is a standing example that we use. Did you mean…? I need txt expansion on my Crackberry, so that I can actually read what my grlz are txting me but more importantly understanding those endless txts that each of them get from their bff’s. r they boyz?
You might be aware that the Getty is in the business of controlled vocabularies and so when it comes to people, places or things in the art world, there’s an app for that. Respectively: ULAN (Union List of Artist Names), TGN (Thesaurus of Geographic Names) and AAT (Art and Architecture Thesaurus).
There is a new kid coming to the vocabulary block, CONA (Cultural Objects Name Authority) currently under development and hopefully debuting next year. (If you search for CONA with our vocabulary-assisted search it matches Coene, Jacques – Cona is a legitimate variant name). When it debuts, CONA will:
…include authority records for cultural works, including architecture and movable works such as paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, ceramics, textiles, furniture, and other visual media such as frescoes and architectural sculpture, performance art, archaeological artifacts, and various functional objects that are from the realm of material culture and of the type collected by museums.
If you’re really interested, there are plenty of training materials and resources on the Research Institute’s website in the use of standards, metadata, and controlled vocabularies. With a brand spanking-new publication on controlled vocabularies coming out shortly.
As we move towards a semantic and location-sensitive web, its resources like these vocabularies that will assist in contextualising information, albeit in the world of art history.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Pick of the week: AFT, 9 March 2010
Hanging Together (RLG) - Fri, 2010-03-12 17:56
Basking in the afterglow of Undue Diligence, I’ve been at leisure to catch up on blog postings and email, which both include the always-informative Above the Fold. Here’s my pick for this week.
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
The New York Review of Books • March 11, 2010
Crisis at the crossroads. Veteran publisher Jason Epstein offers a wide-ranging discussion of the pros and cons of digitization that draws on his extensive experience in both the hard copy and digital publishing businesses. One tidbit: “That the contents of the world’s great libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.”
I have enormous admiration for Mr. Epstein and think his essays always worth attention. In this essay he takes on not only the tumult and change in publishing but worries sensibly about what we call “digital preservation.” In that regard I commend to you the recently-released final report of the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access titled “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information.” My colleague, Brian Lavoie, was co-chair of the panel. They’ve delivered a much-needed and incredibly useful report that may unify our expectations and our vocabulary in managing this important responsibility. (Michalko)
This issue • Subscribe via email or RSS • Back issues
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Museum Design 2034: The Distributed Museum
Center for the Future of Museums [AAM] - Fri, 2010-03-12 10:07
Museum practitioners are pre-adapted to be futurists. Why? Because futurism is, basically, the process of telling compelling stories about things that haven't happened yet. These stories help people explore what alternate futures might be like, and based on that vision, make wise decisions today. Well museums are great at telling stories—usually about the past or the present, but the same skills can be applied to the future. How do you go about writing a story about the future? 1) Pick a few trends that we can observe, 2) think about how these trends interact and the way they would shape the world and 3) imagine different aspects of your life and work in the world shaped by these influences.
For example, consider the following trends
• The rise of the amateur expert and the increasing desire of people to be “doers” in museums, not just “viewers.”
• The rapid pace of technological innovation, specifically the flowering of ways to tie information to geographic coordinates and distribute content to hand-held devices.
• The rising costs of construction and maintenance of buildings, and drag that the fixed costs of operating a building can have on a museum’s budget in times of fiscal stress.
Here’s my story of how this future might shape museum design a quarter century from now.
Founded in 2015, the Museum of Urban Ecology’s (MUE) headquarters is located on the Lower West Side of Manhattan adjacent to the High Line, a New York City park founded in 2004 and built on a section of the former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line. MUE integrates the work of two major initiatives— a network of citizen scientists gathering, sharing and interpreting data on the flora, fauna and environmental health of the five boroughs of New York City, and a network of displays interpreting the “natural” urban environment.
The NYCitizen Scientist Network has over 2,500 members—amateur experts in zoology, botany, climatology and estuarine environments. In coordination with curators at the American Museum of Natural History, NYCitizen Scientists monitor animal and plant populations, water and air quality and log climate records, uploading data via mobile phones, to create an overall picture of the environmental health of the City.
Subgroups of the NYCitizen Scientists include City Naturalists and the Natural Artists, dedicated to teaching residents and visitors about the “nature” of this most populous American city. They accomplish this primarily through a network of displays integrated into the city itself. In addition to installations in traditional venues such as schools and libraries, MUE specializes in “pop-up” exhibits in a variety of formats installed in temporarily vacant storefronts in neighborhoods struggling with vacancy and foreclosure. The installations might be photography exhibits, art installations interpreting the natural world, “traditional” natural history displays of animal mounts or even small zoos. These pop-ups are announced via Proximity Alerts—a microblogging system that has been tremendously successful in generating buzz. Fans compete to be the first to find and “tag” new exhibits, adding them to their “MUE life list” before a pop-up closes anywhere from days to weeks later.
The most popular and heavily used offerings of MUE, however, are the interpretive content they have offered for the past two decades through an evolving range of hand-held portable devices, starting with the iPhone in 2015. This includes Bird Spotter, an application that, when enabled, alerts users to the proximity of species of interest. This GPS-based system is incorporated into approximately 60% of the birds banded and released by NYCitizen Birders (pigeons, sparrows and starlings conspicuously excluded), and the system can be programmed to alert the user to just certain groups of interest (hawks, for example, or unusual migrants) or only individual birds close enough to observe with the naked eye. Twenty museum and retail partners throughout the city also lend out MUE 3-D Overlay Goggles (3DOGS) such as those first popularized through use at Civil War battlefields. Rather than immersing users in the sights (and in case of the most recent 3DOGS, sounds) of war, at 28 sites throughout the City MUSE goggles enable the user to see what the landscape would have looked like at four points in time (10,000, 2,000, 500, and 100 years ago.)
MUE is a fabulous example of a museum capitalizing on the enduring enthusiasm and dedication of amateur experts and on 21st century, technological innovations that provide new ways of distributing content beyond the physical boundaries of a permanent museum building, and the rising costs of creating and maintaining buildings.
***
What do you think? Plausible story? How would these trends affect how your museum plans its exhibits and operations? Starting from the same premise, would you write a different story of the future? Please share…
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
08/03/10 The week in cultural heritage online
Museum Computer Group (MCG, UK) blog - Fri, 2010-03-12 05:14
[This week's guest post is by Paul Reynolds from McGovern Online. Paul is based in Auckland , New Zealand. He consults to the museum library and gallery sector in Australasia. He blogs at People Points. He will be in London in September]
Te Ara – The economy and the city
Last night the rain drummed its way down Queen Street in Auckland, making a small in-road into the humidity of this last week. But that’s Auckland for you – as soon as it has any visitors, especially from Wellington, the rain pours down, the better to confirm their prejudices that it never stops raining here.
The Wellington visitors were a distinguished lot – including Steven Joyce, Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Transport, and Tertiary Education , Louis Holden, the CEO of MCH, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, and, would you credit, Sir Don McKinnon, the former Secretary to the Commonwealth, 2000-2008,
They were here to help celebrate the next theme of Te Ara , The Economy and the City, from the New Zealand Online Encyclopedia.
Actually, I’m cheating on the last one. although he is/was a long term statesman, both nationally and internationally, last night Sir Don was there as whanau/family – being literally big brother to Malcolm McKinnon, historian, and Te Ara editor of the Places theme.
He in also co-editor of this theme – the Economy and the City, the 6th main theme to this extraordinary piece of cultural practice. The other published topic themes are :
- Maori New Zealanders
- New Zealand Peoples – the arrival and settlement of the people.
- Earth, Sea and Sky – marine life, people and the sea, natural resources, and shaping forces such as geology and climate.
- The Bush – New Zealand’s landforms, fauna and flora.
- The Settled Landscape – farming, rural life, and people’s impact on the land..
Still to come are : Social Connections – social groups, families and communities : Nation- systems of government and symbols of national identity. : Daily Life – the customs, leisure activities and beliefs that make New Zealand unique - and lastly, Arts, culture, invention and innovation.
Each issue, and the combined product represents months of work from the writers, illustrators and designers, as well as a mountain of collaboration with NZ and other museums, galleries and heritage library collections.
Issues and objects of conjecture
I’ve been an admirer of Te Ara since it’s inception, as would anyone who is remotely interested in the life and times of this first class online cultural practice.
This doesn’t mean I am either an uncritical friend, or unconscious of how the direction it took has influenced where it might end up. And how, it might even be time for some radical changes in direction.
Thus way back when it was first mooted as an idea, it would have been lunacy on a stick for Jock Phillips, its Editor and mid-wife - to say to any politician, far less a Prime Minister of Helen Clark’s quality – now head of the UNDP - that if you buy into this idea Minister, you might want to also know we have very little idea of what the online landscape will look like in the next few years, far less the 10 year life of the project, and its entirely probably that we might have to rebuilt the whole thing to keep up with new and emerging online practice.
Are we nearly there yet?
And of course - when we actually get online it will change everything, and there will be little point in asking are we nearly there yet – there is no there – the journey is the destination, and it will be for some time yet.
And even if he had said as much to her, its definitely unlikely he would have foreseen how quickly some passengers have started asking if they can drive the bus, or at least have a go at the map reading.
The critique
So what needs attention? Well for example, in the current site, apart from a good use of RSS feeds, Te Ara has no collaboration tools whatsoever. You can’t make a personalisation folder, and by internal policy fiat there are very few hyper-links links to outside sources. Moreover, you will search in vain for a co-lab rights framework like Creative Commons, or any substantive links to the outside world of social networks.
This lack of an external linking policy has come in for debate in the past. However, I predict there will be a fresh airing of this lack in the weeks to come.
I say this because I believe that creative linking, and enhanced metadata behind the scenes, is now a mandatory part of the linked universe of cultural data.
Linked data – the expectation
Moreover, in the forthcoming semantic web, it will be a commonplace to expect that primary and secondary sources cited in objects like Te Ara – and see any page for brilliant unlinked examples of these – to be machine readable to the digitised primary and secondary sources which it cites. And some of these – see for example the graphs on economic activity, will be live.
As to what kinds of sources are on offer right now, have a look at the excellent work being done by the NZ Electronic Text Centre in digitising NZ primary sources – or the McLean Papers on the NZ National Library of NZ , or indeed over in Australian , see the TROVE gateway to the Australian National Library as an outstanding example of a federated discovery layer, which in turn will take you to digitised copies of the James Cook and Joseph Banks journals, And out in the offing is the prospect of much more to come, including deep linkages to museum collections.
The GLAM thing down under
And just in case you think that the above examples, are a tad library and non museum focussed, its well to remember that down here in the Antipodes there is a much tighter connection between museums, galleries and museums – e.g. TROVE sources from , inter alia, Picture Australia which in turn has a mine of sources from Australian museums.
Similarly museum collection metadata is not only expected, but a common place pillar to the likes of Digital New Zealand, and its older sister Matapihi. Moreover, the likes of The Powerhouse Museum isn’t so much leading the way in discovery and presentation, in the likes of its experiments with Open Calais, its way over the horizon out of sight and sound of the rest of us.
All of which brings us back to my central point that Te Ara not only needs to offer more tools and toys for its visitors to play with – simply told – like so many other online cultural entities – it needs to get out more!
Wikipedia
That said, Te Ara does have a bit of relationship with Wikipedia. Not only will you see Te Ara links in there, its fair to say this is one area in which they could and would do a lot more provided the Wikipedia community started to talk out loud as to how they wanted to frame new kinds of relationships. It would also be great if some for the Wikipedia guys relearned that a conversation works best with at least two sides.
MW2010
Like others, I’m aware of progress in that direction – for example, the Wikipedia guys are heading up and over to the MW2010, Museums and the Web 2010 conference for a session on extending the conversation they started in Canberra last year at the GLAM wiki session.
And on that note, I’d also love to commend the British Museum news that in June this year, they are to host Liam Wyatt as their first volunteer Wikipedian in residence. I think this is a great development.
Creative Commons
Talk about Wikipedia, and you start talking IP rights. Back on Te Ara, there is another huge conversation to be had on their current rights framework.
Basically, like a lot of museums, galleries, etc, they don’t have one. Sure they might think they do – i.e. a re-written analog policy posted on the web site. But as yet – as do almost all the museum sector worldwide - they have still to work out their relationship with the read write generation.
That the Creative Commons framework is a key tool-set in this new relationship is I believe, a given. On that note, here in NZ life for the CC community just got a little interesting.
Royal Society NZ
In an unusual move to say the least, Creative Commons International has endorsed the moving of the NZ CC head licence away from the now defunct NZ Humanities Network into the slightly startled arms of the NZ Royal Society with whom the NZ Humanities Council has now merged.
Local misgivings on the move, mostly from the creative open source community of NZ , have been largely put at rest, not least by the Royal Society’s willingness to set up a new external advisory board which they hope will help them work out how to manage this interesting development.
As someone who was involved in setting up the original framework I was a little dubious as to how sensible it was to send something as fragile as the CC into the stern arms of scientific rigour without at least a basket and a note to be gentile with the baby. But it looks like we should be fine.
The Pacific thing – Pasifika!
Finally, as I tap, its Friday night. I’m heading out tomorrow for Pasifika the annual cultural- arts – and community festival for the Pacific community here in Auckland and beyond. You have no idea how blessed I feel by access to the Pacific way. And as for Pasifika, believe me Notting Hill ain’t got nothing on this.
It runs all weekend. Every island nation has a piece of a local park. Trust me, this is totally the real thing – something that the person who thinks a Samoan tattoo is a good idea will find out tomorrow. And on the kava thing – just how difficult is the concept of a mild narcotic!
Virtual Museum of the Pacific
As for the virtual Pacific – there is a lot more to tell – and maybe next time – if I’m asked back. For the moment – have a look at this You Tube video from The Virtual Museum of the Pacific, here. The site itself is here.
It is one of the most interesting things to cross my desk in a 12 month. Linked data – the new black!
Click here to view the embedded video.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Empowered by Collections
Musematic (MCN) - Thu, 2010-03-11 02:02
Recently, a press release went out about a new appointment to a local museum. I’ll be somewhat vague here, as the particulars don’t matter to the discussion, but there was a phrase within that had some of my colleagues (and myself) a bit piqued. The release stated how excited the person was to be working at an institution “unencumbered by collections.” I found this choice of words particularly curious as, regarding the individual, their position is one that has very little to do with collections, and as to the institution, artifacts from other museums are constantly used within their exhibitions. But “unencumbered”? That implies that every collecting institution on the planet is “encumbered”! And to that I strongly disagree.
Do collecting institutions spend a great deal of money, staffing, space and time caring for collections? Most definitely, yes. Is this a waste of resources, especially in a digital age when they could conceivably scan or make models of artifacts and then store only the copies? I won’t repeat the results of years of research conducted by a great many folks who have studied how access to original artifacts supports learning, research, and emotional connections to places, people, and history. Digital objects degrade in ways physical objects do not, nor can they replicate the meaningful, unquantifiable aura of the original.
Wedding Dress, Turkey, 19th century. gold metallic embroidery on velvet. Gift of Sara Levi Willis. 86.42. The Magnes. Click the image to read more about this piece.
Could this encumbrance upon the institution be caused by the devotion to objects by hiring collection managers, when funds for staffing could be used for additional curators and educators instead? Perhaps so, but there are also costs associated with borrowing artifacts for exhibitions and programs. Not as much as storing them, true, but the costs still exist, even if they’re not borne specifically by the non-collecting institution. Someone has to shoulder the burden of storage and management, if there are to be objects to display and study at all.
Are institutions without collections effective and valuable? Of course! I am very pleased that they are able to take the materials we collecting institutions can provide and use them to develop exciting and unique educational content. But that doesn’t mean that collecting museums can’t develop similar programming. And I’d be surprised if there’s evidence to support the idea that non-collecting institutions develop better programs than collecting ones.
As someone whose mission and purpose in life is to make cultural heritage materials accessible to the world, the thing I think I find most insulting about this choice of words is that it demeans institutions, professionals, donors, and all other stakeholders who take great pride in protecting the world’s treasures. We’ve a duty to our public to safekeep and share these artifacts. I would very much like to applaud those archives, libraries and museums – with a special nods to smaller places – who have made fantastic strides in the past decade to increase access to their collections through innovative programming, digitization and publication on the web, leveraging social media for incubating research and ideas, open storage, remixing, etc. We’ve come a long way in a very short period of time, and I can say quite definitively that far from being “encumbered”, we are empowered by our collections.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Focus and reframe: rights and unpublished materials
Hanging Together (RLG) - Wed, 2010-03-10 22:13
I’m using this blog posting to wrap together a bunch of ideas I’ll be presenting at a meeting tomorrow, Undue Diligence: Seeking Low-risk Strategies for Making Collections of Unpublished Materials More Accessible.
Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner helped to reframe processing modern archival collections in More Product, Less Process. Similarly, Shifting Gears helped to recast digitization from special collections. The purpose of Undue Diligence is to help professionals to look anew at rights issues around unpublished materials, specifically with regard to digitization of those materials, particularly 20th and 21st century collections.
The RLG Partnership exists to identify shared problems spaces, and to reduce pain and effort in those areas. With increasing expectations that our holdings will be made digitally accessible, assessing rights (copyright, along with privacy rights, and potentially sensitive materials) within archival collections is one of those points of pain. The prospect of analyzing items within archival collections is so painful, in fact, that many institutions avoid digitizing collections that were created in the last 70 to 100 years. While this is a very safe practice, it does little to advance broad and democratic access to collections in our care.
The RLG Partnership likewise dodged the copyright bullet in 2007 when we held our forum, Digitization Matters (from which Shifting Gears was born). We ruled copyright out of scope. While reframing the conversation around digitization — from preservation to access, from quality to quantity — did help move the conversation on digitization forward, it did little for those institutions who have major collections relating to … the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars, the civil rights movement, the free speech movement… the list goes on and on. This is a small slice of topics that are studied by researchers, taught in classrooms, and of interest to citizens everywhere.
In 2008, we published a short paper called Copyright Investigation Summary Report, which looked at then-current practices around copyright with both published and unpublished materials. Here, we learned that most investigations related to copyright were in relationship to permissions and almost never to digitization. Work was high effort and low return. “We say no a lot,” said one interviewee. Having conducted the interviews, I was pretty depressed by what I heard, which was a tale of professionals paralyzed by potential risks, and of collections shackled.
One of the proposed outcomes of the paper was to “…further explore community practice and issues around unpublished materials held in special collections and archives.” We did so by sponsoring the meeting that lead to the SAA Orphan Works Statement of Best Practices, which was published in 2009. This document provides good guidance for institutions to conduct a “reasonable search,” but does not frame rights assessment in a risk management strategy.
The risk of perceived harm in digitizing a collection is quite variable, based on factors like content, purpose of creation, and date of creation. We believe, in addition to standards for conducting a reasonable search, the community needs to reframe the issues of rights and risks as a community, and also to embrace rights assessment as archivists: at a collection or series level and not at an item level.
We are holding this event, with a star studded cast of presenters, to help set the stage for an important conversation, which is the development of what we are calling a set of “well intentioned practices.” We hope that this will have two effects. The first is that archivists will not need to reinvent the wheel, and can draw from community practices to identify lower risk collections of high research interest. The second is that institutions will digitize collections more freely. Even if institutions consider digitizing two out of ten collections, as opposed to one out of ten collections, access to collections will double!
We will follow up with subsequent blog postings both to report on the content of Undue Diligence and also to report on outcomes.
Many thanks to the advisory group who both helped to shape this event and our program of work in this area.
If you wish to follow the event on Twitter, follow #UndueD. I’ve also set up a Twapper Keeper for the event.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
A Chip Off The Old Blog (or How Marie Antoinette Changed My Life Too)
Musematic (MCN) - Wed, 2010-03-10 20:24
Hello folks. Apologies in advance, I am going to take advantage of my position as a Musematic Blogger to proudly announce the debut blog of my 16 year old son, Nick. He’s flown the coop for a semester and is busy discovering The Big Apple (foreign study in NYC we call it). This week’s assignment–for Nick and the 27 other students in the program–was to blog about a topic of interest. A couple of years ago a movie changed my son’s life–can’t tell you how many times he’s watched it. But wait, you don’t need to read me telling you about his experience, let him tell you about it. You can read Number 1 Son’s First Blog Right Here.
Marie Antoinette, as interpreted by Sophia Coppola, changed my life too by the way. I’ve spent the past three days painting my son’s bedroom Wedgewood Blue. Ah…art for art’s sake…what’s not to love?
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
The Participatory Museum Process Part 1: Overview and Statistics
Museum 2.0 [Nina Simon] - Wed, 2010-03-10 15:34
This is the first of a four-part series on the behind-the-scenes experience of writing The Participatory Museum. This week, we'll look at the overview of the process of the creation of the book and some overall statistics for user participation. Next week, part 2 will focus on participants' experiences. Part 3 will focus on my experience, and part 4 will discuss the self-publishing process. Please let me know in the comments if there's anything in particular you want to know about - I'm happy to share whatever interests you.
Overview: Stages of Development and Participation Types
The Participatory Museum was written over a 15 month period that began in December of 2008. Participants were engaged in the following ways:
- Content review (open). I wrote the plans, outlines, and multiple drafts on a public wiki that was available for review, edits, and comments. While all stages were open for comment, I made an explicit ask right before releasing the second draft, and consequently, the second draft was most heavily edited. 65 people participated on the wiki, though the vast majority of the activity came from a core group of 15 (more on that below).
- Content review (solicited). In addition to the volunteers who signed up to help on the wiki, I directly solicited sixteen professionals in the field who I respect to provide feedback on particular chapters (or in some cases, on the entire draft).
- Content review (stealth). Many of the book sections started as blog posts on Museum 2.0. Sometimes, I'd put out a post on something I was struggling with for the book (see this early example). Readers' comments helped steer the book, even if these commenters never visited the book development wiki. At least 50 blog posts and 240 related comments fall into this category.
- Copy editing. I invited people to sign up to copy edit sections of the final draft. 17 people contributed to this effort. This process involved people downloading sections of the book, editing them in Microsoft Word, and reuploading them. Each section went through two copy editors for redundancy.
- Marketing copy. I invited people to help develop marketing copy for the book - to vote on the title of the book, help write the blurb for the back, and comment on the cover illustration. 210 people voted on the title, 6 contributed to the blurb, and about 30 commented on the cover.
- Image and content research. In a fairly traditional process, I asked professional colleagues to help me source images and examples that should be included in the book. In a couple of cases, I opened this up broadly to my Facebook or Twitter network, for example, when I was looking for a generic shot of visitors checking out a photography exhibition. I also cold-contacted people on Flickr with image reproduction requests, 100% of which were granted.
- Cut the length of the book from 125,000 to 99,000 words. There were many redundancies in the original draft, and Bruce Wyman in particular was delightfully brutal at pointing them out.
- Restructure the book. You may notice that the graphs above show only six chapters, whereas the final book has eleven. This restructuring was based on their comments and edits.
- Streamline case studies, especially those in which I was personally invested. Conxa Roda was a queen of cutting.
- Improve the section on evaluation. Peter Linett, Mark Kille, and Andrea Bandelli were instrumental in making this happen.
- Track down examples from further afield, especially from smaller institutions, institutions outside the English-speaking world, and institutions that focus on living history.
- Shift the tone of the book. Sarah Barton and Elaine Gurian in particular helped me settle on a more generous, positive voice.
- Generally feel confident about making big changes. I made the vast majority of edits and restructuring on my own, but I was bolstered in doing so by the many comments and opinions of the contributors. They cheered me on conceptually as I worked late into the night. Without them, the differences among the drafts would have been much less significant (and the final result of lower quality).
When and how did people participate the most?
With the exception of spikes each time I made a blog announcement about the book development, the traffic to the wiki stayed pretty constant throughout 2009. The dead time in October was an error on my part--that data was lost.
Looking just at the returners (and excluding me), you can see how low the overall traffic was, and how concentrated in the various participatory time periods:
Despite the fact that the wiki enjoyed more visits during the first draft than the second, there was far more editing activity for the second draft. I took a different approach to the two drafts: the first draft was made available as I wrote it, whereas I released the second draft all at once (and gave people a fixed timeframe in which to make their comments). Here's a graph comparing wiki activity during the first draft (Feb-Oct, 2009) and the second draft (Nov 1 - Dec 18, 2009):
Clearly, the numbers of comments and edits were WAY up for the second draft. But this doesn't tell the whole story. When we look at the graph of the relative number of people involved, it looks like this:
Chapter 1, 5, and 6 received a lot more love in the second draft than the first, but the difference otherwise is not huge. The outline is an outlier because it was used as a planning tool and enjoyed lots of discussion among people who were interested in the book in its earliest phases. The number of people actively involved from draft one to two jumped from about 5 to 15--but those fifteen people collectively made hundreds more comments and edits to the draft. Of those fifteen, just six--Sarah Barton, Conxa Roda, Mark Kille, Mike Skelly, Louise Govier, and Claire Antrobus--contributed 95% of the edits. The power law is alive and well.It's worth noting that I only knew one of these six people (Conxa) before this process began. In particular, Sarah Barton had incredible influence on the content development, and she is someone I would definitely go to in the future for content review.
While I was thrilled by the participation of this small group, it was obvious that a huge number of Museum 2.0 readers were not involved in the wiki process. For this reason, I stepped up the double-posting of case studies and book content on the blog and wiki so I could have the benefit of the comments of a wider group. Blog commenters, who not represented in the graphs above, represented the most diverse and numerous group of participants in content review. Hundreds of people offered a single comment on a post or tweet throughout the second draft process.
The solicited content reviewers also had incredible impact on the book, but in a way that was quite different from that of the wiki and blog commenters. The wiki and blog comments appeared in real time, whereas the solicited reviewers sent me their complete edited manuscripts in one pile in mid-December. This meant that throughout the writing stages, I could rely on blog and wiki commenters to steer me in the right direction. By the time I got back the manuscripts from solicited reviewers, I was pretty much "done" covering the wiki comments and could focus fairly exclusively on the solicited drafts. These solicited commenters in general provided incredibly detailed comments, though a few folks opted to offer an overall impression instead. Frankly, I'm glad that not everyone wrote line-by-line comments - I couldn't have handled it. Special thanks go to Georgina Goodlander, Ed Rodley, and especially Bruce Wyman for doing something very wonderful with their edits: making me laugh.
A few surprises
Every time I do a project that involves user participation, I'm always surprised to find some of my expectations are completely off the mark.
Here are four surprises I encountered in this project:
- Unsolicited contributions were at least as valuable as those that were solicited. Part of me suspected that the people who I directly asked to review the drafts would be more honest, more critical, and just generally more helpful in the direction of the book. I expected that wiki volunteers would mostly be Museum 2.0 fans who might not feel comfortable being critical, especially in a public venue. This was not the case. I received FABULOUS critical comments on the wiki, including and especially from people I did not know. In one case, Chris Castle, one of the few people to comment on the first draft on the wiki (and someone I didn't know), became someone I solicited formally for the second draft because I had appreciated her early contributions to the wiki.
- The numbers worked themselves out. I was nervous when I threw open the wiki and over a hundred people registered to edit. How would I deal with a hundred commenters and the 16 I'd solicited? But it turned out that only a small percentage of that hundred got deeply involved - a number (15) that was manageable for me. And that's not to say others who made a single comment didn't have impact--I got value out of every comment and edit, even if people only contributed once.
- People preferred to comment on a finished draft rather than the work in progress. At the time, I thought people would be MORE excited to comment and help shape the book as I was first writing it than to comment on a complete draft. I was wrong. The second draft was offered to participants with a much more specific, time-limited ask, and it was much more successful than the open-ended "help me as I write it" approach to draft one. This makes sense - the second draft experience was much better-scaffolded - and it made me reconsider the extent to which participants want to be involved in the early development of other peoples' projects.
- People loved to copy edit. I was nervous that no one would want to copy edit. I had lined up a good friend to save me if needed (and Dave Mayfield did make many key contributions). But I was totally wrong about this. People were THRILLED to copy edit. Copy editors were the most likely to enthusiastically blog or tweet about their experience. They were also more likely to be young or new to the museum field than other contributors. I think copy editing was a way that people felt they could make a meaningful contribution without having to be some kind of expert. They got a sneak peek of the most final draft. And apparently some people LOVE finding grammatical errors. Heck, I guess I do too.
Next week, tune in for a post focused on participants' experiences--how they were encouraged to participate, how they felt about the experience, and how the feedback and reward structures worked. If you were a participant, please consider filling out this short survey to add your voice to next week's post.
What else do you want to know about this book-writing process?
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Announcing the new Walker Channel — HD video, improved design, search, accessibility
Walker Art Center : new media - Wed, 2010-03-10 13:19
The Walker Channel, in existence since 2003, has recently undergone a re-design. The old Walker Channel was originally built to serve Real Video and stream live webcasts using Real Video. It had slowly evolved over time to use more friendly MPEG-4 and H.264 video, and even moved from Real Video for live streaming to the better ustream.tv. But it never really caught up to the modern, YouTube era of video. The re-design we just completed did that, and added a few other goodies.
Visual Design
Quite obviously, the site has undergone a major visual overhaul. The old site had almost no hierarchy to the video archive, which worked OK with a handful of video, but with 200+ in the archive, it became unwieldy to find a particular video or just browse.
Just like with our iTunes U site, we’ve split our internal, museum centric departments into more logical genres. For example, instead of just “Performing Arts”, we have Dance, Theater and Music. We also highlight content by it’s recentness, and, more importantly by it’s popularity (view count). None of this is ground-breaking in 2010, but it’s a big upgrade from 2003.
Streaming H.264 VideoWe’re now serving all our video content as streaming h.264 video. This means you can watch a video and jump to any place in the timeline before it has buffered to that spot. Using h.264 enables us to easily switch to HTML5 and support other devices down the road. We converted all our older Real Media video into h.264 mp4s.
We also utilize YouTube to serve many of our newer videos. We have already been putting all our Channel content on YouTube for about a year, so there’s no need to upload it twice. YouTube serves a relatively high-quality FLV or MP4 file, and this means we do not pay for bandwidth, which is not an insignificant cost consideration.
Where we’re not using YouTube, we’re using Amazon CloudFront and their new Adobe Streaming Media Server. This means that we don’t have to run our own instances of EC2 and Wowza to encode & stream the video. We upload our video manually, so we don’t need to encode our video in “the cloud”.
High Definition VideoWe also upgraded our camera and video capture equipment to enter the beautiful HD world. We now capture all lectures in HD and webcast them live at 640×360. Going forward, archived versions will be posted at 720P (1280×720). Drawn Here (and there): HouMinn Practice is our first video posted in HD, and it looks great. Here’s a visual representation of what this new video means, comparing the resolutions we have from older content:
Click to enlarge and get the full effect.
We have also added a video switcher to our hardware repertoire. The switcher lets us show the presenter’s slides, in-stream, rather than just pointing the camera at the projection screen. This switcher enables a dramatic improvement in video quality, and will be especially useful for Architecture / Design lectures, which typically feature many slides.
Transcripts and captionsStarting with our new recordings in 2010, we’re adding closed captions and transcripts for nearly every video. This video is a good example. That means a couple things:
- Videos are more accessible for deaf or hard of hearing viewers
- It enables you to visually scan the contents of a video to key on a section you want to watch. In the example video, clicking on the time code on the right jumps the playhead to that point in the video.
- It gives us much more meaningful text to search on. Search engines are still text based, so having more than just the video description to search, is a great thing.
We create our transcripts by sending our video to CastingWords. The transcripts that CastingWords generates is then fed into YouTube’s machine caption processing feature, generating a captions for the video in the form of a .SBV file. The .SBV file is then pulled back into the Walker Channel, where we convert it on the fly to W3C TimedText format for use in jwplayer as captions.
We also re-format the captions as a transcript for display in the Transcript tab on the video. Captions tend to be broken up not by sentence, but by how the speaker is talking and how they’ll fit on screen. Transcripts, on the other hand, are read more traditionally, and should be read in complete sentences. So we break the captions up and re-form them in complete sentences with associated timecodes. Here’s an example screenshot:
Note the fragmented captions (in video) with transcript (below), in full sentences.
Comments and video jumpingWe’ve added comments! Like what you see or want to add your thoughts? Leave a note. One neat thing in the comments that we convert mentions of specific time into a link to jump the video playhead. So if you leave a comment with 3:13 in it, it will turn into a link to that spot in the video.
Similarly, when that happens we change the hash for the page to a link to that spot. The URL will change from http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/ to http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/#t=3m3s. Using that link anywhere else will jump the playhead to that point in the video. YouTube does the same thing, so we borrowed the idea.
Search and backendWe’re using solr for the search engine on the channel. Nate had great success with solr on ArtsConnectEd, so using solr was a no-brainer for us. The rest of the logic for the channel is built using Django, a python web framework that I also worked with for the My Yard Our Message project. To connect Django and solr, we’re using django-solr-search (aka “solango”). It was necessary to sub-class parts of solango to get it to present solr’s more-like-this functionality that we use for the “Related Media”. In retrospect, I probably should have used Haystack Search instead, since it supports that natively. As we move forward using solr and django in other areas of the Walker’s website, we’ll probably switch to using Haystack.
FundingFunding for aspects of these updates came from the Bush Foundation, under a grant entitled “Expanding the Rules of Engagement with Artists and Audiences and Fostering Creative Capital in our Community“. This grant has many applications within the Walker as a whole, but for the online Walker Channel, it is specifically funding the upgrade of our camera and video equipment.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Join in the conversation about Wikimedia @ MW2010
open objects - mia ridge - Tue, 2010-03-09 18:06
Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop to be held in Denver in April, just before the Museums and the Web 2010 conference. The goal is to develop 'policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums'.
If you've got stuff you want to say, you can dive right into the conversation - there's a whole bunch of conversations at http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010, including 'Legal and Business Model Barriers to Collaboration, 'Notability Criteria' and 'Metrics for Museums on Wikipedia'.
I'm going to be at the workshop and will do my best to represent any issues raised at the meeting. I think it's particularly important that we avoid 'Feeling glum after GLAM-WIKI' if we possibly can, so I'd like to go there with a really good understanding of the possible points of resistance, clashes in organisational culture or world view, incompatible requirements or wishlists so that they can be raised and hopefully dealt with during the in-person workshop. I'd love to hear from you if there are messages you want to pass on.
I'm also thinking about an informal meetup in London to help cultural heritage people articulate some of the issues that might help or hinder collaboration so they can be represented at the workshop - if you're a museum, gallery, archive, library or general cultural heritage bod, would that be useful for you?
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Nothing is Impossible: Embeddable E-Flyers
Mattress Factory - Tue, 2010-03-09 17:04
It's that time again. We're less than two weeks out from the opening of Nothing is Impossible, the first in a series of exhibitions from our Curators-in-Residence Mark Garry and Georgina Jackson! Featuring Dublin- and London-based artists Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Brian Griffiths, Bea McMahon and Dennis McNulty, Nothing is Impossible will open with a public reception on Friday, March 19, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. If you plan to attend, you can RSVP and keep tabs on who else will be there over on FaceBook.
With each new exhibition and event, we are consistently blown away by the support from our online community. And we could really use your help again! I've embedded two sizes of electronic flyers (complete with corresponding HTML code) below. Feel free to help spread the word by posting these awesome MF Shannon-designed flyers within your social networks and emailing to the art-loving friends in your contact book. Anything you can do is greatly appreciated by the artists and all of us here at the MF! I hope to see you at the opening next Friday.
EMBED THIS 550 x 800 E-FLYER:
Copy and paste this HTML code:
<a href="http://bit.ly/amtE4G"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2753/4420900048_ef2996669f_o.jpg" border="0" ></a>
--------
EMBED THIS 344 x 500 E-FLYER:
Copy and paste this HTML code:
<a href="http://bit.ly/amtE4G"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2753/4420900048_b00852fe6a.jpg" border="0" ></a>
POSTED BY JEFFREY
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Flashback by Tom Hunter
Musematic (MCN) - Tue, 2010-03-09 08:19
The Museum of London is one of my very favorite museums. The mega-museums in London are a source of constant amazement: The National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert, the Tate Modern, and the Grandfather of them all The British Museum. There is just so much stuff and, for the most part, I’m not allowed to (really) play with any of it.
Confession and question: I became a curator in the first place because of the call of bright shiny objects (okay fresco paintings) and the lure of the storage vaults, but doesn’t everyone kinda sorta wanna be able to explore the environments in historical rooms? Read Charles Dicken’s favorite books in his favorite chair by a fireplace. Have a look through the V&A’s Fashion and Jewellery & Accessories Collection to see if there is anything in the right size? (Probably not) Play an ancient board game with a mummy in the British Museum?
Oh there are opportunities to handle education objects or via reproductions or gallery interactives to simulate exploring historical objects but nothing that really satisfies the magpie in me and then, browsing the web this morning in anticipation of an upcoming trip to the UK I found an exhibition of photographs by Tom Hunter. The museum commissioned hunter to create a series of photographs in which he “he offers an alternative view of the passing of time in London” — what I like most about them is Hunter has used museum staff and volunteers, as well as others, in the photographs. Okay, so maybe I didn’t get to live out one of my little fantasies–but some somebodies at the Museum of London did. Cheers all round for the Museum of London who, to mark their re-opening, chose to celebrate their staff members as well.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
One Potential Future for Museums, Archives, Libraries
Center for the Future of Museums [AAM] - Mon, 2010-03-08 15:57
The IMLS wiki UpNext kicked off last week looking at changing roles of museums and libraries as they adapt to the changing needs of their communities. The latest discussion focuses on shifts in power--are museums evolving into facilitators and networks for information, rather than gatekeepers? In the spirit of this ongoing exploration, I've invited David R. Curry, managing principal of davidrcurryAssociates, to contribute his thoughts of the future of libraries, archives and museums.
David brings an interesting perspective to this discussion, as he has his Master's of Science in Library Science, and has been involved in the library, archives, and museum fields through most of his career. He's served as an board officer, trustee or director of organizations as varied as The Franklin Institute Science Museum (Philadelphia), the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Arts Midwest, The Arts Foundation of Michigan, Friends of Detroit Public Library, and the Michigan Center for the Book. David thinks that libraries, museums and archives will converge in the future, blurring boundaries as they adapt to the forces shaping them. Here's his reasoning behind this conclusion:
Thinking About Convergence Part 1: Drivers
One’s frame of reference can make all the difference in trying to understand complex phenomena, issues or opportunities. The accelerating convergence of libraries, archives, museums, cultural heritage and memory institutions is a good example of such complexity.
The strong and distinct traditions of leadership, professional culture, training, career systems, funding streams, and “issues” within these fields make such convergence, for some, not only challenging to understand as the way forward, but a challenge to those very traditions.
But using a frame of reference external to the field, I see a number of “drivers” – commercial-speak for forces that shape and accelerate trends or direction --
that are fueling such convergence.
The octagonal map and discussion below presents my view of such drivers.
Economic Pressures
Continuing pressures from The Great Recession on federal/state/local government resources, foundations, corporate and private grant-making will mean long-term negative impacts on contributed income for all nonprofits, weakening their near-term fiscal health and long-term sustainability. Responsible board and staff leadership in the LAM (Library, Archives, Museum) community will explore ways to address this reality, including a range of collaborative options involving pooled talent, joint asset management, shared back-office operations and more.
Business Model Evolution
Responding in part to economic pressures, but also recognizing innovation in the nonprofit sector, creative leaders will explore new and new kinds of business models which fold-in strategic alliances, shared services, virtual operations models and merger/acquisitions. In this evolutionary period one important phenomenon is the emergence of “social businesses”—for-profit entities delivering traditionally “nonprofit services” having a range of options as to how operational “surpluses” (when they can be achieved) are applied. LAM leadership might well watch the “incursion” of for-profit entities into the realm of educational services space as they consider how this might affect their fields.
Value Chain Disruption
LAMs are not immune as traditional methods of supply are upended by web-based models, the emergence of brokers and aggregators, and other forms of value chain redefinition. There will be increasing pressure to find scale, invest in innovation, enhance earned income streams, and achieve cost-efficiencies for programming and services delivery. Addressing these imperatives will help fuel convergence.
Interpretive & Services Options
The Internet/Web 2.0 is increasingly the “default” platform for interpretive, curatorial and service design strategies. Whatever an institution does in this realm, and however physical assets and content may be employed, the question about “how this gets delivered on the web” needs to be answered. This common platform momentum will drive a new common skill set requirements and an expansion of audiences served in both sector and geographic terms, fostering convergence along the way.
Digitization and Technology Momentum
The cost-effectiveness and priority of digitization of collections and primary content is redefining acquisitions and programming strategies as well the definition of the audience LAMs serve. The evolution and ubiquity of mobile devices at the global level across economic strata is a “pull” mechanism that the LAM community cannot ignore. Responding to this pull will drive common strategies and integrated techniques to deliver value.
Primary Sources: Preservation/Storage
Demand for access to and leverage of primary sources and collections of all kinds drives the need for common strategies around licensing, intellectual property, copyright management, and associated revenue streams. Just as important, LAMs will have an increasingly common agenda in addressing preservation, access, physical storage, and overall management of primary source content overall, including “born-digital” content.
Content Market Dynamics
The large and economically powerful “commercial” content market, which is perhaps anchored overmuch in entertainment content at the moment, is a key driver (and definer) for market and community expectations. Apple iTunes, Google Books+ and similar disruptions will increasingly “invade” the LAM domain, driving the need for common, robust strategies to deal with the velocity and vectors of change.
The Knowledge Commons and Community-Building Missions
The notion of the “the commons” and community-building as central anchors to mission frameworks is growing, and in some ways is a counterweight to the dynamics of the market for “commercial content.” Activism is growing at a global level (e.g. the A2K “movement,” Convention on Biological Diversity and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) actions), complemented by local, indeed block-level, community building agendas. How LAMs respond and remain relevant will drive common strategies and tactics across institution types.
I hope my view of these “drivers” of convergence makes a contribution to this IMLS wiki discussion (adventure).
Not everyone agrees with this vision of the future--believing instead that museums, libraries and archives will retain distinct identities. Weigh in--do you think David's forecast is correct? If not, what reasons lie behind the scenario you paint of the world ahead?
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Chatroulette: Giving Stranger Interactions a Bad Name
Museum 2.0 [Nina Simon] - Mon, 2010-03-08 14:16
This morning, in less than fifteen seconds, I saw live video of:
- a guy on the phone, lounging in front of his computer
- a guy taking a photo of me while ignoring simple questions
- a guy who used a mirror effect to look like an alien
- a penis
Chatroulette is an online service that allows you to videochat with random strangers. It pairs you up automatically with other users to talk, and you can click "Next" at any time to jump to someone else (as I did to penis-guy, and as all three of the other users did to me). It's in the same vein as Omegle (a text-based "talk to strangers" system), and it's attracting a lot of media attention and tens of thousands of concurrent users.
Chatroulette frustrates me. It drives me nuts that it's being called "groundbreaking" in the realm of human-to-human interactions. Chatroulette is not groundbreaking, nor is it threatening to the social fabric of society. It's a novelty, and a mostly depressing one at that. Chatroulette exacerbates the perception that stranger interactions are uncomfortable, weird, and often sexual in nature. It encourages people to see each other as entertainment instead of as human beings. And because users use the "Next" button so liberally--to escape gross users, to find someone interesting--the fundamental activity on Chatroulette is not chatting or connecting with strangers. It's evaluating people. In most cases, within two seconds, you or the person with whom you are videochatting decides that the other person is not worth their time. And that means you reject or are rejected by others, multiple times each minute. What an unpleasant feeling. As New York reporter Sam Anderson put it:
I got off the ChatRoulette wheel determined never to get back on. I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me.Chatroulette strips away all of the social conventions and scaffolding we use to relate to strangers in public. The interactions are private, which means there's no external social pressure to conform. The interactions are anonymous, which means there's no need to be accountable for your actions. And the interactions are fleeting, which promotes shock value and immediate, dramatic actions. These three characteristics make Chatroulette just about the worst environment possible for interacting with and potentially relating to strangers. It may be a fun plaything for people who like to provoke and be provoked. Occasionally it's a place for a surprising cross-cultural encounter. But it's rarely a place for building relationships--even the simplest kinds--among strangers.
Chatroulette frustrates me most because it doesn't live up to its potential. I blame that deficiency on lack of scaffolding of the social interactions. I can't help but think how much better it would be if the system provided an external prompt--a challenge or a topic to discuss. I could imagine having a great time on videochat debating the merits of a piece of art with a stranger, trying to solve a puzzle together, talking about a news event, or sharing stories. Each time I've tried to initiate this kind of interaction on Chatroulette, my partner in videochat has disconnected from me, leaving me feeling rejected and dejected. While I've heard stories of people dancing with strangers on Chatroulette and generally sharing surprising experiences, the first three attempts/five minutes of use didn't make me want to soldier on in search of positive encounters.
I've had some fabulous interactions with strangers in comparably open-ended environments that offered just a bit more designed structure. Think of the Internet Arm Wrestling exhibit, which allows people to virtually arm wrestle with strangers in science centers around the US. When you sit down to use it, you grasp a metal arm (meant to simulate your competitor’s arm) and are connected to another visitor at an identical kiosk. This visitor may be a few feet from you in the same science center or hundreds of miles away at another science center. You receive a “go” signal, and then you start pushing. The metal arm exerts a force on your arm equal to the force exerted by your remote partner on his own metal arm. Eventually, one competitor overpowers the other, and the game is over.
The Internet Arm Wrestling exhibit, like Chatroulette, connects strangers via webcams in short-term, shared encounters. But because the exhibit experience is focused on a third thing--the arm wrestling competition--visitors are generally playful and positive with each other and walk away from the experience having enjoyed a unique connection with a stranger.
Bringing a "third thing" into the Chatroulette ecosystem would help people interact in a civil manner. It would also help them interact, period. Many times on Chatroulette, I've been connected to someone and we stare at each other, uncertain of how to start a conversation in such a decontextualized environment. And so, out of embarrassment or discomfort or uncertainty, one or both of us click "Next." I've learned that holding up signs or puppets, or playing a musical instrument, helps lengthen chat time. These are all social objects that help get the conversation going.
I could imagine a delightful application on a museum website that would allow me to chat with a stranger about a featured artifact or artwork. The object and the context of the museum website would both provide framing and structure that would likely make for a positive encounter. I could imagine a game in which people were paired up and asked to construct a vision of a better future. I could imagine virtual advice booths, with strangers helping each other solve their problems. Instead, we got Chatroulette--another nail in the coffin for those who believe that peaceful, positive, useful interactions among strangers, especially on the internet, are unlikely.
Now let's go out and design something better to prove them wrong.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Day Against DRM, May 4, 2010
Musematic (MCN) - Mon, 2010-03-08 05:24
“The Day Against DRM will unite a wide range of projects, public interest organizations, web sites and individuals in an effort to raise public awareness to the danger of technology that restricts users’ access to movies, music, literature and software; indeed, all forms of digital data. Many DRM schemes monitor a user’s activities and report what they see to the corporations that impose the DRM.
“As part of its Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) will be helping to coordinate anti-DRM activists all over the world to mobilize the public against this anti-social technology. They have also published an article detailing a short history of a “Decade in DRM” at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/decade-in-drm.
“”DRM attacks your freedom at two levels. Its purpose is to attack your freedom by restricting your use of your copies of published works. Its means is to force you to use proprietary software, which means you don’t control what it does. When companies organize to design products to restrict us, we have to organize to defeat them,” said Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman.”"
That last quote states quite well what I think is one of the most-overlooked points in the “anti-piracy” debate: who are the real pirates? “Piracy,” we tend to forget, means boarding a ship by force, taking its occupants hostage, robbing them of their goods and rights. Sounds very much like what proprietary systems and software, and DRM, and a boatload of other online restrictions do to our computers, no?
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
