two things that i would like to bring to Fluid Engage :

• prior art [we've thought about a lot of these questions before, though we might not have solved the problems - see Bibliography at http://conference.archimuse.com/researchForum ]
• apis as means of inter-application linkages [see for example http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2009/04/16/the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-wit... ]

web pages i showed:

Archives & Museum Informatics [our home page]
http://www.archimuse.com/

when talking to some of the developers at the Fluid Engage project team meeting today (i'm on the Advisory Committee), i realised that an introduction to the way that museums are organized, and what kinds of people do which kinds of jobs, would be helpful.

The other day I was musing about what impact museums are having on the Web and who is 'punching above their weight'?  I began to ask how would we know, and it occured to me to check the relative Alexa rankings of museums (http://www.alexa.com/). This produced a few possible answers and lots of surprises, so I systematically looked through the rankings to find the (c. 200) 'museums' that ranked, by traffic, in the top 500,000 web sites worldwide. I included www.archimuse.com for comparison and amusement (which, if it was a museums, would have ranked 99 among museums).

The last session of the conference on ‘Communicating the Museum’, that took place in Madrid on Friday 29 May 09, was devoted to new media and Web 2.0. With the participation of some 150 communication professionals from museums and cultural centres from all over Spain, the morning was made up of presentations by three speakers followed by discussion.  

Yes, it went well! I was so prepared to face some strong resistances, some questioning why we should waste time on that when we have so many important tasks to do and things of the sort, that I was surprised none of these were uttered (I twittered it but I haven’t had time for blogging until today, Sunday). I guess I was sort of relieved. But I’m very realistic too: first, people in meetings usually are cautious when they don’t really know much about the matter.

Hello,
How are you? We are taking a small survey of what Content Managment Systems Museums CMS. Would you mnd taking a minute to fill out this one page survey?

Suvey

I will post the answers. Thank you!

I was delighted to attend the mw09 session where four museums shared their experience of having their websites redesigned. To my surprise, the difficulties I underwent during our redesign process were almost the same (at a smaller scale, of course) as those of the big museums

(thank you Allegra, Dana, Charlotte and Joana for sharing).

Thanks so much for your evaluations of MW2009 – if you haven’t completed one, you still can online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/mw2009.evaluationForm.html. Our preliminary analysis of these is proving immensely useful as always, but we’re always happy to hear more (so respond online even if you filled one out at the meeting but have had additional thoughts since).

You don't always agree ...