open source

Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied  

Related Paper

Full Paper: Using Online Maps for User-Generated Content in Museums  
Mariana Salgado, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, and Lily Diaz, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland

The following are the raw notes from the Unconference group: Open Source Mobile Device Software at MW2009 on April 16, 2009

We came up with a  mantra:  "Build for now, build fast since, build cheap"

Everyone,

We are resubmitting a grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate open source software built specifically for museum exhibits.

Those involved with serving high resolution images may be interested in the following announcement, of a new, high-performance, standards-compliant open source JPEG 2000 image server targeted at museum and library collections.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/september2008-chute

It's produced by a group at Los Alamos National Labs that is deeply involved with library and scholarly communications standards work; they're also leaders in OAI/ORE, among other projects.

Via Chris Mackie on MCN-L

Job Description

This position will be the authority for all development and maintenance of the Field Museum’s web applications, databases, and interfaces within a Linux/Apache/mySql/PHP (LAMP) environment. Any applicants are expected to be familiar with the open source community and standards and the latest and greatest web technologies and protocols.

Initially this position will be responsible for implementing a new, robust, standardized web development environment in support of Joomla/Drupal in the IT Department at The Field Museum. Once implemented, this position will oversee the environment, ensuring that it is kept up to date, standardized, and that all development work performed at the Museum is within this environment.

In 1999, David Anderson launched Seti@home and with it a method of enlisting the underused cycles of PC's worldwide. While Seti still hasn't found any extra-terrestrial life, it did give birth to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) which Anderson established in 2002. The Economist, December 6 edition, reports that BOINC based computing supports several hundred CPU intensive scientific investigations and has recently been augmented to use PC graphic cards and Playstations for some graphically demanding processing.

The article also identifies some social applications of BOINC of interest to museums. Galaxy Zoo has employed more than 100,000 volunteers to examine the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies and Stardust@home is using volunteers to spot stellar tracks. The Manchester Museum has had volunteers cataloguing 12,000 herbaria specimens from the 19th century. Africa@home from the University of Geneva is enlisting volunteers to extract cartographic data on the location of roads, villages, fields etc. from satellite images.

Projects like these have led Anderson to launch a new platform he calls BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skills Aggregation) which he hopes will be lower the barrier to entry for such web-based knowledge sharing and collaboration projects. Check it out at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro

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MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE HOSTS SYMPOSIUM: OPEN COLLECTIONS: EXPLORING
ONLINE CULTURAL RESOURCES
Monday, June 18, 9:45 a.m. - 3:45 p.m.

Presented with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Registration fee: $12 (includes lunch)
Register online at www.movingimage.us/open or call 718-784-4520.

In fewer than fifteen years, the Internet has become an everyday,
indispensable aspect of life, work, and learning, radically changing the
way we access information. Presenting museum collections online, once a
novelty, has become a necessity. Cultural organizations face an array of
choices about how to represent their collections and how to help users
interpret them.

How can institutions build accessible online collections while
simultaneously meeting internal digitization needs? How can standards of