Announcing the 2008 AAM MUSE Awards

Recognizing outstanding achievement in museum media, the AAM Media and Technology Committee announces the 19th annual MUSE Awards competition.

The 2007 MUSE Awards competition received nearly 200 applications from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Entries included audio, cell phone, and interactive handheld tours, interactive kiosks and multimedia installations, podcasts, blogs, games, Web sites, online collection and image databases, videos, and e-mail marketing campaigns. This year we are expecting another exciting round of projects that reflect innovation in the museum media community.

Visit http://www.mediaandtechnology.org to enter your project.

We look forward to your participationWe will accept online applications on the AAM Media and Technology Web site from December 3, 2007, to January 11, 2008. Only $25 per entry.

There have been several questions lately about collections management software, both on the MCN List and to us here, via our feedback form. It seems that people have forgotten the work done at CHIN in the Collections Management Software Reviews. First completed as a user service when CHIN was retiring its central database provision, the reviews remain the best coordinated place to get a profile of museum collections management software products and their capabilities (though it is time that they were updated --it's unclear from the CHIN website what the cycle is for keeping this information fresh). Stiil, these are reviews conducted by museum professionals, based on common criteria and should be the starting point for anyone looking in this area.

/jt

Hi, all.

What do you use (that you can recommend) for project management for Web projects, both large and small, as well as tracking routine Web maintenance requests? We would need something Web-based and something that can be used by all members of our Web team, as well as internal clients in other departments.

Many thanks!
Maggie

I'm presenting a paper at Texas Association of Museums next week on our museum's implementation of cell phone audio tours.

Hi All, We're developing an xhtml markup standard for the presentation of works of art on the web, based on existing XML schema. I've initiated exploratory discussions on the microformats.org wiki at: http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art I'm sure a lot of you have thoughts about how best to use semantic markup to present artworks. What class names do you usually use? What is the structure of the "object information" page on your website? What metadata schema do your museums use behind the scenes?

Are there successful multi-lingual implementations of "Web 2.0" tools and concepts? Many of these sets of tools encourage easy participation; however, some institutions operate under a bilingual/multi-lingual mandate, which if rigidly interpreted, could make some of these concepts more difficult to apply. Some sample issues/questions/thoughts: - Are tools and interface elements easily adaptable to multiple languages? - Can they be implemented in both languages simultaneously, with links/flows between languages? - Have sites kept language implementations separate, or allowed them to mingle (for example, are mixed blog comments encouraged in the language of the users choice)?