IDEA, the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement, just released “Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences,” which reports the findings of a study that the California-based nonprofit organization conducted recently.

I flew into Houston, Texas yesterday for the 21st Annual Visitor Studies Association conference. This is my first time in Space City, as well as the Lone Star State, for that matter. This morning, I presented a workshop with Jes Koepfler, a fellow Museum Studies grad and my “partner in crime” on the Mischief & Malice: Crime in the Museum online exhibition project (we co-managed this project put together by the University of Toronto’s Master of Museum Studies Class of 2008 using a wiki). Appropriately, we presented Using Wikis for Project Management.

Jennifer mentioned in her blog entry last week that I'll be helping out with managing Archives & Museum Informatics' 1275+ member on-line community at http://conference.archimuse.com, as part of my position with the company. Well, in case you didn't know, we use Drupal, an amazing open source content management platform, to run this site. However, considering how powerful Drupal is, it is admittedly rather complex to a non-techie Museum Studies grad like myself.

I was sitting at lunch today talking with new friends from the Museum World about why I, an "Orchestra" person was at a conference for Museums and the Web.   

I've just arrived at the Delta hotel in Montreal. It must be close to 25 years since I was here before.... as part of a music festival - sang with the Harmonic Choir on a barge or maybe it was a little island.  The Harmonic choir was (is) a group of 5-6 singers singing multiphonics - overtones...

  It's great to be back and I'm really looking forward to the conference.  After attending or helping to run something like 15 orchestra conferences, it will be so interesting to make a foray into the museum world. 

I'm particularly interested in how cultural groups use the web and social media, so its going to be a busy time.  Now to pour over the schedule. 

Just 24 hours to go before heading out of freezing London and jetting to the beautiful tropical beaches of Montreal. Having survived the post-Easter "ooh it wasn't meant to snow at this time of year" blizzard and the anti-Olympics protest police van traffic snarlups, all I need to do is find a plane that's actually operating from our Proud to be British, state-of-the-art, "we told you it would work better if we didn't let any passengers in" Terminal 5 Heathrow. If not, have a lovely conference and I'll see y'all next year ... !