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.

Some time ago – in 2005 – Archives & Museum Informatics launched a survey of museum web activities. We noted then that:

Each financial cycle museum Webmasters struggle
to justify their budget requests. Whenever statistical reports are
circulated someone asks, "How do we compare?" When exploring the
benefits of a new function, Web teams ask themselves "Is it worth the
investment?" Answers to these questions are hard to come by.

[see http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/index.html for the full background]

This survey – the results of which are written up at http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/report/mwbenchmarks2005.html  – was designed to help fill some of the voids in our knowledge. As a first stab at the problem we realise that it wasn't perfect. And things have changed since 2005!

We've been asked to update the survey for a client-group of museums, and thought we'd use the opportunity to ask for input from the community as well. If we're going to launch it again more broadly, we'd like it to be useful to you ...

So, please, take a look at the questions – available as a PDF from http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/MW-Survey05.pdf – and post your thoughts on revisions or additional questions here. 

IEEE Intelligent Systems
Special issue on AI and Cultural Heritage

http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/intelligent/content/CulHerCFP.html

The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

For those who are interested in social tagging, or who might have missed the Community Engagement session at MW2008, I have uploaded my slides "Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags" along with audio track to Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/s.mannion/seeing-tibetan-art-through-social-tags/

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

• share images and tags
• invite others to participate, and
• display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.