Nick Gamble's Blog

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.

If you attended the ICHIM07 Conference Reception, you may remember seeing a giant, green, ear-shaped, metal sign with a mobile phone number and the words “hear you are” stamped on it in the atrium of the MaRS Collaboration Centre in Toronto. [murmur], a documentary oral history project, created the distinct marker.

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.

Peter Samis, who works for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA), delighted the audience in Thursday morning’s Theoretical Frameworks session at mw2008. Peter’s overview of Take Your Time, a recent exhibition at SF MoMA of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, was dazzling. I especially appreciated Peter's honesty about the good and bad news surrounding the museum’s attempt to mash up its voice with those of visitors.