ideas

22nd International Sculpture Conference: CALL FOR PAPERS

London, UK – April 2010

These are the musings of Brad Hemminger, as an outsider looking in, at the museum profession.  I have been fortunate to observe and participate in the transition of three fields from analog media to digital media, caused by advances in information technology.  First medicine, then libraries, and now museums.  Based on my experience, museums are in early stages of this transition, and lots of exciting developments are occurring, with many of them being developed by people attending the 2009 Museums and Web conference. 

I was a skeptic about twittering, seeing it as useless chatter, until in the weeks leading up to this year's conference, I found I was becoming a regular reader of twitter feeds tagged #MW2009 because they were producing one or two url's a day that were useful references.

Our session was a lively discussion of the challenges faced my museums with small staffs and even smaller budgets:

After two days of this conference I have a question that you might know how to asnwer. We've been hearing a lot about web & mobile appications, useability, affective interfaces, organisational change, wiki's, weblogs & mashups, using API's and cloudcomputing, revamping your website etc etc and this has all been very interesting.

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"

 Some personal observations & an impression on the first day of Museums & the Web - in Dutch - can be found here.

Click through for some interesting statistics about our most viewed photograph on The Commons.. 

Trick photo, decapitated man with bloody knife, holding his head 

Accession Number: 1972:0014:0003

Maker: Unidentified

Title: Trick photo, decapitated man with bloody knife, holding his head

Date: ca. 1875

Medium: albumen print, photomontage

Under hösten 2007 genomförde Brooklyn Museum en videotävling för besökare där de inbjöds att på en minut, beskriva musset på sitt eget sätt. Filmerna publicerades på YouTube och bedömdes av en jury som bland annat bestod av MTV Music Televisions VD.

Vinnaren: Mr. Cool at the Brooklyn Museum av Andrei Severny / Charles Grantham
Andra pristagaren: Brooklyn Museum - Art Thief av by Matthew K.

we were tagged by the IMA a while back, in the 25 random things 'chain letter' that's been haunting the web in its various incarnations. from the better-late-than-never school of thought comes our 25:

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.

Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

Conference delegates attending Gail Durbin's workshop were given two minutes to complete the first part of a task and the roar of creative ideas being born was almost deafening

Semantic Webs - and The Rest of the World

While Ross Parry is facilitating our SW workshop (Friday,
12.30 till 1.30) at MW 2008, the digital museum community in the UK is carrying
on the debate Ross opened up for comment in the session.

I am developing a workshop on how we as professionals are using Web 2.0 "to expand a museum’s role by promoting new methods of collaboration within itself and with other museums and institutions" and am looking for examples that I can use in the dialogue. I created a wiki for this discussion at http://redberry.pbwiki.com/ (password is "share").

Please join the discussion!