museums

After more than two years’ hard work it’s a great pleasure to be able to offer a first online version of the database of the Picasso Museum’s catalogue, with more than two thousand works.

Yesterday in London, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum and Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, discussed about the Museum of the 21st Century in front of an audience of 500, at the London School of Economics. The event was coorganized with Thames & Hudson.

two things that i would like to bring to Fluid Engage :

• prior art [we've thought about a lot of these questions before, though we might not have solved the problems - see Bibliography at http://conference.archimuse.com/researchForum ]
• apis as means of inter-application linkages [see for example http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2009/04/16/the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-wit... ]

web pages i showed:

Archives & Museum Informatics [our home page]
http://www.archimuse.com/

when talking to some of the developers at the Fluid Engage project team meeting today (i'm on the Advisory Committee), i realised that an introduction to the way that museums are organized, and what kinds of people do which kinds of jobs, would be helpful.

Clay Shirky speaks at the Smithsonian (courtesy of taoboy)

Wow, I've my mind so full of ideas, new knowledge, new contacts!!. That's the energizing part of attending mw (always so, but this year, particularly intense).

I was just listening to conversations in the Organizational Change session about how to help people navigate through the permanent collections of the museum, the value of hand held devices, audio tours, etc.

This inspired a thought about my fantasy pathway.  

The museum would take the keywords that curators and visitors have assigned to objects both in virtual and real spaces, keywords that are qualitative, as well as experiential, and feeling, that I could then use to navigate my way to other objects with the same or perhaps opposite types of tags.  

When: Wednesday March 25, 2009 at 8:00pm
Where: the Regency Town House
13 Brunswick Square
Hove, England BN31EH
Get Directions

Culture Geeks is a community based in Brighton, open to everyone who is interested in using digital technologies in the cultural sector.

THE TALK

Shelley Bernstein has just announced an initiative to help illustrate Wikipedia articles: Wikipedia Loves Art. Part scavenger hunt, part photography contest, it's involving community in the visual documentation of museum collectons, and enhancing  Wikipedia entries. A far cry from being banned for linking into museum web sites!

One of the key positions in the SFMOMA IET team has just opened up: the Program Manager, IET. Read on for details.

Best,
Peter Samis - Associate Curator, Interpretation

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. 

During the month of July, 2008, you can follow Netwurker Mez as she explores the artistic potential of Twitter. She's New Media Scotalnd's second Twitterer in residence.

Follow Netwurker Mez's tweets at http://www.twitter.com/mediascot

Anyone else doing fun twitter things?

/jt

The MUSE awards were announced at AAM this week, and the list represents an interesting overview of museum technology activity.

Here's a project that wasn't recognised [something that surprised me a bit]: The milti-touch tables at the Denver Art Museum.

david and i are completing an article for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science .... it's got me wondering about what the 'general, intelligent reader' might want to know about museums and the web. 

i'm thinking we need to answer the following questions: