The museum technical community got some good news today: MuseTechCentral officially launched. Billing itself as the MCN Project Registry, the site seeks to “provide a place for the MCN community to share information about technology-related museum projects”.
After some quick browsing (encouragingly, there are already a good number of entries, including several cell phone tour projects I was interested in) it was easy to see the potential of the site:
- When starting a new project, it’s smart to see if this problem has been solved before. If so, how? And for how much? Is it worth the investment? Or is there a vendor to avoid? Now you can find out.
- Vice versa, upon completing a project, you may find yourself being hit up constantly for information requests. Now you can now simply refer people to your project page on MuseTechCentral.
While I was there I created an account and added our Art on Call project to the registry. The site is full of ajaxy goodness that makes form entry and navigation a breeze, although I do wish you could bookmark filtered results.
So far the projects seems to be fairly art-museum-centric, but hopefully that will change as more institutions start to contribute. The registry will be most useful if it truly represents the museum community, so if you’ve got a project to add… go add it!
Overall, this is a great effort by the Museum Computer Network and the Museum Software Foundation. Looking forward to future browsing and adding many more projects!
[via Musematic]
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