New Media Initiatives

Some great conversation happening in the comments of my writeup of the Search session at MW2008, and it made me remember something I wanted to bring up at the conference but forgot. Namely, the concept of “master metadata”, or the idea that there’s one authoritative version of the metadata describing an object.

This came up for me in the session the MFA and MIT did on sharing their data for a new subsite: they mentioned the data was being “augmented” on the final site, and that someday they’d be interested in getting this extra information back into their main repository.

The problem’s immediately obvious: with all of the proposed sharing and opening up of our data, presumably to allow others to weigh in on it and add their voice, there are often situations where institutions would like to have some of this new data. For instance, we’re building a new version of ArtsConnectEd and intend to allow museum educators to variously tag, comment on, and draw relationships between objects. This will almost certainly be “good data”, stuff that would be valuable to integrate in our internal collection database.

The question is, how? Once your data is available for sharing, and someone actually builds something good with it and enhances it, is there a way to get that new data back into the source? Is there / should there be a way to tag metadata as “original source” or “augmented”? Should we be asking anyone harvesting our data to push back their changes for us to audit and possibly include?

Anyone solved this? Seb, are you getting info back from Flickr Commons you can then add to your internal database? Phil / Jenna, any thoughts on how to get that extra data back?

Just when you were starting to think we should be retiring the term “Web 2.0″, Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 comes along to remind us that we’ve largely forgotten what it really means. It is not, for instance, flashy AJAX - or at least, not exclusively. It is not just user comments. Web 2.0, as originally fleshed out by Tim O’Reilly, remains an incredibly cool idea to strive for.

Her online preview of a presentation she’ll give Monday is a fantastic reminder of what Web 2.0 is and what it means for museums — most importantly, the gentle nudge that it doesn’t have to be online to be Web 2.0. I for one am kind of excited by the idea of an exhibition in “perpetual beta,” growing and evolving on the floor, rather than a static and final “release.” Or even something that mixes both worlds, like Brooklyn’s Click exhibition.

If “Web 2.0″ has lost its luster for you, you owe it to yourself to watch and listen to her presentation. It will remind you why it still matters.

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]

This idea came up during the Radical Trust session at MW07 - Seb pointed out that libraries already radically trust their users by essentially giving them their collection and trusting it will be returned. It’s further reinforced by this article in Wired discussing a program started at a North Carolina public library: using the lure of a free mp3 player or the chance the win a laptop, they were able to guide their staff through a comprehensive Web 2.0 learning experience. It actually sounds pretty remarkable - if you’ve been flirting at the edge of Web 2.0, this is a great step by step introduction to some of the bigger and better ideas out there.

Should museums be doing more to help their staff embrace Web 2.0 ideas and technology? Or is it enough to have departments like ours blogging and call it good?

[via Museum Journal]

I started reading Musematic earlier this week. The site promises to be:

Rants and raves on the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM’s Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade.

It’s just starting out (under 10 posts) but the quality of writing so far is impressive. I’m sure this will provide good reading in the future.

We’ve decided to give Akismet a new test: trackbacks. Walker blogs have been trackback-free since the launch, and this was generally considered to not be a loss since we were too new to generate many inbound links.

Today, however, a quick tour through the list of linking blogs proves otherwise: there are worthwhile posts out there talking about us! (awww) In fact, the whole reason I’m posting this here is so I can link to this post about the channel (and link to the original post in the ECP blog). In the future that will all happen automatically with this change.

Hopefully everything will go according to plan, but believe me I’ve got my finger on the trigger over here - any spam gets through, any lame posts about nothing and BAM, no more trackbacks…

In the meantime, read something you like here? Something you hate? Post about it on your blog with a link back to the original, and you’ll show up in the trackback list.

Thanks to Jim Spadaccini at Ideum we have access to what seems a relatively complete survey of museums that blog. Well it’s much more complete than my sporadic attempt earlier.

Quoted from the Ideum blog:

Blogs not included in the original survey

Exhibit Commons

NYC Museum Education Roundtable

Loreto Martin

Hamilton (Canada) Museum Educators Group

Audience Research

Portable Antiquities Blog

Museum Connect

Museum Madness

Modern Art Notes

Art Museums

Tacoma Art Museum Docents Blog

Goldwell Open Air Museum Blog

Walker Blogs (6 blogs)

Bronx Mus(eum)ings

NCMA Blog

Art @ the Katzen

Contemporary-Pulitzer Blog

Eye Level

Children’s Museums

The Children’s Museum Blog

History Museums

Port Moody Station Museum Blog

Dallas History Forum

Science Museums

RedShift Now

Science Buzz

About Museums

Museum Guru

Museum People’s Journal

TechStyle

Assembly

Hanging Together

The Curator’s Egg

Museums and the Web

Museum Photographers Blog

Mode

Skillful Minds

Museum Pro

Ideum Blog

Mario Bucolo Museums Blog

Update:

I just found the Victoria Albert Museum has set up a Wordpress blog for textile artist-in-residence Sue Lawty. So there’s one more for the list.

For this update on the state of museum blogging I’ll just refer to a post on Ideum by Jim Spadaccini. He has surveyed several museum and museum related weblogs and listed them in a downloadable PDF.

For the second installment of this series I found two science museum blogs, one general museum resource and a podcast.

Science Buzz (Science Museum of Minnesota)

This blog addresses current science related topics with medium length writing (a few paragraphs) which shares some online resources and invites dialog. The goal of Science Buzz from their about page:

We’re trying to create exhibits and web content that offer opportunities to dig deeper into science headlines, and give you a chance to talk with each other and with scientists about your questions and concerns.

The science museum also has a atalhöyk Excavation Blog for their Mysteries of atalhöyk project. That blog doesn’t seem to be currently active (last post in August 2005) but it is still online serving as an archive of an event/time.

Science Buzz is published with Drupal and a combination of custom PHP/MySQL code.

RedShift Now: Feild Diaries (Ontario Science Centre)

Different scientists around the world who are actively doing research are set up with blogs. Currently there are 8 different scientists featured on the page. From their Field Diary page:

Real science doesn’t just happen in a lab. Get first-hand information from scientists all over the planet as they send back reports from the field.

While not a blog itself the RedShift Now makes interesting use of methodologies generally associated with blogging. There is a section for short articles called Science Briefs, a regular syndication of content via RSS in the form of a podcast and an area for comments.

Assembly… of the Museums Australia education group

A project of Museums Australia, museum educators seem to be posting a couple times a month on this site. It’s been up since June 2005 and they are inviting other members of Museums Australia to post. The goal of the site from the about page:

*support and advocate learning as a core function of museums

*cultivate best practice in museums by sharing news, ideas and experience of programs and research

Assembly… is published with WordPress

de Young Museum

While a podcast is not technically a blog it is a regular syndication of content via RSS which, current internet buzzwords aside, is one of the most interesting things about blogging. It looks like the podcast just started but their first one is 13 minutes of high quality audio with polished production values and a lot of information.

This is the first installment of a multipart series on the state of blogging in museums. I’m hoping to build on the topic started by Paul on the Off Center blog as well as preparing resources to share for an upcoming workshop. When we submitted our proposal for a workshop at Museums and the Web 2006 the Museum blogging field was sparse, well the blog landscape isn’t as small as it was a year ago. There are a lot of new blogs and blogs that are new to me that I look forward to reading and writing about in the next few weeks.

Eye Level

A blog at the Smithonian American Art Museum. I appreciate their slower paced well written updates. The blog seems to update one or two times a week with each entry being several paragraphs in length. This is not a blog about whats new and current this is publishing tool for short original articles. I grabbed two quotes from their about page.

Eye Level is a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The name Eye Level imparts a sense of clarity to which the blog aspires. The name refers to the physical experience of viewing art, but it also plays on the many roles and perspectives that make a museum a reality–roles that will come into focus here.

Using the museum’s collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level will be dedicated to American art and the ways in which the nation’s art reflects its history and culture.

Eye Level is published using Type Pad

MuseumPro

I was really happy to find this website as it seemed to be an interesting non-affiliated site for peers to share their knowledge and backgrounds. The site is growing slowly but hopefully this initiative will grow into a useful resource. The site describes itself on the about page.

museumpro.org is the place for museum professionals to post ideas, concerns, and questions about the museum industry and our profession. Colleagues then comment on those ideas, concerns and questions in an open forum.

MuseumPro is published using WordPress

<libraryland>

Weblog by Richard Urban. This is not technically a museum blog as it deals with library information but it does provide frequent valuable information for museums and non-profit technology. A description of the blogs goals from the first post.

This is the weblog of my journery through a Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

<libraryland> is published using Blogger