Tomorrow afternoon I’m participating in a session entitled, Saving the Future: Museum Community Response to the Gulf Oil Spill at the American Association of Museums Annual Conference. It is ironic that we are here in Houston, the U.S. headquarters of BP.

In the session, I’m going to be talking about the multitouch Gulf Oil Spill Mashup application that we produced last summer and provided free of charge to museums and aquariums. The application was built with the GestureWorks multitouch SDK and many of the software components in the application available free on the Open Exhibits website.

In case you missed it, here’s a video of the application in action.

I will post my slides here following my presentation. Looking forward to hearing how others in the museum community responded to Gulf Coast oil spill.

Updated May 24, 2010:  It was a great session to be part of and I found the other presentations really inspiring. In particular, I really enjoyed the talk by Jerry Enzler, the Executive Director of the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium. Last summer, their institution opened a major exhibit on the Gulf of Mexico. Their large aquarium tanks were deliberately presented with no fish or any marine life. The tanks were covered with decals representing oil from the spill.

It was a great example of a museum (and aquarium) taking risks and making a strong statement about the environmental disaster that occurred in the gulf.  The opening of this unique exhibit was a great success and the story appeared in the national news. At the time, there were stories about the exhibit in MSNBC, USA Today, and many other media outlets.

I hope to post more about the session in the future, as all of the presentations were very interesting. For now, here are the slides from my presentation, Gulf Oil Spill Mashup Exhibit (PDF 3.7 MB)

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