This week we will be exhibiting at the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting and expo. We will have a booth (#1830) and we’ll be showing our multitouch table along with some of the custom multitouch applications we’ve developed

In addition, I am the chair for a session entitled, Open Source for Museums: The Next Experiment in Museum Technology. We have a great panel and one that represents most of the major open source initiatives in the museum world. The presenters are: Scott Sayre from Pachyderm, Tom Scheinfeldt  from Omeka, Carl Goodman from CollectionSpace, and Bryan Kennedy from Science Buzz  who will explain how Drupal was used in development of their site. In addition to these direct connections, some in the group (myself included) are advisors on other open source projects such as Fluid Engage and Steve.

Last year, I wrote an article for the National Association for Museum Exhibition’s Journal, Exhibitionist, where I interviewed most of the panel members about their projects.  The article was reposted in the Ideum blog see Open Source Software: New Possibilities for Museums. The article has also just recently been translated into Czech and appears in Muzeum, the magazine of the Narodni Muzeum in Prague.

In the AAM session, I won’t be talking much about Open Exhibits, as we are going to focus on projects that are already fully underway. (We are resubmitting our proposal to NSF and we are are still looking for museum professionals to fill out our survey on computer interactives in museums.)  I look forward to seeing some of you at AAM in Philadelphia.

Update May 5, 2009: I will be posting PDFs of the slides presented during the session. Here’s the introduction to Open Source Software: New Possibilities for Museums (PDF 900K). It includes links to all of the projects mentioned and references.

Update May 6, 2009: Two more presentations in PDF form here. Omeka: Open Source Web Publishing for Museums (PDF 2Megs) by Tom Scheinfeldt and Museum Open Source: Make or Break – Pachyderm Retrospective (PDF 740K) by Scott Sayre.

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