Author Archive for Jim Spadaccini

ExhibitFiles: Development Blog

For the last six months we’ve been working on an NSF-sponsored project called ExhibitFiles. It’s a three-year project and our mission is to “create the infrastructure for an active online community of informal science exhibit practitioners, including shared records of exhibition descriptions as a core feature.” Wendy Pollock from Association of Science-Technology Centers is the principal investigator and Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions is a co-PI. Ideum’s role is help design, and build the site which will launch this winter. We’re building it…

We’re a Climate Neutral Company

Last month we announced that we reduced our carbon emissions by switching our electricity over to 90% wind power. Today, Ideum has taken the final steps and have become completely carbon neutral. The process was relatively simple and inexpensive. As I mentioned in the last post, switching over to wind power for our electricity costs us an additional $10 a month, and it required a phone call to our electricity provider. To figure out our complete carbon footprint we needed to look at…

More Summer Solstice Photographs

Here’s some more photographs from our trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on the Summer Solstice. As I mentioned in the previous post the dancers are Hopi and are from Second Mesa, Arizona. Deer dancer makes a call. Three girls with feathers. The youngest dancer. A hunter dancer. The entire group in the Plaza of the great house, Pueblo Bonito.

Chaco Culture on the Solstice

It was an amazing afternoon at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We saw two performances of Hopi dancers and took quite a few photographs. We talked with the two leaders of the group, Bertram Tsavadawa and Ruben Saufkie. They are from Second Mesa, one of a number Hopi Villages in eastern Arizona. Ruben told us about the importance and symbolism of the dances and their impression of Chaco Canyon, a place that they (and other Puebloan people) consider an ancestral homeland. He also…

Off to Chaco for Summer Solstice

We are heading out tomorrow to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to photograph Hopi dancers performing in celebration of the summer solstice. The park which was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture, is located in the northwest corner of the state. Back in 2004, I took a number of photographs of another group of dancers on the solstice, the Tewa Dancers from the North for the Traditions of the Sun project. Here’s a few of the shots from that trip.

Museum Blogs Update

Just quick note that the “AutoAggregator” is now operational on Museumblogs.org. This allows us to automatically important short summaries of postings from many of the sites in the directory. There are now 130 postings on the site. Check it out. Update (6-12-06): We now have 200 posts, but we’re still not bringing in all of the rss feeds. It is complicated, as we explain here.

Museum Blog Round Up:5

The museum blogosphere continues to grow, it seems I hear about a new museum blog every week. Climate Change and the Bering Sea is written by Karen de Seve from Liberty Science Center who’s gathering footage for a upcoming exhibition. At the other end of the Earth, the Natural History Museum has an Antarctic conservation blog which has been posting since late summer (February 2006). Museum Blogging provides “news and insights into…

museumblogs.org : A directory and blog for museums

We’re happy to announce that museumblogs.org is up and running. Over the last couple of months, off and on, we’ve been working on putting the site together. The original idea came from our Survey of Museum Blogs, the follow Up, and numerous conversations and ideas that came out of the Museums and Web conference. (We posted some of those ideas here, the Walker’s New Media Initiatives Blog posted about it here with numerous comments.) The Welcome post on…

Wind Power

As I mentioned in our last post, a review on the book The Weather Makers, Ideum has signed up with our electricity provider to receive 90% (the maximum) of our power from renewable wind. The Weather Makers points out that power plants, coal burning ones especially, contribute significantly to global warming. This was not news to us, as we’ve been involved in helping to stop the development of a coal burning power plant in Nevada. Here in New Mexico, we have…

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