The Latest from the Blog

Flickr Mashups and Interestingness

In designing and developing The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. website with The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology we’ve found ourselves spending a lot of time in Flickr. The Collection of photographs found on the site are pulled in from Flickr using a Flash-base mashup. The Shooting Script activity works in similar way: pulling out John Collier Jr’s images as well as those of other Flickr members. An earlier post, Colonizing Social Spaces, looked more broadly at the benefits…

Video from the Digital Forum

Streaming and downloadable video clips from the National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand are available on their site. Both days from the conference are covered, so there’s a lot of material here that’s relevant to museums, libraries and archives. My keynote speech, Museums and the Web 2.0 is included, along with those from other international and local presenters. I summarized some of the highlights from the sessions that I attended back in November, check out the National Digital Forum category to…

100 Museum Blogs, 49 Surveyed

There are now 100 blogs listed in the Museum Blogs directory and fittingly Museums and the Web online was the 100th added. Our survey of museum blogs is now just one shy of our target of 50 blogs surveyed. The count right stands at 49. The running total of the multiple choice questions has already produced some interesting results. Half of museum blogs are for the public, the other half are for other museum professionals. Also, more than 1/3rd of the blogs…

Comparing Map Services Through Mashups

We recently discovered a few map mashups, Flash Earth and Map Compare, which allow you to compare a variety of mapping APIs (Application Programming Interface). The first, Flash Earth, as its’ name implies uses Adobe Flash to pull in aerial and satellite imagery from Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps, Ask.com, OpenLayers, and NASA Terra. This zoomable mashup allows you to directly compare the different map services within their aerial or satellite mode. It was really interesting to see the different…

Museum Blog Survey for Museums and Web Conference 2007

We are conducting the first comprehensive survey looking at museum blogs and blogging practices. If you write for, or operate a museum or museum-related blog, please fill out the survey on the Museum Blogs website. Seb Chan (Powerhouse Museum) and Myself (Ideum) are the conducting the survey. The results will be presented in a session, Radical Trust: The state of the museum blogosphere at the Museums and Web Conference in San Francisco in April 2007. We will also link…

Museums in Transition

Gyroscope, an exhibit design firm based in Oakland, CA has just released a report on how museums are using “new communication technologies to enhance and extend the visitor experience.” The paper Museums in Transition: Emerging Technologies as Tools for Free-Choice Learning was commissioned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Based on reviewing available publications along with interviews of twenty-four museum professionals (including myself), the report takes a comprehensive look at how museums are using Web 2.0 technologies, handheld devices, and other innovations. Museums in…

“Colonizing” Social Spaces

As museums and other informal educators continue to experiment with Web 2.0 technologies, the concept of “colonizing” existing social networking spaces is emerging as a viable option for institutions both large and small. Back in October at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s conference, we discussed the concept. More recently, in my course at University of Victoria and then at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand, I’ve come across more interesting examples. In addition, I’ve begun to compile some of the benefits…

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – By the People: social tagging…

This is going to be my last post on sessions from the conference. There were a lot of other very interesting speakers, I’ve just run out of time and need to catch my plane back! Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented on the Steve project. Susan is the General Manager for Collections Information Planning for The Met. Steve for those of you not familiar is a social tagging project involving mostly American Art Museums. The impetus for the…

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Opening the gates: new opportunities in online collections

In the afternoon of Day 2, Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney presented on their innovative collections database. Seb started out by taking about visitor expectations have changed when comes to what they might be able to find on museum website and how they might browse collections. Seb cited Amazon and Last FM as examples of sites that provide visitors with “recommended” items, assisting users to browse materials within a collection as influential sites in developing their own collections database.

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