We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.–Peter Gibbons (in Office Space)

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So, today, on Monday February 8 (or on Tuesday February 9 for any readers in alternative time zones)  Step out of your office.  Go up into the galleries and look at a work of art, an exhibition, an experiment, a quoll.  Call your best friend, your spouse,  a friend and make arrangements to grab a coffee/a beer/a bite of dinner after work.  Take a half day tomorrow and treat your kids to ice cream before dinner.   Read a book.  Listen to a favorite c.d. Watch a favorite d.v.d. Enjoy the scenery.

As many of you know, last year I left the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles to take a position as the Director of a new organization called the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) in San Diego.  I have been meaning to try and make some posts here to let people know what the BPOC is and also to give some status reports.  But it seems that 10 months went by very quickly with only a single post of mine on collaboration.  So to make up for it over the next few weeks I will try and make a few posts to let everyone know what has happened and what our plans are going forward.

This first post is an introduction to Balboa Park San Diego and some of the history leading up to the creation of BPOC.  Additional posts will describe the primary funders, how the project is put together, what the plan is and how we are progressing on that plan.

Balboa Park

In 1868, Alonzo Horton set aside a tract of land for a public park, one that would grow over the next 140 years into one of the most significant urban parks in America, with a third more land than Central Park and the perhaps the highest concentration of cultural organizations in one place in the US except the National Mall in Washington, D.C..

In the years leading up to 1915, after many years of public enjoyment, several Spanish Colonial Revival buildings and structures were built for the Panama-California Exposition, a huge fair commemorating the completion of the Panama Canal, transforming an urban wilderness into the national historic landmark we know today. Over the next 20 years, the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Museum of Art, and the San Diego Natural History Museum all opened their doors in the park. In 1935 and 1936, Balboa Park hosted the California-Pacific International Exposition, adding a replica of London’s 16th-century Elizabethan Globe Theater. Other park structures followed, including the opening of the Timken Museum of Art and the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, officially making Balboa Park the cultural center of the city.

Today, Balboa Park represents the center of the thriving San Diego metropolis, housing a rich cultural tradition in an unparalleled setting. Spread out over 1,200 acres, the park is home to 85 cultural, conservation and recreation organizations and attracts more than 10 million visitors a year.  According to the Trust for Public Land, Balboa Park is the fourth most visited city park in the country, attracting more visitors annually than the National Mall and nearly three times as many visitors annually as the Grand Canyon.

Nevertheless, looking beyond the Spanish architecture, important cultural destinations, and incredible collections, the park is in fact facing huge challenges.   Over the last decade, organizations in Balboa Park have started to look to collaborative solutions to solve problems. In 2001, 24 institutions joined together to form the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership (BPCP), including such nonprofit organizations as the San Diego Zoo, the Timken Museum of Art, The Old Globe Theatre, the House of Hospitality, and the San Diego Museum of Art.  BPCP takes a leading role in park advocacy, joint purchasing agreements, sustainability projects, management and facilitation of some park wide projects, and has created a learning institute for museum professionals, areas where collective strengths and resources make the organizations stronger together than they can be individually.

More recently 17 of the same organizations partnered with a local foundation to form the Balboa Park Online Collaborative… more about that and the foundation in my next post.

One of my museum studies students forwarded me this BBC article about a bet between Indianapolis and New Orleans.   I wanna be Maxwell Anderson when I grow up.

Ultra cool. “A legitimate attempt to push storytelling boundaries by quietly superimposing a supplemental, moving layer atop a pre-existing printed narrative.” “”The set-up [a book, a lamp, and a laptop] seems perfectly harmless at first sight. But as soon as you open the book under the lamp … the pages take on new animated and mysterious dimensions … worlds appear and disappear with a direct connection to the actual items printed on paper: animal figures appear over the mountains, peaks emerge in a shadow play, a bird silently flies over, foxes light up the text with their lanterns at dusk … ”

Check it out here.

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For more on the secret technology of English muffins read this recent article from law.com.  Now if only I had a skill, or some secret knowledge….

If so, I’ve got a couple of recommendations for you.

At the Pierpont Morgan: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.“  Great little exhibition.   As I wrote my friend Sarah this morning, I love going to the Pierpont Morgan as much for the supplementary objects on view as for the main focus of an exhibition.  In addition to autograph letters (written both vertically and horizontally to save paper costs), there are prints, drawings, books of manners, and a contemporaneous monopoly-like board game about London.  I particularly enjoyed Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture notes re Austen’s work.  Was not as crazy about the documentary that was produced for the exhibition–you can watch it here–for a number of reasons but I’ll let you decide what you think.

Also quite liked a small exhibition of photographs from Look Magazine which you can find at the Museum of the City of New York.  This display included photographs by, then staff photographer, Stanley Kubrick–including a disturbing and beautiful three-quarter portrait of boxer Rocky Graziano in the shower.   Disturbing because it he is so very beautiful–not a kouros anywhere in any museum that has a finer physique (or a phiner fisique).

And, on a completely unrelated topic, we were staying in an apartment loaned to us by some friends and found a reference to a nearby restaurant, the HiLife.  (1503 Second Ave at 78th) The note on the menu said that the food was good and the Long Island Ice Teas were similar to the famed Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, so who could resist that recommendation.  Food was good and while I didn’t have a Long-Island Ice Tea, their Rum Punch did have a punch.

Off you go now–NYC or bust.

Today is #followamuseum Day on Twitter. Museums and museum lovers have been busily sharing their favorite tweeting museums. At http://www.followamuseum.org you can find some (but not all) of the museums who are waiting to be followed.

The idea originated with Jim Richardson at Museum Marketing who was disappointed to see that Bill Gate had attracted so many followers in such a short time.

But this raises a question. Should museums follow you back? If you think you know, Mia Ridge has posted a quick survey. (I’ll try to report back here if results are shared).

It’s a timely question as I’m participating in a panel at this week’s iSchools conference about social media. Also timely was Clive Thompson’s latest column in Wired “In Praise of Online Obscurity.” While I’m not nearly as famous as the tweeters mentioned in the article, my raft of followers is approaching 1,000. I’m feeling a little hemmed in and often wonder what all those people find interesting about my tweets. But more than anything it’s made me very conscious that I’m not just tweeting to a few friends: it’s an audience.

So what does this mean for museums? If social doesn’t scale what happens to your twitter feed? Does it fracture? What if I’ve done a nice job cultivating a great community around my museums tweets? What happens to the social space when @BillGates and his 400,000 followers crash the party? How could #followamuseum day change the way your museum tweets?

Thompson suggests that “there is value in obscurity.” But there is also value in exclusivity. I wonder how long before museums start special “members only” twitter accounts that only allow paying members to follow.
Update: Mia has posted the results of her “Friendly or Weird” survey.

Inevitably, the name has received almost as much attention as the device.

For those earnest researchers anxious to pursue the naming issue in depth, there is the not-so-startling news that there is a hi tech Japanese adult diaper called, you guessed it, the AiPad.

This, however, may sum it all up:

Mac’s iPad

This is just cool.  Found it online today when I was doing some research on deaccessioning to feed my museum studies students at CWRU.  It’s a black box that auctions itself off on e-bay every seven days.

So many questions!

Today, on the way back from a shopping excursion (my only child is headed off to a semester in NYC) we counted 75 Xmas wreaths still hanging on front doors on the approximately 2 mile jaunt home.  75 wreaths still on doors and it is January 25.

So here’s another idea free of charge to anyone who wants to implement it.   It’s called “Wreath-Away” -  a free public service. Just before Xmas people can sign up to have an email sent to them once a week for every week after Epiphany (until Easter, let’s say) telling them to “Take the Wreath Down Now!”–unless they confirm that they have taken the wreath down.  The logo would be a Christmas Wreath with the red circle and hash mark superimposed over it.

There the idea is free and floating in the universe–if you do implement it and manage to make a buck or two off the idea somehow (maybe local florists advertise the site before the holidays) send me a buck or two if you think of it.

Yours here in Cleveland where the holidays are still very much in evidence…sigh.