The Museum of London is one of my very favorite museums.  The mega-museums in London are a source of constant amazement: The National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert, the Tate Modern, and the Grandfather of them all The British Museum.  There is just so much stuff and, for the most part, I’m not allowed to (really) play with any of it.

Confession and question:  I became a curator in the first place because of the call of bright shiny objects (okay fresco paintings) and the lure of the storage vaults, but doesn’t everyone kinda sorta wanna be able to explore the environments in historical rooms? Read Charles Dicken’s favorite books in his favorite chair by a fireplace.  Have a look through the V&A’s Fashion and Jewellery & Accessories Collection to see if there is anything in the right size?  (Probably not) Play an ancient board game with a mummy in the British Museum?

Oh there are opportunities to handle education objects or via reproductions  or gallery interactives to simulate exploring historical objects but nothing that really satisfies the magpie in me and then, browsing the web this morning in anticipation of an upcoming trip to the UK I found an exhibition of photographs by Tom Hunter.  The museum commissioned hunter to create a series of photographs in which he “he offers an alternative view of the passing of time in London” — what I like most about them is Hunter has used museum staff and volunteers, as well as others, in the photographs.  Okay, so maybe I didn’t get to live out one of my little fantasies–but some somebodies at the Museum of London did.  Cheers all round for the Museum of London who, to mark their re-opening, chose to celebrate their staff members as well.

“The Day Against DRM will unite a wide range of projects, public interest organizations, web sites and individuals in an effort to raise public awareness to the danger of technology that restricts users’ access to movies, music, literature and software; indeed, all forms of digital data. Many DRM schemes monitor a user’s activities and report what they see to the corporations that impose the DRM.

“As part of its Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) will be helping to coordinate anti-DRM activists all over the world to mobilize the public against this anti-social technology. They have also published an article detailing a short history of a “Decade in DRM” at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/decade-in-drm.

“”DRM attacks your freedom at two levels. Its purpose is to attack your freedom by restricting your use of your copies of published works. Its means is to force you to use proprietary software, which means you don’t control what it does. When companies organize to design products to restrict us, we have to organize to defeat them,” said Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman.”"

That last quote states quite well what I think is one of the most-overlooked points in the “anti-piracy” debate: who are the real pirates? “Piracy,” we tend to forget, means boarding a ship by force, taking its occupants hostage, robbing them of their goods and rights. Sounds very much like what proprietary systems and software, and DRM, and a boatload of other online restrictions do to our computers, no?

The IMA is like the Apolo Ohno of the museum technology world. They can’t stop winning awards: Best of the Webs, Muse Golds, even a Webby. ArtBabble is awesome, now that we’re in there. The jury’s out as to whether Rob Stein has been cloned, he’s everywhere, maybe he just never sleeps. Daniel’s definitely been cloned, there’s Sartorial Dan and Casual Dan, they both turned up at the Tate Handheld Conference a while back, there was a moment of confusion and then Casual Dan left. Trust me, I saw it.

OK, maybe they’re not cloned but they’re going to need to be. It seems as though the IMA’s media and technology team doesn’t have enough work to do. It seems as though they’re not content pushing their own technology boundaries, they want to push everyone else’s. The IMA Lab (meet them here) are offering their services to the broader community:

IMA Lab is the media and technology arm of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In addition to serving the IMA’s mission by leveraging these skills, the IMA Lab seeks to help other cultural organizations do the same by offering solutions and consulting services which contribute back to the community of museums and which help other organizations succeed.

Those IMA guys are awesome, in a they-must-be-smoking-crack kind of way. There’s no doubt that the “media and technology arm of the Indianapolis Museum of Art” are leaders in the field, but can this work? Can a museum afford to farm out its technology staff to other museums? What does that look like? How does that work? If they help build some kind of system for museum X, are they liable for its ongoing maintenance and support? Unless I’m mistaken this is a huge ongoing commitment. The obvious consequence is not so much media and technology attention paid to the IMA, but presumably that’s a conversation they’ve had with Max A.

My hat is off to those guys, as a community this is exactly how we should be operating. There are collaboratives out there, Balboa Park immediately springs to mind, but that’s a group of twenty-odd musems. I’m not sure that just putting your services out there as a lone museum is the way to go, but its bold.

I trawled the IMA Lab site, see it here. Curiously, it doesn’t tell you how you might engage the IMA’s services, no contact details, except Rob and Dan’s home phone number. Just kidding.

Those guys at IMA keep innovating. I believe there’ll be a time when collaboration and partnership like this is de rigueur. Rob and Dan will get to say we were first. Those guys…

via Brass Goggles

International Obscura Day.

Atlas Obscura , a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica is holding an International Obscura Day.

“The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.”

“Join us March 20th, 2010 in celebrating wondrous and curious places all over the world. RSVP for expeditions and tours at obscuraday.com.”

Some events already scheduled: (see the website for details)

“In San Francisco we’re descending en masse to the Musee Mecanique and then going to visit the clock and orrerys at the Long Now Foundation.
At Stanford University they’re showing us around the pneumatic dispatch system.In Mountain View, CA they’re holding a demonstration of the Difference Engine for us.
In New York, there’s a private tour of the Radio guy’s collection of science and tech oddities.
In Serbia we’re going to the world’s only Tesla Museum .
In Colorado Springs, the Steampunk Cowboys are leading a tour of a Wild West museum.

These events are all filling up fast (and some are booked solid) – but there’s still room in some and there are more events coming online almost everyday.”

Update: An here’s my contribution:  National Museum of Ship Models and Sea History

In 1943 Hermann Hesse’s book, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlinspiel) was published in Switzerland.  In 1946 Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I read a lot of Hesse in college and, as an art history major, Narcissus and Goldmund, a coming of age novel set in the middle ages, was a favorite.  Never got around to reading The Glass Bead Game as a student.  I vaguely remember dating someone who told me that The Glass Bead Game would be too complicated a read for a girl (and I believed him!).  Reading it now and enjoying it immensely–particularly enjoyed the part where Joseph Knecht the hero uses something that sounds very much like an iPad in his role as the Magister Ludi of his first important Glass Bead Game.  Bottom line, it’s a good read, if you haven’t read it before, and worth a re-read if you have.  Maybe I’ll start an online book club and discuss how museum culture in the 21st century is both like and unlike Hesse’s fictional land of Castalia.

The First Sale doctrine is one of those modest little sub-paragraphs buried in the copyright law whose importance far outweighs its length. It says, in brief, that you own what you’ve bought. Couldn’t be more obvious, right? Think again. There’s a reason it ended up in the copyright statute.

Vernor v. Autodesk is a case with wide implications, so I’m going to quote at length:

Today, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition of consumer and library groups filed a friend of the court brief before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a case devoted to protecting the first sale doctrine.

In Vernor v. Autodesk, Timothy Vernor bought four copies of AutoCAD software from a design firm that was having an office sale. Vernor then put the disks up for sale on eBay. Autodesk, the publishers of AutoCAD, complained to eBay, claiming that the sale of the software was an infringement of its copyrights getting the listing taken down and eventually getting Vernor kicked off of eBay. Vernor then went to court to have a judge declare that his sale of the software he had bought didn’t infringe Autodesk’s copyrights.

If I were to put my old copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix up for auction on eBay, Scholastic, the publisher, would have absolutely no right to tell me otherwise. So what makes Vernor’s case different?

Well, from our perspective, not too much. But Autodesk’s software comes along with a fine-print “License Agreement” which, among other things, tells whoever buys it that they haven’t actually bought it. As in, the software that you paid money for isn’t yours. Instead, the agreement says that you’ve only bought a license to use the software.

This might at first seem like a pointless bit of semantics. Whether I’m buying the software or buying the right to use it, I’m still paying money and I’m still using software. Except that this software is copyrighted. If I buy something outright, I have the right to sell it to someone else. The same thing is true for copyrighted works—but only because of a particular feature of copyright law: the first sale doctrine.

How many times have you ripped a CD to your computer, and then given the CD away? Think about it. Unlike a book you finish and give away, which you then don’t have and can’t read, there are now two copies of those songs — you still have them on your computer and can listen to them, even after giving the CD away. In short, it’s a very different situation when a book/music/content is digital.

As everything goes digital, our First Sale rights will be challenged, and endangered. We may be left with no right to own our own copies of content we purchase. It will all be rented, time defined, non-transferable, and impossible to migrate or update — or preserve. Amazon may end up with your marginal notes to an e-book, which you can no longer access.

Scary? Or just bizarre and we’ll have to get used to it?

Picked this one up on Ars Technica: “Copyright Reform Act tries fixing fair use with seven words.” Which is intriguing, considering the oceans of verbiage expended on the subject in the last few years.

The CRA [Copyright Reform Act] is a new project from Public Knowledge, with much of the heavy lifting being done by the Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford and the Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC-Berkeley. While Berkeley’s noted copyright scholar Pam Samuelson works up a new “model statute” for copyright law in the digital age, Public Knowledge hopes to make smaller interim fixes to copyright law that won’t require the same dramatic reworking.

One can access theCopyright Reform Act document at Public Knowledge.org.

Anyone care to comment here on whether or not these particular seven words would do the trick?

This just makes my little worries and concerns seem so minor.  Wait, wait, was that a chicken bone that just fell on my head?

NO TECHNOLOGY IS INVOLVED IN THIS BLOG.

Visited the IMLS website lately?  What’s new, you ask?  Well just this week a press release announced the launch of UpNext, a wiki dedicated to a discussion of the future of libraries and museums.  UpNext is a platform created to allow interested folk to engage in conversation around the recently published Future of Museums and Libraries: A Discussion Guide.  The IMLS plans to use your comments and observations to shape future policy–so if you want to make a difference, you can sign up here and join in the conversation.  You can find the discussion guide and other relevant publications on the resources page of the IMLS website.

Oh…and if you are already busy planning your schedule for AAM 2010 in Los Angeles there will be a session dedicated to the discussion guide chaired by UCLA Librarian Dr. Gary Strong.  Mark your calendars for Monday May 24, 9-10:15, sponsored by CALM, the Joint National Committee for Archives, Libraries, and Museums.

Jeanne Drewes sent this along this week so I thought I’d share it:

We all know how hard it is to lift the sense of urgency and priority for preserving collections, especially in our economically tight and digitally oriented times. The American Library Association’s Association of Library Collections and Services (ALA-ALCTS) is
sponsoring a competition for the best “2-minute speech” to convince 3 key audiences of the importance of action for preservation as a part of the first national collection Preservation Week (May 9-15, 2010).
The target audiences are:

●       Decision makers-directors, board members, elected and appointed officials, and other people who choose priorities for action and provide the resources;
●       Friends, family, visitors and users, and others who work outside collecting institutions, and the cultural heritage, conservation, and preservation fields-public support is essential for preservation action;
●       Library, archive, and museum staff outside the preservation or conservation fields-shelvers, check-out and ILL staff, building operations, and housekeeping personnel can have a significant impact on collections preservation.

Here’s how the contest will work:
1.      Select one target audiences (i.e. decision makers; general audience; and/or library/archive/museum staff) to persuade with a 2-minute speech to support preservation and take preservation action. Selection multiple target audiences, one 2 minute speech per audience.

2.      Write a short, compelling, and easy-to-understand argument that will persuade your target audience.  Send in one 2 minute speech per target audience.

3.      Send your written submissions in one e-mail per target audience to Yvonne Carignan, Library Director and Head of Collections, Historical Society of Washington, DC, carignan@historydc.org.

4.      Yvonne will distribute all submissions to a review panel representing preservation, conservation, and collecting institutions
of a variety of types and sizes.  The panel will select the top three entries in each category.  The winning “speeches” will be
highlighted on the Preservation Week Web site (www.ala.org./preservationweek) and the winners will also receive a surprise from ALCTS.