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Rijkswidget

One of the joys of owning my Mac has been widgets – small little programs that let me do common tasks without firing up a big application. Things like quick wikipedia searches, unit conversions, calendars, notepads….the list goes on and on. Today I added a new widget from the Rijksmuseum that adds some class to [...]

The Comedies of Fair U$e

Frustratingly, I am still unable to beam myself up and attend all the great IP conferences that proliferate these days (I’m working on it). So I’m really happy that Diane Zorich, my partner-in-crime in running MCN’s Intellectual Property SIG, was able to attend and report on a very important conference that took place at NYU [...]

Preventative Conservation

In an earlier lifetime as a curator, on a visit to Florence Italy in 1996, I made arrangements to meet with Maurizio Seracini, Director of Editech, a company specializing in diagnostic imaging of art works. In terms of full disclosure, let me say that Seracini is an independent professional, a respected colleague, and a friend.  We collaborated [...]

The State of Museum Research

At the AAMs this year, I was on a panel discussing the future of museum research in the 21st century. This panel was prompted by the 2005 IMLS study about the status of data collection in the nation’s museums. If you haven’t read the study’s report, you might want to check it out — it [...]

WIPO Webcasting Wipeout

This seems important enough to post here without comment. In fact, any commentary on my part would be superfluous (not that that usually stops me). Comments are, of course, welcome. WIPO carves up the Internet (and the broadcast spectrum) May 4, 2006 James Love Don’t bother reading this unless the words “new intellectual property right” [...]

Digital Readiness Meeting (long)

I recently participated in the Canada-US Dialog on Digital Cultural Heritage: “Digital Readiness and Cultural Heritage Institutions.”   The invitational meeting was sponsored by the IMLS and CHIN, and featured some of the best and brightest folks working in the our field. We had the pleasure of meeting Ann Radice, new director of IMLS, and Namir [...]

Happy Mother’s Day

[This is neither a rant nor a rave and you might want to avoid reading it. It gets kinda of weepy at the end] The Beijing project hit our desks sometime the end of March.  The museum is scheduled to open a special traveling exhibition at the Beijing World Art Museum on May 26.  You know the May [...]

Some of my best friends are vendors…

A session I’d proposed for a national conference was rejected last week.  Among the very good reasons for rejecting it was the tired old refrain “too many vendors.”  It is time for museums to wake up and smell the coffee.  Vendors and independent professionals (IPs)–as a group–are not our enemies to be feared and prevented [...]

Use or Abuse?

As I sit on the plane from Boston decompressing after the AAM conference, its time to review. The conference was impressive in terms of scale, presentation and content – a thoroughly professional job in all respects. Most of my conference this year was taken up with meetings and Media and Technology booth duty, but I [...]

Culturally Situated Design Tools

My department at the University of Illinois is hosting Ron Eglash as a Research Fellow, and last week I had the opportunity to listen in on some of his lectures. Ron is one of those interesting people who ranges across a number of disciplines to make interesting discoveries. His main work in ethnocomputing and ethnomathmatics [...]