It was the last day of the MCN conference today. Washington DC is cloudy, rainy, and humid, and there are a few large protests downtown, making the place extra exciting. I’ve had a whole week’s worth of exciting, so I’m happily curled up on a couch in Suzy Sarraf’s beautiful condo, relaxing and trying to think about which of these topics to handle first.

Funny thing about conferences; although they’re exhausting, they always leave me fired up and ready to change my institution for the better. Conferences are such a whirl of networking and ideas and give and take, that I can’t help but want to climb the mountain of change right away.That’s the nice thing about working in a smaller mid-sized museum: if you have the time and the passion, you can fairly easily implement some of this stuff. I think my boss was getting tired of me calling and emailing twice a day with suggestions about how we could do XYZ, though.

Anyway, since I didn’t have access to power outlets and wireless in the conference rooms, I ended up writing everything down old-school style. I don’t have my notes transcribed yet, but I’ll upload them and make them available when I do. But for now, I just want to touch on a couple of sessions which I learned a lot from.

On Wednesday, I attended Rob Stein and Ed Bachta’s (Indianapolis Museum of Art) workshop about building a website in Drupal (aka. Drupal Bootcamp – there’s a slideshare presentation available here). Since I’m going to be transitioning the Magnes website to Drupal within the next few months, this was an absolutely perfect opportunity to see experts demo the steps it takes to do this. Admittedly, I don’t think I’m going to be able to migrate the site in the space of a morning, but I’m feeling a bit more confident about the process and that I might be able to do this in a shorter timeframe than I was anticipating. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that some of the extra nifty features are easy for people with background in PHP, but which left me tilting my head as if I were trying to read hieroglyphics. Cue an excited email to my boss and the Director, begging for a class in PHP. Fortunately, not much PHP is needed, and I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to do the majority of the work without much handholding.

One of the things I’m very excited about is that IMA has released their Dashboard module for free download (it’s available for download here). As this is something our Director of Development has expressed an interest in, I attended the 8:30 AM (!) case studies roundtable the next morning. Rob talked more about the Dashboard, including some of the benefits (transparency, donors love it, trust-building, ongoing stockpile of statistics) and downsides (manual updates by users, expired statistics). Really, really intriguing.

Another session which I found incredibly useful was a Friday afternoon session on making collection assets findable on the web, moderated by the amazing Murtha Baca. Ted Dancescu (Getty Trust) talked about some of the nuts and bolts of optimizing your HTML code to Google’s algorithms. In a nutshell:

• Use the description and keyword tags, but no more than 5-10 keywords.
• Use relevant Titles and Keywords
• Match the keywords, et al. to the content body
• Pages should be navigable with less than 4 clicks
• Logical site structure
• Character length of URLs is less than 100, and use of top-level domains
• Have links to and from your site everywhere
• Use descriptive text for images and video (particularly using the Alt tag for describing images, which helps Google Image Search accurately find your image)
• Use names, content, or links as HTML or text instead of images (an aside: Flash-bloated sites, in addition to being annoying, aren’t as easily indexed by Google because of this)

There were a lot of don’ts along with this, too, including redirects, long dynamic URLs, hidden text, keyword dilution, and robot exclusion.

Of course much of this has to do with careful metadata generation and maintenance, which can be a full-time itself. Diana Folsom discussed LACMA’s information integration projects (for their library and museum) and how actively managing their metadata and search terms greatly increased access to the assets for both the staff and the public.

The key point of this session was fairly straightforward: create a lot of access points to the information. If search engines can find it, people will find it. If people can find it, they can use it. If they’re using it, you’re doing your job as an educational/research institution.

Of course now I want to rush back home and start plugging in a lot of keywords. Maybe some nice intern will help me with that, once we have that part of our process defined.

There were so many other sessions and discussions and events I could touch on, but as this is already a mini-novella, I’ll leave it at that.

For those of you who attended MCN2008, please upload your photographs to Flickr and share them in our group pools, Museum Computer Network and MCN2008. My personal photos from the trip are here, taken entirely with an iPhone. Not bad photo quality, I have to say!

Next year, MCN will be in Portland, Oregon. Portland is gorgeous, inexpensive, and there’s no sales tax! I’m really, really looking forward to it. Hope to see many of you again in 2009!