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…
March 7th, 2010 01:23
I think one of the ways that they will mitigate the ongoing maintenance and support is by using open source software that is well accepted and broadly supported in the main stream tech industry and then build a complimentary museum community around it as well. This includes the active training they do at the conferences and their general willingness to help. Case and Point is at WebWise last week I saw Opening History demonstrating the IMA dashboard software repurposed for their work. This is the same plan that Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) is using to ensure the work we do survives.
The connection between the IMA Labs and BPOC is strong because of the similarities of the plan and it was obvious to me for a long time that this is how our community needs to proceed. That’s also why we were the IMA Labs first customer.
March 8th, 2010 11:02
Thanks Nik,
I couple of good points you raise here! As Rich points out in his earlier comment, our whole goal of IMA Lab is to leverage community investment in software by focusing our efforts on open-source tools that can lead to better and more reusable tools for the field.
The long-term strategy for sustainability of this effort includes some increase in staffing on the part of the IMA, but more importantly an emphasis on working with museums to build bench strength on their own teams and to help them take as much control of their own online initiatives as they should want.
Likewise, in using open-source tools, we put the ownership of the technology back into the hands of the museums. This lets the museum seek support from a much wider collection of software vendors w/o necessarily needing to change platforms to do so. I think we’ve all suffered from the ills of vendor lock-in… this is one strategy for addressing those and a better long-term strategy for museum technology. If the IMA can help bootstrap those efforts than I’m certainly game.
I would pay some serious moolah for a clone these days
But am inspired by the likes of Seb Chan, Nancy Proctor, and Nina Simon… who have shunned the need for sleep much longer than I have and lived to tell about it! 
-Rob