This new section will feature peer-reviewed articles — as well as notes, comments, discussions, reviews, and reports — covering research related to the intersection between digital media and cultural heritage, including the practical processes and intellectual discourses that relate to the collection, management, and display of cultural heritage using digital media.

The Digital Heritage section will be co-edited by: Paul F. Marty, Ph.D., College of Information, Florida State University, USA, and Ross D. Parry, Ph.D., Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK

We are now actively soliciting manuscripts focusing on Digital Heritage. Please submit your articles to Robert R. Janes, Editor-in-Chief at eic.mmc@telus.net.

For further information please visit www.informaworld.com/mmc and click on the instructions for authors.

“The aim of this program is to provide a perspective on the theory and practice of museums in a changing technological, social and political environment for current and future museum professionals. It emphasizes the role of technology as a pervasive aspect in today’s museum, examines new models of education, exhibition, and business strategies, and explores the role of the museum as an agent of social change.”

See http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/museum/ for more information. –Paul

“About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. [...] What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.”

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

I wonder if Musematic could participate? Best, –Paul

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUKSIN15180520070523

Excellent! –Paul

http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm

Saying that “Increasingly the choice is between risking a work’s survival and letting it be seen,” the author concludes by saying that museums may have no choice but to implement the same sort of solutions as were taken at the Cave of Lascaux.

Clearly, the author wasn’t focused on technological solutions. She didn’t even mention the possibility of digital surrogates for handling this problem — nor, for that matter, did she mention Walter Benjamin at all.

Nevertheless, while nothing new to the readers of this blog, the issues she raised about balancing the desire to see the original with the need to preserve the original are critically important — and can provide great discussion questions for students!

One wonders when the Second Louvre Museum will hit 8.3M visitors per year, and how the developers of that museum will handle the stress of so many visitors…

–PFM

My immediate thought upon reading this news matched David Utter’s comments in WebProNews: “No doubt about it, Vint and company dropped the ball on this. A little marketing, a little vision, and .um could have been a fulcr.um for lifting some clever domains onto the World Wide Web.”

No kidding! It’s hard to believe none of us ever grabbed http://muse.um!

The “Presenter Agreement” carefully explains that the AAM will be producing a “multi-media CD-ROM” of the sessions featuring live audio recordings and presentation materials. The explanation includes the following sentence:

“All PowerPoint materials are converted to PDF and are 128 bit protected on the CD-ROM securing them from any authorized use including downloading and copying.”

Now, I must confess I find myself somewhat concerned by their apparent plan to use a 128 bit encryption scheme to distribute CDs that no one will be able to read, thereby preventing all authorized use. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to be a tremendous waste of time and money — although Heaven forfend anyone would try to download something from a CD!

Seriously, one wonders whether a) they really have no idea what they are saying; or b) they know this is complete gibberish but were simply trying to come up with some convincing prose–as many of us have done–that would assuage the intellectual property fears that tend to run rampant through the museum community.

Either way, whenever I read techno-gibberish like this (especially when it is distributed by organizations as prominent as the AAM), it reminds me of how important it is for all of us “in the know” to help educate the entire museum profession about the realities of museums and information technology.

And I wonder: where was the museum information professional who could have proofread this before it was sent out nationwide??

Best wishes to all, and see you in Chicago!

One of the things I’ve been working on over the winter “break” is writing up the results from an international survey I administered last year to nearly 1500 visitors at nine different online museums. The survey questions focused on how museum professionals can encourage their visitors to form lifelong relationships with museums: visiting in person when they can, and visiting online when they cannot. I hope the results of the survey will help museum researchers and professionals understand the complementary, cyclical relationship that exists between digital and physical museums from a user-centered perspective.

As I work on writing this up, I got to wondering: what are steps are you all taking to encourage a positive relationship between your museums and your websites? In what ways does your museum website serve as a lure, drawing online visitors in and leaving them with the desire to visit your museum in person? In what ways does your museum encourage visitors to turn to your museum’s website after their visit?

However, the points being made about the “irreplaceable scholarly data” represented in these tablets reminds me of the old question, “if you could save either the artifacts in your museum, or the information about those artifacts, but not both, which would you choose?” This is also a good question for a class of LIS students learning about museum information systems, BTW.

Of course, in class, I initially answer this question by saying, “well, that depends…” — but I usually end up coming down on the side of “saving the information” — because as much as I’d hate to lose the original objects, I argue that most of what we know about those objects is not contained within those objects. Saving the objects, therefore, could make it difficult if not impossible to recover the lost information — and thus saving the information could be more important in the long run in terms of contributing to humanity’s knowledge-base (but being a good professor, I can also argue the other way, if you prefer).

This takes me back to the Cuneiform tablets — and indeed the general question of repatriation vs. scholarship. As digital surrogates and visual representations of museum artifacts increase in quality, how will those advances affect these arguments? If the thousands of tablets at the University of Chicago were scanned as part of the Digital Hammurabi Project (plus see conference paper) or the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, would there be less concern about giving the tablets up?

If you have any ideas, be sure to send your email in cuneiform!