So here’s my top 10 list of failed technology initiatives. I’m not going to discuss specific failed projects, but those technologies we, as a community, thought were worth pursuing and, for some reason or another, just didn’t end up becoming an integral part of our musetech landscape. I also want to stress that this list in no way is intended to dismiss the very real value of these technologies, or diminish the efforts of those who saw that value and tried to get programs off the ground. And sometimes, it takes a while for technology to come around again. 10-15 years ago, ebooks were the laughingstock of the failed technology Top Ten lists. But who’s laughing now??

#10 – Bump for iPhone

Phone sex?

Bump is an an iPhone app that was supposed to streamline the way we shared information ourselves, like swapping electronic business cards. Two iPhone users (Android wasn’t really around at the time) with the app installed could gently “bump” their phones and the app would input your Bump partner’s information into your contact list. Bump had a lot of hype, and every lucky bastard with an iPhone was trying to Bump their phone with everyone else. There would be meetups and professional gatherings at museum openings, with rampant Bumping. But Bump at the time turned out to be premature technology – it rarely worked, and not everyone had an iPhone. And if you were at an event and someone was impatiently waiting to Bump you, the wifi or 3G connection would invariably fail. Moral – implementing technology while someone is waiting is embarrassing.

#9 – foursquare

Huh? Why is foursquare on this list? It has like 10 20 million users! And 3 million people around the world use their service per day! In 2010, it experienced growth of 3400%! In the past 5 months, it grew by 5 million users. CRAY-ZEE. And location-based interactions and check-ins aren’t going away anytime soon. So… why is it on the list?

Museums followed the hype crest for a while, then made the mistake of assuming that the public would do our work for us. In 2010 and 2011, there was a brief flurry of chatter and excitement about our new Foursquare marketing efforts, with prizes and benefits for check-ins at our events and exhibitions. So… why’d we stop doing that? Seriously – when was the last time you saw a museum website with a foursquare badge, or marketing materials with foursquare promotions? Moral – removing technology from the rotation too early is like wearing zeitgeist blinders.

#8 – Prezi

I’ll admit it right off the top: I hate Prezi. Done well, it’s a beautiful alternative to the expected, stale, familiar PowerPoint. It enjoyed a two-year period in 2010-2011 where museum professionals were Prezi-fying their conference presentations. Then it stopped. Why?

First of all, there’s a learning curve to Prezi. Unlike the linear PowerPoint, it takes time to learn how to use effectively, and a good Prezi will also have some thought about the design in advance. And how many presenters start working on their presentations a month in advance? I think I see about five hands in the back of the room…

Second, well, the above is considered a good example of a well-produced Prezi. Here’s an example of a bad Prezi:

Moral: don’t make your audience seasick

#7 – Laserdiscs

Way back in the 1970s, Laserdiscs were considered to be the NEW new media. They were about the size of a medium pizza (12″, thin crust, hold the cheese), and were considered to be a superior medium for art media and sound. They were also believed to be “archival” – unlike magnetic tape media, Laserdiscs were optical, like DVDs and BluRay disks today, and therefore considered to be less-vulnerable to the elements. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and, like compact disks, suffered from bit rot. Their size also meant there was more surface area to get damaged. And you could only fit 30 minutes of material on early Laserdiscs, so the user would have to eject it from the player and flip it over to view or interact with more content. Think of it like a cross between an LP and a CD.

Bit Rot: The Phantom Menace

Unlike magnetic mediums, Laserdiscs enjoyed the advantage of being interactive, which made it an attractive option for early gallery interactives. Due to their perceived durability, they were also used to share collection catalogs with other organizations, and as backup storage for media art and collection databases. Laserdiscs never really gained traction in the United States, though, and other playback and storage formats quickly overtook it as the media of choice. Moral: size matters.

#6 – RFID tracking, CueCat, and QR codes

RFID tags, barcode readers (such as CueCat), and QR codes are examples of attempts to bridge visitors of physical exhibits to expanded information in our websites or databases. The philosophy’s a good one: there’s too much information to put on a wall label, so let’s direct the visitor to a virtual resource where they can followup and learn more. Or, let’s use the physical-virtual bridge as a way to continue our impact after the visitor has left the museum.

RFID tags suffered from negative media hype and public perception. In the case of The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, visitors would be handed an RFID-embedded strip that they would wave over an exhibit and they could be emailed with more information, or results and scores from gallery games. Unfortunately, RFID tags also suffered from some recent media scares that they enabled spying and identity theft. RFID = creepy.

and who wants to wear an awkward paper tag anyway?

CueCat was the early 2000s version of QR codes. Visitors could use the cute little barcode reader to scan a code next to an artifact, then when they plugged it into their computer, it would bring up the urls it had read from the barcodes. It was, however, bulky to carry around, and many museums simply didn’t have the time, funding, or infrastructure to develop content that would sufficiently entice visitors to use it.

Cue Cat in the Computer History Museum

It’s really too early to predict its demise, but QR codes may follow the same path. Content needs to be there before adopting the technology, or incorporated as the project is being developed. For some organizations, they’ve already got some fantastic content on their websites, optimized for mobile devices, that works well for QR code use in galleries (and they have solid wifi and a tech-savvy visitor base). Just as crucially, QR codes suffer frommarketing abuse and dubious uses of QR codes that leads to the public believing that the codes are stupid.

Moral: Sean Cummings -

People will not adopt a technical solution that serves to replace a manual task, if that solution is less efficient than the manual task it replaces.

Stay tuned for Part II, in which I take a look at websites, VR, and learning communities, amongst others…

One of the really cool and exciting things about the rise of the mobile platform is that, by definition, they can be used almost anywhere. This greatly impacts the scale and scope of educational opportunities for organizations looking to get their programs (literally) into the hands of a curious public.

So imagine the opportunities for science organizations looking to encourage self-guided discovery by the public, or adding information from the field into their research databases. In the 19th and early 20th century, science was often conducted by private citizens, whose curiosity (and private funds) allowed them to go out and collect information about the natural world. They kept logs, collected specimens, and wrote papers about what they found. Later in the century, these efforts were concentrated in museums and universities, and the academic perception was that the collection of scientific data was only valid if performed by highly-trained experts.

Now, in the Information Age, access to this data is easier than ever before, and a curious public is eager to learn and contribute their findings back to various bodies of knowledge. With mobile apps, the potential for great warehouses of scientific data, collected from backyards, beaches, mountains, and public parks, is enormous. And even if the app is not designed to collect data, the immediacy of the world means a question can be asked and an answer received in short order.

Back here at BPOC, we’ve begun exploring such apps, and two of our Wounded Warrior interns, Mitchel McCullough and John Donner, and volunteer Sam Trusley, reviewed 14 different citizen science apps. Their descriptions and notes are below the cut. And if you have a favorite app or opinions about the ones listed below, please share it in the comments!

Project Noah

Product Description: Project Noah lets you document the wildlife around you. It is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere. You can post a new spotting, upload photos, tag plants and animals with location data, join missions, and earn patches. The app also contains a field guide to help you identify the wildlife you find.

Maker: Yasser Ansari, Martin Ceperley, Peter Horvath, and Bruno Kruse (with investment support from National Geographic)
Price: Free
Compatibility: Website, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Android
Region covered: Global
Topic: Wildlife

Intern Review: This application strikes me as the most complete in terms of an overall user experience. You must create an account in order to be allowed to use this application. Don’t worry it’s free. There are four sections on the home screen, “my spottings,” “my missions,” “my patches,” and “settings.” The first category is a list of all your observations and photos of wildlife and plants; you can also see all of their locations on a Google map. Like Sci.Spy, there are missions that are created by the application makers and other users for you to fulfill. Once you choose a mission, it appears under the “my missions” section in list format. My favorite feature, and the feature that I think makes this application rewarding and interactive is “my patches.” For each spotting you upload or mission you complete you receive a digital nature page, kind of like being in the boy scouts or girl scouts. I think this feature creates a really nice system of reward and will give users incentive to upload more content.

SciSpy

Product Description: SciSpy is a mobile and web-based app, created by Science Channel, which enlists science enthusiasts to participate in the creation of real science by becoming mobile field observers. Using a free iPhone app or Web-based program, you can upload your photographic observations of the natural world. They’ll be tagged and stamped with date, time and location information that scientists can use to track migrations, changes in the natural environment, seasonal trends and more.

Anyone can view the latest SciSpy field observations on an iPhone or on the Web at http://scispy.com. In order to participate in SciSpy by creating your own observations, commenting on other users’ submission, or flagging content that is inappropriate for the SciSpy community, you must create an account and log in to SciSpy.

Maker: Discovery
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
Region covered: Global
Topic: General wildlife, plants, birds, bugs

Intern Review: Sci.Spy engages the users by setting up “missions” for the user to contribute content. Whether its general wildlife, plans, urban wildlife, birds, or bugs, sci.spy has a category that any average nature enthusiast can add his/her photos and observations. The application also allows you to see popular and recent sightings by other users. It does not have a map feature.

iNaturalist

Product Description: iNaturalist helps you record your observations from the natural world and contribute them to iNaturalist.org, a social network for naturalists.

KEEP TRACK: iNaturalist lets you keep a log of the plants and animals you’ve encountered. Record the cool things you see as you hike around the countryside, then look back at the biodiversity you’ve experienced! The simple act of recording will help you remember and learn about nature.

WHAT’S THIS WEIRD BUG?!: The community can help you identify the things you see outside. Snap a picture with the app, send it to iNat, and you can get help deciding what you saw.

BUILD YOUR LIFE LIST: As you record observations, iNaturalist.org will automatically maintain a life list of all the organisms you’ve seen.

SAVE THE WORLD: Climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction threaten the biodiversity of our planet. You can help scientists, conservationists, and land managers just by recording where and when you observed living things.

Maker: iNaturalist.org
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Region covered: Global
Topic: Plants, Animals

Intern Review: This application pretty much serves as a mobile field journal, where users can jot down their own nature observations by adding a photo and a couple of quick notes. The phone or ipod triangulates the users positions and places a pin on a Google map to mark the observation location. The user does not even have to know the name of the species observed because it will be matched against iNaturalist’s database of species and other user content. This is a useful tool for helping new nature goers learn about interesting animals or plants they encounter.

BirdsEye

Product Description: If you are in search of a particular bird, BirdsEye will show you where it has been observed, and even give you directions. BirdsEye will give you a list of birds seen nearby and a map of birding hotspots for any location in North America (the contiguous 48 states, Canada, and Alaska). The application includes images and audio for the 470 most frequently observed in North America. Additional content is available for more elusive birds—for a total of 847 species.

Maker: Birds in the Hand, LLC and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Price: $19.99
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch
Region covered: Contiguous 48 states, Canada, and Alaska
Topic: Birds

LeafSnap

Product Description: Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves. Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

Maker: Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone and iPad
Region covered: New York City and Washington D.C.
Topic: Plants (trees)

Intern Review: LeafSnap has a lot of nice graphical pictures of all sorts of flora listed in alphabetical order. You just need to click the “browse” feature and a full color list shows up with leaves in alphabetical order according to their name, even including latin species names. One awesome feature is the games component of the application. This feature is a fun way for users to interact with nature. One game called “Green Sweep” gives a set time for users to try and move free-floating leaves into specific boxes with their species names on them. The other three games are matching challenges where users are given a flower, leaf, or fruit name and have to select the correct picture out of 4 different photos.

Zooniverse

Product Description: The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest and most popular citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced and maintained by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

Maker: Citizen Science Alliance
Price: Free
Compatibility: Website, iPhone, Android
Region covered: The cosmos
Topic: Varied; space is a big emphasis

Intern Review: This application is pretty much a continuous questionnaire about pictures of galaxies. It does not seem that engaging or interactive. In the description for the application, it is described as a tool where users can interactively help scientists mine through countless amounts of data. It seems to do nothing but that function.

Encyclopedia of Life

Product Description: EOL is an ambitious project to organize and make freely available via the Internet information about all forms of life on Earth. The first version of the EOL iPhone app allows you to photograph organisms, and have the geotagged photos automatically uploaded to the EOL Flickr Group. EOL will periodically scan this Flickr group for new photos to add to the appropriate pages of the Encyclopedia of Life.

Maker: Natural Guides, LLC
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, internet website
Region covered: planet earth
Topic: every species on the planet

Golden Gate Park Field Guide

Product Description: The Golden Gate Park Field Guide is the go-to mobile guide for navigating San Francisco’s thousand-acre urban oasis. The app highlights the park’s common wildlife, popular attractions, and hidden gems. It also invites users to actively engage with the park and to record and share their experiences.

Maker: Designed by Odopod and developed by SourceN for the California Academy of Sciences
Price: $2.99
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
Region covered: Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
Topic: Plants, wildlife and popular attractions

Botany Buddy

Product Description: From your home screen, get daily updates from Botany Buddy about garden news, information and valuable gardening tips. The Botany Buddy Tree and Shrub Finder is simply the most powerful botanical field guide for Trees, Shrubs, and ground cover ever built. Now with over 9,500 unique images and 2,000 unique species of trees and shrubs, anyone with an interest in botany can easily find and identify the trees and shrubs for their needs.

Maker: AVAI Ventures Inc
Price: $9.99
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Region covered: N/A
Topic: Gardening

Florafolio

Product Description: Florafolio 2 is an easy to use, interactive field guide to native plants of North Eastern North America. This edition focuses on the stunning variety of trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns, vines, and grasses that are indigenous to Eastern Canada and North Eastern United States. Florafolio is the perfect guide for anyone who wants to identify species in the wild or garden with native plants.

• Easily search for plants using Florafolio’s new search engine. In edition to searching for plants by common and Latin name you can now visually search by leaf shape, flower color, wildlife benefit, gardening use and a host of other options.
• Find out which states and provinces each plant is indigenous to though the new native distribution list.
• Easily see what plants attract birds and other wildlife.
• Browse through hundreds of ORIGINAL photos for easy identification and selection.
• Text based descriptions, care tips, growing instructions, and habitat notes are written in useful and approachable terms.

Maker: HoliMoli! Media
Price: $3.99
Compatibility:
Region Covered: North America
Topic: Plants

Nature Find

Product Description: Great nature experiences are available at thousands of places carefully selected by NatureFind with user feedback. Descriptions, interactive maps, photos and other features are included. NatureFind guides you to parks, zoos, botanical gardens, nature centers, natural history museums, trails, wildlife refuges and more. And many offer nature experiences indoors through their displays, movies, exhibits and presentations. This guide also features many of the engaging, informative and exciting events that occur at these places. These events are affordable and available for all age groups. They range from challenging hikes or kayak trips to events for little kids.

Maker: Moonshadow eCommerce, Inc / Sapello, LLC
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
Region covered: United States
Topic: traveling

Intern Review: The application appears to be broken on its “places feature.” After clicking on a specific places feature, the application will not go back to the previous search results. I have tried tapping it multiple times and it remains on the same place page. This application seems broken. The other features: Events, Map, and More appear to work though.

Audubon Field Guide Apps

Product Description: If it crawls, slithers, wiggles, flies, swims, bites, burrows, hops, it can be found in one or more of the Audubon Nature Guides. Great for birdwatching, hiking, and exploring the outdoors, guides feature high quality photographs, range maps, animal sounds and and the ability to create your own lifelists and record sightings. What are you waiting for? Start exploring your world with Audubon Mobile Field Guides. Apps displaying a (+) symbol on our website and on the iTunes Store are Universal Apps. When these apps are purchased, the download comes bundled with both the small screen and large screen versions.

Maker: National Audubon Society
Price: $19.99 for bundled apps, $14.99 for single apps on iphone/ipad, $9.99 for Android app
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android, HP Touchpad
Region covered: North America and specific regions (Florida, California, New England, Texas, Desert Southwest), African Wildlife
Topic: Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, Fish, Flowers, Trees, Amphibians, Insects

WildObs Observer

Product Description: This Wildlife Observation app makes it very easy for you to report your sightings and identify species, and your observations show up on National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Watch website. It’s one of the only apps that allows you to report sightings without having a photo and it also tags your location if you so desire.

Maker: Neukadye
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android
Region covered: North America and UK
Topic: All Wildlife

Intern Review: This application does a nice job of creating a community around nature observations with features under the “Wildlife” heading such as Community: Featured Encounters, where particularly well documented encounters posted by users are featured, and Community: Recent Encounters, where recent nature encounters by users are posted. There are also helpful tools for locating nearby species under the “species” heading. An account does have to be created to run this application.

Trailhead

Product Description: Powered by EveryTrail.com, Trailhead finds trails, hikes, bike routes and more based on your location. You can even search by activity and length. Whether you’ve selected an existing trip or started a new one, Trailhead tracks your route, distance, speed and elevation in real-time. When you’re done exploring, you can post your trip to Facebook, Twitter or EveryTrail.com.

• Search from over 300,000 trails, hikes and bike routes.
• Find trips by activity, length and location
• Track your route with a real-time interactive map via GPS
• View your distance, speed, elevation and more
• Post photos taken on your trip
• Share your trip to Facebook, Twitter and EveryTrail.com
• Find outdoor events in your area with Planet Explore

Maker: The North Face
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
Region covered: North America
Topic: Trails

As Joaquin is currently finishing his Master’s in Educational Technology at San Diego State, he comes to Musematic with a fresh perspective on the current state of the field, and I have been continually impressed by his passion for pursuing programs based on content (as opposed to falling into the “technology for technology’s sake” trap) as well as his ability to think outside of the box.

Welcome, Joaquin, and I’m glad you’re on board!

For collaboration between multiple independent organizations, the process is much the same: determine the organizing body, define the scope of project, build buy-in by outlining benefits of working together and of the project itself, begin the project, show deliverables, and evaluate. The major difference between working internally vs. externally is, unless you have a very large organization, there are a lot more people to persuade and a lot more moving cogs to organize and manage.

This has, admittedly, been something of a learning curve for me. I went from the Magnes, where I organized 5 people to create an internal collaborative structure, to Balboa Park Online Collaborative, where I work closely with a great many more people from nearly 20 different institutions. I get to work on a lot of really cool projects, but the biggest one I have ever worked on is setting up a shared digital asset management system. My director, Rich, just signed the contract with Piction today, so I’m very excited to be able to start talking about this project.

The DAMS will service approximately 12 museums in Balboa Park, but as Balboa Park has over 60 cultural organizations within its 1200 acres, the DAMS could theoretically be used by even more. Selecting a DAMS isn’t necessarily an easy process. Like any other enterprise-level software system that is designed to impact every department within an org, care must be taken to evaluate the system according to institutional needs. For a place like Balboa Park, there are a lot of institutional needs, but ultimately, there are some similarities. For DAMS, it’s core functionality: derivative generation, collection metadata linking, user-friendly web-interface, security controls, video and audio management, etc. When evaluating for a collaborative structure, we* also had to consider if the system could support multiple instances in a virtual environment. And because part of our core mission is access to heritage and educational materials, we also considered if the DAMS could be used as a tool for sharing data – either via social media outlets or through an API (assuming security permissions, of course).

We initially selected three organizations that had different material types and collection management systems, a range of media materials, and who were eager to have DAM in their institution: Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego Air and Space Museum, and San Diego Natural History Museum. We also began discussing the project with the other organizations, and invited them to attend a demo of Piction and a presentation by Howard Goldstein, outlining the differences between a CIMS and a DAMS and why they have symbiotic relationships. Once we explained what DAMS can do for an organization, there was some envy by other orgs that they weren’t chosen to be the guinea pigs, but we’ll get them into the fold soon enough.

I won’t go on and on about the project plan, because (believe it or not) this post isn’t about the process of implementing DAMS, even for multiple independent organizations. What I’m really trying to get at is that, by leveraging shared resources, be it from an technology support group like BPOC or from an external organizing body made of appointed representatives from geographically dispersed institutions, it is possible to create fundamental change for all members. It requires planning and working with others closely to plot the right path, limiting compromise and managing expectations. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

As a result of these efforts, our members will get an enterprise-level digital asset management solution that:

• Helps them manage their image, video, media, and document resources
• Creates derivatives in a multitude of formats
• Links to their collection management systems and use their metadata
• Pushes resources to the web
• Indexes document files, including PDF, Excel, Word, etc. so those documents can be retrieved easily
• Has a Microsoft Office plugin that interfaces with the DAMS
• Can be skinned and branded as if the DAMS is running on their own, siloed server
• Does 80-90% of what they need, the other 10% available at additional cost down the line
• Utilizes a strong support network of experts who are able to help if they get stuck
• Lets them be part of a community of resource sharers

Oh, and because we were able to fundraise against the model of “sharing resources”, they’re getting it for free for a while.

Anyway, I’m terribly excited to be working on this project, and I’m looking forward to talking more about it as we get these institutions online and I can begin evaluating the process itself.

*When I say “we,” I’m not only including the core staff of BPOC and the organizations, but also the many advisers who’ve weighed in on this project, including Howard Goldstein, Susan Chun, David Bearman, Nate Solas, and Seb Chan, to name a few.

Regarding those feelings of exclusivity by GLAM folks, Dan Cohen tweeted about his surprise that people felt excluded from the Digital Humanities. He was reacting to this article from William Pannapacker, Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?

The digital humanities have some internal tensions, such as the occasional divide between builders and theorizers, and coders and non-coders. But the field, as a whole, seems to be developing an in-group, out-group dynamic that threatens to replicate the culture of Big Theory back in the 80s and 90s, which was alienating to so many people. It’s perceptible in the universe of Twitter: We read it, but we do not participate. It’s the cool-kids’ table.

So, the digital humanities seem more exclusive, more cliquish, than they did even one year ago.

I don’t blame Dan, Dave Lester (to whom I complained about this a year ago. Sorry Dave – I remember how appalled you looked and I felt very guilty), and others for being prickly about the article and this topic. They’ve really tried very hard to make digital humanities meetups available to all, regardless of background and I applaud their efforts and those of all of the other organizers of the various THATCamps and DH events. I want to stress that these events are important,useful, exhilarating, and move conversations forward and reach a wide range of digital humanists, including academics, developers, and museum, library, and archive staff. Unfortunately, Pannapacker’s complaint is something I have heard over and over again by many established and well-respected GLAM professionals for the past 2-3 years, ever since cultural heritage technologists began to really gain a foothold in academia and in our institutions. My concern here is that the conversation is trapped in a fishbowl and we’re not serving the rest of our professional communities. We forward our conversations, but what about the rest of the memory institution?

Clearly something is going on, despite the best efforts of the “cliques” to invite new folks into the fold, as it were. I remember feeling rather ostracized myself, despite being moderately well-connected to the movers and shakers. I think the core cause of my own perception may also be the cause of many others’ feelings as well, so I present one possible little bandage that might help. Ready?

Stop using Twitter as the vehicle for outreach.

Ok, so that was a really reductionist view of what I think might be a major factor. But to unpack that statement somewhat, there’s a large community of potential new technologists who aren’t sure where to start. They’re not on Twitter or on the DH feeds or academic journals; they’re still on listservs and email lists and blogs and bulletin boards, and the case has yet to be made to them that they should join these other avenues of information. They’re on subject-specific listservs, like RCAAM (museum registrars), museum-ed (museum educators), and various other library and archives lists. Just to keep on listservs for a moment, I track Museum-L and RC-AAM pretty closely. The last time I heard about a THATCamp or other digital technology event on one of these listservs, it was… uh… so long ago I either don’t remember or they’ve never been posted there (a search for “THATCamp” on the museum-ed archives turned up nothing).

My point here is that there’s a very large audience who really want to be involved, who aren’t hearing about anything until after the fact, because the events are only being shared through word-of-mouth (for which Twitter serves as a vehicle) or through DH-specific resources. As a result, people assume a certain cliquishness, that you have to be one of the “cool kids” in order to even know about these things. Add in the academic factor (e.g. the historic tensions between the boots-on-the-ground GLAMs and academics), and you have a community of folks feeling alienated, assuming that the digital humanities is only an ivory tower thing.

I really hope I’m not coming across as blaming anyone here. I myself have been absolutely lousy this past year with engagement, and it’s something I plan to actively work on. Call it a New Year’s Resolution: I will endeavor to help non-technical GLAMs understand the importance of digital humanities and help them understand DH is relevant to their interests and work. But we all need to identify target audiences beyond “people studying digital humanities and those who work in archives, libraries, and museums.” The former is easy to get. The latter three are fractured and diverse and still need an assist to join us.

There will always be people who feel excluded, as they’re trying to find their feet and not know where to start. And, sure, lots of us are friends and go out to bars and meetups together, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone ever actively exclude anyone from the group. So of course it’s somewhat unfair to have the “clique” charge leveled at a particular group. Regardless, if enough people seem to feel that way, it’s worth analyzing why we keep getting that complaint. And given the number of times I’ve heard it in the past few years, it’s enough to keep me thinking about it and what I, and our clique, could be doing better.

I apologize if I’ve ruffled any feathers, but this is something that I’ve been worrying on for a while now, and I really welcome any debate and discussion that arises; it may be that I’m completely wrong here and looking at it from the prism of someone working in the GLAM trenches who can’t always be connected 24/7. But that may be the very reason why I think my perspective here is a valid one, and representative of something that’s actually happening.

~edited to add: First off, I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to comment here and on Twitter. There’ve been a lot of fantastic discussions flying around today, from this, to “rock-stardom” to the vagueness of “digital humanities” as a term to donuts. Second, I especially want to thank Sheila Brennan for quickly putting up a sort of how-to guide for understanding and getting involved with digital humanities. Do check out her post, Getting to know DH if you work in cultural heritage. Lots of suggestions about points of entry into DH meetups and resources.

Third, if anyone would be willing to serve as a sort of mentor for answering questions from DH/GLAM/Technologist newbies, please fill out this poll. I’d like to make a list available either here on Musematic or on the Media and Technology website.

I have a habit of getting really interested in the process of problem-solving, and I’m really tenacious when it comes to figuring out tech-based solutions. Case in point: for the Museum of Photographic Arts here in San Diego, developing a gallery display of some books we’d had digitized at the Internet Archive. We were going to use iPads to display the books, and it seemed simple enough to just use Internet Archive’s book viewer through a browser within wKiosk, which would enable MoPA to lock down public access to the rest of the iPad. It turned out, however, that the museum’s galleries aren’t yet wifi enabled, so that meant the files had to be local on the iPad. Rats. Ok, so now the features of the kiosk were expanded to: security from tampering, local files, and visually appealing with ways to “turn” the pages of the book.

The first was taken care of through wKiosk. No problem there. Getting local files onto the iPad could be achieved through a $10 bit of software the bossman introduced to me called DiskAid, that lets you navigate and place files into specific directories within the iPad. Two out of three down…

The pretty and functional pieces were the stickiest. Initially, we tried to use Javascript to create a very pretty page turning effect. It looked great when there were only 5 images loaded into the script. Unfortunately, 135 images were too much for the script to handle on Safari (wKiosk’s native browser), and we had to scrap a JS-enabled solution. Too bad, too, since it looked really nice. As it turned out, Safari and iPads in general have a hard time with JS, and even a different script wouldn’t have solved the problem.

Eventually, Rich came up with the brilliantly simple idea of just using some plain ol’ HTML to create a simple local site. Yes, friends, we had to go back to 20-year-old technology in order to get our project to work on 1-year-old technology. Oy. I didn’t bother with trying to write some fancy CSS to get the page turning effect, but if we’d the time, we would have been able to do that as well. But it really wasn’t necessary for the gallery experience.

6 lines of code later, and 70 web pages, we have a happy museum and two beautiful book displays that cycle through the pages every 20 seconds. Tap the page on the right to go forward, the page on the left to go back, and the home button at the bottom to go to the cover page. There are also right and left arrows to make it more obvious.

In sum, the most effective way for me to complete this cutting edge project was to rely on the really old, tried, true and reliable techniques. And here’s a brief step-by-step of the process:

1. Assuming that you’re working on books from Internet Archive, download all of the image files of the volume. Choose the jp2 zip file.
2. Reprocess the images at 600 pixels (vertical. Or 800 for a single page with the iPad in vertical orientation) and save as JPG (For Photoshop, you’ll need to install the j2k plugin to work with the JPEG2000 files first)
3. Create a blank page and use the following HTML (for a page called van2.html):

<head>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”20; URL=van3.html”>

<title>******</title>

</head>

<body>

<div align=”center”><img src=”images/top.jpg” width=”900″ height=”40″ border=”0″ align=”absmiddle” /></div>

<div align=”center”>

<a href=”van1.html”><img src=”images/sidebarleft.jpg” width=”25″ height=”600″ border=”0″/><img src=”images/van_0002.jpg” width=”462″ height=”600″ border=”0″/></a>

<a href=”van3.html”><img src=”images/van_0003.jpg” width=”462″ height=”600″ border=”0″/><img src=”images/sidebarright.jpg” width=”25″ height=”600″ border=”0″/></a></div>

<div align=”center”> <a href=”van1.html”><img src=”images/homenav.jpg” alt=”home” width=”900″ height=”40″ border=”0″ align=”absmiddle” /></a></div>

</body>

</html>

Create a new page for every image or set of images you want in the kiosk and adjust the code accordingly.
Download and install the software DiskAid. There’s a 15-day trial, but it’s worth the $10.
Prepare your iPad by purchasing and installing wKiosk.
Using DiskAid, place your web pages and images into the wKiosk directory in the iPad (Copy to device). You’ll need to create and add the images folder separately.
Start wKiosk in the iPad, open up the settings, and navigate to the first web page in the series. Set it as your home page in wKiosk, remove all of the public access to the rest of the iPad and you should be good to go.

That’s all there is to it!

~edited to add a quick followup: it turned out that some of the users who were familiar with iOS devices were expecting to “swipe” to navigate. Once it was clear how it worked, the users were fine, but as a result, we’re going to continue tinkering with the options. I’ll post details about the next version once we’ve completed it.

In The Web is Dead, authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff point to usage trends and investment in app-based technologies to support their assertion that online visitors are abandoning the Web. They make the distinction that the Web – a series of interconnected documents that people go to in order to sniff out content – is decreasing in popularity in favor if the more generalized Internet – the electronic information superhighway that apps and software plug into. Or, as Anderson (writing about usage) puts it:

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.

via Wired

Anderson and Wolff (who is writing about investment) are correct when they claim that there’s a marked increase in development efforts and usage for semiclosed platforms. Things that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do on computers 15 years ago are now fairly commonplace, though not yet ubiquitous. Tasks like watching streaming movies through Netflix, chatting with international friends on Skype, enjoying and sharing music playlists via Pandora or Last.fm, and having real-time document collaboration with physically separated parties didn’t exist then, but they were tasks we performed via other means. Having apps to provide those experiences within our computers and mobile devices has made our lives more streamlined.

But where Anderson trips up is that he fails to take into account that this is not a zero sum game. Of course there is going to be increased adoption of internet-based tools as more of them become available. Every time an entrepreneur invents a new app to consolidate our everyday tasks onto our computers, you’ll see adoption. But that doesn’t mean that users are suddenly going to stop using their browser. In most cases, users are going to add that app to their bookshelf of “tools I use to get stuff done.” I rather like how Jason Fry of the Neiman Journalism Lab put it in his article, The web dies, the hype lives: What Wired left out of its eulogy:

It would have been less compelling but more accurate to say that the web isn’t dying but being joined by a lot of other contact points between the user and the sea of digital information, with points emerging for different settings, situations, and times of day. Sometimes a contact point is a different presentation of the web, and sometimes it’s something else entirely.

I think I’m pretty much the demographic the Wired community is thinking about – mid-30′s, educated, tech-savvy, overloaded with devices. I have an iPhone, a Windows Vista laptop, a desktop Windows XP computer attached to a large television, a Wii, and now an iPad. Taking my own usage patterns as an example, I use the Web on the desktop computer to navigate (on the web) to Netflix to watch streaming movies, or to Pandora to listen to music while cleaning, or to the Lifetime Channel’s website to watch the latest episode of Project Runway. The laptop is where all of my main productivity and online interactions (Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Skype, various blogs) are performed. It, along with the Wii, is where I get some gaming done if I have the time. My iPhone is my portable friend, and since I got the iPad, I don’t use it much for browsing, so that’s mostly app-based, using it for navigation, silly little timewaster games, texting, and searching the Web when a question comes up. The iPad won’t take over my laptop, since the office productivity tools I need aren’t as useful there, but I use it a lot as an eBook reader, a browser, a feed reader (via Flipboard and Twitter), a note-taking device, a sketchpad, and to organize some other lifestyle and business management needs.

None of these devices is a threat to another one. I have them all because each one does something different. Likewise with the Web and apps. I’d quite happily keep using the web-based Google Docs if it did everything I need it to do. I really wish I didn’t have to catch up with my friends on Facebook, but that’s where everyone went (away from Livejournal), so that’s where I go. I never had great experiences with RSS readers, so now I get all my museum news from my pals on Twitter. If I want to read or write specific commentary, I go to a blog on that topic, or write my own.

The point is that people choose the tool they need to get the job done. Again, Jason Fry:

It’s also interesting to ask whether users of various devices care — and whether they should. Anderson brings up push technology…

The problem with the first incarnation of push was that the only contact point was the computer screen, meaning information often wasn’t pushed close enough to you, or was being pushed down the same pipe you were trying to use for something else. Now, information is pushed to the web — and to smartphones and tablets and game consoles and social networks and everything else — and push has vanished into the fabric of How Things Are.

There isn’t a zero-sum game between the web and other ways of presenting information to customers — they all have their role in consumers’ lives, and increasingly form a spectrum to be tapped into as people choose.

At any rate, it seems possible that, some day, we’ll be able to use one machine to do all of our Internet-based tasks, but the Web is still too useful to declare its outright demise. Will it happen someday? Maybe, but like every other living organism, I think it will continue to evolve instead. But it means that we also can’t turn our backs on content delivery for the Web or apps (especially those for mobile devices). Make the content ready for both simultaneously, including factoring in production and management methods, and, if you can’t do it yourself, partner with those companies who can help with delivery. Cultural institutions are traditionally not very good at this, but I think it helps to think outside the Web, while recognizing how your users actually use your content.

I was reminded of that threat very keenly today, after I saw this article from Read Write Web: Google Adds Semantic Search Results with Google Squared.

According to the company’s blog from one year ago today, when Google Squared first launched, “unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.”

…

By clicking “show sources” on the Squared-provided result, a list of sources appears showing you how Google is arriving at this answer.

…

Much of this information, however, relies either on Google’s ability to naturally parse information or for web publishers to begin “adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface”, as the company wrote at launch last year.

This is really quite fantastic for information-seekers. We’ve been heading this way for a while, and I’m happy to see this rolled out on this scale. For most users, they won’t even notice it, but for those of us whose business it is to provide content, what does it mean for us?

First, it means is that we’ve really got to get our collective acts together. When I was writing my master’s thesis four years ago, I posited that soon we would have our collections online and we would be able to move on from public access and onto public interpretation. Unfortunately, my timeline was wrong and many institutions are still at square one.

Looking collectively at the field, there are hundreds (or thousands) of collections, large and small, who still do not have collection information management systems, digital asset management systems, content management systems, SEO optimization, metadata standards, embedded metadata, or a combination of all of the above.  Why is this? Well, for the most part, museums, libraries, and archives are notoriously bad at adopting complex technologies unless significant pressure is applied either internally or externally. And when they do recognize the need, the persons responsible for advocating for adoption find themselves stuck trying to explain something intangible to a board of directors who are more interested in on-site programming and foot traffic. It is incredibly difficult at this time to show hard statistics about SEO increasing foot traffic or even online learning.

For example, here’s my institution, the Magnes’, most well-known work:

Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn (1856) by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim - Magnes Collection

I just performed a search for this piece, using a couple of different search terms. The first result in both image and web search (Google) was the page in Flickr. Second hit was to Wikipedia and then Wikimedia Commons. For the last two, the image had been scanned from a German text Magnes had licensed the image to. There was no link to Magnes, nor anything that suggested that the piece was in our collection. There were zero hits to our website or to our collections online (in my own defense, we’re overhauling our website for precisely this reason, embedding metadata into the images, and I have no control over database SEO right now!).

This isn’t limited to small, underfunded history museums. If you perform a web search for “starry night van gogh”, MoMA is the third hit. Not too bad, actually. But if you perform an image search, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is displayed prominently, but you won’t find MoMA as a source until the bottom of the second page.

Ok. So clearly we all need to do some work with optimizing both our sites and our images. However, those things are really hard for most museums. If I could wave a magic wand, there would be a product that does all of the following (vendors, are you listening? Take notes. DO THIS. We will give you our money!):

• Manages museum, library and archive information in one, federated database, including exhibitions, conservation, provenance, rights, location tracking, etc.
• Exports and imports into a variety of crosswalked metadata standards
• Utilizes controlled vocabularies and standards in order to facilitate pan-institutional linkages
• Serves as a robust digital asset management system, embedding the collection data into EXIF/IPTC/XML fields of the master asset and makes derivatives at will
• Displays collection assets online in a clean, flexible, attractive manner, utilizing sharing and embedding features, optimizing keywords and tagging, and having an available API for online visitors to use

The frustrating thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of systems that do most of this, but not all of them. Institutions who can do this use a variety of systems, bandaged together with bits of programming. Granted, I’m not a programmer, but I know such a system is possible. I’ve seen bits of it work together, but none all at once. Lacking such a system means that institutions can’t fully prepare their assets for the semantic web.

Archives and libraries are likely a bit better off, as they’ve applied easily-computer-readable XML standards to their already happily formatted data. But I have to wonder if the model for siloing data will be a benefit or a curse in the long run. Will these silos be flexible enough to engage with online users expecting to find information with only one or two search terms, in only one location? This leads me to my next point…

Second, we need to take a hard look at how we’re actively sharing our data and with whom. Search engines are not going to find all of our stuff, from us, if we release the assets online without some methods of bringing the user back to home base. Like the Oppenheim painting above, users finding assets online won’t know where its from, and thus, probably, won’t have the benefit of any additional research about the original works. Our authority is threatened because of this. Our ace in the hole is that we have the authentic object, but what happens if no one knows where the authentic object is?

I’m not at all suggesting that we limit our release of assets, but I am recommending that we slow down a moment and take stock. “Just get them online” isn’t good enough. It’s never really been good enough, only a start. Online assets mean very little if they lose their context. A digital file of a painting may be pretty, but without the information we can provide, its only function is ornamental.

The way we use the web is changing. The way the search engines are using the web is changing. We need to respond more quickly to changing search algorithms and use patterns, and we need to try to figure out some easier solutions for linking our data to the rest of the web. A cohesive, easy-to-use product would be a good start. We’re also siloed within our own institutions and consortiums, making connections with our friends while forgetting that we’re also part of the larger world. I fear for those of us who don’t get a handle on these problems soon; if we fail to do so, our role as respected educational resources becomes diminished, if only from lack of exposure.

From Museum 2.0: Should Everyone Work on the Front Line as Part of Their Career?

Spending time on the museum floor can be exhausting, but it’s also a pleasure. It’s a learning environment free of meetings and bureaucracy. It’s a place to learn, one interaction at a time, how to serve visitors better. The stultifying, repetitive tasks teach you how to be more efficient and effective. The constant interaction with visitors gives you an opportunity to delight, mixed with a healthy dose of reality. In most museums, the people who design visitor experiences don’t operate them–so they (and I’m included here) miss out on the important feedback loop of how visitors use what is presented.

Nina’s right. Being with the visitors and seeing our exhibitions through their eyes is the only way to gauge their effectiveness. Sure – you can hire folks to do visitor surveys and interviews, but the resulting data removes the nuance of public interaction. How many visitor studies describe how a young woman with her group of friends may pause mid-stride to look at something most people wouldn’t notice? Or how the discussion of an exhibit is blended in with political references? Or how many people stop to chat with the guards, because they know the guard hear every docent lecture from here until Sunday? There’s a lot we can’t get from studies and surveys. And that’s ok, but it does mean that there’s a lot of value to be learned by being in the spaces we create.

My very first museum job was to be a gallery attendant. My first day ever was spent serving champagne at a Valentine’s benefit auction for the museum (and my fellow AAM-goers wonder why I volunteer for champagne duty at the MUSE Awards…). It was hectic: there was no time to really think, I was focused on making sure I didn’t smack someone in the forehead (or an artwork) with a cork projectile, and it was an amazing, wonderful experience. Here I was, making sure the major fundraising event went smoothly, so as to ensure we has the operating funds we needed to be effective. That was great. Even better was seeing how excited people were. They were laughing, competitive, loud, boisterous, and they’d egg each other on.

Most of the time, though, I’d sit at a desk and count visitors. Most of them wouldn’t say much; they’d come in, look around quietly, or might whisper to friends. It was pretty hushed, and, admittedly, pretty boring. But sometimes, you’d have wonderful visitors who would ask me what *I* thought about the pieces, or what they meant. I wasn’t allowed to play curator, so I had to be careful in my phrasing, but it was fascinating to see what people thought about and what they disagreed with or didn’t like. People Have Opinions about exhibits, and some people aren’t afraid to express them. As a young person with no say about an exhibition, it can be a little traumatizing to bear the brunt of someone’s opinion, but it was never AT me, just TO me.

And that’s okay. We want our visitors to feel something about what we’re presenting, and the work we’re doing. If no one’s talking at all, then clearly something isn’t working. That’s exactly the sort of evidence that we need to be exposed to ourselves. Not to mention, it’s just fun to be around people who are engaged and excited. It’s a good refresher before going back to the desk job.

Do collecting institutions spend a great deal of money, staffing, space and time caring for collections? Most definitely, yes. Is this a waste of resources, especially in a digital age when they could conceivably scan or make models of artifacts and then store only the copies? I won’t repeat the results of years of research conducted by a great many folks who have studied how access to original artifacts supports learning, research, and emotional connections to places, people, and history. Digital objects degrade in ways physical objects do not, nor can they replicate the meaningful, unquantifiable aura of the original.

Wedding Dress, Turkey, 19th century. gold metallic embroidery on velvet. Gift of Sara Levi Willis. 86.42. The Magnes. Click the image to read more about this piece.

Could this encumbrance upon the institution be caused by the devotion to objects by hiring collection managers, when funds for staffing could be used for additional curators and educators instead? Perhaps so, but there are also costs associated with borrowing artifacts for exhibitions and programs. Not as much as storing them, true, but the costs still exist, even if they’re not borne specifically by the non-collecting institution. Someone has to shoulder the burden of storage and management, if there are to be objects to display and study at all.

Are institutions without collections effective and valuable? Of course! I am very pleased that they are able to take the materials we collecting institutions can provide and use them to develop exciting and unique educational content. But that doesn’t mean that collecting museums can’t develop similar programming. And I’d be surprised if there’s evidence to support the idea that non-collecting institutions develop better programs than collecting ones.

As someone whose mission and purpose in life is to make cultural heritage materials accessible to the world, the thing I think I find most insulting about this choice of words is that it demeans institutions, professionals, donors, and all other stakeholders who take great pride in protecting the world’s treasures. We’ve a duty to our public to safekeep and share these artifacts. I would very much like to applaud those archives, libraries and museums – with a special nods to smaller places – who have made fantastic strides in the past decade to increase access to their collections through innovative programming, digitization and publication on the web, leveraging social media for incubating research and ideas, open storage, remixing, etc. We’ve come a long way in a very short period of time, and I can say quite definitively that far from being “encumbered”, we are empowered by our collections.