Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

At the same time, the Center for the History of Museums has been talking about “future studies” that will prepare museums for inevitable changes – a move from being re-active to pro-active about our futures. While spending time looking at research may not be immediately helpful to you today or tomorrow, research helps to shape the “Cone of Plausibility” – in fact the goal of research is specifically to expand the “limits of plausibility” by pushing the boundaries. When I first started my graduate program (almost 6 years ago), multi-touch displays, augmented and virtual reality, telepresence robots, smart phones, all seemed like science fiction. Now I have more computing power in my pocket than all of my first 5-6 computers combined and it’s constantly connected to the Internet (well, at least when AT&T lets me).

If we are going to try and prognosticate the future(s) of museum information technology, keeping an eye peeled for relevant research seems like a good idea. In my next series of posts, I’ll review a few of the research conferences that I’ve attended that feature research grounded in museum settings. I’d also encourage anyone who’d like to contribute a guest post about other conferences to leave a comment.

In the meantime, Günter discusses the workshop on hangingtogether.org

• Collaboration Context: Global
• Collaboration Context: Local
• Collaboration Context: Group
• Collaboration Contexts: Conclusions

and Merilee has posted this animation about the workshop:

Anthologize: a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

Just like the earlier Omeka tool, CHNM hopes that Anthologize will find uses outside traditional academic settings.   Included in the use cases that helped shape the tool are a few relevant for libraries, archives and museums:

Library, Archive, and Museum staff are increasingly using blogs to engage visitors and users in new and exciting ways. Publishing online gives the public behind-the-scenes access, richer engagement with collections and staff, and increased connection to our institutions and their future. However, cultural heritage practitioners are understandably concerned about the impermanence of online platforms. Anthologize provides the opportunity to publish online work in multiple formats suitable for archiving.

• Publish research or processing activity on a blog and create the exhibition book from blog posts.
• Pull together blog posts across institutional divisions to create a topically coherent publication.
• Edit the proceedings of a professional workshop or conference to share expertise with new audiences.
• Anthologize a behind-the-scenes blog to offer as a gift to donors.
• Collect and preserve online publications.
• Document social media outreach programs.

I’m looking forward to playing around with the tool soon (comment on whether you’d like to see it added to Musematic – as usual I’ll probably install it on my blog first to test it out.) and would be interested in hearing what everyone has to think about it in a museum setting. I like that it’s built on top of an existing platform (WordPress) and that it exports to several standardized output formats, especially TEI. It will also allow you to import feeds from different sources – nice for compiling an anthology out of different sources.

Do you think you’d use Anthologize in your library, archive or museum?  How? Why?  Where?  Are these realistic use-cases for this tool?

If you are interested in following along as Anthologize filters out into the world,  you can follow on Twitter or the #anthologize hashtag.  (comments from today’s unveiling are found at #oneweek).  I suspect the live stream for today’s announcement will also be available later (Dan Cohen mentioned it would be broadcast as a future Digital Campus podcast)

Curious about bills having to do with museums?   libraries? archives?

International Obscura Day.

Atlas Obscura , a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica is holding an International Obscura Day.

“The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.”

“Join us March 20th, 2010 in celebrating wondrous and curious places all over the world. RSVP for expeditions and tours at obscuraday.com.”

Some events already scheduled: (see the website for details)

“In San Francisco we’re descending en masse to the Musee Mecanique and then going to visit the clock and orrerys at the Long Now Foundation.
At Stanford University they’re showing us around the pneumatic dispatch system.In Mountain View, CA they’re holding a demonstration of the Difference Engine for us.
In New York, there’s a private tour of the Radio guy’s collection of science and tech oddities.
In Serbia we’re going to the world’s only Tesla Museum .
In Colorado Springs, the Steampunk Cowboys are leading a tour of a Wild West museum.

These events are all filling up fast (and some are booked solid) – but there’s still room in some and there are more events coming online almost everyday.”

Update: An here’s my contribution:  National Museum of Ship Models and Sea History

The idea originated with Jim Richardson at Museum Marketing who was disappointed to see that Bill Gate had attracted so many followers in such a short time.

But this raises a question. Should museums follow you back? If you think you know, Mia Ridge has posted a quick survey. (I’ll try to report back here if results are shared).

It’s a timely question as I’m participating in a panel at this week’s iSchools conference about social media. Also timely was Clive Thompson’s latest column in Wired “In Praise of Online Obscurity.” While I’m not nearly as famous as the tweeters mentioned in the article, my raft of followers is approaching 1,000. I’m feeling a little hemmed in and often wonder what all those people find interesting about my tweets. But more than anything it’s made me very conscious that I’m not just tweeting to a few friends: it’s an audience.

So what does this mean for museums? If social doesn’t scale what happens to your twitter feed? Does it fracture? What if I’ve done a nice job cultivating a great community around my museums tweets? What happens to the social space when @BillGates and his 400,000 followers crash the party? How could #followamuseum day change the way your museum tweets?

Thompson suggests that “there is value in obscurity.” But there is also value in exclusivity. I wonder how long before museums start special “members only” twitter accounts that only allow paying members to follow.
Update: Mia has posted the results of her “Friendly or Weird” survey.

Google Goggles is a “visual search application” for Android phones. Snap a picture with your phone and Google turns it into a search. The first video here is the “official” video from Google, but the second one should be of interest to museums. Here the Google rep demonstrates how you might search for Kandinsky’s Farbstudie Quadrate.
See more on TechCrunch.

Official video from Google

Wait a minute…this was something different. People are essentially paying to advertise for Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And if you think about it, this kind of promiscuous branding has been part of “web 2.0″ since the start. Please! Steal my logo! Make it go Viral!

I’ve been working since 2001 on various projects that aggregate metadata from many many many different libraries, archives and museums. One of the consistent fears that I’ve heard over the years is that such aggregations will dilute branding of a particular institution. People have asked to make sure their logo was next to images that appeared in the aggregation. This seems like a pretty reasonable request until – as an aggregator – you sit down and try to aggregate logos from several hundred cultural institutions. Which one should I use? Where is it? Here’s one on the home page, but do I have permission to use it? – all the legalize suggests they will kill my family if I touch their logo. The marketing people e-mailed me a 20 page “graphic identity” PDF with rules for using the logo. Aww..frak it’s just embedded in this glitzy header image and it will take me 10 minutes to photoshop it out.

I would love – LOVE – to be able to put together a “logos of culture 2.0″ panel like the one above but my experience suggests that this will be a huge time sink. I know, it’s kinda gimmicky, but I think it would make a nice poster for my office.

Also as we’ve worked on museum dashboard prototypes, people have ASKED us to add the logo from an institution on collection-level descriptions. We’re also working on new prototypes for our Opening History interfaces and have imagined that it would be nice to included a logo from the hosting or contributing institutions. In the current environment, that’s not likely to happen – but what about next generation aggregations/APIs, etc. Can I retrieve your logo to go along with the data I harvest? Really, I don’t want to steal your brand – I want to help promote yours!

I can also imagine trying this using a little bit of hoard.it moxy – essentially scraping anything with a filename that looks like “logo” out of museum websites. I wonder what I would catch in my dragnet.

Not being a marketing type I have a few questions for you, dear reader:

1. Are there discussions about how to liberate our logos in this way? Or are we still trying to “protect our brand” by making it difficult?
2. Good examples of institutions who have done this? Can I make a badge for my blog/website with your museum’s logo?
3. What would be some reasons NOT to do this? Or perhaps ways to do this other than using your “official” logo?

Web 2.0 logos courtesy Ludwig Gatzke

Congratulations to:

• Kathy Amoroso, Director of Digital Projects
  Maine Historical Society
• Dr. Tatyana Bogomazova, Chief of the IT Department
  Russian Academy of Sciences
• Tiah Edmundson-Morton, Reference, Instruction, and Outreach Archivist
  Oregon State University Archives
• Alyssa Glass, Web Producer
  Adobe Systems
  and museum studies graduate student at JFK University
• David Lockwood, Museums Manager
  Dumfries and Galloway Museum Service
  (Scotland)
• Emily Pfotenhauer, Outreach Specialist
  Wisconsin Heritage Online
• Sivia Sadofsky, Technology Program Manager
  Museum of Anthropology at
  the University of British Columbia
• Andrea Thomer, Lead Excavator
  George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits

The Museum Computer Network conference is November 11-14 in Portland,
Oregon. For more information visit http://www.mcn.edu.