Richard Urban

Richard Urban is currently a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and serves as a board member for the Museum Computer Network. He arrived at this interesting association with librarians after serving as Operations Coordinator for the Collaborative Digitization Program, where he participated in the development of best practices for cultural heritage materials, conducted training, and tried not to get run over while standing at the the intersection of libraries, museums and archives. In a previous life, Richard earned a MA in History and a Museum Studies Certificate from the University of Delaware.

• Posts: 70

Announcing MuseTech Central

Introducing the launch of MuseTech Central, the MCN Project Registry!MuseTech Central provides a place to share information about technology-related projects in the cultural heritage sector. From implementations of digital asset management systems, to the latest use of educational media and interactives, the registry represents the latest technology and information management projects in museums, libraries, and [...]

Museum Advocacy in a Year of Change

Tomorrow, I get to go cast my vote in the U.S. Primary Election. The excitement in the air over this years election has had me thinking about what all this “change” might mean to me as a museum professional who is interested in technology. My first stop was AAM’s Speak Up For Museums site (http://www.speakupformuseums.org) [...]

Digital Asset Management Database (DAMD) available through MCN

from Rick Rinehart, Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the MOAC: Community Toolbox Hello members of the MCN community, I’m proud to announce that, through a partnership between MCN and the MOAC consortium, MCN is now distributing to you,the members, a new free software tool for managing and sharing [...]

Museum Games: from the gallery to my hard-drive

Here’s a question for those of you who are developing museum interactives, particularly museum educational games. How much are these games developed for only one setting. E.g. an in-gallery kiosk OR the web. How often are they developed for both platforms (web and gallery)? I’ve been looking at the games that museums share via their [...]

Remixing Çatalhöyük Day

I’ve mentioned the work that the Open Knowledge and the Public Interest project has been doing in Second Life in several of my presentations.    They’re now ready to take the wraps off of the Catalyhoyuk Island and are doing so with a full day program.   For those of you who have been less than impressed [...]

Facebook Pages

On November 6, the social networking site Facebook released a new feature, simply called “Pages.” Previously only individuals were allowed to create accounts on the site, as some non-profits discovered when they had “psuedo” accounts removed. Most museums have relied on the Facebook’s “Group” feature to allow them to connect to Facebook audiences. Now any [...]

How to Make a Museum Exhibit Mockup with Free Tools

William Turkel has been writing a great blog called Digital History Hacks about digital tools for public history. In the spirit of the open-source conversations started last week at MCN by the Museum Software Foundation, I’m passing this along. How to Make a Museum Exhibit Mockup with Free Tools Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

MCN History

This is for everyone playing along at home. Earlier this year Marla and I worked on an article that will appear in the next edition of the Encylopedia of Library and Information Science that covers the basics about MCN. A version of that article, A Brief History of the Museum Computer Network is available on [...]

Tag yourself

Tagging has been a popular activity at several recent conferences, so I thought I’d make it easy for Musematic readers to show their colors. These graphics work with a 1″ round sticker (or you can happily resize!). I’m printing out a bunch of these for MCN next week – if you are a reader and [...]

Metaverse Friday – Getting Ready for MCN

Hi there, We’re getting ready for our presentation next week on Second Life Museums. Museums in Second Life Chair: Paul F. Marty, Assistant Professor, Florida State University, College of Information Participants: Richard Urban, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , Troy McConaghy, International Spaceflight Museum Rob Rothfarb, Exploratorium Museums have been exploring the use of multi-user [...]