For those of you that made it to Atlanta, I did a brief presentation at MCN2011 about collaboration to create digital interactive exhibits. Some people noted that my presentation contained references to the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. Why the Wu? I choose them because they are an extraordinary example of the benefits of working on projects as a team. Here are seven tips from the Wu-Tang way of working that we can learn from.

 You Gotta Have a Crew

Wu-Tang clan is made up of eight rappers (nine before the death of ODB). When you have this many collaborators in one group, you have lots of creative minds working together to reach the same goal. Having a team of people work on a project means you have better and faster results because the responsibility is shared. However…

 There Must Be A Strong Leader

In Wu-Tang, RZA runs the show. Sure, there are a lot of strong personalities contributing to the product, but RZA chooses the direction they go, and he has final say. On technology projects, someone has to take responsibility for setting the goals to reach. Committee doesn’t make great projects. Have a leader, have a vision, and take the expertise of each group member and put it where it can enrich the whole.

 C.R.E.A.M.
(Cash Rules Everything Around Me) 

Maybe not all of you are familiar with the term, but it’s applicable to all of our work. Technology projects are expensive. The costs of the devices and the hours of labor to develop and implement them add up quickly. Focus on the outcomes, divide labor between the members of the group, and have deadlines for each project.

 Work With What You Have

The first few Wu-Tang albums sound like they were recorded in a basement. That’s because they were recorded in RZA’s basement. You have to use what’s available to you, and you have to maximize that to your advantage. It’s not going to be perfect, but if you are doing something original that has engaging content, most of your audience won’t mind.

Have A Network

Wu-Tang is not just a group of rappers, they are also collaborators with a number of other groups. Their willingness to share what they learned and their success has opened doors for other artists. Your institution can’t work in a void. Find other organizations to share knowledge and information with. Everyone benefits.

 Innovate, Don’t Recreate

Wu-Tang is influential because they took their interests, 60′s and 70′s kung-fu cinema, and put it in the framework of hip-hop music. They didn’t reinvent the genre, just spun it in a way that highlighted their strengths. You don’t have to create something brand new for your museum. Take what you have available to you and put your mark on it.

The first “northeast” SIG meeting is nigh. We’ll be getting together at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on July 15th, gathering at 10am at the Staff entrance to get our badges, register any computing devices, and head inside to Founders Hall for a day of what look to be excellent presentations and networking. I already have a long list of folks coming from as far away as DC (we consider “NorthEast” to be a flexible concept) with whom I hope to spend some time during the day.

Unlike the several-day-long Fall MCN conference (in Atlanta, this year, from Nov 16-19), we have kept the program simple. There is one track with a strong emphasis on presentations about things that you can go home and use immediately, with subjects ranging from Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems and what works, to a presentation on using Linked Open Data (LOD). We have also tried to ensure that there is plenty of time to get together and shmooze. It isn’t all about data and technology—a lot of the point of having an event like this is to find and meet people who are doing similar work for support, sharing, and the pleasure of being able to talk about exhibit issues and museum trustees with other folks who care about those subjects.

The crowd, so far, is as diverse as you would encounter at MCN: Lots of people connected in some way to IT or technology at Libraries, Archives, and Museums—folks on the LAM, as it were. (I probably won’t be allowed to repeat that attempt at a pun, so enjoy it here.)

Please help spread the word. You can follow along with the hashtag #mcnsig. In fact, if you are attending, please send your twitter handle along with the usual name and email and let me know if you’d be interested in tweeting the event.

In case the link got buried, you can see the program and other details on the MCN website, on the northeast-SIG page. I look forward to seeing everyone in just a couple of weeks.

This year, the MCN conference’s closing plenary was a formal debate, featuring two teams of debaters considering topics of broad interest to the museum community.

Our debate propositions and teams were:

1. Museums that are not run as businesses will ultimately fail.
For the motion: Erin Coburn and Rob Stein; against the motion: Nancy Proctor and Bruce Wyman

2. Engagement with online visitors is as important as engagement with those on site.
For the motion: Rob Stein and Len Steinbach; against the motion: Beck Tench and Bruce Wyman

The debates were hard fought, sharply argued, and lots of fun. For those of you who weren’t able to be there, Rich Cherry’s team at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative captured and edited the event. Thanks to Rich for arranging the videotaping, to Scott Granger for the video capture, and to Chris Borkowski–BPOC’s newest staff member–for editing the footage. A four-minute digest of the event has been posted on the MCN website at: http://www.mcn.edu/great-debate

One of my favorite aspects of the debate was the participation of the audience. Audience members not only voted for the winners (the speakers who persuaded the most people to change their minds during the course of the debate*), but also asked really smart, thoughtful, and relevant questions during the event’s cross-examination section. The digest version of the debate doesn’t include the audience questions, but a full-length video, which will be posted shortly, does.

Thanks to our debaters for their fearlessness, preparedness, and wit–and their willingness, in some cases, to debate a position that they didn’t necessarily agree with! Thanks, too, to everyone who attended, added to the discussion with questions, and took place in the voting.

*For the record, the winners of the debates were Erin and Rob, arguing the affirmative side of the proposition, “Museums that are not run as businesses will ultimately fail,” and Beck and Bruce, arguing the negative side of the proposition, “Engagement with online visitors is as important as engagement with those on site.”

Having a regional Special Interest Group also lets us focus on what our nearby peers are doing that we can learn from, and makes a dandy day away from the office learning about some technology or projects of interest.

One idea that we’ve been discussing would be to have a two part gathering–in one room we’d have organized sessions focused on a particular subject, say, “storage” or “who’s doing what with mobile.” In another room we’d set up a THATcamp–a less structured, more impromptu set of sessions that would provide a less structure place where ideas could be mooted, projects still a bit inchoate could be explained, and so on.

There is one final reason for doing a regional SIG. It would be nice to see everyone more than once a year. If we can pull in new members, or meet more people, all the better.

If you are interested, do be sure to email me and let me know–you can reach me either through the MCN website, or you can contact me directly at work: http://jwa.org/contact/ari-davidow

MCN 2008 featured current and emerging practice in technology and information work in all kinds of museums. Leading experts in metadata standards, data curation, new media development, copyright, digital imaging, social tagging, collections information sharing, information technology, and related areas spoke to, and with, the 356 people in attendance from nine countries and from 31 states in the United States.

Among the attendees were five scholarship recipients, who have shared some of their thoughts on the conference in recent Musematic posts. A rousing silent auction in DC raised record funds for next year’s scholarships. We also had a great reception at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, with some of us narrowly dodging G20 motorcades on the way there…. But back to the serious stuff, just a few of the topics addressed in this year’s sessions were:

• Semantic Web work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Technologies in Small Museums
• Change Management and Diffusion of Innovation
• The Smithsonian’s Digital Strategy
• Social Tagging
• Innovative Applications and Innovative Evaluations
• Logistics of Extensive Data Standardization Projects–including comments on the crucial, and often less-analyzed, social processes that can enable or hobble such projects (what I might gloss here as “interpersonal logistics”)

Responding to enthusiasm about last year’s Case Study Showcases, MCN 2008 offered three such sessions, each of which started off one day of the conference. All told, these comprised a total of fifteen brief presentations, followed by small breakout discussions in a wide range of areas including Rapid Imaging, Digital Asset Management, Collections Information on the Web, Open Source projects, and many, many others. These case studies often present invaluable, sneak-preview windows into exciting projects still in their formative stages, as well as expert practitioners’ informal reflections on longer-standing programs of work. Responses to this year’s attendee survey indicate that for many participants these sessions were, once again, a real highlight of the conference.

MCN Taiwan, MCN’s first international chapter, hosted a luncheon and poster session as well as a panel presentation. Special Interest Group meetings were held by MCN’s Digital Media, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Metrics and Evaluation, Small Museum, Standards, and California SIGs. Special coffee-break sessions provided a close look at allied work in our professional communities. These included projects recently funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, offering delegates the opportunity to speak directly with project managers and IMLS program officers, and winners of the AAM Media & Technology Committee‘s MUSE Awards for 2008.

A rich variety of behind-the-scenes meetings took place during the conference. The ImageMuse working group of imaging experts in museums, the CDWA Lite and museumdat Working Group, the Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) Advisory Committee, and the steve social tagging project all held meetings to coincide with MCN 2008.

The full conference program, with session descriptions and information about sponsors and exhibitors, may be downloaded from the MCN website’s main conference page. As they are received from speakers, presentation slides and other materials will become available on the site’s conference program pages. And Richard Urban’s recent Musematic post notes some remote-sensing traces of the conference.

P.S.: Mark your calendars for MCN 2009 from November 11 through 14 in Portland, Oregon! Believe me, we’re really working on that wireless thing….

For our specific application, backing up to storage in a computer cloud run by Amazon, the magical moment came when I first discovered NetApps boxes and realized that I could separate data storage from the servers that had to use the data, forever ending the need to copy and maintain duplicate sets of data–often duplicate sets of much data–on many identical servers. In return for sharing our experiences, however, several people have mentioned the joint Fedora/DSpace project to create a cloud specifically for institutions like my own, DuraSpace (“…Space,” the new Mellon Foundation frontier…. Oops.). We’re ready to volunteer and see if this makes more sense than using a commercial provider like aws.amazon.com.

I was gratified to realize how many Drupal users there are in MCN. This open source content management system is being used to power a growing number of our website services. One of this year’s challenges will be to find ways to collaborate so that we can share specifics, and share brainstorming and problem-solving. I think I’m going to look very good back at home when I show of the dashboard module developed by Rob Stein’s team at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. If I can talk some of these MCN Drupal users to collaborate on interfaces to the Fedora Commons repository, we’ll be able to make our software development budget go much farther, much faster, and likely help mature some still-simple tools in ways that will solve problems for all of us.

One of the most exciting sessions was reviewing early Semantic Web work by an amazing team from the Met. For those new to the concept, the idea underpinning the Semantic web is to build enough smarts into our web pages (some of which will get there using automated text analysis tools) such that one can ask better questions of data. Instead of “searching” for a match with “Emma Lazarus” on a website, one day I will be able to get the same results by asking about “the poet who wrote the poem on the statue of liberty” or “Jewish poets of the 19th century” because the implicit data from various snippets about Emma Lazarus, will have enabled the underlying semantic web engine to put bits of information together and answer increasingly sophisticated questions about what data are actually present on a site. This is big. One of the references? The accurately named (and delightfully written) Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL.

The final sessions I attended contrasted two different approaches to Open Source software planning and management, whether intentionally or otherwise–that of Archivists Toolkit and the still-largely-on-the-drawing-board CollectionSpace (nee OpenCollection, now picking up on the new “…Space” meme). The two projects address similar issues, but listening to them described it is clear that merely saying “Open Source” doesn’t tell you much about the viability or quality of a given software project, any more than “commercial” does. The label only describes part of the development and maintenance process. As you consider whether to deploy either open source or commercial software, your major costs lie in the software customization and long-term maintenance. Software license fees (or lack thereof) are a very small part of those costs.

Instead, the critical issues surrounding software viability really lie with the community of vendors and users (along with your clarity as to your needs, and the actual fitness of the software to meet those needs). That, of course, is where an organization such as MCN excels–in helping you find that community, share experiences and problem-solving with peers around the world. Having said that, it will be most interesting to see how the MCN Board shapes changes to MCN community tools–currently this blog (co-run with AAM’s Media and Technology committee), the MCN website, and the MCN mailing list–adding new tools, or changing how these are run–to take advantage of current web affordances for building and sustaining community.

See ya’ll online.

P.S. Late addendum. David Dwiggins took some incredible notes of several conference sessions. Take a look at Dave’s Conference Musings. Enjoy.

Funny thing about conferences; although they’re exhausting, they always leave me fired up and ready to change my institution for the better. Conferences are such a whirl of networking and ideas and give and take, that I can’t help but want to climb the mountain of change right away.That’s the nice thing about working in a smaller mid-sized museum: if you have the time and the passion, you can fairly easily implement some of this stuff. I think my boss was getting tired of me calling and emailing twice a day with suggestions about how we could do XYZ, though.

Anyway, since I didn’t have access to power outlets and wireless in the conference rooms, I ended up writing everything down old-school style. I don’t have my notes transcribed yet, but I’ll upload them and make them available when I do. But for now, I just want to touch on a couple of sessions which I learned a lot from.

On Wednesday, I attended Rob Stein and Ed Bachta’s (Indianapolis Museum of Art) workshop about building a website in Drupal (aka. Drupal Bootcamp – there’s a slideshare presentation available here). Since I’m going to be transitioning the Magnes website to Drupal within the next few months, this was an absolutely perfect opportunity to see experts demo the steps it takes to do this. Admittedly, I don’t think I’m going to be able to migrate the site in the space of a morning, but I’m feeling a bit more confident about the process and that I might be able to do this in a shorter timeframe than I was anticipating. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that some of the extra nifty features are easy for people with background in PHP, but which left me tilting my head as if I were trying to read hieroglyphics. Cue an excited email to my boss and the Director, begging for a class in PHP. Fortunately, not much PHP is needed, and I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to do the majority of the work without much handholding.

One of the things I’m very excited about is that IMA has released their Dashboard module for free download (it’s available for download here). As this is something our Director of Development has expressed an interest in, I attended the 8:30 AM (!) case studies roundtable the next morning. Rob talked more about the Dashboard, including some of the benefits (transparency, donors love it, trust-building, ongoing stockpile of statistics) and downsides (manual updates by users, expired statistics). Really, really intriguing.

Another session which I found incredibly useful was a Friday afternoon session on making collection assets findable on the web, moderated by the amazing Murtha Baca. Ted Dancescu (Getty Trust) talked about some of the nuts and bolts of optimizing your HTML code to Google’s algorithms. In a nutshell:

• Use the description and keyword tags, but no more than 5-10 keywords.
• Use relevant Titles and Keywords
• Match the keywords, et al. to the content body
• Pages should be navigable with less than 4 clicks
• Logical site structure
• Character length of URLs is less than 100, and use of top-level domains
• Have links to and from your site everywhere
• Use descriptive text for images and video (particularly using the Alt tag for describing images, which helps Google Image Search accurately find your image)
• Use names, content, or links as HTML or text instead of images (an aside: Flash-bloated sites, in addition to being annoying, aren’t as easily indexed by Google because of this)

There were a lot of don’ts along with this, too, including redirects, long dynamic URLs, hidden text, keyword dilution, and robot exclusion.

Of course much of this has to do with careful metadata generation and maintenance, which can be a full-time itself. Diana Folsom discussed LACMA’s information integration projects (for their library and museum) and how actively managing their metadata and search terms greatly increased access to the assets for both the staff and the public.

The key point of this session was fairly straightforward: create a lot of access points to the information. If search engines can find it, people will find it. If people can find it, they can use it. If they’re using it, you’re doing your job as an educational/research institution.

Of course now I want to rush back home and start plugging in a lot of keywords. Maybe some nice intern will help me with that, once we have that part of our process defined.

There were so many other sessions and discussions and events I could touch on, but as this is already a mini-novella, I’ll leave it at that.

For those of you who attended MCN2008, please upload your photographs to Flickr and share them in our group pools, Museum Computer Network and MCN2008. My personal photos from the trip are here, taken entirely with an iPhone. Not bad photo quality, I have to say!

Next year, MCN will be in Portland, Oregon. Portland is gorgeous, inexpensive, and there’s no sales tax! I’m really, really looking forward to it. Hope to see many of you again in 2009!

LET’S DO I.T. RIGHT!  [www.mcn.edu/conferences]

36th Annual MCN Conference

November 12th -15th, 2008

Washington, DC

Save now! The Early Bird Registration Deadline is September 27, 2008.

http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp?subkey=888

To qualify for Earlybird Registration rates, mailed registration forms must be postmarked no later than September 27, 2008. Faxed and online registrations must be received no later than midnight on September 27, 2008.

Conference Hotel – GRAND HYATT WASHINGTON

Take in the excitement of the city from Grand Hyatt Washington. Perfectly located in Penn Quarter — with convenient in-lobby Metro Center access — this downtown DC hotel is the ideal base for exploring the city. Historic monuments and the Smithsonian museums are all within walking distance.

In order to keep costs down, we encourage attendees to reserve accommodations at the conference hotel. We have arranged a Special MCN Conference Rate of $224 per night single or double occupancy valid for Tuesday, November 11th through Saturday, November 15th.

Visit www.mcn.edu/conferences for the full schedule of registration rates and discounts, the conference program, and hotel & travel information.

First, I went through the list and indicated everyone’s gender as best I could.  Fortunately many people had added a Mr. or Ms., etc. to their membership record, but there was also a small number of people who’s names didn’t provide any clues.  Rather than making a wrong guess, I just left them as the “unknown” slice of the pie.

Looking around at an MCN conference, these aren’t very surprising numbers.  What I find interesting is that I’ve heard lots over the years about the lack of women in information technology positions, and particularly women completing computer science programs.  (see the resources at National Center for Women & Information Technology).  I’d be curious to know how we stand in relation to the rest of the non-profit sector (as opposed to the Fortune 500 companies NCWIT focuses on – Beth Kanter are you listening?).

What kinds of institutions do these people work in?   Here’s the top of the list produced using Wordle.  To get this I had to limit the list to the top 5 words from institution names, otherwise the names of some institutions with many MCN members start showing up.  I might try to remove names (to protect the innocent) and re-run this to show the broader range of cultural institutions represented by MCN members.

And what do MCN members do?  Also using Wordle, this view shows the words from the titles that MCN members hold.

This is a pretty slim slice of what we might know about MCN Members.   Additional information was collected as part of the MCN Membership survey that is now about two years old and is available in the Members Only section of the MCN website – maybe I’ll reblog some of that here.

For the 2007-2008 year we had:

• 386 Individuals (including Non-profit and corporate representatives)
• 45 Non-profit Members
• 14 Corporate Members

These individual members were located around the world – although most of us are in the United States and Canada.

Zooming in a little closer to the United States, we find out that MCN members are concentrated in New York and California.  Not too surprising, especially considering that many of our members work for arts related organizations (more on that in part II).  Even so, that doesn’t necessarily explain why we don’t have any members in a big swath of the Plains and Mountain West.  Any readers who are in those states care to comment? (according to the Musematic logs, you are out there!)

Next up,  we’ll take a look at what kinds of positions we hold and what kinds of institutions we represent.

Oh, and if you want to fill the holes in the map….Join MCN today!

Graphs created using Many-Eyes