Category

The future of encyclopedic museums?

Terrific OpEd piece by Holland Cotter in this morning’s NYT. Opportunity on Madison.

A little help for Oxford University please…

Here’s your chance to do something tangible in the way of cultural heritage documentation. Oxford University is using crowd-sourcing to decipher the writing on papyri fragments. No worries if your tool kit doesn’t run to ancient languages.

Must Read for Interns and Intern Supervisors

Great blog post by Jodi Glickman entitled “Nobody has time for interns.”

DFW! I wuv it.

At some point in your life you may have incorporated into your vocabulary some child’s phrase that struck you (at the time) as particularly compelling or appropriate for the situation. Almost ten years ago we were on vacation with some good friends, staying in a cabin, in a state park. Two and 1/2 year old, [...]

Discography.org

Just in case anyone ever needs this, or a little entertaining reading on a weekend afternoon: a rather cool searchable database of U.S. court cases dealing with popular music (including copyright cases, of course). Each case is introduced with a plain-English and sometimes lighthearted summary. This isn’t your usual legal site. Even the name says [...]

Just Jack! Museums in a Gigabit World

I am absolutely unapologetic about cross-posting this little note. For the past two days I’ve been sitting in a lecture room at CWRU with 50 colleagues from all over the country discussing how we might re envision public services in a world where everyone is connected by high-speed, reliable, big, big bandwidth. the bulk of [...]

Mapquest: the feature I want

Even though I have an iPhone and mostly use the GPS on it for navigation, I still find myself gravitating towards mapquest on those evenings or afternoons when I devote time to planning automobile excursions hither and yon. Thus it was the mere work of a minute or two this afternoon to plug in our [...]

Deep in the Heart of Texas….

…the Media & Technology Standing Professional Committee (M&T) is preparing to launch another fantastic round of panels and programs for the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums which kicks off this coming weekend (as my subject line indicates) deep in the heart of Texas in Houston. Hope to see a whole passel [...]

Code and the American eating disorder

Google has replaced God as the Source of All Things, so naturally it gets blamed a lot. Nicolas Carr has made a fascinating and revealing analysis of Google recipe search results , and it is deeply scary. If Google algorithms can affect the way a nation eats, not just how it does its homework, that’s [...]

A New Model for Collaboration?

Apologies for cross posting. This semester I am teaching a course called “The Convergence of Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Collecting Institutions” for Johns Hopkins University.  We just completed Week 10 of the 14-week course.  The topic for last week’s discussion was “New models and structures for collaboration.”  Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on my [...]