It’s too bad the findings aren’t able to break this down into the devices people have. Fortunately, it does shed light on the people most using them: ages 30 to 49, college educated, and makes more than $75,000 a year. How does that compare to the visitors and program participants at your museum?

Pew Research Center: “Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period”

“Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.

…You could even take it one step further and make Boycott the one-stop-shop for all of your political needs. Imagine if you could scan a cereal box and find out that the company’s CEO likes to hunt rhinos, ride elephants, and eat shark fin soup — at the same time. Imagine if you could scan a video game box and immediately see all of the active legislation, the Representative sponsors and supporters, and how much money they’ve received from industry lobbying. You could even go as far as equipping the app with facial recognition, so that you can point your phone at a Senator’s face on the TV and quickly find out whether what he’s saying actually jibes with his real world behavior and voting record. This isn’t a futuristic concept; we could do this right now with the tech we have.

As I’ve returned to being primarily an art historian I don’t have a whole lot that’s relevant to say in the Musematic arena anymore. What prompted me to write this post in the first place is I currently find myself in a situation where technology cannot help me–and I’m not talking about computers, Ipads, or GPS. For the first time in years I’m stuck and can’t think of a technology to save me–and mind you I’ve been in some tight places before.

There was the time I was in Egypt, traveling as resident art historian for Eastern Michigan University’s European Cultural History Program. Half the group had gone to the pyramids where, after viewing the monuments, they would jump on camels and meet us at the Step-Pyramids of Djoser. My group had headed for the Step-Pyramids and was caught in a sudden sandstorm and would have been completely lost had it not been for compass.

And then there was the time a group of us decided to spend the night in one of the caves near the cave monasteries in Cappadocia, Turkey. What saved us that evening was a technology that has been around for eons–a piece of flint and some metal to strike a spark.

The phones at the Post in Rome enabled me to complete my dissertation. The monks at the Church of the Aracoeli in Rome refused to let a woman into the Bufalini Chapel in the 1980s and so you might say that a large pocketful of gettoni enabled me to reach a friend with connections at the Cleveland diocese, who made connections in Rome, who got me an audience with the Pope’s Confessor, who made a phone call to the Fransicans at the Aracoeli and told them to let me in to see the painting cycle I needed to see. And, six months later, I was on top of the world because I had my very own dot matrix printer to print out my completed dissertation–of course it took several hours and was loud and annoying but what an improvement over carbon paper and white out.

But tomorrow folks I’m invited to a Debutante Ball! As the mother of her “Escort,” the “Deb’s” parents have kindly invited me to sit at their table. My son will be resplendent in his tuxedo, head and shoulders better looking than any handsome prince I’ve ever seen. I’ve got a dress and a carriage (okay so it’s a used Audi but let’s not quibble over the details). So what’s the problem? This event lasts for 8 hours and the grand total of my experience with balls comes from Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer novels–and I’m pretty sure things have changed since the Regency period. E-how offered me the following suggestions when I typed in “How to behave at a Debutante Ball.”

I’m off the grid tomorrow night and to tell you the truth, I’m scared. E-how offers this particularly frightening piece of advice:

The simplest way to remember how to behave at a debutante ball is to make sure that you don’t do or say anything that you wouldn’t do or say in front of your grandmother, your first grade teacher and your minister.

Wish me luck. It’s a brave new world. And, in the words of the immortal Douglas Adams “So long and thanks for all the fish!”

“Not only has the net left its Wild West days; it’s entered the era of the gated suburban subdivision. As part of this trend, the open, html-based website is being replaced, or at least supplemented, by the proprietary app. In app stores, the already blurry line between software and media disappears altogether. Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will.”

To CIO, or not to CIO – that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of mismanaged data
Or to take arms against a sea of piecemeal information decisions
And by strategizing, end them. To define, to plan –
A CIO – and by define to say we end the heartache
of our audience once and for all,
be it one or be it one thousand?
‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
To define, to plan – a CIO – perchance to dream
Of ending battles of lord and master
Of our information; ay, there’s the rub,
Where for art the strategic IT plan?
That ‘tis obsolete when ‘tis writ? For in that plan
What dreams of organizing information
And content deployment may come? When
We have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of integrating
One trickery app twixt another.
And in the end, to grunt and sweat
With that ticketing app from who’s reporting
I.T. know not how. And in the end to grunt
And sweat with that collection information system
That puzzles the will, and dread our weary days
With it, and ne’er call the desk that is helpless,
Because that does make cowards of us all.
So, soft you now, the fair museum technologist!
Be all your sins remembered, dread of time is here
When we need a plan or decision of
Great pitch and moment to organize these things
Lest we get hit by a bus, and all our sins forgotten.

Just wanted to announce that the 2011 Horizon Report>Museum Edition has gone to press (and was officially launched at MCN in Atlanta last week). Follow this link to a page where you can a) download the report, or b) watch a >4 minute video which gives a brief overview of the six technologies featured in this year’s report.

Meanwhile, as always with Horizon Reports, you can view all of the work of the advisory board leading up to the publication of the report (including lots of great resources) on the project wiki:

Thanks to Nancy Proctor and the MCN Program Team for facilitating the launch of this year’s report at MCN 2011 in Atlanta last week.

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.

There ended up being a free and elegant solution to this problem. We downloaded a screen capture program called HyperCam. This software allowed us to record users touching the interface, as well as the audio during the session. We brought in small groups of people of various ages and asked them to use the interface without any guidance. As they reached points where they did not know what to do, we would give them instructions on next steps. After they were done, we asked them to give us feedback about their experience. All of this was recorded onto the computer as a video file that we could send to the students working on the project.

This process became essential to the development of the interface. We ran three different rounds of testing as the interface was built, which gave the students working on the project a lot of material to work from. The students were able to go back to the recorded files and pinpoint trouble spots and create guidance cues for the users.

Free tools such as the HyperCam screen capture software and others enable an institution like ours to work in ways we have not before. In this case, it gave us an opportunity to refine a project based on user feedback rather than our assumptions.

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