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:

In The Web is Dead, authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff point to usage trends and investment in app-based technologies to support their assertion that online visitors are abandoning the Web. They make the distinction that the Web – a series of interconnected documents that people go to in order to sniff out content – is decreasing in popularity in favor if the more generalized Internet – the electronic information superhighway that apps and software plug into. Or, as Anderson (writing about usage) puts it:

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.

via Wired

Anderson and Wolff (who is writing about investment) are correct when they claim that there’s a marked increase in development efforts and usage for semiclosed platforms. Things that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do on computers 15 years ago are now fairly commonplace, though not yet ubiquitous. Tasks like watching streaming movies through Netflix, chatting with international friends on Skype, enjoying and sharing music playlists via Pandora or Last.fm, and having real-time document collaboration with physically separated parties didn’t exist then, but they were tasks we performed via other means. Having apps to provide those experiences within our computers and mobile devices has made our lives more streamlined.

But where Anderson trips up is that he fails to take into account that this is not a zero sum game. Of course there is going to be increased adoption of internet-based tools as more of them become available. Every time an entrepreneur invents a new app to consolidate our everyday tasks onto our computers, you’ll see adoption. But that doesn’t mean that users are suddenly going to stop using their browser. In most cases, users are going to add that app to their bookshelf of “tools I use to get stuff done.” I rather like how Jason Fry of the Neiman Journalism Lab put it in his article, The web dies, the hype lives: What Wired left out of its eulogy:

It would have been less compelling but more accurate to say that the web isn’t dying but being joined by a lot of other contact points between the user and the sea of digital information, with points emerging for different settings, situations, and times of day. Sometimes a contact point is a different presentation of the web, and sometimes it’s something else entirely.

I think I’m pretty much the demographic the Wired community is thinking about – mid-30′s, educated, tech-savvy, overloaded with devices. I have an iPhone, a Windows Vista laptop, a desktop Windows XP computer attached to a large television, a Wii, and now an iPad. Taking my own usage patterns as an example, I use the Web on the desktop computer to navigate (on the web) to Netflix to watch streaming movies, or to Pandora to listen to music while cleaning, or to the Lifetime Channel’s website to watch the latest episode of Project Runway. The laptop is where all of my main productivity and online interactions (Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Skype, various blogs) are performed. It, along with the Wii, is where I get some gaming done if I have the time. My iPhone is my portable friend, and since I got the iPad, I don’t use it much for browsing, so that’s mostly app-based, using it for navigation, silly little timewaster games, texting, and searching the Web when a question comes up. The iPad won’t take over my laptop, since the office productivity tools I need aren’t as useful there, but I use it a lot as an eBook reader, a browser, a feed reader (via Flipboard and Twitter), a note-taking device, a sketchpad, and to organize some other lifestyle and business management needs.

None of these devices is a threat to another one. I have them all because each one does something different. Likewise with the Web and apps. I’d quite happily keep using the web-based Google Docs if it did everything I need it to do. I really wish I didn’t have to catch up with my friends on Facebook, but that’s where everyone went (away from Livejournal), so that’s where I go. I never had great experiences with RSS readers, so now I get all my museum news from my pals on Twitter. If I want to read or write specific commentary, I go to a blog on that topic, or write my own.

The point is that people choose the tool they need to get the job done. Again, Jason Fry:

It’s also interesting to ask whether users of various devices care — and whether they should. Anderson brings up push technology…

The problem with the first incarnation of push was that the only contact point was the computer screen, meaning information often wasn’t pushed close enough to you, or was being pushed down the same pipe you were trying to use for something else. Now, information is pushed to the web — and to smartphones and tablets and game consoles and social networks and everything else — and push has vanished into the fabric of How Things Are.

There isn’t a zero-sum game between the web and other ways of presenting information to customers — they all have their role in consumers’ lives, and increasingly form a spectrum to be tapped into as people choose.

At any rate, it seems possible that, some day, we’ll be able to use one machine to do all of our Internet-based tasks, but the Web is still too useful to declare its outright demise. Will it happen someday? Maybe, but like every other living organism, I think it will continue to evolve instead. But it means that we also can’t turn our backs on content delivery for the Web or apps (especially those for mobile devices). Make the content ready for both simultaneously, including factoring in production and management methods, and, if you can’t do it yourself, partner with those companies who can help with delivery. Cultural institutions are traditionally not very good at this, but I think it helps to think outside the Web, while recognizing how your users actually use your content.

We got a taste of what “no email” means right before we switched over when our phone vendor goofed and our phone and email access were down for a day. Since we hosted our own email server, that meant not only that people who called our office got nada, but that we had no access to email and no way of telling people that we weren’t reading the email. Not good.

Hopefully, that won’t happen again. And that’s really not why I started this ramble today.

Two interesting things emerged from this excercise.

1. All staff under the age of 40 have smartphones and wanted their work email to sync with their smartphones. (Over staff over 40 with smartphones, half said, “sync,” half said “I’m okay with relying on my computer”.) Suggests that whatever we’re doing with smartphones, we might want to do more. Worrying about webpages for computer browsers may go the way of the fax–it’ll still be used, but won’t be the significant medium. Instead,  we finally have a ubiquitous computing device that everyone seems to have, and seems to use as functional extensions of the brain and fingers.

2. The Law of Unintended Consequences. Did I mention that we have a lousy, slow internet connection? Imagine what happened when our small office now had to download/send all email via an external, hosted server. Yup. The coup de grace. Next step will be to add some actual bandwidth. Or move us all to smartphones.

This is the question I posed in discussion thread this week:

Based on the IMLS Report you read last week,  the articles you are reading this week, and the needs of the institutions you currently work for or hope someday to work for, do you have the skills you need? If not, what do you still need to do and do you have a plan for doing it? Are their any opportunities for convergence here? If so, what are they?

Their answers are fascinating, and, with their permission, I hope to share some of the responses with you in the fall, after class is over.

On this glorious sunny summer morning I’m sitting on my side porch and, in order to put off grading for a few more minutes, I sat and thought about the question I’d asked them and what my response would be.

Here it is:

I am a mid-to-late career professional, switching gears and focusing on teaching museum studies.  I have practiced what I currently preach and wanted to go back into teaching because I saw interns coming into the field with museum studies degrees that had given them a good theoretical grounding in museums, but fewer of the practical skills that would help them get ahead.

I have a straight Ph.D. in art history, I did not choose the museum studies route because curators (my original goal) need to be content specialists rather than museum studies students.  This is still the case in most art museums for curatorial postions–given two candidates who, all other things being equal, one has a museum studies degree and one has an art history degree–the art history degree trumps most of the time.  I worked as a curator for a decade before turning to interpretation and new media.  I was more interested in ideas and telling stories than in buying works of art (particularly at a museum with a very limited acquisition budget) and, to be honest, the number of 15th century frescoes that come onto the market is extremely limited.

New media and technologies absorbed me for the second decade of my museum career and towards the end of that decade, as technologies changed more often and as a new generation of museum employees came on board with more flexible ideas, and advanced training and skill sets in the development and use of new technologies, I shifted once again to where my own interests and strengths might do the most good for the community and began focusing on ethics and convergence.  Meanwhile, I am secretly (don’t tell my husband) thinking about working part-time on a second Ph.D. This one in history–possibly medieval.

The IMLS report frightened me slightly because I feel I am too old a dog to learn most of the new tricks.  And, I honestly feel many of us mid-to-late professionals need to either consider some retraining or get out of the way.  I wrote about this, two years ago, in one of my first blogs for Musematic entitled: “What Are We Doing for Erin and Adam?” http://musematic.net/2006/10/08/what-are-we-doing-for-erin-and-adam/

And….just as an FYI…Erin didn’t need my help at all she is currently on her way to NYC where she will take on an important leadership role in data management, interpretation, and new technologies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I may have already told you this earlier in the semester.  My father, who passed away in 2009, at the age of 86, gave me two pieces of advice when I went off to college (in 1979).  1) There will always be a job for the person who is the best at what they do; and 2) Never marry someone that dogs don’t like.

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)

What could be better?  That’s what I was thinking to myself when this morning’s mail brought my desk copy of Herman T. Tavani’s Ethics and Technologies, and Strategies for Ethical Computing (Third Edition).   I know that sounds crazy but I’ve been at odds with myself for the past six months trying to decide where I was going to locate the desk (my mother’s Paul McCobb Planner Group Secretary) I use for my primary work.  Two weekends ago I made Patient-Long-Suffering-Spouse help me in an intense and back-breaking game of musical furniture.  As a result the piano is now in the dining room, waiting for someone who can actually play the thing to sit down and fill the house with music.  The dining room table can actually be used, once again for dining.  And my work desk is where it should be, in the designated room that we’ve always referred to as “my” office  (probably used to be an enclosed sun porch) but that desk was taken over by PLSS for dealing with household finances.  So now there are two desks, he only uses the finance desk in the mornings before work, and for a brief time in the afternoon after work, and the rest of the time the office is mine, all mine.  So for today, at least, I am playing the absent–minded professor. I’ve sent the boys (husband and son) off to pursue their own plans and I’m happily ensconced at my desk with a textbook at my side and a syllabus to revise for my Johns Hopkins students.

Larry Johnson, the CEO of NMC had invited me to kick-off the workshop and I so I offered the group some reflections upon the history of museums in United States, common aphorisms, and audience satisfaction.  And much to my delight Rachel Smith was visually recording the session and posted the following photograph condensing what I said into the image below.  Thanks Rachel.

The best thing about the day was listening to the presentations and ideas and commentaries of the really bright young people who are working in museums today.  They are transforming the landscape and we (who are bowed at the shoulders, with creaky bones and joints) should take advantage of their enthusiasms and allow them to show us  museums and audiences through their eyes much more often.   A big shout out to Lillian from the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.  You rock girl!

And…swallowing my words….

Lo many moons ago in this blog I declared my intention (in musical parody) never to tweet.  But today, June 30, 2010, I take it all back.  I’m tweeting–but sparingly–one tweet a day, an object from a museum somewhere in the world.  You can follow me on twitter as @hwitchey.

Smaller, cheaper, faster, better – The promise of technology. Isn’t technology meant to make our lives easier by streamlining workflows, eliminating manual processes and supporting our administrative, interpretative and educational initiatives? That’s the myth. While technology is often smaller and faster, the reality is that technology sometimes isn’t better (shock, horror) and it definitely isn’t the cheap option. Technology may not be cheap, but done right it is a great investment. However, technology done badly can be an expensive mistake and that gives many the impression that technology doesn’t work and is an expensive waste of time. As museum technologists we struggle with this image.

In our current financial situation technology can be the soft target when we’re looking at our budgets, a second-class citizen struggling to convey its true value. I sometimes see technology as the sporting equivalent of a benchwarmer – a dispensable player who can be removed from the game without affecting its result. It’s not.

Who’s to blame for doing technology badly? No point looking around at others, we are when we don’t do our due diligence in matching solutions to requirements, or worse, when we don’t even bother to do requirements because “isn’t it obvious?”, or even worser, when we use technology for technology’s sake.

I’ve seen it many times. Applications are often a substitute for existing (manual) processes, so when we look to bring in a new application we look to replicate the processes that we have in place and are unwilling to change our ways. Third-party applications are often the result of a distillation of processes from a variety of different sources and situations into something simple. Instead of using the moment when we select technology as a time to question how we do something, we look to blindly replicate our processes with something that wasn’t designed to be as convoluted as we’ve trained ourselves to be. Bringing in technology under these conditions is a recipe for disaster.

There are any number of reasons why technology doesn’t hit the mark, but a sure-fire way is not clearly identifying the purpose and goals at the outset.

I’m reminded of a quote:

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.

- Andy Rooney, US news commentator

But technology done right is a bit like the definition of pornography – I’ll know it when I see it. And the epitome of “technology done right” is that its transparent – its there but you don’t see it, it presents no barrier to the experience. And if we’ve done our job right, it actually enhances the experience.

The two-day Technology, Interpretation & Education conference showcased the value of technology and discussed getting it right. From the MUSE award virtual reception (thanks Jack & Suzy and congratulations to all the MUSE Award winners), to the Art Institute of Chicago on Teens and Technology: Remixing the Museum to Stephanie Weaver on Creating a Social Media Strategy to the consistently engaging Nina Simon on Developing Tools for Visitor Participation. The conference featured instances where the disciplines of education and interpretation have been brought together, supported by technology, to provide an engaging experience that represents value: a thoughtful and resonant engagement with our audiences, or more specifically, a visitor’s thoughtful and resonant engagement with us. Instances where traditional ways of interpretation and education have been replaced by elegant and meaningful solutions that further our individual missions, not necessarily using cutting-edge technology, but the right solution for the job at hand.

Technology done right is a thing beauty and a joy forever – that is, until the upgrade. But as the Chinese Curse goes: May you live in interesting times. That is certainly true of the times we are living in. And in these times we are being asked to “do more with less” – and often the instinctive answer is some technology solution. But as museum technologists and as museum professionals we’ve been tasked with “doing more with less” for many years.

We have less, so let’s do less. I think its time to focus our time and resources and “do less with less”, but “do stuff that matters”, to quote Tim O’Reilly. Tim O’Reilly also talks about “big hairy audacious goals”, but see Mike Edson for that.

“Do Less With Less”: Museum technologists always want to say yes, they are particularly good at saying yes or rather, they are bad at saying “no”. In this time of financial and resource constraint, as technologists, as content developers, and as educators, we need to create a culture where its okay to say “no” if our goal is to wisely and judicially use our skill and resources to create lasting projects of value. To misquote, Rich Cherry, Director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative: “Don’t half-arse, just say no”.

In the short story Runaround (published in I, Robot in 1942), Isaac Asimov came up with three fundamental laws that all robots must obey:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

I’ve come up with the Museum Technologist’s equivalent that I’d like to share with you – to make the point of doing less with less. So for us Museum Technologists, I give you the Three Laws of Museum Technology:

1. A museum technologist may not implement a technology solution that is inappropriate, uneconomic, unsustainable, unproductive, inelegant, inflexible, a closed architecture or not based on standards
2. A museum technologist must obey the opinions and decisions of a museum non-technologist except when such opinions and decisions conflict with the first law
3. A museum technologist must protect his own existence as long such protection does not conflict with the First and Second law

So, what is an inappropriate technology solution? Well, I talked about that one: not matching solutions to requirements and doing technology for technology’s sake.We technologists have, what I like to refer to as the shiny gadget gene, we see others doing something cool and there is an overwhelming urge to emulate it. Or we see others with some success and we want to do that very same thing. We are a culture of emulation, but we have to be careful that we emulate for the right reasons. We jump on the bandwagon, without thinking whether we should be on it or even sometimes thinking about where it is going. The early institutional websites were a great example of this, but now I hope we’ve individually figured out why we do all have a website. I worry that our current social networking efforts are similarly inclined. Are you clear why your institution has a Facebook page and what the plan is? Are you clear why you are capturing User Generated Content on your website, and what the plan is? Technology for technology’s sake is not doing “less with less”, its doing “more with less”. And most importantly, it violates my first law.

What about uneconomic? We have to be careful of not buying into the myth that replacing something with a technological solution is the cheap alternative, or that technology is in itself, “cheap”. In our world there is rarely an immediate return on our investment and thinking that is the case, is a problem. Technology is an ongoing investment and trying to do it on the cheap, for example selecting technology based on relative cost and ignoring the requirements (assuming you did some), will result in tears before bedtime. Unquestionably, technology can support us in our mission, help us build engaging interpretive and educational solutions, but it requires investment and commitment from the highest levels in our institutions and the returns are not hard cash, but are hopefully feet through the door, greater access to our content and meeting our missions.

And let’s not forget that Open Source Software is as free as a free puppy: no upfront cash, but years of scooping poop. Just because Social Media is cheap and easy (is it really?) should we be doing it? There is an important distinction between “cheap” and “economy”. Done wisely and judiciously, technology can be a great economy, saving time and resources over the long term. No doubt that some technology solutions absolutely can be cheap and can be a “financial economy”, but our returns on investment are about meeting mission, sustainability, preservation and access, which by their very nature, play out over the longer term. Doing “less with less” means being crystal clear that what you are about to do clearly addresses these mission-related goals.

To do less with less is to focus on the things that are core to our institutional mission, things that are being done for the right reasons which everybody is clear about, and are done in a way that maximizes resources and finances. We should plan for flexibility because we don’t know where this “thing” is going; we should plan for scalability because we don’t know how big this “thing” might get; we should use standards because we want to play and share in a much bigger arena; we should collaborate and stop trying to re-invent the wheel. And most importantly, we should address the long term – the sustainability of the things we’ve created for our institutions after we’ve moved on.

Doing less with less may also extend to how you structure your workforce. Here at the Getty we reorganized departmentally to recognize that there functional areas that shouldn’t change – such as content development – the way we interpret our collections, but there are areas that will change – how we brand our content and how we deliver it. How does doing “less with less” fit into a world where new technologies and platforms are constantly emerging? If you know something will change, at least you can plan for it with modularity in hardware, software, people or resources.

In these “interesting times”, your take on doing “less with less” may be different. Maybe “doing less with less” is to do something that creates a revenue stream, or to do something purely because its high-profile, or even to do something that is in fact technology for technology’s sake – a one-off, no-holds-barred, shiny-gadget project. Far be it from me to judge. Essentially, “doing less with less” it is to be thoughtful and appropriate in how you conduct your business and how you support and deliver your interpretive and educational goals under the banner of your mission.

PPT available on slideshare here.