UK’s Royal Society has made access to its historical journal (60,000+ papers) available free online. Here’s a great article from BBC on the topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15445507

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! (more…)

From “ReadWriteWeb” last Saturday (I’m behind on my newsletters because our old router at home gave up the ghost) so here’s an article entitled: “If you’ve never heard of pinterest you’re a bigh dork.” Pinterest is a visual bookmarking site used primarily by women–user-generated content curation in another sphere. Check it out.

In early 2011, the Museum of Photographic Arts decided to integrate iPads into the galleries. Our first exhibition to feature the iPads, Streetwise: Masters of 60s Photography, used them to present rare books from our library collection. With the help of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, we used HTML and an app called wKiosk to allow the user to browse through the books. You can find Perian Sully’s Musematic blog about how this was accomplished here.

Currently, I am working on three new displays using the iPads. Two of them will be informative text, while the other will allow the user to choose and watch from a selection of three videos. We are still in the process of developing these interfaces, but I will post more about them when they are complete.

What I like about the iPad is that, when using HTML, we can design and present simple interfaces for exhibition content. HTML is easy for my staff and I to work with, and using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Dreamweaver or a free alternative, such as SeaMonkey, lets us rapidly create and change the presentation and content.

What I don’t like about the iPad is that, using HTML, we lose the fun and slick function of the iPad interface. All I am able to do with HTML is have a visitor click on a button, and this loads another page. Yes, it is functional, but I see visitors trying to swipe, pinch, and drag on the screen, only to have nothing happen. The Balboa Park Online Collaborative did find some ways around this issue using Javascript. The results were good, but I am not a programmer, and we don’t always have the funds to hire someone to create this for us. This also requires planning and implementation that does not always fit with the hectic and changing timelines encountered with creating and installing exhibitions.

I spent some time looking into alternatives to this issue. My first thought was using Keynote for the iPad, iBooks, or the Photo app. All of these seemed like they would offer some of the gestures, and simple yet effective methods of designing the presentation of the content. Unfortunately, all of these apps allow the user to back out of the full-screen view and manipulate the app and its features. My hope was to create a seamless, internalized experience where the user never sees the iPad OS or features. These apps are just not built for museum presentation purposes.

The next solution I found was to start developing applications using Adobe Flash and Air. Although these are powerful tools, they take a lot of training to get used to, and you need to buy the Apple developer’s license to put the application on the iPad. It’s about $100 per year, which is not that bad considering what is possible using this method. However, it means investing time and energy in Flash development, which is slowly but surely being phased out for HTML5.

Most of these issues will be resolved once there are more resources for HTML5. As a new standard, it will let me do many of the things I can do in Flash, but will integrate with the iPad without the need to additional external applications. There are a few HTML5 programs available, but nothing that meets the ease of use that my staff and I need to quickly create content presentations.

If you have experiences using iPads to present content, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear how you approached it.

The team in Florence looking for Leonardo’s lost “Battle of Anghiari” is in the market for a new Gamma camera. Watch the Kickstarter video and pass it on.

At the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, most of our projects share one key objective: leveraging resources. For websites we standardized the CMS platform and deployed 20 websites in 2 years with 3 developers. For digitization we created shared studios and digitized 160,000 images, videos, films and slides and got them online in 18 months. And for shared resources we ran fiber to 14 buildings, sharing a 50 mb pipe to the Internet and a digital asset management system (How many 2 1/2 year olds can do that?)

So as we pursue mobile projects that showcase the great variety of attractions within the Park (80+ destinations and 50+ events each day), that objective translated into the re-use and re-purposing of content. After all we want to solve the common problems that visitors face (like getting lost!) using a low-cost approach and ship it fast.

The first app that we created was the Balboa Park iPhone app, a branded app that works on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. By featuring content fed directly from the Balboa Park website via RSS feeds (organization listings, locations data, event instances, etc.) we spend very little time maintaining the app. If it’s right on the website, it’s right on the app, and we know we’re providing visitors with up-to-date info at their fingertips. We are also launching some kiosks around the park that use the same feed.

While we had a great response to our first iPhone app, we knew we weren’t meeting all the needs of our visitors. We then wanted to focus on two objectives:

• Provide a product for the increasing audience of Android users. Over the last year, we saw the share of mobile traffic to Balboapark.org from Android devices grow to more than 29% of mobile traffic (mobile traffic is 10% of total traffic).

• Provide better navigation tools. While our first app had a detailed Google map, people were still having trouble finding the right routes to their destinations.

A few months ago we began working with the Meridian App team— the same developers that helped us launch our first iPhone app—to build a multi-platform Balboa Park guide for both iOS and Android devices. Our content would be integrated into the Meridian platform, which would have guides to other destinations such as the Portland Art Museum and had a strong emphasis on turn-by-turn navigation. By joining this common platform instead of branding our own app, we would also minimize our expenses while enjoying this advanced functionality and other features that the Meridian team would continue to add.

Plus it would be free for our visitors to download. As we learned from our first release, people may buy $4 lattes but they care about their dollars when it comes to apps.

Yesterday we released the Balboa Park guide on Meridian.

Now, if you want to find your way from the Air & Space Museum to the San Diego Zoo, or from the Prado Restaurant to the Museum of Man, you can find your way, step-by-step. Next steps will include adding location-aware audio and video content.

The Meridian app is available for free through the Android Market and the App Store.  You can start the process of building your own app here: http://www.meridianapps.com/

Intel’s new collection of stories, The Tomorrow Project: Best Selling Authors Describe Daily Life in the Future, is read according to an article on the BBC’s website today.

For more here’s a link to the the press release from Intel with video and links to podcasts of authors reading chapters.

Many of you are probably already familiar with the new IMLS initiative “Let’s Move.” To quote from the IMLS website “Let’s Move” “is a comprehensive initiative, launched by the First Lady Michelle Obama, dedicated to solving the problem of obesity within a generation, so that children born today will grow up healthier and able to pursue their dreams.”

More than 400 museums have already signed up to participate and I want to assure you I’m on board with this initiative.

I was just wondering though, if museums are going to help fight childhood obesity by incorporating physical activity into our programs, could someone ask the President if he would mind adding opportunities for children to improve their visual literacy into the President’s Challenge. ? That way we can ensure that the next generation of happy, healthy children who are coming into museums have a better understanding of the world’s unique cultural heritage?

Meanwhile I realize that, in terms of the physical fitness side, I am surely the pot calling the kettle black, but here’s a thought for parents. If you want your children to be physically fit AND enjoy going to museums a good way to achieve that goal is for your children to see you being physically active and enjoying museums.

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

I would like to welcome our newest Musematic contributor, Joaquin Ortiz, Digital Interpretation Manager at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. In that role, Joaquin is responsible for coordinating design, development, and evaluation of digital interactive exhibits and online exhibitions. He also manages MOPA’s educational outreach programs for senior citizens. He also has a background in digital media production, with an emphasis in documentary video.

As Joaquin is currently finishing his Master’s in Educational Technology at San Diego State, he comes to Musematic with a fresh perspective on the current state of the field, and I have been continually impressed by his passion for pursuing programs based on content (as opposed to falling into the “technology for technology’s sake” trap) as well as his ability to think outside of the box.

Welcome, Joaquin, and I’m glad you’re on board!