Im in Ur Museum Blogz

Very late AAM wrap up

2010-11-24T15:22:00.000-08:00

I meant to post something after AAM in LA this May. Oops. I had some amazing experiences and met a lot of excellent people, including some people I've only known online or as a name on a listserv.

I stayed at the very cool looking Moroccan themed hotel where the rooms were not actually as impressive as one might hope for the price. But it was cool looking and an experience. I roomed with the delightful Ms. Perian Sully. We were in walking distance of the conference, which took place the same week as the American Idol finals. I saw no famous people that I knew, alas. But it was really funny to compare/contrast the AAMers and the American Idol groupies. Not that there wasn't overlap.

The conference: I attended a variety of sessions, including some in marketing and volunteer management which are so far from my homebase of collections work that I felt really out of the loop, but it was interesting to be there. Honestly, I took away less from the sessions (though there were some great ones) than from my personal experiences. The conference took place during a time of great uncertainty for me - my university was making cuts the week I was away and I knew I was being hit, but I didn't know how hard. So, unfortunately, I allowed my anxiety to taint some of my interactions. But at the same time, I learned a great deal and got really great advice from museum professionals I admire and respect.

I presented as part of a panel on Moving Collections for Small Museums. I had a great panel with two lovely and talented women from two very different institutions. The panel was well attended and went fabulously. It was kind of thrilling to be going to THE conference in the museum field and get to be a presenter.

What I am most proud of, however, is my interactions with people. I am an introvert with what may be some low grade social anxiety. I have trouble talking to people. But the conference gives you an automatic link - professionally! I found a few people I could go up to and hang out with at events, I arranged dinner dates, but I also met people randomly and had great conversations. I was meeting people I knew through other people. I was, I discovered, networking. Maybe not very well, or very efficiently, but I was making connections with people.

My favorite moments of the conference were experiences I was able to have at field trips/events. There was an evening event at the Getty. I hung out with Perian and her tech-peeps (who I view with a certain amount of awe) for a while, and then went exploring a bit. The Getty had a da Vinci show. It was... a religious experience. You walk into the first room and there's this enormous statue. By Donatello. And it's the real statue. At this point, you know they're not fooling around. The next three rooms are pages from the sketch books. PAGES. FROM. THE. SKETCH. BOOKS. The man's writing is right in front of me. The man's hand made these amazing images on this very paper. I was filled with a sort of amazement and joy. I wanted to giggle a little. I might have.

The other experience was a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It was the next day, I think, after the Getty. And, wandering around the MJT, I had a very similar experience - not one of awe for da Vinci, but one of glee once I relented and let the absurdity/amazingness of the place wash over me. Just to explore and encounter the weird and wonderful was... wonderful.

The two venues are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but the end result was very much the same. It was fabulous.

The best session I attended at the conference proper was "Beyond the Shiny Object: Mission Driven Museum Technology Development." It was the last session of the conference and included Nina Simon, Shelley Bernstein, Beck Tench, and Bruce Wyman, who are all fabulous and energetic and full of ideas. The room was full of ideas and totally vibrant and inspiring. It was the perfect session to end the conference with.

My biggest mistake: Not bringing enough business cards. Rookie mistake.

Overall, I had a great time at the conference. I think I'm getting the hang of these things.

Gearing up for AAM 2010

2010-05-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

I'm excited because I'm headed off to the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums tomorrow. My schedule is simultaneously seeming quite full and full of gaps.

Especially exciting is the fact that I'm not just attending, I'm involved. I'll be hanging out at the table for the Committee on Museum Professional Training at the Marketplace of Ideas on Monday, talking about the transition from grad school to professional life. And on Tuesday, I'll be part of Heavy Lifting 101: Collections Moves for the Small Museum.

It's also been interesting to see the invitations for registrar specific special events come rolling in through the list-serv, and I've signed up for a few of those. And I'd like to nab tickets to another evening event or two - at the moment, I'm only signed up for a registrar event on Sunday and the emerging museum professional event on Monday (because it was cheap and I didn't know what the funding situation would look like).

And, while I'm at it, I think I'm going to be bringing along a few resumes. At this juncture, I know that my position will be "reduced" but how much I do not know. So I will be looking to see what sort of opportunities might be out there. If you know of an institution looking for an energetic collections manager/registrar/curator with an interest in technology and exhibit design, let me know!

See you in LA!

Personal Reflections on My Job

2010-04-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

I was thinking the other day about my job. My job is great. I've grown so much here. When I began this position, I was fresh faced, out of grad school, had never held a full time job in my life (because, you know, I'd been in school for all of it). I had never been in charge of the work of others and had never had real responsibility. So I was thrilled when I was offered the position.

And then tragedy struck. A deep personal tragedy - the kind that rips the fabric of your reality apart, slaps you in the face and then sews that fabric back up with gaping holes and mis-matched edges. I pushed my starting date back two weeks, dealt with what I could, and managed much of the rest those first months on the job. I did a lot of growing up and I did it so fast. So much faster than I would have liked. So the person I have become today, through facing that tragedy, from taking on the challenge of this job, from growing in a multitude of ways over the past few years is a very different person than I think I was when I started this blog in the throes of a Masters thesis.

But I meant to talk about my job. I'm a collections manager. More specifically, I'm a Preservation and Museum Specialist II, which technically mean that I'm assistant to a curator and need to have all my decisions checked. But that is more an issue for Museos Unite than here.

During my time so far I have contributed substantially to the establishment of a new museum with an existing collection. I have moved a museum collection. I have reconciled records, I have digitized records, I have photographed the collection, I have rehoused it, and I have been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And all this was only possible because I learned how to place myself in a position of authority, while guiding and teaching interns and volunteers how to work with collections. And I am learning how to maneuver my way through the many offices and various signatories of our parent institution.

I've had the opportunity to attend and present at two major conferences, with a third presentation coming up this May at AAM. The first two were great, and probably happened as a direct result of my having this blog and sticking my head up at a time when museums were just beginning to dip their toes in the water. When it started, this blog was relevant - to what was happening, to my thesis. Now, not so much. And that's why I'm really thrilled that my AAM presentation will be on the collections move that I did in my professional capacity.

But more than doing the job I set out to do, I have had the opportunity to learn so much more. I have developed a small exhibit and been a major part of tempering the academic-speak of another. I have learned how to work with vinyl, and plexiglass. I am deeply involved in the exhibit design process. I have arranged the objects within their cases for our latest exhibit. I make mounts. I maintain our online presence (although I admit that part is not so great). I attend to the front desk when we have no volunteers to do it for us.

And, you know what?, I love learning all of these new things. The exhibit stuff is great. I love making things happen, and I adore having conversations with visitors who are so into the topic that they can't stop talking about it. I love doing silly little projects. And I love the chance to grow.

But I'm worried. I'm deeply worried. Our parent institution is going through a severe budget crunch and an ax is going to fall somewhere. And, even though we've done really amazing things with surprisingly limited support, even though we've made great strides connecting to the community in a town where the town/gown curtain sometimes feels like it's made of iron, I'm very worried.

So I've been thinking about my job. It's been such an excellent opportunity for me, and I have grown so much, and accomplished many things. I mean, I've been at the beginning of a museum which has so much potential to be a catalyst in the area, and that's a rare opportunity. And it feels good to think that the little things I do every day, even the dull things (photo editing, I'm looking at you), have helped to make something good.

This feels like a farewell letter. I don't know if that's what it is. An ax is going to fall here soon, and I've been open with my supervisors that I would dearly like to find a job closer to my family - 2000 miles is tough. It is what it is. But I'm proud of what I've been a part of so far and feel ready for whatever my next step is going to be.

Wave-ering

2009-12-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

Oh what a clever pun. *cough*

Okay, so I got my Google Wave invite on Sunday, but didn't log in until this morning. Now that I've been on it for all of three hours, I can appreciate its usefulness, but I'm not overawed.

My initial perceptions are that it has two primary uses:

1. Collaboration. It's stated goal. Yeah, I think it's going to kick ass over a wiki (which I've never really gotten on board with) or slow collaboration like Google Documents. I can very easily imagine using this platform to collaborate on projects or conference presentations. It could be a fabulous back of house, exhibit and programming planning tool at larger, more wired institutions. It could be an awesome community outreach tool for the right institution with a very wired and motivated community to reach out to.

2 (a distant). Breaking news. Like twitter, but maybe more manageable? The recent Seattle manhunt offers an example. Not a huge use, but when it's important, it could be huge.

I don't know what I was expecting when I opened it up this morning. My first reaction was confusion. Then I watched some videos and visited the help pages to learn how to find public waves. The waves I searched for? Knitting and Museums. Because that's how I roll. So I saw what they looked like and ran in terror. Seems like a public wave really needs a strong structure/purpose to make it work. Folks need a goal, otherwise it's just a (slow) chat room.

Wave is not easily browse-able. It doesn't seem to be something you use casually. You need pre-existing contacts to wave with, if you want to stay out of the public wave fray.

One application I would like to use a wave type structure for is programming ideas. My museum is currently seeking wide input about our next round of programming. Our current platform is a Facebook discussion, which is not very well structured. A wave would be much, well, cooler and more effective. But the beta-type nature of the product, as well as the "new barrier" of it forbids that. And I'm unclear if waves embedded in blogs will allow non-wavers to contribute.

So this is my initial impression: Wave is super neat for collaboration among pre-existing communities, but won't be great for casual outreach for museums. Not that Wave ever claimed to be that. Subject to change, your mileage may vary. Because I've discovered that I'm not really an early adopter of these sorts of things. It took me a long time to get into the Twitter thing, and I held out from Facebook for years. If you love it, convert me. Why should I love it?

Multiple personality discord

2009-10-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

I just read Mike's post about holding two twitter accounts: one personal, one professional - and the incomplete comfort there is in doing that. And it really struck a chord.

Before I started this blog, I was just another museology grad student plodding along. Then suddenly I had this voice. And people I respected were talking back at me. And opportunities began to open up. Really, starting this blog has opened up so many doors for me as a museum professional and allowed me to engage with communities of people that I would not have otherwise.

But I keenly feel this personal/professional divide. I straddle it poorly. I have four blogs. Four. Plus two or three blogs I had agreed to contribute to and don't (sorry guys). I have this blog, my personal blog, my knitting blog, and my collections management blog. I maintain a personal facebook profile and one for my museum. I tweet for myself and for my museum. That's a lot of me, splattered all over the internet.

And my internet persona will not resemble what I am like if you ever meet me. I am very quiet, very introverted, very poor at conversation. Not until I know you personally (and maybe I have two-three shots of espresso in me) will I become bubbly and excitable. Unless we're talking about something about which I am passionate or consider myself an expert. I am one internet away from being a reclusive hermit.

But on the internet I consider myself pretty forthcoming. Probably too much so. I will tell you my life story if I think it's relevant. I manage to keep my personal self out of my museum's online presence, for the most part. But here it gets blurred. Because when I began this blog, I wasn't really fully truly expecting anyone to notice it. So my tone has always been very personal. Frankly, I prefer to type as I think (so there are a lot of conjunctions, have you noticed?) and I do fairly minimal editting.

And twitter. If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am VERY rarely twittering about the sorts of things I blog about here. Twitter is primarily a place where I spout off whatever is on my mind - and it often has to do with yarn or caffeine. And it is usually highly inane. I'd say about a third of my followers are Museo-related folks who seem to put up with it. A handful are knitters, and a handful are people I actually know. Although, for me, actually know includes people who I have never met in person but who are friends on my personal blog.

It's a weird dynamic. And I do feel the pull. So, yeah. It's an interesting age to live in, where we have so many ways to express ourselves and so many chances to recreate ourselves.

IMLS calls the bloggers

2009-09-17T14:07:00.001-07:00

Or rather, we dial into a conference call. Today I participated (well, I use the term lightly, and you'll see why in a bit) in a conference call with other bloggers and the IMLS. I'd gotten an email invitation for the call back in *checks email* mid August, then with dates/time in early September.

The IMLS wanted to discuss their most recent publications; my initial assumption is that they wanted to sort of advertise the publications, which is totally fair, and good on them for connecting in with us internet dwellers. So I printed off the reports, glanced at them, and promptly shoved them to the back of my to-do pile. Which means they never got read. Which means my active participation in the call was very low. The publications seem interesting, and I'm interested in reading the one on 21st Century Skills and the one on the future of libraries and museums (.pdfs)... someday. And the others seem like really interesting evaluations of programs and partnerships.

But here's my impressions of the call: It was fine. It was neat to be invited (thanks IMLS!), but I didn't get a whole heck of a lot out of it. I hadn't read the publications, so I was hoping for other, more lively bloggers to carry the conversation and make things interesting. And there was some of that. But the call started off with the fine folks at IMLS giving overviews of the publications and making some announcements. Then they opened it up for questions and were met with... crickets. Until Kevin of Library Preservation stepped in helped kick start a conversation. But, as far as I could tell, only three bloggers (Kevin and myself included) had called in. And I hadn't even planned to do so yesterday (see not doing my homework, above).

Here's what I would like to see next time: Rather than a sort of show and tell, which I felt was kind of what happened this time (partly our/my fault for not being proactive and ready for a conversation), have conference calls around one subject, or focused around one publication/topic area. Before having the call, follow up the initial email with a list of some sort - I'm not sure whether main points, potential conversation questions, or provoking statements would be best - but something to help fire up and focus potential participants. But don't stick to those bullets - if the participants are quiet, like we were today, use them as jumping off points.

Also, and this is very important, have everyone on the call introduce themselves. I desperately wanted to know who I was talking with. I think there were 5 or 6 IMLS folks (who were introduced and I completely failed to keep track of) and just the three of us bloggers.

Finally, and maybe the IMLS is going to do this but I'm posting this about three hours after the fact and they haven't had the chance to yet, send out an email to the participants/invitees offering a follow up from their point of view. Because I'm curious if they got what they wanted or not.

Frankly, I would like to see more of this. Especially if there was some way to focus the conversation. I feel like the "Here's everything we've got: Any questions?" approach was too broad. I think the IMLS has a good idea here; it's an excellent way to harness the thoughts and voices of people who are below the executive level in museums and libraries (since it seems like high ranking folks are the ones involved in the face to face discussions IMLS and other similar orgs occasionally hold). Thanks IMLS, for putting a voice on your organization for those of us there today.

Talkin' Museum Studies Blues

2009-08-12T13:51:00.001-07:00

There's been a lot of talk about museum studies lately on the blogs I read lately. The first three links are articles suggesting ways to make the museum field more diverse, mellow, and profitable. Straight up? I don't like any of them. Newcurator suggests having a job guarantee from programs, more or less. Elizabeth Merritt suggests that museums cut it out with the museum studies grads and work with local schools and programs to cultivate talent. I'm not so much against this, and Nina Simon points out that there are places where this has been a successful model. Phil Katz's post, while meant to be contentious, hit me in the gut. My initial reaction is the same as the first commentator's. Katz asserts that the way to solve the problem of the underpaid, unhappy women in the museum field is easy: Hire more men! Because men get paid more, so they'll bring up the pay for the women. And, sure, some men get paid a lot for museum work. But that's no solution, even if it worked.

So: The first three links at the top think that we should quit hiring museum studies grads, quit hiring women, and that museum studies programs shouldn't train everyone who wants training (if I may simplify and cherry pick each entry, which I will).

The fourth link, from koko500 (who I've only just discovered), begins with a personal reflection on the above conversations and asserts that what's important is generating PASSIONATE museum professionals. The final link up top is a post by Leslie Madsen-Brook takes up an angle from the conversation: How do you get "professional development" when your institution can't afford to send you to fancy conferences and you're not paid enough to fund yourself? One answer: Social Media.

And I bet you there are other voices and opinions out there to find on this topic. But let's talk museum studies for the moment. Let me, as I am wont to do, shoot from the hip on this one.

Let me, like Koko, explain my experiences with museum studies: I began my program in 2005. The only real museum experience I'd had before that was working in the gift shops of a couple of art museums. I thought I wanted to do into exhibits and education. Knowing I would need money, I contacted the archy collections department at the Burke Museum (since I had a degree in archy) to see if they hired students. They did. I started the first week of school. I'm not sure I had ever been behind the scenes in a museum before that. So there's my baseline. I went in pretty much blind.

After two years working in the archy department, completing a couple of internships, and gaining a wide breadth of knowledge through my coursework - oh, and writing that pesky little thesis that spurred this blog - I left my museum studies program feeling like I could do just about anything. And, through the network of contacts that came built in with the program, I found the job I have now. In fact, I graduated June of 2007 and was offered the job in July. The fact that this job is precisely the kind of job I wanted, but had not expected to get, made it even more spectacular. And it's not what I thought I wanted back in September of 2005.

For me, going through a graduate program was the right thing to do. Others have had to work harder to find a job. Others have found that the museum field is not what is going to make them happy in life.

My program was mostly female. It was mostly white. It was mostly women under 30. The program was in the throes of expansion. Two or three years before my class, the program had about 8 students each year. My year was 25. And the number of applications has only increased since then, and the program has begun to adapt to the larger classes. Only half of my class finished their degree within the two years of the program. Some still haven't completed the thesis portion of the degree. Some have museum jobs despite that.

It's a competitive field. We know that. We know that the money's not great. Or anyone who bothers to think about what they're investing in when pursuing a degree will know that. But lots of fields are competitive now. And lots of qualified people are fighting tooth and nail to find a job. So, yeah, the picking might seem slim. But it's been that way for a while, hasn't it?

So what's my point? Well, that's the trouble with this blog, is the whole shooting from the hip aspect.

I guess what I wonder is: If the problem is with diversity in museum staff, is the problem with the museum studies program? Or is the problem with our society's tendency to put barriers to museums? Limited hours, hard to get to, high admission prices. Not in all cases, of course, but many. And those barriers turning away some people who might like to attend otherwise. And then there's the less tangible barriers of places not being comfortable for people in all walks of life - being very quiet, or white walled, or having more security guards than patron.

If the problem is with salaries, is it the fault of a glutted job market where we'll take what we're offered because we love the field anyway, or is it the fault of the chronic underfunding of cultural institutions?

Me, I don't know the answers. I'm not sure I have a suggestion. But here's what I think:

- I don't believe that museum studies programs should limit admission based on the job outlook in their area. Admission is based on merit and what the program can serve.

- I don't believe the way to increase staff for museum employees is to hire more men because the men will get paid more and increase the averages.

- I do believe that there are many paths to the museum world, for people of all different backgrounds, of all different educational levels.

- But I also believe some of those paths are harder than others.

- And, yes, I believe that museums could do more to facilitate progress along those paths.

- I believe that the museum job market will always be competitive.

- I believe that it's a good thing that the job market will be competitive because it means that people love museums and that museums will get the best employees they can find.

- I believe that, for me, I took the best path I knew how and it was the right one for me. Even if I am a white, female, underpaid museum employee with less access to professional development than I would like.

Here's a cookie for making it to the end.

Meaty Metadata

2009-06-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Help me, Internet, you're my only hope. I'm trying to wrap my brain around metadata. I mean, I get metadata. Data about your data. That's rad. But how to implement it?

Background! I'm preparing for a photography/object digitization project. I'm researching metadata and imaging standards and trying to learn photo editing and, well, how to use the DSLR camera the museum has. Frankly, my brain is swimming.

Now, the photos will be uploaded into PastPerfect, which prompts for Dublin Core Data, so that's easy. But those photos will be the access photos, not the masters. For the master photos (and other versions) how do I associate metadata? Do I create an excel file to keep in a folder with the files? Is there some super secret way to attach the data to the images themselves?

Another issue that I'm running into is with file type and conversion. Everything I read says: TIF!! But my camera (a Nikon D60) takes uncompressed photos in the proprietary .nef format and the Nikon program (which will convert the .nefs to .tifs) seems to only convert at 300 ppi (for a 3872x2592 pixel image). Maybe that's the max ppi that the D60 can take photos at? But right now I'm thinking that I'll keep the .nef, make a submaster .jpg for cropping and editing and make an access .jpg (640x420ish? 300 ppi) for PastPerfect. I don't have photoshop. I do have Gimp, but that doesn't work for 16 bit color, only 8 bit.

Final goal of the project is to create nice quality images which can be used for possible digital exhibit, images for possible web access, and images for the database. Database images, however, are the only immediate application of the project. Everything else is out there in space.

Help? Advice? Pointing to resources which lay out implementation in very simple language (I've already got a ton of resources on my desk, but many are almost a decade old)?

I take it back

2009-05-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

And by "it," I mean most of what I said about The Bigger Picture. I had a gut reaction based on outdated information and a homepage that I didn't care for.

I've since subscribed to the Bigger Picture and it's quickly becoming one of the blogs that I most look forward to reading. The integration of photographs with posts on all topics keeps it lively and interesting. There's some humor and lots of history.

So.. my bad.

Go Team Digital Preservation!

2009-05-06T09:50:00.001-07:00

via @musebrarian on the twitter.

Participatory Design: Kicking it old school

2009-04-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

So the words "Participatory design" are running though my head quite a bit lately. Probably because I'll be hanging out at Nina Simon's Participatory Design workshop on Friday afternoon. I've been thinking about it and what participatory design means for my museum.

My museum isn't even off the ground yet. We're out of the gate, heading onto the runway, but we don't expect lift off till September (which in this awkward metaphor, means opening to the public). So it's been hard for me to think about participatory design, because we're not even open yet.

Until it hits me. D'uh. The museum has been attempting to design things through participation, we've just been doing it old school. See, we've been hosting a series of discussions about the museum - we have a speaking interpreting each main point in the mission statement and then an extended discussion about what attendees would like to see in terms of programing. It's not elegant, and it requires attendees to come on site, but we are seeking direction from the community. And the advisory council, which sets our programming goals, is made up of a cross section of university and community members - more limited perhaps, but still a relatively progressive model, I think.

It's not a crowd curated show, it's not a well defined process yet, but it is a new museum attempting to serve the community beyond the campus in a town where campus and community sometimes butt heads. Participation, in my view, hasn't been stellar from the non-campus community, but there are some, and their voices are important. And the people who come are invested. So I think that's pretty neat.

I'm really looking forward to the workshop tomorrow, and seeing what sort of ideas come out of it. We want to be an open museum here, we want to be innovative and transparent, it's just a matter of getting there.

A comment on Smithsonian Blogs

2009-04-14T08:09:00.001-07:00

The Smithsonian blogs. Eye Level is perhaps the best known of the blogs, and possibly the oldest. I've always found Office of Exhibits Central most interesting, even though posts are rare. And most of the others, I've not looked at.

A funny thing happened recently; I find myself on the press release email list for Smithsonian web based initiatives. This makes some sense; after all, here I am blogging about them. The most recent release is an announcement for The Bigger Picture blog, "which presents an inside look at the Smithsonian’s photography collections and invites audiences to engage in an online discussion about photography’s powerful impact on our world." So I hop on over to check it out. I am immediately annoyed by the layout. There's a small photo and a short paragraph before a jump, or a cut, or whatever you prefer to call the link which hides most of the content. This bugs me. I don't find it good for browsing; I don't want to click all those links, and then go back and clink more links.

As with the other Smithsonian blogs, I find the information and images presented on the blog to be intriguing. But I still feel like the real human voice is being hidden behind layers of editing. I could be wrong; maybe the Smithsonian is relaxing their approval structures, and I just prefer the hyper-personal voice for a blog (or something between the institutionally edited and the OMG LULZ!!!1!! voices, anyway). But it just feels disingenuous. [Edited to Add: Catherine Shteynberg sets me straight in the comments: Authors are not edited! Way to go, Smithsonian. I recall seeing a presentation about a different .si blog which showed a very layered process for creating content and tends to color my thinking about the way things are done. Then again, my biases are at least two years out of date.] I get the same sense looking at the comments; it almost feels like the various authors of the blog are required to post comments on the other posts. Only a few comments struck me as coming from individuals outside the project. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just strikes me funny when I think of blogs as a way to engage community and stakeholders outside the institution.

So, while I commend the Smithsonian for pursuing these avenues to disseminate information which might otherwise not be shared with a potentially large audience, I still have my misgivings about the way it's being presented. Oh. And here's a link to the press release: Click me.

Woah. "Senate Amendment to Bar Museums From Any Economic Recovery Funds"

2009-02-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

From an email from AAM via the RCAAM

Senate Amendment to Bar Museums From Any Economic Recovery Funds
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has introduced an amendment to prohibit any funds in the economic stimulus bill from going to museums.

The language of the amendment, (Amendment No. 175, as filed) is, "None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas."

This amendment may be offered as early as Wednesday, February 4. Call your Senators TODAY and urge them to vote NO on the Coburn "Limitation of Funds Amendment No. 175." To reach your Senators, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Senators' offices.

Please call today!

----------------

I am not entirely certain how museums, zoos and aquaria are lumped in with casinos and golf courses, but I certainly hope this amendment is defeated!

Checking in

2009-01-27T22:36:00.000-08:00

Funny how life interferes with the blogging. Well, perhaps not interferes. I've shifted my main blogging efforts to my personal blog, my knitting blog, and my collections management blog. I'd like very much to maintain this blog as well, but it seems to fall increasingly by the wayside (no updates since SEPTEMBER? inexcusable).

Being actively (oh so very actively) employed with a looming deadline for a major project cuts significantly. I'm not even doing so well on the collections management blog now that I'm packing an entire collection for a move in less than two months. Oy, that came up fast.

I'm going to make an effort to think about this blog more and see what I can do with it that might be valuable and interesting. Nattering on about "oh I have too many blogs to blog at" is not valuable nor is it interesting. And there are plenty of smart, dedicated people on the web saying smart, insightful things about museums and digital technology. So, exactly what sort of niche can I fill? Reports from the frontline of working at a small museum with almost no funding and trying to maintain a web presence? Stories of a first-time museum professional trying to make her way in the wide world of museums? Pointing and linking to things that I think are interesting and relate in some fashion to museum and technology? Hmmm.... Ideas? Suggestions?

Twitter, Flickr, and Blogging: Using Free Online Applications to Facilitate Visitor Feedback

2008-09-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I was part of a panel at AASLH about facilitating visitor feedback using technology. The other speakers focused on technology in the gallery, especially the potential of cellular phones. I spoke about using free online applications, focusing on blogging, Twitter, and Flickr. I'm posting my powerpoint slides here for your perusal, along with some narration to give you a better idea of what I spoke about. I gloss over a lot of what I assume readers of this blog might know, but am happy to elaborate if desired.

Go below the jump for the rest of the presentation. (Click on any slide to embiggen)

Today there are so many online applications that it can quickly become confusing.

That's why I am going to speak about only three kinds of applications: Blogging, where Blogger and Wordpress are two popular platforms; Microblogging, which includes such applications as Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk; and Photo Sharing, where I will talk about flickr.

So these three applications all have 4 main things in common. They are free and online, otherwise I wouldn't be speaking about them today. They all rely on user generated content - that's content provided by you. And they all have self selected audiences - no one has to interact with a museum on the internet, so those who do have chosen to for some reason.

(Slide which provides a definition/overview of what blogging is - essentially I read the slide and elaborated slightly)

So this is an example of a museum blog. This is the blog which I maintain for my institution. As you can see, it's also a subject specific blog, dealing primarily with Collections Management. This is a screenshot of a semi-regular feature called "Whatzit?" where I feature an object, or an extreme close up of the object, offer some minimal information on the object such as that it is metal, and challenge my readers to guess what it is.

The primary method of receiving feedback through a blog is by comments which readers leave on your post. This is the bottom of the post in the previous slide. I had two people leave comments guessing what the object is. It's a fluting iron, by the way. So, just two comments, and one of those comments came from a friend of mine.

So, if you're blogging, how can you faciliate feedback? (You do the things on this slide.) By showing your presence and your interest in what people are saying to you through comments on the blogs, you are demonstrating that you value the feedback, which may lead to continued commenting and interaction. But, in general, you should expect fairly low levels of feedback to a blog. Nina Simon, who writes the excellent museum tech blog Museum 2.0, reports that she has an approximately .5% comment rate. Which means that people may be reading your content, but they might not be talking back to you. Think of it as a large lecture course at a University where lots of people might show up, but very few will speak up.

If blogging is a lecture course, microblogging is a seminar course. The brief updates and following structure, together with the direct response function creates a more informal, interactive environment. Today I'll be focusing on Twitter.

This is a screen shot of the Twitter profile of the Renton History in Museum in Renton, WA. The museum has begun experimenting with various online applications in the past couple of months, and I think they're doing a great job on Twitter. You can see that the "About" in the sidebar has all the pertinent information about the institution, and you can also see how many people are following Renton History's tweets, and how many people Renton History is following. You can also see that Renton History is tweeting about all kinds of things - about a program, about stories of regional interest, and is participating in the direct @ response.

On Twitter, feedback is mainly in the form of @ responses. And this story demonstrates the power of direct interaction. The user whose tweet is shown here had worked within eyeshot of the Renton History Museum for some time, but had never visited. One way or another, they ended up communicating on Twitter and the user came to visit the museum, something he may not have considered doing before. The museum has made a personal connection through Twitter.

(This is how you can facilitate feedback on Twitter.) By using Twitter you can expect relatively low levels (only 38 people are currently following Renton History's tweets) of higher quality interaction.

The final application I will be speaking about is Flickr. Any one who has used Flickr knows that it is more than just photosharing. Using flickr you can (do the things listed on this slide, which I explained).

This is a screen shot from Renton History Museum's flickr account. You can see that the photo in question (of a restored coal car being brought into the museum) is tagged, put in a set, and has a description.

Here is an example of a history organization using a group to facilitate interaction. You can see that there are more than 50 members in the group who have contributed over 1300 photos to the group photo pool. To me this indicates a real interest and motivation on the part of flickr members to be involved. You can also see that there is a message board at the bottom where anyone can begin a discussion. You can also see that the message board hasn't been used in three months.

(I explain briefly what the Commons is.) This is a photo from the Powerhouse Museum in Australia and the comments left on the post. Some comments are just marveling that people in the past went hiking in full dress, while others, notably the second from the bottom, adds more information to the photo. The Powerhouse Museum leaves the last comment, thanking the commenter for adding to the information about the photo.

There are three main kinds of feedback that can be expected on flickr (see slide), and to facilitate feedback, you should get involved and be active (see slide).

So how might you get started with all of this? Just do it!

AASLH 2008 Day 2

2008-09-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to sunny Rochester!

Day two started out in a session updating everyone on the Connecting to Collections initiative, which was interesting. I was truly hoping to hear anecdotes about success stories, but that was not the focus. Instead the focus was on updates about the program rather than its impact.

The morning plenary guest speak was Lynn Sherr, of ABC news and multiple books. She spoke fascinatingly about women's history, the history of women's history, and Susan B. Anthony. She was an excellent speaker and I was tempted to buy her book and get it signed as a gift for a relative.

I then skipped the luncheon, the meeting of the membership, and the silent auction, returning for the afternoon concurrent session. I attended a session where a conservator, a curator, and an exhibits person discussed issues of use and object presentation. It was an engaging session, with a lot of back and forth and interesting issues brought forward.

I then attended the evening reception at the Strong Museum of Play. This was excellent. This is the part of the entry where I start to get excited about today. The Strong Museum is Really Really Big. It's awesome in the awe sense of the word, especially if you love children's things and child like wonder. I was almost giddy when I walked into freaking Sesame Street.

I took advantage of behind the scenes tours of the collections space (15,000 square feet!!!) and of the exhibits construction/planning space. The collections space was a-freaking-mazing. Huge and with beautiful storage units and very interesting collections. I have some really remarkable images, but not uploaded. Expect a photo post in the future to make up for this.

Right now it is getting late and I want to run through my presentation for tomorrow one more time. I'll be putting that up on the blog later as well... eventually.

AASLH 2008 Day 1

2008-09-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

Phew! Day one of the annual meeting of the American Association of State and Local History is over. It's being held in lovely downtown Rochester where it is surprisingly difficult to eat dinner after 8 pm for under $10 within walking distance of the hotel (assuming you are a young woman walking alone in an unfamiliar city after dark... so we're talking 2-3 blocks in any direction).

I began my morning by attending a session on Using Digital Collections to Expand Your Audiences. It was nothing new or exciting. In first, the first speaker was extremely underwhelming and thought it was wonderful that a new image shows up everytime you load a certain webpage. One gentleman spoke about how easy it is to make video in house. His was the most interesting of the session. The other two gentlemen spoke about their specific archive digitization projects which, while interesting, were not really helpful or inspiring.

At the keynote address, I sat in the back of the room and knit on my sock. This is not disrespectful; I do actually listen better when my hands are occupied. Two other knitters spotted me and joined in, one even returning to her room to get her knitting. The keynote speaker, Bernice Johnson Reagon, was really wonderful. And she managed to get several hundred historians, archivists, librarians, and museum folk to sing along in a call and response. I took video. But the hotel wireless is slow, so I cannot upload it to prove this to you.

Second session of the day addressed Museum Studies Programs and the Future of the Profession. Unimpressed. Had been hoping for something interesting, something new to chew on. But I heard about how the Cooperstown and GW programs work and that there are too many people with Master's Degrees applying for too few jobs and that there are too few people with the kind of experience necessary to be the director of medium and large institutions.

Final session of the day went Beyond Construcction: Transformational Small Museums Building Projects. Four museums build and renovate. Very interesting stuff. Had been hoping for information on packing and moving collections, which was not the main focus. Nonetheless, it was the most interesting session I attended all day.

I have to say, it feels good to be among other museum professionals. While my job is an excellent experience, I am working alone among non-museum professionals, and certainly, non-museum generalists. I was even able to strike up a conversation about blogs during one of the "networking breaks." Ice cream was provided.

Visitor Feedback on YOUR blog

2008-08-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

I will soon be part of a panel at AASLH on visitor feedback and new technologies, so I would like to get your feedback and experiences. If you are a major player in your institution's blog and/or online presence, please consider responding to some or all of the following queries (in comments or email to lynnbethke at gmail dot com).

So tell me, what kind of visitor feedback do you (or your institution) receive through your blog and other online ventures (tagging ventures, twitter, facebook, and so on)? Do you solicit feedback through your online presence, or accept it passively? Do you acknowledge feedback in some way? Do you address this feedback internally? Externally? Do you mind if I get in contact with you to learn more?

Your help is appreciated, and any presentations I develop for this panel will be shared on this blog.

Shifting gears

2008-08-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

I just got back from two beautiful weeks of vacation and returned to a fairly full inbox and about 300 unread museum blog and museum-related blog feeds. In my mailbox at work was the summer issue of History News, the magazine of the American Association of State and Local History. And in the magazine, in the History Bytes column (get it? it's for web issues!), is the recent dilemma "To Blog or Not to Blog." Blog awareness has been here for sometime. I feel like I was able to produce my thesis at a point just as the blog wave was breaking on the museum shore, which is fortunate timing for a work like I produced. A thesis on blogging today would likely take a very different form, as there would be a great deal more material to work with, and a greater amount of material published on the subject.

But I am not writing a thesis anymore, so my devotion and fervor about blogging is beginning to fade. Don't get me wrong, I still think blogs are great, and really love when institutions speak with a personal voice and take you behind the scenes. I continue to hope that my museum's blog (which I write, not as often as I should) would be one I'd like to read.

No matter how this sounds, it is no eulogy. This was meant to be official notice that I am shifting gears on this blog. I'm widening up the focus. This has been happening for a while, but I'd not acknowledged it. For the time being, I am going to post as the mood strikes me and see what develops.

Tag!

2008-08-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Museum just launched online collections and has a tagging game you can play!

The idea is vaguely familiar... hmm....

The game is not as exciting and addicting as the Google Image Labeler which I played compulsively for a couple days back when it was launched. But the thank you video was definitely worth the registration, even if I only tagged 2 objects with 10 tags. I also appreciated the registration form telling me that my username was awesome (which, I assume, is not a judgment on how excellent I am, but that my username is unique). I will be looking forward to seeing how this works for the Brooklyn Museum.

A nice bonus of the tagging game is that it requires you to take a closer look at the art than you might otherwise, like this neat-o necklace that I tagged.

And I may even return to play again.

Heads up

2008-07-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Miss Griffis, the museum blog which posts letters written from a WWI doctor written to a woman who, over the course of the letters, becomes his wife, has reached the end of WWI! The letters are now dated after the Armistice and it is very interesting reading.

Digital Museum Webinar: Emerging Trends in Technology

2008-05-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Pre-webinar thoughts: I am pretty excited for this final installment of the webinar. I hope to hear about new approaches which are cheap to do and easy to access/implement. Even if they're not, it's good to hear from folks on the cutting edge. I'm hoping not to hear too much about Second Life, as I think anyone with a background reading this blog will recall that I am not a believer in the potential of SL as a widely effective tool. And this time I remembered to bring my big headphones! Hooray!

Post-webinar thoughts: Overall this has been a good experience. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this through the EMP fellowship.

I was a little let down by today's session, but only because I am, apparently, much more aware of emerging technologies for museums than most. As such, my notes get a little loopy. What I would have loved to hear more about is what's around the corner. Is it geotagging? Geocaching? Really, it's probably all about anything you can do with a cell phone, and you can do just about anything with those (unless you're rocking the Nokia 1100 like I am). I heard a lot about what I already know about, but I suppose I should have expected that. Learned a little more about the Brooklyn Museum's Click which sounds awesome, and a little more about open content, which is all over but not getting recognized enough and exploited perhaps.

Definitely an interesting experience overall, and it's very cool to be able to hear from/interact with national speakers from the comfort of your own office chair (or discomfort if you happen to be sitting in an office chair older than you are, like I am).

Mod: Phyllis Hecht, Assoc Program chair, Museum Studies, John Hopkins.
Topics: Social networking, user generated content, open source

Social Networking: Larry Swiader (holocaust museum), Michael Jenkins
Leveraging existing conversations. Defines social networking. This is old hat, I yawn. But I guess I'm not your average attendee, what with this blog and all.

Purposes: Breaking down barriers and stuff. Holocaust museum has a facebook site to introduce staff to students and energize genocide prevention program. H&M also has social network to increase brand awareness.

Presenter debate: Where does YouTube fall? Social networking or user gen. content? Both!

OpenSocial for apis. iGoogle widgets. - I would not have holocaust widgets in my igoogle page, my igoogle page is for happy things. But, it does distribute content, message, okay. Widgets have potential, I can see that. Larry says they must be overtly branded to attract visitors who may be transient.

Potential pitfalls: brand consistency (depends on your institution I think), total transparency (yes), measurement (yep, this is hard).

Larry responds to comment deletion. They do it, but limit it to patently offensive stuff - leave controversial to stimulate conversation, hope that community will be self regulating.

Michael (from the Met) takes over: now shows us ArtShare. Developed by the lovely and extremely talented Shelley Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum, then opened it up to other museums

User-generated content: Matt MacArthur (NMAH), Michael Jenkins
Recent explosion of tools to create and promote this sort of thing. Matt explains Web 2.0 to us.

Why invite this? Connections with interests, experience, with each other. Museum facilitation leads to better visitor experience.

What are some ways this has been done? Tagging/folksonomy (powerhouse). Inviting user comments. Discussion/chat (ScienceBuzz). Blogs (walker). "Build your own gallery/collection" (art gallery of ontario). Mix in user-created material. Building around user contributed material (museum of london). Dude sounds tired, no excitement coming through. Or is it just me?

Challenges: Unexpected results (what, no comments? If I build it, will they not come?). perceived risks and challenges to authority (it's the FEAR!!!). time.

Michael: History of user generated content. 2005 ArtMobs. MOMA responded, the MET responded, restored authority but in a different way, and it works okay. MOMA podcasts rate above SmartMobs podcasts. SmartMobs has no recent updates - demonstrates issues of sustainability.

Today: Brooklyn Museum's Click. Crowd curation. Shelley rocks us all again. Sounds just totally awesome. Maybe I should participate. Let's put the curators out of work!

Open Source Software: Robert Stein, IMA
software with code made public which allows users to use/modify/adapt software.

Museums have specific set of complex needs in software and NO MONEY. Examples: Pachyderm. Museums don't depend on competing with peers, almost the opposite. Museums software industry not lucrative. Museums use software designed for other sectors, often, and pay $$$$ for integration software. Therefore OpenSource stuff has lots of potential for us. Pooling of resources will lead to better software.

To succeed: Create standards for rep. of data, for specs of functionality. Example: Open Collection. Need commitments from museums to get software companies to support this. Encouraging vendors to work with this/support this. Bonuses: OSS needs tech and non-tech to come together and produce a beautiful baby software. Example: Steve project.

Open Content: Susan Chun (consultant)
Creative work, under copyright. Broadly accessible and freely distributed. Terms define restrictions. Okay, so we're talking more or less about Creative Commons, I think. Leads to low cost automated distribution. I think this is a good thing. But I can imagine the FEAR that's out there. Types of content: images, texts, audio, video. Philosophical/policy questions and tactical questions should be asked. Pros and cons.

iTunesU, Flickr's Commons, providing teachers resources.

Wrap up discussions:
Is there a magic bullet to make the audience respond? Nope, none, that we seem to know.

Greg Stevens from AAM makes some closing remarks: asks for topics for future webinars. Thanks us all.

More job hunting advice

2008-04-10T12:40:00.001-07:00

But not from me this time. This blog post by Meredith Farkas talks about finding a library job, but has good sensible advice.

How to get a job in museums. Part 2: Applying and Interviewing

2008-04-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

So the last post was more about preparing to be a candidate for a museum job. Let's get down to brass tacks; applying, interviewing, and getting yourself a nice cushy museum job. There may be some redundancy with Part 1, but if there is, then it bears repeating.

1. Apply. Apply early and often. Apply for jobs at the edge of your comfort zone; this is a competitive field and more applications=more possible jobs. I have a good friend who applied for a position that she was at the very edge of her comfort zone, was offered the job, and is now learning a great deal in the position. What I'm trying to tell you is that the risk can be worth it.

2. Customize your cover letters. You should know this by now. Even if you have some template paragraphs, be very careful when you create new letters: please remember to name the correct museum in your letter. If you don't and discover it later, you will be mortified. And, again, get people to look over your letter and help you refine it.

3. Wait patiently and apply for even more positions.

Interviewing:

4. If you're interviewing for a job across the country or for a job down the hall, chances are you're going to have a phone interview at one point or another. I believe that I had about 6 phone interviews (I had one literally at the other end of the country, and one from the third floor while I was one the first), so I will relate my technique for feeling confident on the phone.

- Dress nicely. Yes, I know this feels silly, especially if you are interviewing at home, but I felt so much more put together and ready to interview when I was dressed nicely, and especially when I was wearing professional shoes. Your mileage may vary.

- Have your materials at hand. I had a copy of my resume, a copy of the job listing, a sheet of paper with my notes and questions on it, and a blank sheet of paper to take notes on in front of me when I had phone interviews at home. Also, have a glass of water in front of you, in case you need it.

- Smile. A smile comes through in your voice. Again, it seems hokey, but I think it really makes a difference. Plus, smiling releases endorphins in the brain to make you happy!

- Take your time. I rush like a banshee in interviews and it's a problem of mine which leads to giving less than concrete examples when answering questions. So take your time - if you need a moment to think, tell your interviewer that you need to think for a moment. It's acceptable to take a short moment to formulate a response (although, again, I stress that I am not an HR person nor do I play one on teevee).

- Listen for cues. Good phone interviewers will make little noises to show that they are listening. My worst phone interview was with someone who made no little noises at all, which gave me no cues to play off of. Of course, since you're on the phone, this is can be difficult, therefore, your mileage may vary.

- Thank the interviewer. Follow up with a thank you note or email. I tend toward email, but a paper note probably makes a better impression.

5. Interviewing in person. Same as interviewing on the phone, but without all the paper spread out in front of you. I can speak less to this portion as I only had a couple of in-person interviews, but there's a lot of good information out there.

6. Be prepared. Know about the institution you are applying for. Check out the 990s of the institution on GuideStar.org. Get nosy. This is a place you may become intimately familiar with.

7. Be prepared. No matter which interview format you have, there are going to be certain questions. What attracted you to this position? What are your strengths? Weaknesses? When responding to the weaknesses question, spin it in a positive light; "I would say my greatest weakness is my confidence when speaking in public, but I've been learning techniques to improve my technique." Or something like that. Show your assets (desire to improve) when discussing your liabilities.

8. Thank them. I said this before, but I'll say it again. Thank your interviewer. Send a thank you email. Send a thank you note. Keep your name in their mind.

9. Follow up calls. Now, I will admit that not once did I call to follow up on an interviewer. But I've since decided that calling to follow up is like the secret test of interviewing that no one tells you about, eveer. So, if a place tells you they will get back to you by X date, and you don't hear from them, call them the following business day to check in.

Waiting, part 2.

10. Wait patiently (with the exception of polite follow-up calls). In this day and age, many museums lack the staff to tell you that you didn't get the job. This will frustrate you, perhaps even infuriate you, but this is the way it is. You may get an email rejection, you may get a letter of rejection if you interviewed, but very possibly not. Find a coping mechanism and keep applying for more jobs. If they do want to offer you a job, you will hear from them.

And that's as much insight as I am prepared to give. There is a lot of information out there about negotiating salary, benefits, etc, but I don't feel I have any depth of knowledge in these areas, save for two nuggets of information:
1. Look at the low end of the salary range, not the high one. And the salary may be non-negotiable.
2. In lieu of salary negotiating, negotiate about fringe benefits - vacation time, flexible scheduling, etc. Museums may have more ability to bend on these points than on that sticky fiscal point.

Coming up sometime: Part 3, or How I Got the Museum Job I Wanted

Three recommendations

2008-04-03T16:16:00.001-07:00

No, it's not deja vu - I just posted this over at ye olde collections blog and it fits here too.

--------------------------------------------
Do you like reading this blog? Wanna find some more museum-y type blogs to read? Here's a couple that I'm really digging right now:

Curator's Corner. From the Wm. McKinley Presidential Library & Museum written by Curator Kim Kenney. Very chatty and a great look into the variety of projects Ms. Kenney is involved in.

The Bowers Museum Collection Blog. Profiles one object each week with really excellent information and great photos. Very interesting stuff.

Smithsonian's Office of Exhibits Central. A really remarkable look behind the scenes of how exhibits are built. Posting can be erratic, but worth adding to your feed reader when they do post.
-----------------------------

I love the blogs that give you a glimpse of something different, something unusual. I'm especially impressed by Office of Exhibits Central and wish they would post more.

AAM Digital Museum Webinar 3: Online Learning and Education

2008-04-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

Really looking forward to this webinar. Should be interesting. I forgot my giant over-the-ear headphones at home, so will be using my earbuds.

Yeouch! My earbuds apparently have some kind of higher preset volume than the other headphones. Am frantically messing with volume settings. No luck.

After notes: I like these sessions, but it begins to feel very frantic when I'm trying to listen, read a slide, a chat box, and liveblog it. I wouldn't take anything away, but it's a lot of multitasking at one time. My brain is full.

Notes below the jump

NOTES:
Question 1: How is online learning implemented by museums?
Deb Howes, MOMA: Both museums and the internet focus on Information and Visitors. The internet, however, attracts a more diverse audience than museums can hope to manage. about 50% of participants have twice as many web visitors than museum visitors (but what def. are they using for web visitor?). Web offers formal and informal learning opportunities. Formal roughly equates to passive: reading, viewing, etc. Informal learning roughly equates to active: searching for info? Not sure about this assertion. blog.mode: addressing Fashion.

Victoria and Allegra: Teens as an audience. Do you offer teen programming? Well, not unless you count interns under 20, but that's hardly what they're asking. Hey now! Teens are using the intarwebs, so museums are working with that to get the teens involved. Museum teen sites? Or do we mean teen pages? Walker site has a business side and a play side (the mullet model of websites!)

David Schaller: Games v Game like activities. What is a game? engagement, conflict, rules and outcome. 2 kinds of games: Intrinsic (game play leads to information (fish ecosystem game) game play has constraints of environment (Colonial Williamsburg). Mold gameplay around content. Content centric) and Extrinsic (tic tac toe, memory. Game play not effected by extras (squid instead of Os)) content. Intrinsic is probably a more powerful gameplay experience.

Question/comments: How much of a role does Ed. Dept play in website? MOMA had much involvement. Do teens actually use these specialized sites independently or are directed by teachers? Mix of both. Site marketed to teachers. Teens stumble upon site outside of school at least somewhat.

Question 2: Which online learning environments work for which Audiences?
Allegra and Victoria: MOMA. How teens use the internet. as of 1/2007 55% of 12-17 yos use social network site. 64% create content (12/2007). Girls post more networking and photos; boys more likely to do videos. Teen friendly outreach content, social networking. Science Buzz offers model for online community exchange. Also RedShift Now. Online Video: on MoMA's site, on YouTube. Expansion beyond one site makes it easier for individuals searching for specific content from non-specific sites. Red Studio teen podcast most popular download from MoMA.

Susan Edwards: Getty trust. Who plays digital games? Demographics. Avg age: 33, 1/4 over 50. 38% are women. 81% of teens play computer games. Lifestyle: over half of parents think games are positive. 93% read books/newspapers regularly. 62% attend cultural events, 50% do creative activities.

David: Who play extrinsic content games? has low/no learning curve, low time commitment. Games can introduce collections/promote institution. Who plays intrinsic games? more involved, immersive, meaningful actions, problem solving, can assume new roles/identities, safe environment for exploring/risk-taking. Allow for recreation of rules of nature/society in a contextualized world. More than kids play these games.

Deb: Which online approach works for adults? Asynchronous occurs without a teacher (websurfing). Make sure that your content is well tagged, accessible, and easy to find much information - similar things, but well organized. Synchronous=a class with teachers/learners. Can do in a collab. space/virtual worlds/IM. Simulcasting type things. Combination can be effective, like in a teacher workshop. plan, use high quality, respond to user needs.

Questions/comments: How can you show that your tools/games/experiences help learning? It's hard to evaluate online. could incorporate into game through levels. or just use return stats to indicate success.

Question 3: What are good strategies for beginning and sustaining online learning in museums?

Allegra and Victoria: Teen project, consider the following: Audience, objects, scale, branding/marketing. Teens are attracted to authenticity: No phonies! Resources and scale: free-blogs, wikis, myspace/facebook, youtube, but has costs in terms of staffing, production, and marketing. Build in evaluation.

Susan: Keeping the Games Alive: Maintenance and scalability. Goals/budget/promotion step. Attracting and sustaining learning. scaffolding - keep content fresh, provide opportunities. "Whyville" like 2nd life for kids. Partner to develop. Foster online community: boards, blogs, polls leads to promotion/engagement and feedback in one.

Deb: How to get started and sustain the momentum? Know your free tools! (cough*google*cough). Add online components to existing programs. Keep it going through partnered outreach. Have on-site support. Create lifelong museum learning continuum.

Q&A mode: Oh noes! Can we trust the teens? Moderated posting.
Trying to recreate the physical space is not the greatest method - online is different anyway even in 2nd life. Intrinsic experiences cost a TON $150-400,000. Jeepers. Who funds online learning? Getty has a grant.

How to get a job in museums. Part 1: Preparation and Application

2008-03-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

It's spring of the year, just about the time antsy students are getting ready to graduate and track down that first big museum job.

Last year, at this time, I was searching for a job. So I've been there. I feel your pain, really I do. So, I've decided to offer up my thoughts, opinions, and rants on the subject, seeing as I have successfully secured a position very nearly matching my ideal position in the field. Please be advised: I am not an expert and have never worked in Human Resources. There's your grain of salt.

Let's do this by numbers, shall we?

1. Get a degree, and get the right one for what you want to do. Almost no positions require no degree at all. Graduate high school. Then go to college. Major in what you want (I'm anthropology and english lit), but take museum classes if you can. Then go to graduate school. Get a Master's degree in Museum Studies, or Museology. If you want to be a curator, get your Ph.D., because you'll need it to be a curator at any of the larger institutions.

2. Remember that a degree is not a magical pass to get a museum job. Especially remember this if you're a Master's student, because that extra $40,000 you just dropped for the degree will be helpful, but it won't show return on investment immediately... or any time soon likely.

3. Get experience. Do museum internships as an undergrad, do them as a grad student. If you can, get an entry level job, especially if there's a museum associated with your program. Try to work in a museum for one or two years. Get experience in a variety of museum areas. Museum work is not one size fits all. Development people are different from collections managers are different from educators. Do as much as you can in museums before you need to launch yourself out into the museum job hunt.

4. Make connections. Get to know the people you work for, work with, intern for, intern with. In the museum field, personal connections are gold. Get to know people locally. If you can afford it, go to national conferences. If you can't, try getting to the local conferences.

5. Learn to write. And have as many people look at your resume as you can. When you're applying for jobs, the cover letter is your real chance to present yourself, not just your accomplishments, but also your ability to communicate. The museum field does not have a lot of money; you are going to have to write grants/be involved in writing grants at some point. It behooves you to polish your style early and often. And work on your long resume - polish the format, the wording, everything so that it's ready to customize easily and quickly.

6. Find all the job resources you can. Check out all the national and regional association website. Bookmark them. Join the Yahoo! group Musejobs. Check them. Check them regularly.

7a. Be flexible. This is key. If you can move, your job search is likely to be less frustrating. Consider living places you'd never lived before. Define your geographical limits.

7b. Be flexible. This is key. Most museum jobs do not perform a single function. Many museums are very small and you will be wearing many hats. If you want to be a collections manager, think about being a registrar, an assistant director, a curator for a small museum. Consider all options, don't be set on a job title. At the same time, identify what you would most like to do and what environment you would like to do it in: Big or small museum? History, art, science, children's? East coast, West coast, the South? Lots of responsibility or lots of supervision?

7c. Be realistic. This is key. Work out your budget. What can you live on? If no one has told you yet, museum work is usually not going to make you rich. What will you be happy doing? Are you willing to work in the pest management department or will you refuse? And remember, please remember, that this a a field that many people want to work in, many people are qualified for, and in which there are relatively few open positions.

Basic rule of museum job hunting: There are more job openings for development people and educators. If you want to get a job more easily in the museum field, don't be an objects person. Also, development seems to get paid more.

8. Apply early, apply often. Once you're in the job search, apply broadly. Keep a close watch on those resources you identified and send out your application as soon as you can. Being on top of the game may earn you points. Doesn't hurt at the very least.

9. Wait. Wait as patiently as you can. (See rant below.) Apply for more jobs.

9.1 Don't complain on museum listservs. Seriously. I enjoy the inevitable drama, but please don't. For one thing, you're usually using your real name and establishing a persona as someone who feels entitled and may be a whiner. If you need to complain/ask for advice (I feel that most, not all but most, job seekers on museum listservs asking for advice are only thinly veiling their whining), do it privately. Search the archives of the listservs - see if your issues haven't already been addressed. Otherwise I'm just going to roll my eyes and wonder if you realize that potential employers may be reading that list and your name may turn up attached to the posting on a search.

10. Be aware of your net presence. What happens when you google your name? How does that look to a potential employer? It is your Bedazzled myspace profile, or is it a museum newsletter commending your volunteer work? Increasingly, these things matter.

Part 2 coming soon: Responses and interviews.

AAM Digital Museum Webinar 2: Technology and Museum Visitor Experiences

2008-03-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

Pre-webinar: So I'm waiting on the start of the second in a series of AAM webinars about The Digital Museum. I worked with Learning Times tech support, so with luck I will not be holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, but will have the opportunity to use my shiny shiny headphones instead. Below the jump will be my notes, in the understandable only to me, maybe, format that I favor.

Woo, they're talking and I can hear them! And there's a poll and I can see the results as they come in. Way cool!

Peter Samis - SFMOMA
- Frameworks of meanings - contextualization, webs of relationships
- Anchors in experience, velcro vs. teflon. Low v. high context environments: continuum.

Scott Sayre - Ways to Restore context
Audio Tours in Transition: Cell Phones
-Audio tours have an evolving history as technology evolves. mp3 and cell phone tours are the thing now.
- Cell phone as unifying device. Cell phone eliminates peripheral costs of hardware
- Cell phone tours easily move outside of the museum *can link museum to community with a minimum of cost*
- GPS and geotagging. Yes. yes yes yes. This is good for us since this is a rural, environmentally oriented community. Way to connect objects to museum, and to connect the landscape to the museum. Integration of landscape and technology. YES YES YES.

Robin Dowden, Walker Art Center: Audio Tours in Transitions: Multimedia tours.
- Frida Kahlo multimedia handheld guide.
- additional cost, but used by 12% of visitors.
- sounded really cool, really interesting, would like to take that tour.

Peter Samis: add axis to continuum - personal mobile (like the above two) to social embedded. SFMOMA "smart tables" just above phone tours. It's a step above wall text - conveys interest and passion more than words on the wall at an eighth grade reading level.
- Learning lounges which are focussed info points and provide place for interaction
- most people use wall text, but it is the least helpful source of info (audio tours being best)
- More interpretive sources used= more art appreciation

Robin Dowden: Embedded social spaces: Case study: Dialog table
- sociable computing. Gesture recognition of picking, grabbing and dropping. AWESOME. Not really useful for us, but dude. We are living in the future. Where's my jetpack?
- Case study: Dolphin Oracle II: dolphin responds, expands vocabulary.
- these things exist within the range of possible experiences.

Mike Mouw and Dan Spock: Minnesota Historical Society.
-increasing social aspects of the museum visit, enhancing the social experience
- game in the MN150 gallery: quiz show type thing with points. How fun!
- Open house exhibit: modern style lantern slide with rfid tags. Cabinet exploration. Stories in plates on the table. Wow. These are so cool.
- Immersive experiences enhance the entire museum visit

General Q&A:
-Designing for the experience and allowing the technology to fade into the background (MHS). How to create connections to the narrative arc?
- open discussion box breaks down into question central.
- cell phone coverage issue?
- MHS finds that everyone loves the game. All ages.
- familiarity with technology is the leading factor

post-webinar throughts: Whew. The experience is a great deal more pleasant with head phones. The projects profiled by the presenters are all very exciting. But they all appear very costly and I am keeping in mind solutions for my very small institution which has a disproportionately small budget. The idea of geotagging collections was mentioned, and the idea of using cell phone tours to lead tours to places (historic buildings). These two seem to have the most potential here - we have a relatively small community and a large outlying area with a focus on agriculture. Also, our exhibit space will be very small. But working out a way to integrate content into the community at large, via cell phone use, has a lot of potential.

The Internet KILLS Museums!

2008-03-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

Err, actually, it's the opposite of that.

A study came out just recently that showed visits to museum websites correlate positively with in-person visits to museums.

http://interconnectionsreport.org/

I've only looked at the conclusions Powerpoint, but this looks like a powerful argument in the face of Internet Fear. If visitors use the internet, they're more likely visit a museum. How cool is that? In a time when people spend all day looking at screens, it seems reasonable that they might then wish to see real things in 3D for part of the time when they don't have to look at screens (this is me blathering, and not from the report. All wild conjecture here.).

And, dang, I wish this report had been available when I was writing my thesis. It looks like it's full of good stuff.

Digital Museum Webinar: Planning for Technology

2008-02-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

When I heard about this webinar I was excited. Then disappointed. As someone fresh out of grad school, I don't have a lot of disposable income to put toward professional development, even very reasonably priced professional development. But, hark!, AAM's EMP (that's Emerging Museum Professionals, not electro-magnetic pulse or Experience Music Project) was offering a limited number of fellowships to EMPs. So I applied for one and was lucky enough to be selected. I just finished with the first Webinar, and it was pretty neat. Plus I received a copy of The Digital Museum: A Think Guide for being a participant.

I am taking webinar notes directly into Blogger. Keeps me focussed!

First of all, the technology issues: What's an online seminar about technology with technology issues? I assume these were all on my end. I couldn't get the audio to work. I'd run the tech check last week and it showed up fine, but it was frustrating to catch the first few words of something and then it would drop for an uncertain amount of time. Luckily, there was also a call-in number. I had to dial it about 5 times before I got through (busy signal) so I bet I wasn't the only one with this issue.

I've gotten through! And am making funny faces! Also, please to note my complex system of post-its.

And then I had troubles with Adobe Connect Professional, particularly with the polls the presenters could do: they didn't come up fast enough for me to participate in, alas. I imagine this has to do with my internet connection, even though my pre-webinar tech-check gave me the thumbs up. Heavy sigh.

Now that I've got the tech-whining out of my system, let me just say it was great. I really enjoyed this webinar. I don't have the resources to make it to MW2008, and this felt like a little piece of that: People who get technology talking about technology.

Two of the presenters talked about planning. One, Len Steinbach, focussed on Return on Investment Analysis. Angela Spinazze focussed on more general planning for technology. I enjoyed these presentations, because one of the things they focussed on was one of my harping points: know why you want to do things before you do them! Angela also brought up that it's okay not to implement technology. Yes. Not everything is for everyone.

The third presenter, Holley Witchey, spoke on morals and ethics - the little issues that we don't like to talk about because we tend to transgress them on occasion - as they relate to museum technology. All the presenters brought forth great ideas and gave the participants a lot to think about. I found it invigorating to be part of such interest about technology. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the sessions.

You can still register for the three upcoming sessions. I've put my (unintelligible) notes below the jump, for those interested.

Len Steinbach: Return on Investment

- Be sure to consider the direct costs, the indirect costs. How will you maintain your project? What is your perceived benefit? Take everything into account in your planning. This is return on investment analysis.

- What kind of return do you want? $$$ or mission? How do you evaluate mission based returns? How will you?

- Is there a champion in your institute? Who makes technology happen? And will there be momentum to maintain the change after the champion leaves? Make the plan to make it happen.

- Balancing multiple projects. Return on Investment will make your reasoning transparent. Provides a strong case and creates measurable expectations.

- The risk of too much success and the needs of staffing. How can small museums manage their success? engage in partnerships. buy external hosting with giant bandwidth. What is the worst case success scenario? What is the cost?

- Resources on best practices, ROI: the book, Len will post links to resource docs in forum. Management: part art, part science. No exact formula.

Angela Spinazze: Technology Planning

*grr! I'm having a bear of a time with the Adobe Seminar thing. I'm not getting the polls loaded, the slides, the presenters. Arg. It's so frustrating.*

Planning: Assess needs. define purpose, priorities, goals, objectives. Identify stakeholders. Set Timelines. Calculate costs. Manage Expectations. Evaluate Outcomes. (And now the adobe thing is working. but too late to participate in the polls.)

Assessing needs. Do it! observe, determine. What needs are you meeting?
Stakeholders: Anyone involved, anyone with an interest. Possible funders? Competing project people? Who are you up against?
Timelines: project, roll out, testing phase. Build in times. Testing!!
Costs: See Len's. Understand what your immediate costs, your contingency costs, your long term costs/maintenance costs.
Expectations: Do the needs assessment to find out what people's expectations are, and be able to address people's concerns as you go. Be prepared to explain if things go wrong.
Evaluate: Do it!! Learn from what you've done.

Planning process will take as long as it needs to take. Take it as seriously as you would an implementation phase. Resolve problems as they emerge, if you can.

Questions to consider: (things for needs assessment - the obvious of why we want/we need things and why?) How will it relate to/support/advance the mission? Cost (develop/maintain/UPGRADE)? Ease(resources?)? How will this effect other museum priorities and activities? Demand (from where? Is there any?)? How does it relate to branding? What is the rep/age of the technology(established?)? Transition Plan? Who needs to be on the project team?

Advice! Plan extensively (3-5 years!!!). talk with people, find resources, find other plans. Start small and build. Don't do it all at once (because you can't. no one can). You don't have to do it. Making mistakes leads to learning opportunities. Be creative, have fun.

What are you trying to do for whom?

Examples, inspirationary places: 59 smartest orgs online:http://www.squidoo.com/org20, http://www.tasi.ac.uk/, http://www.wethepeople.gov/projects/index.html, http://www.techsoup.com/

Planning for the future: Keep your eye outside the box. Keep your finger on the pulse of trends. Look outside the museum community (or community in which you work). http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

Retroplanning: Look at what you've made without planning and evaluate it and move forward. (ie old websites, dodgy online exhibits, etc.)

Holly Witchey: Morals and Ethics (you Kant make me)

*love any title with a pun in it*

Ethical issues in one place may be legal issues in another. Museums like to talk about BIG and IMPORTANT and GLAMOROUS issues. These are pretty easy to discuss because they're entertaining and generally involve other people.

What we don't like to talk about: Personal copies? Music on comp/networks? Copyright issues in powerpoint presentations? Borrowing tech? Personal browsing? THE SMALL ISSUES, institutional culture.

Everyday tech costs money too!

Solid vs. Chameleon Ethics. Fortune cookie: The fact that others are bad does not imply that you are good *what a depressing fortune cookie* How can we start conversations in places where values come into conflict? (Exhibition/preservation) Choices.

For a CoE to be valid: Involvement with production. Coherence with general principles and conscience. Coherence with company's officers behavior.

Guidelines for dealing with conflicts: articulate, analyze, personalize (look at your values), escalate (if needed).

Library of Congress - more than just books and paper

2008-01-16T21:30:00.000-08:00

Via BoingBoing: The Library of Congress is using Flickr and inviting everybody to help tag some of its photo collections.

I love seeing big places take this stuff up. Honestly, I'm still skeptical of its efficacy, but if they can generate a buzz, they might have their moment in the sun and get some stuff tagged.

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Oh hai! I'm still here, in ur museum blogz. But mostly I'm my museum blog where I've recently instigated a flickr account. Funny how not needing to be obsessed for months on end with a single topic will slow down the posting rate...

Blog Alert

2007-12-03T00:44:00.000-08:00

Missoula, Montana. I've been there. Stayed over one night while driving cross country. A couple of months ago I stumbled across a blog from Missoula. The blog of the Missoula Art Museum, as it happens. And it is titled: Fix. Get Yours. As in your art fix.

I've noticed that I pay more and more attention to this blog. It only occasionally references what's going on in the museum, but the way it's written and the topics it covers make me want to check out more of Missoula, specifically MAM, the next time I'm there. Why? Because it's engaging. The folks writing this blog seem really into what they're writing about. It's just kinda hip. It has an energy. And, since it's my main source of information about MAM, I think that maybe the museum has the same sort of energy and interest. A lot of blogs lack that energy and enthusiasm, or they lose it over time. So far Fix has maintained their enthusiasm since June. I hope they keep it up.

Ad placement

2007-11-27T22:05:00.000-08:00

Blogger tells me this will be post #99. Not bad. It also tells me I haven't posted since November 7th - 20 days ago. That's not so great.

Every several months I get the urge to go out searching for new museum blogs, and I google search and I google search and wade through pages and pages of results... I was doing this, quite a while ago now, and I noticed something.

If I search for "museum blog" on google, the Ralph Stanley Museum Blog has a sponsored link on the results page. It's an interesting tact. They don't have a sponsored link on the results page for "museum blogs" though. Nor do they have one when you search for "Ralph Stanley," interestingly enough.

I don't know what I think of this tactic. It's interesting, certainly, but I can' imagine it's terribly effective in directing traffic to the blog. My google analytics doesn't show anyone search for "museum blog" in the last month, though there is one search for "museum blogs." And this blog is on the same page for both (third).

It does separate the Ralph Stanley Museum blog from the crowd of results, but it's such a specific search to choose. Then again, it's an interesting way to publicize a museum blog (although the Ralph Stanley Museum blog tends toward being an events board), and one I'd not considered until I noticed this. With a wider application of the ad to a greater variety of search results, it might have some noticeable efficacy. Then again, maybe not.

Putting my money where my mouth is

2007-11-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

As part of my job, I've been asked to think about the design of our website (which does not exist yet) and consider how more interactive possibilities might be incorporated. A link to my collections management blog, obviously, or if we could get it in the frames without leaving the main site would be better.

But what else? Podcasts are out (don't have the time, the tech, or the passion). Something where people can talk back, but not just a link to an email address. Full out forums are too big and too... well... dated (not that they don't work, but those are really designed for super committed special interest groups). Starting a Flickr account would be awesomely cool - and flickr has some widgets that look great on blogs and which could be interesting on a museum website. Twitter? Twitter seems cool and hip and all that, but is the user base really large enough that people would understand it and buy into it?

I think what I want is like "Guestbook 2.0" or a mini forum board. Where people can leave feedback and it shows up on the site immediately and can be responded to by museum personnel (ie, me), but requires little to no tech savvy from the end user, but doesn't look, er, lame. A guestbook with comment threading? Does such a thing exist?

And what else? Easy to use, easy to understand, and minimal work investment on our end. I know you're creative people reading this feed; let me pick your brains.

Edit: Gadunk! A Facebook group/profile! This IS a college campus after all. That whole guestbook 2.0? I want something like The Wall from Facebook to be on the site (except comment threading instead of wall-to-walls). Now where does one get such a thing....

Tag! You're it!

2007-10-28T16:57:00.001-07:00

You know what's useful? Tagging. It must be, because we use it all over the place - flickr, blog posts, on our email, everywhere. And when you get down to it, filing in a filing cabinet is just tagging, albeit only one tag in one place. Unless you have cross-reference paper files, in which case I salute your ambition.

So when I got excited about the Powerhouse Museum's project to tag its collection online, it's not surprising. (By the way, are there other such endeavors I'm not aware of?) It has been asked of me, though, why would anyone just go and tag that? That's boring. It's one thing to tag it for your personal use, but tagging other people's stuff. Yawn.

Fair enough, I sputter, but, but it's COOL!

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered Google's Image Labeler. And was almost immediately obsessed with it. It's tagging. You're tagging images from all across the internet. But it's a game! You're paired randomly with someone else from somewhere else, and you need to match the words you use to describe the images. Some words are worth more than other. Man is 50 points, guy is something like 60, and boombox is 140. And you only have two minutes to match as many as you can and earn points.

I didn't think of it as doing a service to google by tagging; I thought of it as trying to get the high score (which I did hold once for about 8 hours - it broke my obsession, thank the heavens). If it were feasible this would be an excellent way to increase use of museum tagging projects.

Of course, there's the whole problem of reality. Museum tagging sites (probably) don't get the kind of traffic google does, so the near instant pairing up of internet users would not be possible. But are there other incentives? How do we make tagging fun? Is it possible if you don't have Google-sized traffic? I don't have answers.

How to Study Museums

2007-10-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

I just caught wind (via Musematic) of a new MA in Museum Studies offered by John Hopkins University. A new program is not surprising - museum programs and Museum Studies MAs seem to be proliferating like very slow academic bunnies. What is surprising is that the MA is almost entirely online except for an on-site summer seminar.

I have three reactions to this:

1. This MA recognizes that technology and the interwebs are important for museums. A classmate of mine conducted a survey and found that technology in museums is the least covered topic in museum programs nationally. So the recognition of that and the addressing of it is important.

2. How cool. An online MA for museum studies. I would totally love to take some of those courses, but am so not going to pay for that. But it's really appropriate to people in the field who may not be able to devote the kind of class time needed at a brick and mortar instition.

3. How the heck can you have a museum studies program outside of a museum? The most important thing to me, as a relative museum outsider to the museum field at the outset of my graduate work, was having that chance to live and breathe museums for two years. To gain significant practical experience while addressing museum theory. For me, it's unimaginable to have gotten my degree with such limited requirements for hands on.

I think it's very interesting. But I don't think it's the best degree for a young person out of undergrad to pursue. Every spring, the Museum-L listserv has an influx of graduates worrying about getting a job. And the advice is, inevitably, get hands on experience, get your foot in the door. Those are two things I find problematic with this degree. It's up to the student to develop those two opportunities. That was true at mine too, but there were clear doors. I worry that, if the student is a stay-at-home-mom with limited time to volunteer or be involved in the program, that she will have a difficult time actually putting her degree to work.

Nonetheless, I think it's an interesting idea, a good thing for people in certain places, and covers topics which are largely lacking in scholarly museum education.

A beginner's guide to cool museum stuff online

2007-10-03T21:05:00.000-07:00

I am really lucky. The folks involved in creating the museum at which I work are interested in the potential of new media for involving the community. But, they don't have as much exposure to the cool kinds of things museums are doing as, say, me! So a couple of weeks ago I put together this sort of "beginner's guide" for one of the professors with whom I work. And I thought I'd share. I think, if you read this, you probably know which applications and institutions I'm the most impressed with, but, hey, why not? :D

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The Brooklyn Museum has a great all around approach to new media and community: CLICK

Australia's Powerhouse Museum is doing exciting things with their collections online, not just having them there, but allowing visitors to "tag" the online entries with keywords they find useful: CLICK

Eye Level, blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum: CLICK

The Walker museum in Minneapolis has 6 blogs and are quite good. I especially like OffCenter and the New Media Initiatives blogs: CLICK

The Science Museum of Minnesota has a pretty cool area called Science Buzz with a blog that posts current science stories, polls, and offers registered users the chance to post at top level. There are also interactive kiosks inside the museum from which visitors can comment: CLICK

The Victoria and Albert has a section on knitting which incorporates their collection, but goes beyond it: CLICK The V&A also have a couple of artist blogs.

That's an overview of some of what's out there. The Powerhouse and Science Buzz are two of the most exciting things, in my opinion. Many museums are podcasting; many are creating facebook groups or profiles; some museums are venturing into Second Life; and some are playing with Twitter. Pretty much, any new application which catches on with a segment of the population, museums are starting to experiment with.

Leslie of MuseumBlogging.org had a pretty good series on museums and social networking sites: CLICK

Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 writes very thoughtful and thought provoking posts at her blog: CLICK

Two final things: If you want to look around at museum blogs, http://museumblogs.org/ has a list of 208 museum and museum-related blogs. And the sidebar of my thesis blog has about 100 museum blogs, not all of which are on museumblogs.org: http://museumblogthesis.blogspot.com/.

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Whatcha think? What did I miss that's supah cool?

Oh! I got up the nerve to submit an abstract to MW2008. It's not really anything new, but I thought it might be an appropriate place to share my thesis research. If it did get accepted, I think I'd put up a new, modified survey to beef up that side of things. I won't be heartbroken if it doesn't make it in, but it'll be pretty nifty if it did. Anywho. I'm hoping to go either way.

Wales all around

2007-09-24T23:28:00.000-07:00

Over at my job blog I was talking about whale ear bones (cough*shamelessplug*cough), and now I'm going to talk about Wales.

You know, the country! Wales has had my attention recently. Knitting podcaster Brenda Dayne is based out of Wales. The Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood is based out of Cardiff (and it looks like they do a lot of on location filming - I am such a Doctor Who nerd).

Wales is a small country. It has a population less than half that of Wisconsin. And yet, yet! it has two museums with blogs, at least.

First up is Amgueddfa Blog, of the National Museum Wales which posts in both English and Welsh. I can't read a word of Welsh, but I love the look of the language. Can't post much of a review, as there's not been a lot of action since I subscribed, but it looks like there was some fun archaeology stuff over the summer.

And then there's Behind the Scenes at the Oldest Museum in Wales from the Swansea Museum. Sadly, this blog has been dormant for nearly a year, but there are some really lovely photos up in the old posts. It would be great if they'd renew the photo posts, since high quality photos are so much fun to look at.

So, way to go Wales!

Another announcement! and organizational musings

2007-09-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Another one of those posts that a better blogger would split into two separate posts.

Lots of announcements here lately!

I just wanted to let y'all know that I've been invited, and have accepted, to become a contributer to Musematic. Glad to be joining the ranks!

What does this make? That's four and one half blogs! (Museumatic being a half, since it's not all me, all the time.) Well, last night I dropped it down to three and a half, letting go of my languishing knitting blog in favor of Ravelry.

Clicky for bigger.

Ravelry is sort of like LibraryThing for knitters and crocheters. It's still in beta, so you can't fully poke around. I'm kind of fascinated by these organizational tools for the masses. Ravelry allows me to catalog my yarn, my needles, my projects, my books, just about everything, in a fairly extensive way. In some respects, it's like PastPerfect with a social networking side of things.

Now there's an idea. What would a social networked collections management system look like? Would it be a mating of database with listserv? Would there be forums for the small museum? For the curator/registrar? For the collections manager/director? For the dedicated volunteer? ..... Would anyone use it?

It's kind of fun to think about. What if you could comment on other folks collections? As a curatorial tool, it could be very powerful. But realistically, there's just so much sensitive information in these kinds of databases, that it could become difficult to maintain it separately. Not to mention, there's so much going down in the world of caring for collections that the idea of social networking is almost laughable. Although, such a thing would have the potential to envelop the three types of social media communities proposed by the Radical blog in a recent post. Hmmmmm.......

Reconsidering Second Life

2007-09-14T08:52:00.001-07:00

In the last issue of Museum News there was that happy colorful exploration of Web 2.0. In this most recent issue, there's an article on museums in Second Life. I remain highly skeptical about Second Life. When I logged in sometime last year, I was frustrated by lag and texturing problems. Either my broadband or my year old laptop were unable to handle the requirements. I continue to feel the technological requirements of the environment make it a less than ideal space in which to reach a broad audience.

But I'm here to say something good about Second Life. Gasp! The article in Museum News - "My Raven-Haired Avatar Flies through the Museum" - had an example which made me pause. When the Exploratorium in San Francisco set up an internet broadcast of a solar eclipse along with a concurrent event in Second Life, they discovered something. Although many people visited the website to watch the webcast, they watched for an average of 7 minutes.

Those who came to the Second World event, about 60 to 70, stayed for the entire hour. They were engaged and asked questions.

This is the most compelling argument for Second Life I have yet heard. Quality of visitor interaction. Yet, I still wonder about the trade offs in terms of cost to develop and maintain an in-world space... But I'm open to being persuaded.

Up and running!

2007-09-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

With the blessings of my supervisors, I have now started a Collections Management blog! I have been in my position as Collections Manager for the Anthropology Department at Central Washington University for nearly four weeks now, and it's high time I started blogging about it! So check out Adventures in Collection Management. If I am not mistaken, I think this is the first Collections Management blog associated with a museum (well, museum in the making). There are blogs about Collections objects, but I haven't seen anything like what I intend to do - a little bit personal reaction, a little bit chronicle, a little bit instructional discussion.

There's only one post - I registered the url about half an hour ago - but keep it on your radars. I'm excited.

Updated Links List!

2007-09-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

My sidebar links became obsolete almost as soon as I first posted it. I have finally revised it to include all the new museum blogs I have found. There are now about 100 museum blogs in the sidebar! Yowsa! Not all are active, but they're self identified as blogs.

Since I am no longer doing academic research, I am getting a little bit loosey goosey with the definition of museum for the purpose of blogging. Essentially, if it takes itself at least mostly seriously, I will consider it. Besides those museums are usually the most fun.

Anyway, check it out. Am I missing anything?

Scan Once, Scan Right

2007-09-08T16:19:00.001-07:00

Are you or your institution looking to scan a slide collection? Are you interested in knowing more about digital imaging? Do you not know your DPI from your .jpg? Then check out Scan Once, Scan Right, the most excellent thesis project of one of my Museology classmates, Larissa, goddess of digitization.

Although the thesis addresses a specific project, Larissa envisions it as "something that other museums or institutions could use as a guide or starting point for their own projects."

Brooklyn Strikes again!

2007-09-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone who saw the session with the good folks from the Brooklyn Museum was pretty blown away by how, well, awesome they are. The Brooklyn Museum has a huge backing of community involvement and web forward thinking. And awesome Flickr use.

And now they have blogs! Have they been around a long time? Did I miss them?

Links!
feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum - Feminist art, news, and events from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

and

bloggers@brooklynmuseum - a behind the scenes blog.

Both blogs have full text syndication. How I love full text syndication. I hate stubs, I hate clicking through, I really do.

Plus, and this is really cool, you too can be on the Brooklyn Museum's blogging community, if you ask nicely.

I look forward to seeing how these blogs read!

Will you be my friend?

2007-08-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

I've noted a lot of talk in the past months about the internet and the changing meaning of friendship. I haven't actually gotten to reading what people are writing, and once I do, I'll return with a follow up post.

But these are my raw thoughts in their usual semi-coherent form.

I started blogging because one of my friends was doing it, and he was doing it on a site which combines the internet-special idea of "friending" with independent blogging - Livejournal. So I signed up, identified him as my friend, and have, in the intervening four year, accumulated around 50 individual "LJ friends," some of whom I know in real life, some of whom I have since met, and some whom I have never met but am, nonetheless, good friends with.

And all these social network sites which revolve around the idea of friending - they are all incredibly popular. And even reading a blog on a regular basis offers the idea of intimacy, of getting to know someone a little bit.

But, I wonder, can museums be your friend? This is why that issue of voice is so crucial. If there's not a real person communicating about the museum in a genuine way, I think it's harder to gain that friend-like trust. Maybe I'm wrong. But I don't feel a strong connection to the museum blogs I read, not really. I feel a stronger connection to the museum-related blogs I read, where it feels more individual, more specific. And I assume myself to be representative of others, so this is how it must be, right?

It's something to think about though... if Web 2.0 is about social connection, social collaboration and interaction, how can an institution which might shift personality with each new director maintain a sense of the personal in a blog? Or should it? I'm just not sure.

Astronomers spend millions, find nothing

2007-08-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

I know this is a museum blog blog, so to continue under that premise, I will link to the Buzz Blog post: Nothing to Write Home About. Plus they linked to it before I saw it on BBC News.

Mostly, I think this is super cool. I'm a great big nerd, a well rounded great big nerd. And Sci-fi is one of my nerd foci. So when astronomers are willing to admit they found nothing, I think that's awesome. When it's a nothing that's a billion light years wide, devoid of even dark matter, that is super awesome. BBC Article Link.

There's my news contribution for today.

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Then there's the Unicorn Museum which is a slick satire of the Creation Museum. Hey, I like unicorns as much as the next guy.

200!

2007-08-20T19:53:00.001-07:00

Anyone else notice that Museumblogs.org has hit 200 blogs?

This is gettin' big people....

Truth time

2007-08-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

I gotta be honest. For the past month or so, I have not been in ur museum blogz. But now I'm back home, settling in to a more regular lifestyle, and I'm ready to dive back in.

I just ran through my feeds. I did not read them, oh me oh my no. You all are a productive lot. I pretty much glanced at the most recent post and moved on. I read my blogs via bloglines. I am more likely, by several times, to read a post if it is syndicated in full text and not just title or title and snippet. This applies to all my feeds, not just museum and museum-related.

While I was out of blog range, I did get a chance to visit the John Michael Kohler Arts Center which is putting on an amazing show right now - all about environmental artists, mostly of the outsider and visionary persuasion. They've taken out their usual standard galleries (Art and Industry industry gallery, the Hmong Gallery, the Kohler House setting) and used the entired building as a showcase for their amazing collection of environmental artists. I do believe most of the stuff in the show belonged to them. I loved it. I've long been a fan of Eugene von Bruenchenheim, but I became acquainted with Levi Fisher Ames, Stella Waitzkin, and Emery Blagdon, among others.

I grew up in Sheboygan County, where the JMKAC is located, and I am consistently amazed by the kind of exhibition they produce and their adherence to recognizing outsider and self taught artists. I would wholly recommend making a by-trip to see this show if you have the opportunity.

Of course, I may be biased. I used to work there. And the Kohler Foundation once awarded me an art scholarship. Nonetheless, I think this is pretty cool. Plus they produced a hoodie with Bruenchenheim's chicken bone chairs on the back which I do intend to purchase.

We're coming to a museum near you.

2007-08-15T06:21:00.001-07:00

Remember that video I posted ages ago - the I-generation? Probably not. But the premise is that folks my age and younger are often pretty well connected to the internet and technology things.

Well, we've finished our museum degrees and are out looking for jobs. Some of us have found them (yay!), some of us are still looking (just keep swimming, just keep swimming), but we're all probably going to get there in the end. For example, I have two friends that are still in the interview process. Both of them, although their interests lay in collections management, are interested in updating their potential employers' web presence.

We represent the intersection of web savvy and university trained museum professional. It seems that many museum tech people have not been trained originally as museum professionals - nothing wrong with that, just saying. Given that we are something of a shift, or even an intersection, I think it will be interesting to see what happens. Are we isolated? (No, probably not, as at least two other folks we graduated with are very involved with podcasting.) Will the degree-bearing museum person with an interest in technology shift what the museum online world looks like? (I'd wager no, actually, because, while we are passionate, most of us can't code to save our lives.) But I think there is potential. Something to keep an eye out for, in any case.

When I think of blogging for my new institution (which I haven't even started yet, due to circumstances), I imagine a blog which is, at first, very informal. Possibly even personal. Basically, I think of me blogging about my job. About the day to day of collection managing a previously undermanaged collection. And I imagine a tone very close to the tone of this blog. Because it is hard for me to blog things I am excited about without having this crazy, half-developed, decidedly non-refined tone.

Anyway, watch out for us. We're coming.

Incommunicado

2007-07-31T21:39:00.000-07:00

Expect radio silence from this corner of the blogosphere for the next several weeks. Sometimes you have to drop everything and then try to put the pieces back together.

I'm sure you'll get on fine without me. May I recommend perusing the xkcd webcomic if you are looking for something to fill the time?

Props

2007-07-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

Props to the Wood County Historical Center for blogging collections. The linked post is the third ever on their blog, and I found it fascinating. It takes a piece that might not get out on the exhibit floor, gives a lot of background (with photo examples), and shows how something as, well, down right weird as a whiskbroom holder (weird in the modern era of DustBusters, anyway) can tell us a great deal about social life and relations over a hundred years ago.

I find the writing sounds quite formal, but they break it down into easy to digest sections. So props Wood County Historical Center, I look forward to reading more.

Poser

2007-07-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

I gotta say, sometimes I feel like a poser. (Poser? Who even says that anymore? That's so 1992. Wannabe is a little more contemporary.) I pretend to be all up on museums and technology and play at it a little bit. But I'm not hardcore. Sure, I'm a believer, I'm an evangelist, but I couldn't write you any code. I could make you some nice HTML links, but that's the extent of my power.

So what am I doing here? Why am I playing in the techie playground?

Because this is where the cool stuff happens. The exhibits playground, the collections playground, those are nice, those are classic. They've got the see-saw and the swing set and a couple of tetherball poles. But the techie playground has the super cool twisty tube slide and everything is brightly colored.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to be a collections manager. Collections was always my goal. I got sidetracked by museums and the web because of the coolness factor and the lack of discussion (written discussion, anyway). While I am passionate about collections, there's something much more exciting about the rate of change and the open potential of technology. I do believe in the importance of the object, oh yes, but I bet we can make the object a lot more interesting when we use new online applications to play with it.

*~~sorry about the empty "read more"s at the end of these posts. My script is broken. I'm going to try and fix it. Not by myself. I'll be following instructions - like I said, no code for me.~~ Rock! I am excellent at following instructions!

Personal News below

2007-07-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is another one of those pesky posts about me.

I went and got myself a real job, as a Collections Manager for a University museum that is still in development. I'm quite excited about it. :D

No word on if we'll be blogging yet. I brought it up in my interview. We'll see.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled semi-topical blog.

New words to use

2007-07-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

I notice that a lot of museum blogs don't update that frequently. Maybe it's that there aren't enough words in the English language.

But fear not! For Merriam Webster has inducted 20 new words into the Dictionary. My favorite? Ginormous. And little did I know that ginormous did not originate with Will Ferrell in the movie Elf, but was in fact first recorded in "Partridge Dict. Forces' Slang" according to the Oxford English Dictionary which already lists ginormous as a word.

My second favorite is smackdown.

Does this relate to museum blogging? No, not really. Well, maybe we could put something together involving the control of knowledge by the establishment/popular production of knowledge, but I'm not going to bother. I just wanted the 20 of you who read this to know that ginormous is really and truly (and officially!) a real word.

Print and Pixels

2007-07-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

I just got my copy of the July/August Museum News. I flipped to the table of contents, only vaguely interested, but what did I find?! An article entitled "Museums and Web 2.0." Boy does the layout make web 2.0 look fun and kicky.

It quotes Nina Simon, Brooklyn Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and MoMA. It offers an overview of the idea of Web 2.0, Wikipedia, YouTube, and MySpace. It suggests that you make sure your museum has a Wikipedia entry, and warns against, honestly, being dumb. Don't post video of your security guards punching in entry codes! Okay, I know that's written in jest, but still.

It also introduces the idea of trusting the visitor. AKA radical trust. "You trust users not to upload inappropriate content; if they do you trust other users to report it..."

While I appreciate the very relaxed tone of the article - I imagine it's purposefully written in a semi-informal blog style - I'm a little surprised that the article focussed so strongly on Wikipedia when museums tend to have little interaction with it. Also surprised that podcasting and blogging aren't mentioned as part of the Web 2.0. Perhaps because there's not a single service you can point to for those? And Facebook, too, because I tend to imagine that Facebook is going to reach more of a traditional museum-going audience than MySpace. But perhaps that's the advantage of MySpace - reaching someone you probably wouldn't.... like that 14 year old emo kid over there. Oh, and is "TMI" really "teen" speak? Because TMI is in frequent use on certain boards I frequent where a significant part of the community is over 40.

Still, it's nice to see AAM produce anything written on internet technology since the last book they published on the subject was 8 years ago. It may as well have been 38 given the way things change. Raising awareness is probably a good thing, at the very least, even if it's only a start. Nonetheless, I will wait for the sequel to the article and look forward to the letters to the editor in the next issue.

I'm just hoping that Nina will write a book for us one of these days. ;)

Cool! Medical images!

2007-07-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine has made their collection of medical images spanning 2000 years available via a Creative Commons license.

Like this image, Napoleon Bonaparte's Toothbrush:

Everything is Miscellaneous

2007-07-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

Are you guys catching this? Leslie Madsen-Brooks is posting a multi-part series on Museums and Social Networking sites. So far, three parts are posted: 1. Introduction and Facebook, 2. Myspace, and 3. Flickr. She's offering a lot of great observations and pulling together a lot of writing and links. I'm looking forward to the next installment featuring social networking services of a different color: YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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I'm currently reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. It's one of those really entertaining, interesting, and provoking reads. I haven't yet had a chance to synthesize it, but one thing that really seems to stand out is the potential for messy data. And I mean messy data in a good way. Weinberger speaks of the "new digital disorder" as a third order method of organization - a method not bound by the rules of a two dimension paper based system.

Of course, in order to open up, say, digital collections to third order methods of organization, like tagging, museums need to have their second order organization in hand. A lot of museums can't say that their collections are completely cataloged in databases such as ARGUS or PastPerfect. And if the museum doesn't have control over its objects, it isn't sensical to start to relinquish that control to tagging projects.

And then, when you do have your second order ducks in a row, how do you get people to participate? As the sidebar to the Powerhouse Bulk Collections tagger states: "One of the key problems we have identified with social tagging of our collection is that there just isn't enough tagging going on and although the tags that are added do have significant benefit in terms of making certain collection records more easily discoverable only about 3000 records have been tagged so far." Yeah. What do people get from tagging? Tagging personal images, blog entries, bookmarks, what have you, has a use for the average person on the Internet. Tagging stuff for kicks? That's what museum people might do, not your average Myspace user.

Same problem as always: It's cool, we know why we're doing it, but how come no one's coming to play with us? The Powerhouse Museum is trying to address this issue by aiming the bulk tagger application to museum professionals and amateur groups.

Or, next to each collections object, have one of those nice buttons that say "Digg This" or "del.icio.us" so that the tagging is done through already beneficial applications and then find a way to mine that data.... Except for all those tags that'll just say "museum."

I agree

2007-07-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

YES! Web 2.0 stuff is cool, but for crying out loud, be thoughtful. Know what you're doing, but, more importantly, know why you're doing it.

My thesis research showed that a lot of blogs were started because someone thought the museum ought to have one. In some of those cases that someone seemed to have a strong vision of what the blog would become - and those are usually pretty successful, noticed blogs. In others, the blog became a bit miscellaneous and may be on the road to failure unless someone can come up with a purpose, a reason for it.

Of course, reasons don't guarantee successfulness. I know of at least one museum with a well thought out blog that I don't entirely buy into as successful yet. Perhaps in time.

Just because it's fast and easy doesn't mean you should do it. Oh, you should do it, but have a purpose. And a community to connect to.

Flickr-y goodness

2007-06-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Woah. So Making Conversation with Museums made a post on May 20th that I somehow completely missed in my then thesis-induced haze. Luckily, bloglines belched it up for me this morning, because it is so cool!

The Tate is using Flickr. The Tate is using Flickr to involve the public in creating exhibit content. Dude. That's awesome! How cool is that, really? All of the images submitted will be on screens throughout. Additionally, 40 photographs will be chosen and will be curated as part of the exhibition's website.

This means that anyone can become part of the process. Potentially, a 14 year from the North could have her image become part of the Tate. Or someone who's never been to the Tate. You don't even need to live in Britain to take part! although the image most have been taken in Britain. The potential for school groups, for marginalized groups, for groups that don't attend museums to have a voice, to have an impact, is present. Way to go Tate!

The Tate's page about the exhibition.

Tate's flickr group "How We Are Now"

Everybody's got a theme!

2007-06-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

What is it with day of the week themes for blogging? Game Friday, Metaverse Friday... And don't get me started on the knit bloggers day of the week obsession - which I won't go into, because we are museum professionals here, not knitters. It's hard to knit and catalogue objects at the same time....

Back to the question at hand: Why do we love themes? I think it's the love of structure. As a people, we like to know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. If we're at a museum, we (generally) like to know which way we're headed and why. Paleontological museums usually start in the distant past and work up to the present. I'm quite certain I would be confused and frustrated if they choose certain alternative structures - like grouping eras by rhyming! or average number of papers published per creature! Certain alternative structures could make sense - like examining by life form - but it would be more difficult to understand the large picture.

So, structure is good. Structure in blogging is useful. *gasp* Did I just say that? Me, with my willy-nilly way? Structure is useful? Yes. Yes it has its uses. I like weekly features. I even like posts with specific images that signal certain non-weekly features. It gives me a sense of "oh yes, I know what's coming next, I'll be sure to read that." Alternatively it could give me a sense of "oh yes, I know what's coming next, that's usually rubbish. NEXT!." So that danger is present. I would wager the same issue crops up in exhibit texts.

Another potential danger with structure is too much structure. Museums love structure. We thrive on structure. We NEED structure to fulfill our missions. It's necessary. But when blogs become over-structured, with too many headers and features, they run the risk of becoming online, staggered, magazines. In my opinion, blogs should not be overrun by article style writing. Good writing is invaluable, absolutely, although definitions of what "good writing" is depends greatly on the reader.

I am hugely resistant to over-policying, over-proceduring, over-structuring blogs. While I acknowledge that policy, procedure, and structure are good and useful, I feel as if, when it comes to blogs, museums are tempted to maintain the usual amount of control. Too much institutional control, and a museum blog runs the risk of becoming boring. I know there are many restrictions, but museums bloggers usually do a good job of walking the line between policy and boring. Would I blog institutionally the same way I blog here? Probably not.

I could beat this horse to death a dozen times, and I might have already. But I feel as if it's a central source of tension between the institution of the museum and the format of the blog.

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Topic change! To paraphrase the immortal words of Denise Williams: Let's hear it for the girls! Leslie Madden-Brooks of Museum Blogging highlights the women of the museum blogosphere. Does the women-to-men ratio in museum blogging accurately reflect the women-to-men ratio of museum professionals? I'm not sure it does quite yet (in my class of 24, there were 3 men). But we've got things to say and we're saying them.

Museum Blogs: New and Unusual

2007-06-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a bit indiscriminate in what I'll calling a museum blog. I think my working definition is "if it takes itself seriously as a museum, it's good enough for me."

This means I get to read the Dr. Pepper Museum Blog and the Jack Kirby Museum Blog, both of which are fun. I'm not entirely clear on how museum-y these museums are, but I'm glad to know they're out there.

A recent search for "Museum Blog" on google turned up some more institutions I'd never heard of writing blogs:

The Bradford Washington American Mountaineering Museum: I really like the tone of this blog. These folks are just building their museum. It reminds me a bit of the Creation Museum Blog - it's effective in the way they talk casually about what's going, but display their excitement at the same time. I bet mountaineering has a strong community base - I wonder if the BWAMM has found a way to tap into/connect with that community?

The Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum: A maritime museum in Arkansas? I had no idea! The tone is a bit formal, somewhat reserved and museum-y. What I love about this blog (which has apparently been operating since July of 2005!) is that they're talking about their collections, giving some information on objects and new accessions. I was just complaining that I don't see enough of that. I know nothing about Arkansas' connection with all things maritime, but I get interested reading about the stories of the objects.

I was going to share a third, but the blog is really more a regurgitation of the museum's event calendar, and I'm not excited about that. So no link for you, unnamed museum!

To be or not to be?

2007-06-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

What do you do with a thesis blog when you finish your thesis? (I got the official grad school email, by the way. I'll have my piece of paper in 3-4 months. You'll just have to take my word for it until then (unlike LeVar Burton or Lt. Jordi LaForge, whose word you don't have to take (I'm sorry, that was a particularly lame reference, even for me, queen of nerdery))

I'm not sure what to do with this place. I don't want to give it up, cause I like you guys. Even if I think I got called fat in Italian. I don't speak Italian. But what to do with it? How to stay relevant? I've got a few ideas:

1. Become a link style blog. Read museum blogs, pointing out stuff I think is cool. Pros: Not really being done. Cons: Dear gourdesses there are so many museum blogs! Plus I think it would lose some of my voice, which could be a pro if you hate this rambly thing I've got going.

2. Try and get academic with it. Make posts trying to be all analytical and insightful. Pros: People love this stuff. Cons: It's not me. Sure, I've been in school FOREVER, but I'm just not cut out to be analytical; I see too many sides to things.

3. Just keep on keeping on. Do what I want. Some links, a little analysis, maybe blog reviews. Pros: I like doing this. It's messy, it's fun, and there's variety. Cons: It's messy. I might be taken less seriously than blogs which are more formal, and I would like to be taken seriously.

Really, I think I'll end up going with option number 3. But what are your thoughts? What would you like to see here?

And one more thing: That title bar. Maybe I ought to change that a bit now. Options (after the colon is the subtitle bit)!
1. Im in ur museum blogz: Readin' and analyzin'
2. Im in ur museum blogz: Online Culture and Museums
3. Aw, I dunno. I really like that "Im in ur" thing despite the fact that it'll date this like nobody's business. Suggestions?

Don't watch this space

2007-06-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

Because I am going to be pretty much AFK for the next several days. I won't even have my laptop with me! *gasp!* I'm not sure I'll have much time to come up for air, much less time to read my feeds.

After that I think we'll tackle the problem of what to do with a thesis blog when the thesis is finished. For now, a flower:

Mountain meadow flower - Goose Hill something or other, Deception Pass State Park, WA. April 20, 2007.

Confidential to Soledad: I am able to access the thesis document running Windows XP, Firefox, and using Adobe Reader. Let me know if it still doesn't work and I can try emailing a copy when I return from AFK

Thesis thesis thesis

2007-06-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

Direct link to the 141 page .pdf of my thesis: Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging

93 pages of content, 50 of appendices (primarily the survey responses).

Thank you to everyone who helped me out with the survey and were responsive to this blog. I appreciate it.

Abstract:
Museums have long had an online presence. Recently, museums have begun experimenting with forms of online communication beyond the traditional website. One approach which many museums are exploring is blogging. Blogs are websites which are frequently updated, have posts in reverse chronological order, and have links to other website. Interlinked blogs form an online community called the blogosphere, and museums are joining in. At this writing, more than 50 museums maintain blogs, and that number is rising. What little literature exists on museums and blogs focuses primarily on how museums can start blogs and drive traffic to them. Museological literature lacks discussion attempting to ground blogging in applicable theory. This thesis begins that conversation by asking if blogging is an appropriate and beneficial practice for museums. Three interdisciplinary areas of theory – education, communication, and public relations – are examined to determine the appropriateness of blogging practice for museums. A general survey of museum bloggers and case study analyses of four museum blogs ascertains if blogging can be a beneficial practice for museums. In so doing, this thesis offers museums a document they can consider in their discussions of internet strategy while also laying groundwork for future in-depth analysis of museum blogging. Taking a museological approach, this thesis finds blogging to be appropriate and beneficial for museums.

Mmmm metablogging

2007-06-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

So if I blog erin82's metablogging, am I a metametablogger?

erin82 of Henry Art Gallery's HankBlog talks about voice, audience, and the messiness of blogging. Maybe the messiness comment is my own.

Maybe it's the archaeologist in me (I have a degree in that too) but I love how hands on and dirty (not in that way) blogging can be. The unrefined nature of what I conceive of blogs to be. Interesting situations can arise from this, as erin82 points out, but when blogs are run with a heavy hand (cougheye levelcough), I find they begin to lose their appeal.

I has thesis!

2007-06-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

I defended my thesis on Friday....

And I passed. I can, indeed, has thesis. (Click here if you do not get it. Well, that might not help, but maybe you'll get the idea.)

I wasn't given any revisions, just a few grammatical errors were pointed out. It was excellent. What was really gratifying to see is that it sparked discussion. The Q&A went on for nearly as long as my talk. I got really interesting questions on the topics of branding/institutional voice, calling blogs by other names (virtual exhibits?), and policy issues. There seemed to be a lot of concern about control.

In my opinion, things are much more interesting when you relinquish control. Some of the comment threads on Buzz Blog are very cool - especially when you can feel that school groups are really getting into it from the kiosks. And I don't know what sort of institutional control is exerted over the Exploratorium Explainers, but they voices in the posts are so genuine and spontaneous - they sounds like people just writing a blog. WHICH IS WHAT A BLOG SHOULD BE. Often I feel some blogs are written far too much in the style of an article; it's what keeps me from fully embracing the Burke Museum Blog (sorry Rebecca).

But maybe different things appeal to different people.

The point of this post was to let you know that I don't have my document for you now, but I should have it soon. I know you're waiting on pins and needles. Maybe tomorrow. :)

One more thing

2007-05-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

Video of 500 years of the female face in art.

From the Juxtapoz website via Boing Boing.

This is amazing - Web 2.0 and art. I could watch this video a few times and learn more about portraiture in a couple of minutes than I did in my entire Art History class in college.

T-minus 28 hours

2007-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Little more than a day now until I defend my thesis. If you are interested in museums and blogs and will be in the Seattle area, feel free to pop in. Details are in a post a couple down.

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Richard Urban of Musematic has created a Google Group for museum researchers, the museum research group. I'll be very interested to see what kind of research is going on in the great wide world of museums.

We are the future

2007-05-27T15:14:00.001-07:00

We are the future. And we want your collections to be accessible online. And we want them indexed on search engines so we can find them.

I'm sitting here in the Wallingford Chocolati (chocolate, espresso, and wireless. What more could I want?) with Larissa, the Museology program digitization queen. We're here with the purpose of creating our defense presentations, but we haven't quite gotten to that point.

We've been sidelined talking about the places where our theses interact. Larissa's all about digitization of collections and public access to those online. And I'm all about, well, blogging. Duh.

Why are there no blogs that take you behind the scenes in collections? Why? Or are there and I've missed them? Every once in a while I'll see them take a peek, but rarely. Most museum visitors are not aware that there is vast collections storage beneath their feet, much less of the COMPLETELY AWESOME stuff that goes on in collections and is held in the collections (is my bias showing? Oops.). I think that Glenbow's Dear Miss Griffis does a pretty cool job of using their archives as their blog, but this is not what I'm talking about.

Can we juxtapose the Botany Photo of the Day blog with the Powerhouse Museum's Collection Database with your average blog? Yeah yeah yeah, I know there are copyright restrictions - I'm thinking of historical collections primarily, not art. If I weren't a museum person, that is what I would want to see. Cool old stuff. Not just the 3" by 4" placard of information from an exhibit, but the story. Stories. Museum 2.0 just had a thought provoking post on the power of stories.

What are the really successful blogs? Boingboing? Yeah. It's the places where you find all the cool little stories that not too many others know.

Am I being totally coherent? No. But I am excited by the possibilities! It's not only the possibility of making collections accessible to the public, it's making collections accessible online for researchers, for everyone. It's using Flickr to encourage accessibility and invite participation.

This is what I want the future of collections to be. Collections so often gets the short end of the stick, but the potential. The potential is huge. So much potential countered by so much institutional Fear. But look out museum world. We're coming and we see the potential and we have the Trust.

It's Official! I has a defense!

2007-05-25T18:10:00.000-07:00

You are cordially invited to attend Lynn Bethke's thesis presentation
entitled, "Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to
Blogging." Lynn's presentation will be held on June 1st at 2:30pm in
the Burke Room.

Constructing Connections:
A Museological Approach to Blogging
Presentation by Lynn Bethke
June 1, 2007
Burke Museum, Burke Room, 2:30 pm.

Museums have long had an online presence. Recently, museums have begun experimenting with forms of online communication beyond the traditional website. One approach which many museums are exploring is blogging. Blogs are websites which are frequently updated, have posts in reverse chronological order, and have links to other website. Interlinked blogs form an online community called the blogosphere, and museums are joining in. At this writing, more than 50 museums maintain blogs, and that number is rising. What little literature exists on museums and blogs focuses primarily on how museums can start blogs and drive traffic to them. Museological literature lacks discussion attempting to ground blogging in applicable theory. This thesis begins that conversation by asking if blogging is an appropriate and beneficial practice for museums. Three interdisciplinary areas of theory – education, communication, and public relations – are examined to determine the appropriateness of blogging practice for museums. A general survey of museum bloggers and case study analyses of four museum blogs ascertains if blogging can be a beneficial practice for museums. In so doing, this thesis offers museums a document they can consider in their discussions of internet strategy while also laying groundwork for future in-depth analysis of museum blogging. Taking a museological approach, this thesis finds blogging to be appropriate and beneficial for museums.

Changing of the Hosts

2007-05-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

I removed my Rethinking Museums material from esnips.com. I wasn't particularly happy with the esnips set up I had. I've moved the paper and presentation to my google pages, which gives me the illusion of control over my material. Click here to visit them.

Quick! Look over there!

2007-05-23T23:46:00.000-07:00

Whoops! Still no museum blog content. Here's a pretty picture instead.

Yes. That's a real place. And it is far far far more amazing than my years old camera translates. It's an overlook of Diablo Lake along SR20 in Washington state. OMG. Amazing.

Upcoming entries will include:

- Official defense announcement (now with 100% more abstract!)

- .pdf of my whole shebang thesis (pending defense and passing thereof)

- trying to figure out what to do with this blog when this thesis process is over (or am I putting the cart before the horse? I've been having trouble with that. That and counting chickens.).

Someday there will be content.

Copyright and Fair Use

2007-05-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most entertaining discussion of copyright I've seen:

A Fair-y Use Tale

Using clips from disney movies, often only one word, Eric Faden constructs an explanation of copyright and fair use. This got BoingBoing-ed this morning and I'm having trouble getting the page to load (either takes forever or just doesn't at all), but hopefully this problem will ebb as the weekend progresses.

Edit: Found a copy of the film on YouTube:

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Reflections

2007-05-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

I emailed my "final draft" to my committee on Wednesday night.

When I hit upon my thesis idea, cleverly conceived as "doing something with museums and blogs," I didn't know that many museums had blogs. I knew the Burke was trying a blog to go with hosting the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. (I would have linked to the blog, but it's gone now. Tsk tsk.) But I found it abysmal - a picture with teacher questions eliciting student responses, if any. I thought, "this isn't how museums should blog! Museums should be more hip to the jive in terms of blogging. None of this worksheet material, give me content!"

A quick google search turned up Ideum's Survey of Museum Blogs and Community Sites. And I was pleased to see that museums were blogging.

When I started this thesis, the museum blogosphere was manageable; I was able to subscribe to read feeds from all the museum blogs without becoming overwhelmed. But now. Now it is overwhelming. Museumblogs.org is tracking 164 museum and museum related blogs, and I'm not even sure they're picking up all the museum blogs that are out there. The blog for the Museum of the American Cocktail? The Ralph Stanley Museum blog? Of course, I don't know what definition of museum MuseumBlogs is operating under, so it's possible these fall outside the range of the definition. But they're here and they're posting.

A quick count of museumblogs.org gives me 71 institutional musuem blogs (although I'm just going by the "institution" listing sounding like a museum name. That is a lot. And I'm thinking this number is low. I'm thinking that there are a lot of upstart blogs - a lot of baby blogs after MW2007, and probably a second round after AAM. Not to mention the exhibition blogs and blogs from smaller museums which may or may not fit definitions of museums.

The kind of paper I tried to write, a ground floor kind of paper, is not what is needed anymore. Research at a greater depth, real content analysis, something comparing and contrasting museum, zoo, and library blogs. The possibilities/ramification of museums and cultural institutions on Facebook and MySpace (I would love to read this paper, by the way. Somebody should write it.). The next level of research needs to happen.

I'll be pdf-ing my thesis after it's in its final final form (sometime after the first of June), and posting the file. What does my thesis actually do? It offers up some theories that are of use to museums and which apply to blogging (establishes blogging as a museologically appropriate practice) and offers four case studies of museum blogs as they existed from January through March of 2007. The case studies show that blogging can be a beneficial practice for museums (well, I think they do). Ground level stuff, but I hadn't found it wrapped up in a nice package like that yet.

If I were starting a thesis of museum blogging at this point, I'm not sure where I would start. Perhaps not as general as I did. I think, at this point, we can start getting into the specifics of the things.

Crunchtime

2007-05-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for some kind of intelligent discussion about museums and blogs, you can go ahead and skip this entry. This entry is reserved for the personal ramblings of the author and not for intelligent contributions to the museum community.

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I'm working against the clock. I set a goal to have my "final" draft to committee by May 15h. And now that 2/3 of my committee have given me comments on my draft, I'm having a bit of a crisis of faith.

There are a lot of things which need to be done to make this thesis business respectable. One of my main problems is making assertions but not supporting them adequately. For some of them I should be able to cite, but many of the assertions are based on my observations of museum representatives at conferences, through their survey responses, or through their blogs. I struggled with my authority as a quasi-expert on the subject in the winter and came to the conclusion that I could say some things based on my personal knowledge, but now I'm having trouble with that again.

Part of me is wondering why in the world I choose a topic so far from my comfort zone (english, anthropology, literature, collections management) and tried to write a major paper on a subject I was only interested in, as opposed to experienced in. Part of me is using this blog to procrastinate actually revising my paper. Ha!

Okay, back to the salt mines.

The I-Generation

2007-05-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

One of my LJ friends posted a link to this nerdcore video:

And it fits in with what I've been thinking about lately. Trust vs. fear. Younger vs. older.

When I presented at Rethinking Museums last Thursday, there were some interesting questions, some stemming from my use of the Creation Museum Blog as an example. Museums are afraid of the appropriation of their words and images from blogs by other organizations with goals counter to those of the museums. I have trouble understanding this fear. That is, I understand the fear, but I have trouble understanding how it can be contextualized anew. Museums had this fear when they first started going online, but they decided the benefits outweighed the costs. And, even with the fear, words and images can be appropriated from printed material. I don't fully understand why this is fear is being transferred to social web application. And it frustrates me.

I've called it The Fear. Museums have The Fear. But maybe it's me and my generation; we have The Trust. We grew up with or got involved at a relatively young age with the internet and then with social applications. We Trust others online. We share information, personal opinions, stories, photos, and more with people online who are "strangers." Some my best friends today, I met online first.

Maybe I can really only speak for myself in this capacity, but I Trust. I Trust that people are basically good and basically well intentioned. I know that my words could be appropriated for use beyond my control. But it's beyond my control, and there might be someone out there who finds what I have to say interesting and useful. It's worth the cost.

I've heard people older than myself say that they were scared at how trusting younger people are. So I wonder if this Trust v. Fear thing comes down to Younger v. Older (gross generalizations, of course). As the younger people of today gain footholds in museums, I wonder what will come out of it. More of the cool open tagging initiatives like the Powerhouse Museum has? More blogs? Avenues for freely uploading visitor produced podcasts? Something else? And what about people who've been doing social networking since they were 12 and didn't start easing into it at 18? What is their worldview? What kind of initiatives comes to someone who literally grew up participating online?

The future is wide open. I trust it.

Rethinking Museums Presentation

2007-05-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

I'm offering up my PowerPoint for Rethinking Museums in a .pdf format. Here it is! Okay, so it's the eSnips folder, but you're looking for the one cleverly labeled "Rethinking Museums Presentations." Very sneaky.

A note: I acknowledge that my sources are not cited within the powerpoint. That's because you should read the dang paper. Some info lifted directly from the .pdf of the Radical Trust presentation and from How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere? by Kathy Gill. Other than that, it's mostly hodge podged.

I'll be interested to see what kind of response there is at the Tech panel. Erin is presenting on podcasts, especially those of the Henry Art Gallery (scroll to the bottom of the page), Rebecca Durkin is talking about the Burke Blog, and David Giblin is talking about the digitization efforts at the Herbarium. I'll be interested to see where the ensuing discussion leads.

Hope I saw you there!

One two three... Here ya go

2007-04-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

Okay. I looked high and low over the internet for a file storage site that seemed okey dokey. eSnips is where I ended up at. If you know of better, free, shareable online file hosting, please let me know. I'd really prefer something with unique URLs for each file, instead of folders.

Without further ado, I offer you my Rethinking Museums Paper. It's a version of the first half of my thesis, which talks somewhat about theories and museum practice and blogging. I know it's not a revolution, but, hey, it took a long time. :D

(That link takes you to a folder from which you can download the .pdf of the paper. I hope.)

ETA (05/01) NEW AND IMPROVED! .pdf actually made with Adobe! Relatively non-permissive Creative Commons license added to scare the plagarizers.

Hip Hip Hooray

2007-04-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

Hip hip hooray, she says. I've decided that my first official draft of my thesis is done. I'll send it off in an email to my committee early tomorrow morning. That way it's at the top of the weekend email pile. Until their revisions come back, it's time to relax. I spent half of last week far too wound up.

But of course there's the little matter of a conference presentation on Thursday. I had probably ought to get to work on my PowerPoint for that. But not today. And probably not tomorrow. I'm thinking Tuesday. Don't look at me like that. The conference paper is written. This is just a powerpoint.

Business: I hereby declare the survey officially closed. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Last Call

2007-04-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Last call for my survey!

No matter if you're a hip cat or a squarester, if you blog for a museum and are free this Friday evening, I want to hear from you! For more information, click here.

Heck, even if you don't blog for a museum, you're welcome to take it, although I don't know what incentive you have to do so. And it won't make much sense. And I probably will just look at your responses to the more general questions (like, what do you see as the future of museums and blogs?)

And for those of you who have taken the survey, thank you so much. So far I have 11 responses from 10 institutions. A lucky four of those are profiled in my thesis. Aren't you just dying to know who they are? All in good time, my pretties, all in good time.

(I am no good being professional. Maybe I ought to tone down the quirky on this blog. Lay off the hamster macros for a while...)

Hamster Macros

2007-04-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

I dig Google Analytics. I just get tickled pink by seeing how many hits I had each day and what Google searches bring up my site. Mostly it's "im in ur" searches, but it's often "rethinking museums" (which is happening next week by the way - the conference), and sometimes searches looking specifically for the blog, or for my name.

The thing about the searches is cool, because you can see what your audience wants. Apparently, they want hamster macros (another search hit of late). But, if I were an institution, I would be more critical about these tidbits of information. If you're a museum blog and you're not tracking search hits, you should be. Most of you are. But it's fun too! Mellow and profitable! (2 points to id that reference, comfypants excluded)

Search terms can also let you know what potential communities might be interested in making contacts. I could do a joint museum blog blog and hamster macro blog. It would be confusing and have a targeted audience of 2? 3? I think Perian is with me, but I don't know who else would be. I'm writing flakey, but you get the idea.

I think I need to go join the zombie horde and get on with my thesis revisions. BRAINS! BRAINS!

Brains!

2007-04-25T22:47:00.000-07:00

There's a really provocative post up at Museum 2.0 about museum studies graduate programs. You should go check it out, though for the life of me I don't know why you're read this and not read Museum 2.0.

I would try and articulate something right now, but, you know what? I do feel a bit like a zombie. And I could use some brains right about now. Make sure you read all the comments too.

More personal rambling

2007-04-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe later I'll be able to talk intelligently about museum blogging. Maybe in about a month and a half.

Let me tell you a secret, internet. I'm afraid that my thesis isn't good enough. And I feel that I have legitimate reason to feel that way. #1 I'm not doing anything revolutionary. I'm, more or less, stating the obvious. Even though I haven't found it stated the long way yet. #2 It's only at 64 pages long. I thought these things were supposed to be longer. Because, duh, length = value. (please to be noting sarcasm).

Okay. Pity party over. The first thing is the only one that's bothering me. The thesis is supposed to make a "museological contribution" and, from the viewpoint of the program, I'm doing that. But I think my efforts at academia are pretty laughable. Wait! I thought I declared the pity party over! Go home, pity party goers!

Clean Cup!

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My draft is weighing in at 64 pages, pre-revising. And, actually, revising may bring it down if I choose to condense some of the longer epistemology and communication sections.

I am struggling with "scholarly sources." Maybe because I don't know the language for how blogging is discussed in sociology or communications. I've got loads of articles from a PR journal, but, honestly, I'm citing a lot of text book. Because the theories I'm offering up are so basic. Plus Museology is primarily a discipline of text books; the scholarly, academic journals are fewer and far between. So, I don't know. Maybe it'll slide once I get things better cited. I do want to fall to my knees and thank Jennifer and David for making all the Museums and the Webs papers available online, because I have found that to be pretty much the only source of writing on museums and technologies outside of blogs and books from 1998. And blogging is less of a scholarly source than conference proceedings, despite the astuteness of many bloggers out there.

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I wrote a couple paragraphs on radical trust today. I stuck them in the PR section. I want to bring in more strongly the themes I carried away from MW2007 of the potential of building community if you can tap into it, and having a reason to do it. The reason it gets hard is because it is Extremely easy for me to fall into "you should do this" mode. Revising is going to be an interesting process, I can see....

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One last thing, I promise. I think I'm going to post my Rethinking Museums paper here, you know, once I get that finished. It'll be a first toss of my baby to the sharks.

Happy dance!

2007-04-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Although I have a ton more work to do

Although I have a ton more writing to do

Although I have A LOT to do yet

I've finished a draft.

(go go hamster macros! I love icanhascheezburger.com)

I just wrapped up a draft of my second half. A draft of a first half plus a draft of a second half equals complete draft!

Of course, in a lot of ways, it still looks like something the cat dragged in. I'm going to go over it a bit more later tonight, do a little rough editting, send it off to committee. Then Monday starts the work of revising the document into something that looks like a Master's thesis. Even a little bit like it will do.

WOO HOO!

Oh my.

2007-04-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

I just reserved a room for my thesis defense. I will be defending in the Burke Room at the Burke Museum on Friday June 1st, 2:30ish (time confirmation to come later). You are all cordially invited. Or tell your Seattle area friends; the more the merrier.

This is serious, people. I'd best write this thing.

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I will be presenting a version of the first half of my paper at Rethinking Museums as part of the Museums and Technology Panel on Thursday morning, May 3rd. Tell your Seattle area friends, or come yourself. I mean, hey, it's a free conference. Gotta love it.

No title today, sorry

2007-04-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

# notes:

Looks like there's a new blog at the Smithsonian: Office of Exhibits Central. There was an announcement on the Livejournal museum communities. Looks like they've been posting for a while though. I suspect an Eye Level style model for posting and start up. It's the Smithsonian, after all.

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Connecting with Communities. That's what this is all about. And let's have a little case study of what happens when you do connect with a community.

That's from my Google Analytics. In the past week I had a chance to connect with the museum and the web community. I handed out a few business cards (MOO cards rock!), put a few cards up on the jobs wanted board, and got mentioned in a couple presentations. And look what happened. An explosion. Normally I'm lucky to get about 8 direct hits to the blog. But almost 90? Wow.

I'm realistic. I may have grabbed a couple new readers, but most are probably poking their heads in. If my goal was to stay well connected with this community, I would get my URL out there more, go to more conferences, leave more comments on other blogs (as it is, I leave almost none *shameface*). But I'm pretty well wrapped up in my own little world right now. Maybe later, when I need to figure out where to go with this blog, maybe then I'll get active and try and get internet-famous.

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I think I've got a thesis title. Whaddya think of this?: "Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging." It's a little more refined than "I'm in Ur Museum Website, Readin' and Analyzin' Ur Blogz" (bless its geeky little heart). The bit after the colon may be refined, but I think Constructing Connections gets at a few key concepts of blogs, so it's very plausible.

Revelation and Reflection

2007-04-15T22:27:00.001-07:00

I mentioned an Aha moment on Day 3. I know you're dying from the suspense.

I've been missing something basic, something I should have been completely aware of from the get-go: my audience.

I don't remember exactly what was said, but I suddenly discovered this. I need to be writing my thesis for museum staff who need something coherent to bring to their administration to demonstrate that blogging is in line with mission and has benefits (and this could be extended in argument to all social technology really). This gives my thesis a purpose. It gives it a reason more than me telling my committee things I already know. It's fantastic!

The things I took away from this conference are:

- not all museums are ready to blog or should blog (for *blog* read *embrace social media*)
- museums need to be ready (and willing!!!) to connect with their audiences if they do blog
- speaking of audiences, museums may have to face the fact that a blog will not draw in a crowd, but might make the few already paying attention more highly invested, or cause a new small crowd to gain interest. These are valid reasons for a new project.

- very few museums have embraced radical trust. They're edging that way, but the fear is strong with them. And fear leads to the dark side. (Who has the fear? The Smithsonian, for one, which leads to many people saying it doesn't really feel like a blog.)
- to blog most effectively, radical trust is essential. The Smithsonian is the Smithsonian and people are going to read them because they are the Smithsonian. Reverse order time stamped entries do not a community make.

- microaudiences are key to utilizing the social web. Geocaching has loads of committed cachers. If museums started pulling in the GPS/Geocaching community, it would be amazing. I'm sure there are other communities offering possibilities to museums which can be connected with.

- the language of use has to change. Museums are talking about getting their visitors to do this or that. "Our visitors will rate the images" or some such. Museums need simply to create and facilitate the opportunity for engagement. Not everyone wants to have a museum as part of their social life. Sometimes they just want to be casual acquaintances. Or window shoppers. Sometimes I felt like museums are waiting to pounce on/exploit their visitors. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

- museum blogs are no longer going to be special and unique snowflakes. There is a snowstorm brewing. In the end, some of those snowflakes are going to melt away. Others are going to become parts of glaciers and be with us a long time. (okay, maybe glacier is a bad metaphor to use here, especially for the agility blogging offers, but this is what I got folks)

- And it's not about the technology, it's about what the technology allows us to do. This should have always been obvious, but sometimes it feels like some are getting caught up in a stampede toward social media when it may not be appropriate or useful for that particular institution.

Two final things, real quick I promise:
1. I don't believe in Second Life. What institutions like the Exploratorium are doing is way cool, but I don't feel as if Second Life has the same potential as other social media. I feel that, in a lot of ways, SL is too prohibitive in costs and technology for a lot of audiences. I'm usually pretty hip to the jive, but SL is hard.

2. Optional tagging for collections ala the Powerhouse Museum is AWESOME! It really does give a purpose to digitization, lets museums know what visitors are interested in, and, importantly, democratizes collections and curator speak. OMG awesome.

MW2007: Days 3

2007-04-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Day 3 was not so eventful as Day 2, primarily because I didn't arrive at the conference until about 2:15 when I grabbed a mocha and settled in a couch to knit with Larissa.

Around 3:30 we headed to the cookie break, grabbed a cookie, and got roped into handing out evaluations. We are loyal volunteers.

The closing plenary was nice. Something Seb said provoked an "A-HA" moment which will be blogged about in the coming days. One commenter mentioned that there are a lot of Hows being discussed and many fewer Whys; I felt validated.

The closing reception was held at The De Young Museum, which was very lovely. I was completely taken in by the Vivienne Westwood exhibit. Having become much more knowledgeable about textile design through both Project Runway and my own knitting, I found it fascinating. Although I was disappointed when a dress that was quite clearly crochet was labeled as a hand knit. Research, people, research.

The De Young's new building has a tower with some simply phenomenal views of the San Francisco. I took, approximately, a bajillion photos. But have yet to upload them, so it is simply a taunt at this point.

All in all, I quite enjoyed this conference. I hope I have the opportunity to attend next year, although so much is up in the air when it comes to my immediate future that I can't commit to anything. I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet all the people I met (okay, except the one guy who made me cry, I could have done without that) and to really feel like part of a movement. Power to the people.

MW2007: Days 2

2007-04-14T22:45:00.000-07:00

Since the wireless in my hostel is sketchy, day 2 is late.

Again, there's no need to really go over the sessions, since they're all around this part of the internet. I went to the Birds of a Feather breakfast where I had a nice talk with some folks from University Museums. After that I ran to the IMLS session.

Following the IMLS dooley was Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere. It was very cool. The gathering in the room was massive. I'm not sure what to say about it, but it was very cool that they took the time to update their numbers from their published ones. Their powerpoint is available online. I was tickled to pieces to see a screencap of this site, with it's terrible long title, in one of the slides. I was as giddy as a schoolgirl. I suppose I am yet a school girl, so it wasn't entirely inappropriate.

Afterwards I went along to the Bloggers meet up where I got to hang out with some of the heppest cats in the museum blogosphere. I sat next to Erin82 of the Hankblog (who I go to school with but is still a hep cat), Leslie, Geoff, and Nate, as well as Pilar, Trisha, and Witt, who may or may not have blogs that I haven't linked to. Sorry folks, it's late.

The lunch was fun, and it was really great to put faces to blogs. I can't imagine what a meet-up like this might look like next year.

After that I went to a coupla sessions and the best of the web awards. I don't have anything to say about those, so I won't.

The reception for Day 2 was held at the Exploratorium! SCIENCE! I suppose these things are for networking, but I grabbed some food and my pal Larissa and I headed out to play with SCIENCE!

I don't know what these are, but they were purdy!

Personally, I found the theremin most exciting.

Although I had to take a picture of this and tell it that "I am not a number" (3 points for knowing this reference).

And there was more, but that's enough for here.

Day 1: MW2007

2007-04-12T23:51:00.000-07:00

So this is not liveblogging. This is... something much different. It's deadblogging? I don't know, but I sure am beat. I didn't realize conferences were so tiring! My last one certainly wasn't. I guess this won't so much be blogging about the conference as my perceptions of it. All the papers are online anyway.

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive totally rocked my socks at this morning's opening plenary. The potential for hosted material is astounding! I'm sure you can find a better summary elsewhere, at Museum Blogging, perhaps. It was awesome though. Go superlatives!

The Web 2.0 session was really engaging. Jeff of Eye Level gave an enlightening talk about how Eye Level operates. Shelley and Nicole from the Brooklyn Museum rocked my socks with the awesomeness that operates out of that place. And then I started to get tired. And stayed tired through Community Created Content and Tagging and Terms.

I am tickled to death that this corner of the internet has managed to get me recognized by total strangers. Today, Bryan Kennedy of Science Buzz did a double take and said "you're ..... " and I confirmed I was indeed in his museum, reading and analyzing his blogs. And at the Graduate Student Forum, this guy sat across the table and said "How's your blogging research going?" I cocked my head and squinted at him "Do I know you?" Turns out to be Richard Urban from Musematic. All is madness.

The graduate student forum turned out to be quite intimate. It was nice, but very small. There is the usual amount of feeling inferior to grandiose research. I'm still in this mode of, um, I'm just doing this cause I think it ought to be said and I can't find where it's been said before.

I'm very excited about the Radical Trust session tomorrow: I think it's going to be massive. And awesome. Massively awesome.

Predictions and Observations
Okay. So you know what? I don't think museums have got this whole concept of radical trust. I think museums are terrified to let users contribute content (including comments), with a few exceptions, who tend to be quite successful. Eye Level's comment screening is almost draconian. Not that they're censoring criticism, but it is a VERY Heavily Controlled blog. But Eye Level manages to seem to work. SAAM seems to have achieved its goals, anyway. Nonetheless, it has the fear, I think.

Despite this fear (or at least lack of trust), I see a barrage of new museum blogs coming out in the next 6 months. And I see most of them failing. Because of this fear. I think many of them are going to have a case of institutional petrification and will not be agile enough to move and adapt with the internet. These are blogs that will be blogs for blogging's sake, or will be trying to translate (relatively successful) offline programming into an online format which will dramatically reduce it's efficacy. I'm wondering if there won't be a backlash from the older, less trusting, less participatory web savvy attendees next year or the one after, complaining about how blogging failed for them. Because I was, frankly, a little startled by some of the points of conversation brought by attendees in the blogging workshop.

That's all for now. I need to sleep sometime.

MW2007: Day -1, a report from the front lines of volunteers

2007-04-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

Today started awesomely as I had the chance to sit in on Beyond Blogging: Is It Community Yet?, a workshop run by the lovely and talented gentlemen who keep the Walker blogs awesome, Nate, Justin, and Brent. It was so nice to see people who know blogs and know what they're talking about get up and talk about the things I'm always talking about. The guys were awesome and their wiki notes are available online. It's posted to their New Media Initiatives Blog, so I guess it's not a sooper dooper sekrit. Check it out, lots of good info there.

And I had one of those meta moments, sitting in the workshop, seeing my name in the presentation, although I would again pass credit to Julian Dibbell. It was pretty nifty.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Gail Durbin from the Victoria and Albert Museum over the coffee break. We spoke about both blogs and knitting, two of my favorite subjects. The V&A has a knitting page where users can contribute content. Check it out!

The workshop said adding images makes more interesting posts. I love images in posts, but rarely include them. I shall endeavor to add more and more random images.

My day got less exciting from there, as I did a three hour shift on the registrations desk, followed by a further two hours collecting tickets at the door of the SF MOMA conference reception. I had one very unpleasant experience with a gentleman at the door, but I was helped by the wandering through the Picasso exhibit that followed, as well as the random encounters with favorite artists Guston, Klee, and new discovery Clyfford still (although the one image online is not representative of the kinds that I found fascinating). It had been a long time since I'd been in a major art museum. I adore wandering from piece to piece, allowing myself to be pulled in by whatever attracts by attention.

For tomorrow: Grad Student Research Forum ( *looks around sneaky-like* now with secret reception afterwards. I didn't tell you.).

Woot Woot!

2007-04-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

I'm in San Francisco!

Proof!

If you're joining me for MW2007, and you're thinking about doing some touristing at Fisherman's Wharf, might I suggest a visit to Musee Mecanique? It's free, and so amazing. A collection of old time and contemporary arcade machines and early mechanized scenes, which are ALL IN WORKING ORDER and you can USE. It's one of those really interesting things: Preservation or Use? Only through Use do we get the full effect of the object, but with Preservation we can understand them longer. I have to say, using them was so cool! I didn't read any of the signage, but I came out with a better understanding and appreciation of early mechanized entertainments.

Like this one. Put in a quarter and there's a scene with dwarves heading to the mines and a mushroom house, all very neatly mechanized.

Or this one. Put in your quarter and it lights up to reveal a spinning fun house mirror.

The element of wonder at this exhibit was high. There was so much to see and it's the sort of thing you find one of here or there, usually not in working order. If you have the chance, go.

Holy Productivity Batman!

2007-04-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a super day for thesis work. I managed to draft both a Cost/Benefits section (which is mostly a place to address the potential negatives (thank you, Nina, your comment was extremely helpful and is now a paragraph in my thesis)) and a glossary, because it's been repeatedly brought to my attention that a lot of people have no idea what I'm saying.

So really, I have the case studies to write, a few little bits here and there, and then some massive revising. Especially in the PR section. And a lot of other places too. But especially PR.

Tomorrow I fly away for MW2007. I am really excited about this. I think it's going to be an excellent time, and hopefully a good chance to do some networking (which I am pretty bad at, truth be told) and hand out some cards and *cough*resumes*cough*. I'm still not certain if I'll be able to attend the museum bloggers meet-up as I am currently committed to help as a volunteer for a session running immediately after Radical Trust. I'm looking to trade and am hoping to make it.

Whee!

Question

2007-04-01T00:38:00.000-07:00

Is there any good reason why museums shouldn't blog?

I suppose like if an institution is totally shady and is going to be lying all over their blog and be generally dishonest and/or not transparent, then no. Or even if there is shady practice (and certain well known institutions spring to mind after my course on Law and Ethics), engaging in a discussion of it would be really interesting.

I can't really think of any other good reasons though. Help me out. I mean, I acknowledge that I have a small (HUGE MASSIVE) researcher bias, and I'm trying to balance it.

List. Lists are friends:
- blogging might be passe in 1, 5, 10 years (but how many museums produced freaking laserdiscs, and blogging is way cheaper than that)
- potential to bring negative attention to the museum (if your bloggers are mean, dishonest, not open to conversation, or just oblivious)
- potential to leak information (should be some blanket policy in effect anyway about donor/NAGPRA/general information which is not public)
- potential to alienate older/non-tech savvy people (I don't really buy this one despite just making it up. Besides this is way outweighed by accessibility, younger people's involvement, and potential community building, IMHO (I'm not much for internet slang, and that one always makes me think of IHOP))
- The internet could blow up. But museum blogging would be the least of our problems then, eh?

Nothing really compelling there, nothing that can't be easily outweighed. There's gotta be something.....

PS: My abstract got accepted to Rethinking Museums. So I'll be part of a panel on Museums and Technology. I hope you're coming! I have insider info that online registration ought to be available next week, probably early in the week. Major props to the women putting this together (okay, there might be some men involved, but you are so outnumbered dudes) and doing it in such a compressed time frame. You rock!

PPS: Today, while exploring the great Northwest and taking (most of) a day away from my thesis...

I was totally INSIDE of a tree. Photographic Evidence Here.

That's a tree. I was standing inside of it. It was an awesome experience, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word. That expression on my face is one of being awed and excited. I'm telling everyone, including all you nice museum professionals. (The tree in question is located along the River Loop path at the Newhalem Visitor's Center in the North Cascades State Park, WA.)

Yes! (think Orson Welles voice)

2007-03-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

Ever heard the Orson Welles/frozen peas thing (link to audio)? It's very nice. YES!

But that is completely irrelevant to what I mean to write here.

Things are getting all shook up. My question has changed. The content will not change, but the slant from which it is approached will.

The original question was "Why? Why should museums blog?" And I was having a terrible time writing the justification for my thesis. But it's because my question is so biased. I can be biased, I'm going to write that I'm biased, but my question shouldn't be biased, or it's boring!

So the question has shifted. The overarching question being addressed is "Is blogging a good thing for museums?" with the two subquestions "How does blogging fit into museum theory?" and "How does blogging fit into museum practice?" with a ring-a-ding wrap up so the blog case analyses can be especially impactful.

It's another one of those things that seems obvious, but is hard to see when you're in the thick of it. I feel as if it will give a lot of coherency to the paper.

Even though I have only two months left, I feel capable and ready. YES!

pop

2007-03-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

That was the sound of my bubble.

I like to think of the Internet as a friendly, happy place where everyone is thrilled to take part. But I forget that the Internet is also a dark scary place where extremists of all kinds can find a friendly happy community for their dark and scary beliefs.

Let's back up.

I started to think about the user vs. visitor thing after Nina posted about it. I looked around and found Creating Passionate Users which is cute if a little more geared toward corporate things.

The last post on that site from Kathy Sierra really popped my bubble. POP.

Kathy has been systematically targeted with threats, misogynistic comments, and things that are just plain unconscionable. And it doesn't seem to stem so much from the things she says as who she is. A woman. A woman with a public persona.

I won't claim to know much about Kathy and who she is, but what has happened to her is disgusting. I wouldn't wish that sort of intimidation on my worst enemy. It really makes me angry. But I don't know what to do in the face of such raw misogynistic antagonism (I almost wrote terrorism. It amounts to the same thing.). The whole affair makes me want to use words that are unbecoming in my semi-professional blog.

So the bubble's popped. Kathy's terrible experience (and I expect it's not over yet for her) will serve as a reminder that not everyone sees the sunny side of an internet that lets you have a voice and converse with people near and far, likeminded and differentlyminded. Some use it as a place to scream, stab, and hurt.

I'm going to miss my bubble.

Tortoise and the Hare

2007-03-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

Slow and steady wins the race. I've set small writing goals for myself each day on my Google Goals Calendar. After the next four weeks (one of which is blank due to MW2007), I have a big blank. I hope to fill this in based on when my committee would next like to see some writing from me.

And so far, so good. I wrote a methodology section that is probably 2.5 pages long once it's formatted to grad school specs. It's an encouraging start to my last quarter of school for a long time.

Tomorrow I hope to work out the justification portion of my writing (I don't know why I gave it two days on the calendar) and then start to outline/draft an actual blog analysis.

I think my issue right now is that I need a more solid argument. I need a stronger thread to hold together the bits of things I want to say. I'll work that out with the justification, I suppose.

Yay! This is exciting.

Spring is here. Let's get hopping!

2007-03-25T14:24:00.000-07:00

After my jubilant half point posting I sent my wreck of a first half-thesis off to committee and promptly hid from it for the rest of spring break. But tomorrow marks the first day of my last 10 weeks of classes (I've been in school for nearly 20 years now, I'm ready for something different, something with personal responsibility. Hire me?), so I am sitting in the Chocolati Cafe in Wallingford, sipping a delicious mocha frost (seriously, it is AMAZING) and trying to schedule out my thesis work.

But first I had to go through and make a list of institutions which had responded to my totally awesome and super fun survey. I think it's gone really well. I've had 10 responses from 9 institutions. And among those 9 responses are the institutions I had really hoped would respond. I would love to hear from many more of you museum bloggers, so please, help a grad student out.

One thing I find very interesting is the variety of ways that institutional blogs are created. In some places, a person starts a blog because they feel the museum needs one, and it's easy. In other places, there's this great long process where months of research take place before the blog is launched. I love it.

Although I know what needs doing and the timetable I have to do it, it is still extremely daunting. At this point, everything that is written is so unpolished as to be laughable. And I don't have my structure worked out for the second half.

Today is list making time. Time to make lists of what I need to do and time goals for accomplishing them. It is my sincere desire to complete and defend my thesis by June. It's doable. I just need to get cracking. I may post a giant list here and cross it off. Crossed off lists are so fulfilling.

And on a less thesis related note, I finally dyed my hair again. Nothing like a fresh coat of the blue to make a girl feel revitalized.

Stick a fork in me

2007-03-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

I'm still not done.

But! BUT BUT BUT! I have a draft of my first half. It needs a lot of work. I probably need a lot more subtle and strong arguments, but I think my committee will help me to identify my weak spots (where I'm not already aware of them).

It's 26 pages with the 1.5 inch left hand margin required by the grad school and sans footnotes. Footnotes will be the next project, along with a read through/revision, and then it's getting emailed off to my committee. Because I do not have the drive with it to try and profoundly refine my writing at this moment. So it'll get a rest until my committee meeting.

In the meantime, I'll focus on the results of my survey, write up my methodology, write up the blog analysis for what I can manage. I'll also work on my blog spreadsheet. Basically, get a running start on the second half of things.

Feeling good. Except for the panic attack this afternoon reading someone else's related thesis and feeling like mine is all crap compared to it. But I'm not setting out to be revolutionary. I just want to say what I feel hasn't been said in depth, despite it's obviousness. Validate me.

Poo poo Microsoft Word

2007-03-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

It's a little disheartening when Microsoft Word refuses to acknowledge the two words around which my life is revolving: museology and blog. Get it together, Word! Validate me!