Sessions at Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference 2011 on Thursday 17th November

Room: International North
The broad principles of the "aura" around the work of art were first articulated around 75 years ago, in the wake from the waves of mechanical reproduction and distribution. These days, we're swimming in something else: ambient informatics around every object in every museum around the world.

This electromagnetic aura doesn't reproduce the work, so much as it surrounds it, placing it in the read/write context of the rest of the world. This will be a landscape view on the systems by which this new aura is produced and understood, and what is at stake, what might be gained, what might be lost.

Room: International North
The day's sessions previewed and promoted by MCN presidents, present, past and future!

Room: Hong Kong
New technologies and design innovations have inspired a nascent renaissance in digital publishing. These advances in web publishing can be largely attributed to the Apple iPad that launched in 2010. Many of the emerging innovations improve the experience of digital reading, often by craftily emulating features from print publishing, such as columns, horizontal page ‘turning’, and inline imagery. This panel presents examples of new directions in digital arts publication from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the online arts magazine Triple Canopy. Unlike the more pragmatic content delivery of web pages and blogs, the projects presented focus on delivery of a superior reading experience. The panelists will discuss successes, challenges and the exciting future of digital publishing.

Room: Singapore
This roundtable is an opportunity to identify and discuss new practices, strategies, benefits and pitfalls in museum marketing, outreach and audience development in the age of social media.

Room: Manila
Chaired by Dale Kronkright, Head of Conservation at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, this session includes:

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Leveraging Preservation Funding to Enhance a Museum’s Reach at the Shelburne Museum

11:30 AM - 12:00 PM: WikiProject: Public Art

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM Conservation in the trenches, from the Smithsonian to Haiti

Room: Vancouver
This session proposes to demonstrate how museums can analyze their existing member and visitor transactional data to increase revenue, retention and donations. Using case studies from The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the presenters will walk attendees through what data these two organizations examined and how they analyzed it to better understand visitor and member behavior in order to maximize revenue. Steven Roth of the Pricing Institute, will provide best practices guidelines for pricing/revenue management, specific to museums.

Room: Montreal
Although digital asset management has been a common topic among museums, libraries and archives in the last several years, many of our member institutions are still struggling with a lot of issues and processes surrounding DAM and its related systems and tools. While many of our members are in the process of selecting, evaluating or implementing their first-generation of DAM systems, a few early adopters or implementers of DAM systems are actively evaluating their existing systems and making plans for their future development and growth. The proliferation of new digital media types and the explosion of digital assets in museums have made it a more pressing issue.

Room: Brussels
Session Description: Within complex institutions both in structure and in operation, such as museums, often there are inefficiencies in sharing data and information across the organization. As such, organizations are challenged in meeting overall strategic objectives that support the institution's mission. Additionally there is not a shared understanding of the organizations mission and the part each person plays in meeting the goals.

Key Issues:

Main barriers to sharing data across an organzation are:

People, business process and technology.

Benefits to sharing data may include:

Ability to do more with less, increase business process efficiencies, enhance stewardship and customer service.

Room: Cairo
What's the point of museum websites? What purpose do they serve? Building on an unconference session from Museums and the Web 2011 and Koven Smith's recent Ignite Smithsonian talk, the panelists will ask what the museum website of the future should do. The panelists will examine the meaning of online collections, issues of trust and authority on the Web, and how to establish meaning and purpose in a highly networked world.

Room: International South

Visit the exhibitions and demonstrations of the museum industry's leading vendors.

Exhibit Hall Opening Lunch 12.00pm – 1.30pm
Exhibit Hall Open 12.00pm – 2.00pm / 3.30pm – 5.00pm

A Kinect Hacking demonstration will be held in International South during the opening lunch.

Exhibitors:
Note: this list represents all exhibitors registered at the time of program publication. Additional exhibitors will be present.

• Antenna Audio
• Avid Technology Inc.
• Backstage Library Works
• Blackbaud
• Capture Integration
• Extensis
• Gallery Systems
• Gixel Art Imaging Systems
• Hasselblad
• KE Software Inc.
• MCN Taiwan Chapter/Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program
• Piction Digital Image Systems
• Selago Design, Inc.
• Tessitura Network
• TourSphere, LLC

Room: International South
Kinect is a motion-sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based on a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.

Kinect has started to pop up in museums including the Museum of Science Boston and the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. Join us to learn about Kinect device technology. Then, try it out yourself!

Room: Montreal
As the software that underpins web and mobile sites, choosing a content management system (CMS) is a vital part of many redevelopment projects. As there is no one size fits all solution, this panel discussion explores the process by which the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Balboa Park Online Collaborative selected their current CMSs.

Room: Manila
From digital photographic 3-D modeling of damaged surfaces to complexity theory applied to the deterioration of paintings, computational methods are leveraging a new sophistication in conservation practices. Where might computational applications take us? Where might conservators want to go? Join the discussion!

Room: Vancouver
Chaired by Paul Marty, Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies within the College of Communication and Information at Florida State University, this panel includes:

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm: From Digital Museum to Social Media - A Case Study on the White Dolphin Act of NCTU Cultural Digital Archive Taiwan

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm: User-focus and the museum mission

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm: Walking the Talk: transparency in practice

Room: Hong Kong

Chaired by Douglas Hegley, President of MCN, this panel includes:

2:00pm - 2:30pm: Art Loop Open: How technology helped build an inside out museum in Chicago

2:30pm - 3:00pm: Bridging Play Across Game Design and Museum Studies

3:00pm - 3:30pm: Creating community and access to oral history videos

Room: Cairo
Trickle up, Trickle down: Collaboration at local, regional and the national levels. The convergence of common technologies has leant itself to individuals and small groups having a global impact on standards and techniques across our communities. This panel talk will discuss how user groups on a local, regional and national level interact to build and share in common practices.

Room: Singapore
This session is the first in a strand of 6 sessions and workshops at MCN 2011 on “Widening audiences: Digital Access in the 21st Century Museum for people with disabilities and older people”. This session will:

• introduce the key concepts in considering how to widen access to the museum experience for older and disabled people through the use of new technologies, including websites, Web 2.0 applications such as social networking, blogging and crowdsourcing and mobile technologies such as audio and multimedia guides.
• provide examples of current accessibility of museum experiences, with a focus on digital media
• explore the relevance of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons (2008) with Disabilities and the ADA for digital access
• provide an overview of the other sessions in this strand.

Room: Manila
This case-study showcase will include three, twenty-minute project overviews by panelists that have made great strides in developing and implementing solutions that facilitate the creation, management, and dissemination of conservation documentation. Projects that focus on both the digitization of archival documentation and the real-time creation of new documents will be discussed.

Feedback and questions will be strongly encouraged during the closing twenty minutes of the session, as this case-study showcase is meant to foster community dialogue and idea exchange regarding future planning, goals and resources.

Case studies will touch on:

1. The digitization of analog materials and the creation of new, digital materials on the fly.
2. The unique challenges of working in the laboratory environment.
3. What's being implemented in museums presently (open-source, license-free or proprietary software applications, other digital tools used in combination).
4. The future of conservation digitization and digital repositories for conservation information.

Room: Cairo
This series of panels concentrates on the topic of knowledge sharing: between collections, between institutions, and between collections/institutions and users. We will also include examples that aim to broaden and optimize communities' collections access use. The panels will provide a rich variety of perspectives from full institutions to specific projects; speakers include those who work to create new methodologies, wrangle with challenges of existing practices, and study historical and theoretical perspectives of the knowledge sharing of museums, libraries, and the museum library as an institution.

The Part 1 panel will be moderated by Sherri Wasserman. Part 1 panel participants will be:

Judd Ruggill & Ken McAllister (Learning Games Initiative): "Gonzo Archiving: Arcana, Apocrypha, and a Boatload of Computer Games"

Farris Wahbeh (Whitney Museum of American Art): "Artists’ records and the work of art: documentation strategies from the perspective of a records continuum"

Ariana French (Yale University): "Collections sharing: A museum’s (slightly cautionary) tale"

Room: Montreal
Chaired by Rob Lancefield, Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, this panel features three independent presentations on diverse aspects of multilingual technologies in museums:

4:00pm - 4:30pm: Semantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries: A Focus on Metadata and Vocabularies
4:00pm - 4:30pm: Multilingual Museums
4:00pm - 4:30pm: Managing Multilingual Content

Room: Hong Kong
Building on last year's "Great Debate" on the value of online-only museum visitors, this session explores the investment and value propositions associated with these visitors. What are the benefits and are they worth the costs? How do you sell it to management and Board, or do you sell it at all? How do online-only visitors fit into overall and technology strategic plans? As museums expand their online resources their audiences will likely expand more and demand more -- and museums will grapple with their long term response. Through presentations, and panel and audience discussion, this session will help attendees understand, articulate and meet that challenge.

Room: Singapore
This session is the second in a strand of 6 sessions and workshops at MCN 2011 on “Widening audiences: Digital Access in the 21st Century Museum for people with disabilities and older people”. This session will discuss the needs and preferences of people who are Deaf, hard of hearing or who have physical disabilities for using digital technologies. In particular, the potential for using multimedia formats to present varied types of museum experiences in accessible ways to these audiences will be discussed.

The speakers will be:

Larry Goldberg - Innovations in Technology: Turning Sound into Words

Simon Houriez - Museo : inclusive multi-media for children who are deaf or have a hearing loss

Christopher Power - Access to multimedia for museum visitors with physically disabilities

Susan Nichols - Art Signs

Emmanual von Schack - How to Make a Museum Accessible to Deaf Visitors?