Sessions at Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference 2011 on Saturday 19th November

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

Room: Hong Kong
Augmented reality has an increasing presence in industry and commerce. In the art world, it’s used for guerilla exhibitions, can replace ads with art, and spur interaction and discussion. There is a proliferation of new platforms and programs for augmenting imagery or audio, for storytelling and information. Geolocated augmentation can bring back the power of place. AR branches into image recognition, with the potential to give visitors intuitively triggered augmentation to help solve problems of language and labels. AR connects with the 3D digitization of objects.

Can museums find meaningful uses for these potentially powerful tools?

Room: Cairo
In good times and bad, collaboration between institutions can positively affect budgets, ease workflows, and achieve projects that might normally be impossible or difficult to complete. At San Diego’s Balboa Park, a dedicated team of experts are helping 21 cultural institutions achieve their dreams through technology deployed with thoughtfulness and innovation. These institutions are reaping the benefits of shared knowledge and resources, bringing them together in ways rarely seen in cultural organizations.

This case study will explore five efforts led by the team at Balboa Park Online Collaborative:

• Rich Cherry – Mobile and the Games we Play - cell-phone adventures and public interaction
• Perian Sully – Shared Rapid Capture Meets Collaborative Digital Asset Management - implementing a shared DAMS installation with multiple instances for 12 organizations
• Maren Doughty – Good Impressions: Running a Collaborative Google Ad Campaign - deploying Google Ads on multiple museum websites
• Kristi Ehrig-Burgess (Mingei) - Converting Tapes to Files: Automated Video Capture
• Joaquin Ortiz (MoPA) - Collaborating to create digital interactives for Streetwise

Vivian Kung-Haga will chair the session.

Room: International North
The first Culture Hack Day in London in January 2012 brought together 12 cultural organisations with 3 media companies and over 100 software developers to make exciting cultural-digital products. To celebrate the theme of this year's conference, we'd like to recreate this and encourage attendees to engage in agile, iterative practices.

Bring along your museum's data - whether it's in a CSV file, an open API or an RSS feed - and spend the day working in teams to create rapid prototypes and develop new creative ideas to make the next generation of tools, websites and applications. Whether you're a developer, designer, produceror curator, you'll get the opportunity to create new products, enrich the museum sector and transform hidden data into exciting new applications.

Room: Vancouver
This workshop presents an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on a typology of museum visitor experience preferences. The typology distinguishes three major types of experience preferences -- for Ideas, for People, and for Objects. These differences affect how people distribute attention, how they behave, and how they respond. The theory includes a specific method for providing experiences that visitors will regard as superior, and thus offers practical advice for enhancing the effectiveness of displays, exhibitions, and websites.

Room: Manila & Singapore
THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) is an open meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot. It is an unconference, which means that there are no presentations, and all participants work together to form the program. On Saturday, November 19 in downtown Atlanta, GA, the Museum Computer Network is sponsoring THATCamp MCN, a free, day-long unconference for anyone interested in how new technologies and platforms are changing the landscape of museums. The detailed schedule for the THATCamp sessions can be found on the MCN2011 THATCamp website: http://mcn2011.thatcamp.org/sche...

Room: Brussels
A workshop on the practicalities of making the web and other digital technologies accessible to people with disabilities and older people. An overview of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines V2 and other guidelines relevant to the accessibility of digital technologies will be given. A range of methods for effectively but easily involving audiences with disabilities will be discussed. A development lifecycle for digital applications which includes accessibility will be presented.

Room: Montreal
With new technologies at our disposal, more of the exhibition experience may be captured and preserved for future research and enjoyment. This session will explore how museums currently archive their exhibition materials and recent thinking about how new media changes the possibilities for and the challenges to preserving, disseminating, and engaging with exhibitions for future generations.

Room: Hong Kong
While today’s users became used to highly interactive and visualized online environment, museums are driven to figure out creative ways to present the educational materials. In this panel, three cases will be introduced to show how to use new technology to engage the audience better. First, a set of interactive kiosks invented by the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, combing gesture-based computing and multi-touch screen, enable users to approach ancient Chinese painting and calligraphic works and see the details, which are normally not allowed due to conservation reason. Secondly, the National Museum of Natural Science, Taiwan, created a game based learning website for children with knowledgeable, storytelling, explorative learning, joyful, and personalized characteristics. Lastly, an online exhibition website created by Academia Sinica gives an example on using new technology to represent and visualize the 2.5 million-word calligraphy diaries and attract the general public to appreciate the rather academic-oriented text-based material.

Room: Vancouver
Dynamic, culturally situated tools such as Dr. Ron Eglash's African Fractals and other web-based applets, Evan Roth’s Graffiti Analysis software for the iPhone/iPad and Jung von Matt’s Tagged in Motion (Augmented Reality graffiti) translate local knowledge systems through digital media. Museums can use these existing, common open platforms to develop projects to cultivate participation and the quality of engagement among visitors from diverse social and economic contexts. The aim of this paper is to compare my observations from several new media forms and formats that can transform the museum-going experience and engage diverse audiences who are active users of mobile phones, gaming devices and other emerging technologies.

Room: Montreal
It is becoming increasingly common to encounter geographical mapping and location-aware interfaces online, and museums will inherently run into many of the same problems as other industries when implementing GIS solutions. This paper surveys many of the common challenges faced in the design, implementation, and distribution of web applications based on geographic datasets. We will evaluate some of the free online authoring and delivery tools that can be used to develop and deploy GIS web applications. We will also discuss how enterprise GIS software and open source map rendering tools can be integrated to render rich datasets in visually compelling and engaging ways. Finally, we will explore clustering techniques used for extremely large geographic datasets and illustrate how geolocated collection data can be clustered and presented along with resources from external APIs that also include geolocation data.

Room: Cairo
The Field Book Project, The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), and Connecting Content are distinct yet intersecting projects that use collaboration and innovation to leverage resources and improve access to important natural history collections. Each can be defined as collaborative in its own right. The three projects also directly collaborate with one another to build connections and ensure compatibility across related resources. The Field Book Project is a CLIR-funded project to improve access to primary-source field books at the Smithsonian and is being extended to accept content from other natural history museums. BHL is a consortium of 12 libraries working to digitize and deliver legacy taxonomic literature, and Connecting Content is an IMLS-funded project to define and provide logical connections between field notes, specimens, and published literature.

This session will present an overview of how these projects complement each other.

Room: Montreal
Discover how The Field Museum created a new web strategy and followed it with a strong implementation process:

• implemented the main web site (fieldmuseum.org) in Drupal 7
• migrated content from static site
• created tools for content re-use and content administration responsibilities
• created a microsite builder to easily spin-off exhibition-specific sites in a timely manner
• created a web interface for their collection

Technologies used: Solr, Drupal 7, Workbench, KE Software's EMu

Room: Vancouver
Wikimedia serves as the umbrella foundation for multiple websites, most notably Wikipedia, the notable free encyclopedia, and Wikimedia Commons, a multi-media repository of free images, videos and recordings. Topics and multimedia on both websites cover all areas of interest including Indigenous related-topics, and are edited and uploaded by users, called editors. Anyone can be an editor, which has allowed for the concepts of freedom of information, Creative Commons copyright, and open-source software to step to the forefront of research and technology. How can Indigenous communities work with, benefit from and utilize Wikimedia.

Room: Montreal
This paper will describe a proposal to use Freebase (http://wiki.freebase.com), an open repository of structured data, as a repository for museum object records and to develop a reconciliation service that will take advantage of the Google Refine service (http://code.google.com/p/google-...) to look up and enhance museum object records using descriptive information or vocabularies provided by members of the museum community.

Room: Montreal
Through the projects including OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, it's possible to collaboratively map and document outdoor cultural places, and make use of the information in web and mobile apps, going beyond a basic Google Map mashup. Through the OpenStreetMap project, places that have been mapped include the National Zoo, Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, and Arlington National Cemetery, and the Wikipedia community has documented and mapped public art, historic sites and monuments. This presentation will cover what the communities are doing and possibilities for cultural institutions to collaborate.

Room: Vancouver
Virtual worlds contain environments with the potential to generate in our minds a state of enormous synaptic plasticity. They can, just by being experienced, provide a basis for the increase of learning and memory in their visitors, and they can change themselves to respond to the reaction they generate in the visitors. In addition, these remarkable environments can also become a portal through which information of all kinds can be experienced in many ways. Through sight and sound, we can experience a piece of sculpture that is also telling us about tidal rhythms, or we can learn about anthropology as we play a game, looking for clues to the social structures of a fictitious culture. This presentation is a comparative case study about three interactive virtual environments that combined these qualities to create an entertaining immersive experience for the visitor.

Room: Vancouver
IMLS offers many funding opportunities for a variety of museums activities. Program staff will facilitate a conversation with museum professionals who are currently involved in IMLS funded projects and have served as peer reviewers, who will share practical examples from their own participation in the IMLS grant process, as well as provide an overview of their projects. This session will be beneficial for those considering applying for funding in the future as it will help demystify the application process and provide suggestions and pitfalls to avoid when planning a project.

Room: Hong Kong
This roundtable will formalize and deepen discussions on platforms that have been recently developed to aggregate digital assets and enable online visitors to collect and share across many institutions' collections. Below are some key questions to be addressed. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own and any experience they may already have from partcipating in pan-institutional collecting initiatives:

• What are the overarching challenges and opportunities for museums and visitors alike?
• What factors should museums consider before committing to participate in such projects.
• What standards in metadata, interoperability and imaging are required?
• What are the copyright and business model implications, both for museums and the developers of these platforms?
• What are the implications for non-art collections?
• What shifts are required of museums' institutional cultures?
• And most importantly, what new opportunities are opening up to enable museums to better serve their audiences and deliver on their missions via these online innovations?

Room: Brussels

Conference delegates are invited to submit their websites or digital applications and/or issues before the conference and the presenters will be available to discuss accessibility issues they have on a one-to-one basis. Please submit the digital application or accessibility issue that you would like to discuss to Helen.Petrie@cs.york.ac.uk<mailto:Helen.Petrie@cs.york.ac.uk> by 7th November 2011.

Room: Brussels
Conference delegates are invited to submit their websites or digital applications and/or issues before the conference and the presenters will be available to discuss accessibility issues they have on a one-to-one basis. [Attendees were invited to submit a digital application or accessibility issue that they would like to discuss to Helen.Petrie@cs.york.ac.uk by 7th November 2011.]

Room: Cairo
Part two of the panel discussion on What Museums Can Learn From Libraries and Archives is moderated by Paul Marty.

We will investigate this phrase by discussing a variety of methodologies used by libraries and archives to share knowledge: 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.

Part two speakers include:

William Hart-Davidson, Mike McLeod, and Jim Ridolfo (Michigan State University & University of Cincinnati): "Balancing Stakeholder Needs: Imagining the Michigan State University Israelite Samaritan Collection as the Foundation for a Thriving Social Network"

Trilce Navarette (University of Amsterdam): "Knowledge sharing: a history of museums and libraries"

Karen Weiss (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution): "Taking An Archival Approach to Digitization"

Room: Montreal
Museums are facing a media-hungry world and are looking for ways to produce and deliver more video and audio content. Although production tools are getting more approachable, there are numerous details an organization must take into account. This session will cover both creative and technical considerations when planning for video production.

Room: International North
This year’s closing plenary session will reprise last year’s popular “Great Debate” which brings together the museum community’s best and brightest—as well as some of its most charismatic and endearing personalities—to cross words over controversial subjects in the museum technology realm. This year, Rosanna Flouty, Mia Ridge, Rob Stein, and Bruce Wyman will consider the proposition, “There are too many museums.” As before, audience members will participate in the cross-examination—providing questions for extemporaneous responses by the contestants—and will select winners of the debate by show-of-hands voting at the conclusion of the session.

Last year’s topics, “Museums that are not run as businesses will ultimately fail,” and “Engagement with online-only visitors is as important as engagement with those onsite” produced two hard-fought arguments that many in the museum community are still discussing today. This year’s topic is expected to raise responses covering a range of matters of interest to the museum technology community, including the impact of the networked environment on museum practice, the different values embodied in different kinds of museums, and the value of the museum as a distinct, individual, physical entity.