Sign up for the Internet For Peace and become part of the movement to nominate the Net for a Nobel Peace Prize

“We have finally realized that the Internet is much more than a network of computers.It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe areconnecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society.And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication.Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance,discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the mosteffective antidote against hatred and conflict.That’s why the Internet is a tool for peace.That’s why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of non-violence.And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Net.A Nobel for each and every one of us.

via Sign up for the Internet For Peace and become part of the movement to nominate the Net for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Message for Dutch speaking visitors: NIEUW: Ga direct naar de Nederlandstalige museummedia.nl.

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This website is an initiative of the award-winning Dutch company Infofilm. Infofilm is producer of digital media for museums: touch-screen apps, online collections, museum audio and video tours,  rfid-, wifi-, iphone-, ipod touch-applications, 2D and 3D animations, motion graphics, big screen presentations, cross media, etcetera.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is among the first to adopt them in Northeast Ohio as part of its marketing strategy.

The art museum chose to experiment with QR codes for the first time to become more attractive to those people who often are early adopters of technology and are willing to try new things, Mr. Brokaw said. The use of QR codes is one way to make the art museum more accessible and attractive to young audiences, he said.The campaign coincides with the reopening of 17 galleries at the art museum that had been closed for construction, Ms. Fink said.Though QR codes have been slow to catch on in the United States, their popularity is expected to rise now that 50 million Americans have smart phones, Mr. Brokaw said.

via Crain’s Cleveland Business: Art museum quick to try new ad format.

This is what we mean by ‘Crowdsourcing’. Historypin is a digital time machine that creates a new way for the world to see and share history. It was created by We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google. Look at this fine animation:

Historypin has 12554 photos and stories pinned so far.

‘We Are What We Do’ is a global movement that inspires people to use their everyday behaviour to affect big environmental and social issues. There are loads of small things we can all do everyday.

Augmented reality can be a new feature for exposing cultural news and locations. Several companies are exploring this new technique: Layar, Wikitude. Junaio…

Layar is one of the augmented reality browsers for Android and iPhone. Soon on Nokia. This latest video shows daily scenario’s of how Layar is used: to find a place to eat, to get to know the city through history, to play games and to see which bands is playing where now. This video also premiers Floaticons, the cool 3D objects which we all can use to express ourselves in this new world of Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality is the new emerging mass medium, for all to use, to experience and interact in.

Museummedia can help you implementing augmented reality.

For artists, being included in a museum exhibition generally means first having to penetrate the well-guarded gates of a prestigious art gallery. But now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube are aiming to short-circuit that exclusionary art-world system, at least briefly, in much the same way that other hierarchical systems have been blown apart in the Internet age.

via Guggenheim and YouTube Seek Budding Video Artists – NYTimes.com.

Social Fabric works, and works well, because it acknowledges that no online presence can replace the visceral experience of visiting the Toronto museum, and instead opts to recreate the conversations one has with fellow visitors. I guarantee that even if you’ve only ever been to one Textile Museum show, at that show someone asked, “Would you wear that?” Now you can tell the whole world.

The Textile Museum’s executive director John Dalrymple describes Social Fabric as “a platform, more than a website. Like Facebook, it is designed to generate responses and input from a larger community of people. We sort of set the table by providing the context and the selected objects, and then that’s where our level of control ends. It’s up to people to respond in whatever way they like.”

Read more: Following the threads of a conversation – The Globe and Mail.

Museums and the Web is an annual conference exploring the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, MW reviews and analyzes the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. On Twitter @museummedia asked MW2010 participants following question:”Do you experience Twittering as useful as participant of #mw2010? If YES, What’s the benefit for you?”

Here are some reactions:

• smailtronic @museummedia absolutely, #mw2010 makes it easy to keep up with things you may have missed.
• Redltx @museummedia Twitter is THE way of staying in touch with the rest of the  #mw2010 comunity. So much going on, will give some kind of overview
• whitneyft @museummedia tweeting helps promote Asynchronous dialogue+ allows you “to be” in many places at once and hear parallel realizations. #mw2010
• AnraKennedy @museummedia My first #mw2010, new to Twitter too (as individ rather than  org). Helps to connect w new people & feel part of it all.
• innova2 @museummedia Twt multiplies your mw experience, you can voice your views&allows u 2 share with yr followers what’s being discussed  #mw2010
• museumboerhaave Our curator of medicine and educational staff member spent together 6 hours a day on Twitter. Is that too much? (-; #mw2010
• outtacontext 1st time following tweets of my panel DURING panel! RT @museummedia:  Do you experience Twittering as useful as participant of #mw2010?

You can still give your reactions on Twitter @museummedia with hashtag #mw21010.

Published on: 16 February 2010

Museums adopted the Web early, building on their experience with videodisc and CD-ROM publications in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the first, they introduced experimental features including visitor feedback, three-dimensional 3D walk-throughs, and deep coverage targeted at niche audiences. Only with the maturation of the genre did they routinely have basic hours and location information for visitors as part of their sites. Consistently, museum use of the Web has been programmatically driven, emphasizing exhibitions and events, rather than collections databases and privileging browsing over site-searching though supporting search engines. Over the next years, museums will increase the amount of location-based content delivery and aim content at cell phones, pdas, and similar devices being carried by their potential audiences.

More: Museum Web Sites and Digital Collections – Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition.

This one looks good and works great:

Try your own website here.

This is a very readworthy post by Sue Bell Yank, Writer, Organizer, and Asst. Dir. of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

“The upcoming American Association of Museums AAM conference happening here in Los Angeles in late May is called “Museums Without Borders” accompanied by some fuzzy language about “connection, community, cultural identity, and the power of the imagination,” but many of the actual session titles betray an overriding preoccupation: how to get new and younger audiences in interface with museums in innovative, user-generated, participatory ways.

The overwhelming consensus as evidenced by the alarming aging of audiences to traditional arts venues – like museums, the opera, performing arts is that younger generations of Americans eschew the largely passive role of audience, and demand participation from their art institutions.”

Read more here: Sue Bell Yank: How Art Museums are Striving to Stay Relevant for a New Generation.

Active RFID tags and sensors, in tandem with video cameras, watch over the king's golden sandals and other Egyptian antiquities on display at museums.

Arts and Exhibition International is using RFID technology to protect the treasure of King Tutankhamun's tomb as the artifacts are displayed at locations across the world. The system, provided by U.K. RFID technology company Integrated Security Information Systems ISIS, is traveling with the “Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs” exhibit, currently being set up in Indianapolis. If display cases are tampered with while on display, video images from a CCTV system provided by Bosch Security Systems are instantly displayed in the museum’s security office, museum staff members can receive alerts on their pagers and an audible alarm inside the gallery warns the perpetrator that the system has been triggered.

Read more RFID Protects Tut’s Treasures | SecurityMiddleEast.com.

Second Story’s GRAMMY Museum Interactives encourages museum visitors to become part of musical creation through four inspiring visual installations. The installations were created with Adobe Flex 3, After Effects CS3, Flash CS3 Professional, Photoshop CS3, and Illustrator CS3.

The 3D Documentary Explorer is a radical new way of telling the story of The Virtual Revolution, using video clips from the first two episodes of the series.Once you click to launch the Explorer, press pause or play to move between ‘Watch’ and ‘Explore’ modes. In ‘Explore’ mode, click the arrows to the right and left of the video to see pictures of web pages relevant to that clip. Click on the link above the web page to load it in your web browser.

Start exploring the documentary in 3D

Source: BBC – The Virtual Revolution – 3D Interactive Documentary Explorer.

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is an experimental social media platform that is developed in collaboration between the Australian Museum and the University of Wollongong. The Virtual Museum of the Pacific contains 427 objects from the Australian Museum's Pacific cultural collections. Users can explore, tag and annotate these objects with rich media. In this video, we introduce its background, motivations and user experience, and also lead into its future research direction and technology platform. To see for yourself, visit http://epoc.cs.uow.edu.au/vmp

Vincent Roman: Here are a bunch of different reasons why I think developing Web Apps for visitors is by are a superior model and strategy for museums in the long run:

• Maximum Accessibility & iPad Ready! – No stone unturned in ensuring that each and every visitor has full access to the same information.  Saves the need to special case for devices and provides a breadth of service.  The best thing about this is that you are now officially iPad ready if you have developed a web app.  No ifs, buts or maybes about it.
• Seamless Development – The fact that you are simply developing another web service means that, as a development team, you don’t need to add any new dimensions.  You can carry on developing within the structure of the existing web site.
• Development Costs – Because are developing for a platform which your existing development team are 90% familiar with you can ring fence and reduce the potential costs.  iPhone development would be much more costly and less penetrative in terms of ROI.
• Open Source – There is so much prior art in the field of web apps the ability to get from 0-60 mph in no time is exceedingly easy.  This helps with reduction fo dev time and costs.  It also means that museums can more readily share their experiences and though their sites can share a common structure, they don’t need to all be the same.
• Flash-Content – You can use flash as desired.  Sure it won’t work on iPhone etc, but you can easily take care of alternate content in these cases, as you would on any setup where you miss flash.
• Niche Sites & Testing Ideas - Due to the fact that rollout time and cost can be kept to a minimum, as well as the fact that barriers to entry are low, it is super easy to create new content for specific exhibitions or tie ups that a museum does.  Testing ideas is also a lot easy before full roll out, which ties in nicely with Jim Richardson’s beta museum.
• iPhone Interface – Despite building a web app, you can still create a standard iPhone like interface to your web app, using whatever graphics and combining them with JS.  Libraries are being built that will make this task a whole lot easier.
• Reliance on 3rd Party – Part of the issue I have with iPhone Apps is the reliance on the App Store, in the same way of rolling out an Air App you rely on getting a certificate for it.  Developing a browser friendly web app cuts out this “unknown” from the equation.  I suppose it is possible, being a cultural institution that the App Store might fast track your app approval, but this isn’t something one can expect, rely on, or anything else.
• API / Web Services – Any API structure you create to service your web app can easily be opened up and made public so that other people can do cool things with the data on their own web sites.

Read more: http://www.vincentroman.com/blog/mobile-sites-web-apps-for-museums/

The Chopin Museum collection numbers over 5,000 exhibits. Among them are autographs and first editions of the composer’s works, his letters, memorabilia and documents. Key editions of Chopin’s music, as well as of works by his contemporaries are also featured. There are also paintings, graphics and sculpture pieces.

The organisers, the Fryderyk Chopin National Institute, have given the museum a multimedia dimension. The means of expression are closely linked to the scenario, which consists of several strands. One is an audio track, made up of works by Chopin, soundscapes and dramatised audio presentations. Audio-visual presentations allow visitors to discover in detail what particular objects on display represent. There are virtual books, interactive displays, children’s games and projections. The museum is structured in such a way that the visitor can take an individual path depending on their interests and preferences. Owing to RFID technology used in ticket production, visitors are able to pick the length and intensity of their path. On many occasions visitors will come across exhibits highlighted through the use of visual and sound effects. “We want the museum to be a universal, inspiring place that will respond to the invidual needs of visitors in a well thought-out way” curator Alicja Knast explains. The museum opens to the general public in April.

via The most modern biographical museum in Europe.

The Best of the Web Awards are given every year at the Museums and the Web conference. Since 1997, a committee of peers has reviewed sites nominated and called our attention to outstanding models. We need your help to find the best museum work on the web. Nominate a site for the Best of the Web competition: best_web_2010_nomination_process.

A panel of peers reviews sites identified through an open nomination process. Conference attendance is not required to nominate a site. You’re encouraged to nominate a site other than your own. So tell us — what caught your eye this year? What’s the Best of the Web in the museum work? All nominations are available on the online conference community site at http://conference.archimuse.com During the first two weeks of April, community members will choose their People’s Choice.

See the sites nominated so far at http://conference.archimuse.com/best_web/nominees and make your addition. Nominations close Sunday February 21.
Posted By jennifer trant

A visual summary of tamper’s filmic maneuvers, circa early 2008; the system is built atop the g-speak spatial operating environment:

In 2005 the Louvre’s website went interactive. The goal was for it to be an element of the Louvre in its own right, an arena of exchange, sharing and creation. Visitors have been encouraged to highlight their Louvre experience before, during or after a physical visit, or just use the website on its own if they can’t make it to Paris. The website was organized to be intuitive to the visitor instead of being based on how the museum thought things should be organized. On-site multimedia would also be pushed, with changes being made in temporary and permanent exhibit rooms. Mobile tools such as self-guided tours and other downloadable interpretation enhancing materials were also made available.

Read more CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium.