#mcn2013

[videowerque]

Make Museum Video Now! A fun panel from MCN 2013 in Montréal with David Hart, Vickie Riley and Emily Black Fry. Lots of nuts and bolts on our ideas about making video easy and accessible for everybody.

[videowerque]

Presentation at MCN2013 in Montréal with Jesse and Kyle on the trouble with handling large quantities of video... and we end up on a rant about why YouTube is so great for aggregation.

[allanamayer]

Conservation and Preservation panel

(This session is the most delicious brass-tacks shit.) Mark from Museum of Science: De-duplication? internet 2? new terms like crazy here. Data keeps coming; storage isn't quite expanding enough. Planetarium shows in Maya, oh my! Lots of the file-format-specific problems I've enumerated before in born-digital preservation projects. Storage needed more than retrieval, for lots of this material. Cloud/net hosting is silly! 4-5 years for replacement on drive tech and maintenance. Tearing down and starting again, all the time. Needs: affordable, scalable, modular, sustainable, easy to maintain. (Buffalo, Everdeen examples of not-scalable.) Exablox - 'a piece of the puzzle.' Splitting the data types into high-availability and low-availability (archival) data. Central storage -- feeds into EMC Data Domain (for de-dupe and compression). Sent to dark storage or Exablox. Adding boxes! ("assimilates to the Borg") Backup targets, production, archival storage. Still using tape -- high-priority goal of getting rid of it. (Honestly, whenever someone says "modular" in relation to computing I think of that Raspberry Pi supercomputer built into a Lego case.) Exablox guy: object-based file storage for mid-size companies. rack-n-stack scalable. "Magic extended storage." Global namespace. (Q: What happens when one box goes down? Can you automatically plug in a replacement and have it clean out the content of the broken one? You know the distributed-data model of torrents is pretty crap when one-twentieth of a given file isn't available. / A: Snapshots for recovery.) "Inline de-duplication." Encryption and replication. So, is it replicated or de-duplicated? http://www.internet2.org/ and http://www.internet2.edu/ (It's too bad "Big Media" means broadcasting. I'd use "Big Media" to talk about industries like ours that have huge file-storage needs because of digital art projects like video, multimedia, interactive, 3d modelling, PDM/CAD, 'variable media,' etc. These are special-needs groups.) Martien, David, CCA bros: archaeology of the digital exhibit was great; loved the old computers they got from a museum. "Digital archaeology" is such an accurate term to describe the rescue missions and expected loss of dealing with born-dig files. They work from the OAIS processes: They pay a houscall, collect info from the firms and staff, identify materials (and dependent files thereon), send over drives for transfer / uses file transfer service, do home processing. "Versement" is not a fonds? Or is it? Using TMS (who isn't, heck); Basecamp for projects; using traditional archival arrangement. Shipping Space? In-house harvesting software / file-processing tool. Nice pretty pie-charts showing file types on a given piece of media. Covers lots of problems/worries/things. Drag-and-drop sorting of files( -- not smart. Should tag/categorize instead, preserving file links). (Do museum pros not know the phrase "dark archive?" It's not new.) (Do museum pros not know that migration is bad?) Australian War Memorial ladies: A memorial, but also a G,L,A, and M. Daaaaaang. Digitizing for pres and access: 89 terabytes of assets. Apparently Australia calls it "digital-born," not born-digital. Supermarket analogy: After picking out your chosen data/foods, the institution/supermarket won't come home with you to help you arrange it in your system/pantry. "Terrifying." .... "At a war memorial, most of our materials were built thinking they would be destroyed, in a very short period of time." ... "If I don't record what I do, it hasn't been done." "Can you reconstruct an object based on your records? If yes, then it's good enough documentation." Disasters are good catalysts for change! (These presentations are interesting; an admin gives the intro and their learning experience, then hands it over to a techie who gives the nitty and the gritty. Odd that all three here would work that way, in amongst the many panels I've seen this week. Something to remember about the way technical programs work in institutions and get represented externally.)

[5easypieces]

The Open Authority spectrum, and finally a definition for engagement that I like

I'm listening to Lori Byrd talk about the Reggio Emilia learning model as a possible framework for implementing Open Authority in museums and similar institutions. I was struck by something she said that was a component of that model, which is that the teachers learn along with the students, rather than "dumbing down" the material. How amazing would it be for museums to interact with their communities in this way? Think of a curator looking at visitor interaction as a way of increasing his or her knowledge, rather than simply dispensing it. Yowza.

I've always had issues with the word "engagement"--I feel like we toss it around without really having a clear definition of what it means, but this model, to me, finally looks like what I think we really want when we use that word. I just wonder whether we have the courage to attempt it.

[allanamayer]

Defining Open Authority in the Museum

Ed: "We're more like a boat in the midst of a terrible storm in a large sea." Yeeeeeeeeeeeee. (Note to self: Write "You're Not Alone!" for srs. Remind them that the niche archival training we get in schools isn't so specialized that it needs to be secretive. That's a grad-school machination. Anyone can learn proper archiving principles. In an afternoon.) Lori: "I'm going to establish a spectrum of open authority." tagging, feedback // discussions and engagement // full collaboration on exhibit design, e.g. Elizabeth: a couple of case studies on varying open authority levels -- usually expertise combined with a community-of-practice collaboration. Collecting outdoor mural documentation! Pursuant to last post's accessibility mention: Instead of special programming, ongoing programming for patrons with disabilities and needs. Low-vision audiences were asked to tell the curators about every piece of art they couldn't engage with. Now on the board! (I still hate that this is special. We are not experts at all things. We cannot be experts at all things in a given amount of time. Guys, honestly, ask for help. It doesn't actually hurt you.) From someone else's tweet from this session: "Is there an ontology for user-generated content?" Oh-ho-ho do I have a forthcoming whitepaper for you. Porchia: reviews a collection of definitions for typical museum visitors. Rechargers? Wanderers? (Source this later.) Argues they have to be redefined when we have to deal with individuals, families or groups with differing/multiple intents. "I want to offer ..... I hate to say 'a solution' ...." (Pah!) New phrases: 'radical trust,' 'empathetic museum.' The "Oh Snap!" guy: (I fucking love this project.) (I hypothesized about other types of un-finished exhibits -- mystery exhibits, either mystery theme or totally undescribed artworks -- where people can win prizes and recognition for contributing interesting ideas and research tidbits. ---- whoops, missed the rest.

[allanamayer]

NMC > Horizons Report

The NMC guy is broadcasting cachemonet.com during the pre-test. Not sure if it's just an audio calibrater or an actual part of his presentation, but, still. Challenge: Accessibility is often a token mention -- but not enough active grappling with the issue. (I find the quantitative-ness of the "one year / two to three years / four to five years" prediction a bit odd. I want to see more examples of everything, practical applications that make these things feasible for the majority of institutions. Alex F. just admitted that many of the four-to-five things are "we think they'll be important, but we can't see HOW yet.") So, BYOD: Lots of quizzes. Lots of rewards! Are people really in need of "prizes and discounts"? Or is using your device to access digital content its own reward? Alex F. shows a trailer for the Tate QuizTrail app. Of course, the actress doesn't look like she's having any fun. Sounds like there's a war on between the "go ahead, take your cell pics" team and the "please dear god download our high-res versions instead" team. Team Grainy and Team Indignant? Crowdsourcing: "In 2012, Kickstarted funded more art projects than the National Endowment." (In dollars or in number of projects?) (Watching tweets stop during videos and then stack up again during speakers' bits is fascinating. Also, tweets are _so_ empty.) Cooper Hewitt has a form to fill out for errors in object records - and unique tags to attach to photos of an object on social-media sites. Collecting user documentation is a big thing for me. Electronic publishing: OSCI project. Not just for blogs anymore. Museum catalogues are going to be fascinating in digital form. "Substantial scholarly breakthroughs." Interactive x-ray overlays of paintings! Location-based services: bluetooth beacons, bytelights, rfid. Wifi triangulation. "Who needs QR codes when you have image recognition?" Preservation and Conservation:: yep. You guys are really blowing this one. Shoutouts to "digital curation" programs, but not in the way most programs define themselves. Tate's time-based initiative is working on it. But why is it four-to-five years? :( Carl Haber: senior physics scientist. Builds particle cameras. Freaked out about LOC collections decay. Photographs physical storage media (records, wax cylinders, tape) and replicates digitally. Ba-bam! ("Key trend" is a horrible phrase.)

[allanamayer]

Today was volunteering-heavy for me, so not much to report on. But, from the afternoon session on Open Content:

Geertje from the RM: People always cite us when using our data because it’s a mark of quality. People respect our brand and so we get our name splashed around all the time.

Anouk from the KB: We luckily partnered with Google Books and ProQuest to get this done. Pre-1700s books were done by ProQuest, and others by GB for future use. We wanted digital services to be a big front-facing part, not a tiny department. We had a big mixed committee from most departments. A big review of copyright and materials and data. Small steps: a goal of two sets in six months. And participate in a hackathon in six months. cc0 and pd sets, a master class on open data, and the hackathon was a huge success. One set of cc-by-nc. links to other resources. we advertise on other open-data sites! for researchers there are fewer restrictions so we ask them to contact us. two residency programs, late this year. we go to digital humanities conferences and advertise our content. Europeana participant. made a newspaper app. goes back in time! a showcase of our news collection and to see what can be done. can’t make every dataset licensed well. many more than three levels of rights.

(The more I hear about this the more I think how amazing it is that places like PEM are refusing exhibits with restrictions or modifying donor agreements. Phenomenal work to be that proactive.)

Contracts with Google and ProQuest are restrictive in some ways. Original digitization contracts did not anticipate openness. DRM program for the whole institution will be needed, hoping for next year. Lots of academics ask for help to access data. Did not anticipate the tech support! Needing to publish academically is tough to deal with.

Q&A: How did the ProQuest partnership work? Well! They started with us on microfiche, and we went from there. What got built in your hackathon?  KB: nothing! RM: we got more cool apps from our hackathon than from our commercial contracts. Mostly quizzes. Some cool facial-rec stuff pulling portraits from the art.