Actually Friday

I've fallen down on my blogging job; sorry about that. I hate to think of you all out there waiting with baited breath. Things got busy,I started meeting people and used coffee breaks for networking rather than blogging.

Friday morning sessions were case studies around topic of using technology to highlight collections in a variety of organizations. How appropriate! Presenters included Kansas University Special Collections, the Virtual Museum of Canada, MoMA, National Museum of the American Indian, MutualArt.com, and a couple European portal sites spanning museums and in fact countries. It was interesting to see how these were designed and what they highlighted. The most interesting to me were the MoMA and NMAI presentation, since they focused on getting their CMS online and usable to the public. NMAI is of particular interest, as they also use Kemu for their CMS. The web site was eventually built by Mediatrope; it looks very nice, but was apparently a challenge.(This will go live in February 2009.)

The presentation on ImageMuse was not particularly helpful to me; the majority of the time was spent on how to achieve true colors from digital images. It was more geared toward art museums and photographers rather than me. But the second half about Updig (universal photographic digital image guidelines) had some interesting and useful suggestions regarding digital photos for a variety of uses; I look forward to spending more time on their site and reviewing their principles.

The session on Funding Organizations and Museum Technologies was enlightening, and seemed hopeful. I realize, of course, that actually getting grants is no picnic, but all the grant officers were encouraging and offered information on what they are interested in and how to go about pursuing grants. Representative from Mellon, NEH (Joel Wurl!), NSF, and IMLS spoke. The NSF one was particularly interesting; they have a ton of money, and have a very expansive definition of science; technology and education projects are of particular interest. Something perhaps to think about.

The reception for the conference Friday night at the Corcoran was great fun. We got to see the Avedon exhibit, and there was good food and an open bar. I met some new people, learned about some interesting projects, and got to talk about some of ours.