The highlight of Friday at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis was — obviously! — the  Best of the Web Awards, where the Commons community and institutions represented. (Here’s George Oates with the actual award for the Flickr Community!) But we hear a lot else went on Friday, too!

Over on the #mw2009 Twitter feed, people were taking about:

The Steve Museum Project — this one’s about user tagging, and what good it is anyway.

@10ch: Steve.museum results are remarkable. 88% of user tags found useful by staffers, 86% of which were new words to describe art. #mw2009

@smannion: Tiffany Leason on what motivated taggers: Curiosity, fun, to learn about art. Research interface didn’t exploit those. #mw2009

@smannion: Helping local museums document their collections was another motivating factor, especially for existing members. #mw2009

@smannion: @bwyman on deck with his ideas for tagging interfaces: 1) New tours based on single tags, e.g., images tagged ‘rapture’ #mw2009

Digital NZ — led by Commons institution the National Library of New Zealand — also attracted attention:

@homebrewer: Cool. Digital NZ lets users build a set of filters and then generate a custom search widget for their own site. #mw2009

@homebrewer: Data inconsistencies exposed when seen in combined results – crowdsourcing the cleanup to users. #mw2009

And Nina Simon’s talk “Going Analog: Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change” posed challenging questions as well as provoking discussion:

@pgorgels: Museums as libraries… Back to 19th centuries study collections? #mw2009

@stevegardam: #mw2009 For Nina Simon’s organistional change workshop, how to make museums more like the web. Museums: friendly like Flickr

@georginab: ninaksimon: Don’t try to change visitor behavior, think about what they ALREADY do in your museum and how you can intervene. #mw2009

@smannion: @ninaksimon is concered about *physical* not online. If your museum doesn’t work in the physical world, it’s not gonna work online. #mw2009

But maybe it all comes down to baseball?

@smannion: Hilarious moment in @ninaksimon’s session: Q: If museum were like fantasy baseball what would you do? A: ‘I would trade my curator.’ #mw2009

More soon, including talk about the Commons!

Tags: conferences, Museums and the Web, mw2009, National Library of New Zealand

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