Here at Indicommons, we’ve been following the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado, via Twitter. Here’s a short round-up of papers of interest to The Commons being presented there this week.

Buckets and Vessels by Aaron Straup Cope:

With the mass of digital “stuff” growing around us every day and simple tools for self-organization evolving beyond individuals into communities of suggestions, is the curatorial prerogative itself becoming a social object?

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Aaron also led a workshop called Machine Tags: Theory, Working Code and Gotchas (and Robots!)

Common Ground: A Community-Curated Meetup Case Study by Paula Bray and Ryan Donahue:

Why do institutions and on-line communities want to participate in face-to-face meetups such as Common Ground: a community curated meetup? Does this type of experience provide a deeper engagement with audiences and give institutions an opportunity to learn from these experiences? What are we finding in the process?

Can Structured Metadata Play Nice with Tagging Systems? Parsing New Meanings from Classification-Based Descriptions on Flickr by Joseph B. Dalton:

This paper discusses the rationale behind NYPL’s decision to combine existing metadata – in the form of subject headings – with user-generated tags, and demonstrates some of the challenges, benefits and drawbacks for institutions that may be interested in using similar approaches for their own collections.

Flickr as Platform: Astronomy Photographer of the Year by Fiona Romeo and Natasha Waterson:

Variously described as “wonders of the cosmos” (Daily Mail, 2009l) and “the best space porn of the year” (Davis, 2009), Astronomy Photographer of the Year is an annual competition and exhibition organised by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

This paper will outline how we used the Flickr platform to reach new visitors, build a community of practice, develop an innovative standard for identifying and locating astronomy photographs (’astrotagging’), shortlist and judge competition entries, develop an on-gallery interactive showcasing all contributed photographs, and repurpose user-generated content for exhibition labels.

According to Flickr’s developers, “the integration is so seamless… you might as well consider Flickr to be their ‘backend’ serve.” (Kandalgaonkar, 2009).

Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest? This last paper of interest has no true connection with The Commons on Flickr, however it raises and answers a fundamental question regarding the concept of a museum commons.

There has been an exciting surge of interest in the museum sector in expanding access to museum data through the classic idea of creating a commons. A Web-based multi-institutional museum commons could open up public access to collections, deepening contextual knowledge of objects and helping museum professionals recognize the unseen value of their own collections. For example, collections items that seem orphaned or fragmentary in one institution may enjoy a rich life on-line, once reunited with relevant collections and data from other institutions in an on-line commons environment. Commons-oriented intellectual property policies should also enable content sharing for educational and other non-commercial uses, or they may be used to facilitate new innovations or for-profit businesses beyond the scope of traditional rights-and-reproductions activities.

You might also enjoy scrolling back through the social media advice (@edmj/museum-socialmedia-advice) from MW2010’s unconference tweets!

There are plenty more papers to read; we’d love to hear what words of wisdom you found in them!

If you’re not in Denver either, you too can follow. This year the conference organizers have created a list of on-Twitter attendees, to make it easy. Not on Twitter? No problem! You don’t need to join to watch the list feed.

We’re especially keen on a talk by Paula Bray (Powerhouse Museum) and Ryan Donahue (George Eastman House): Common Ground: A Community-Curated Meetup Case Study — and have bookmarked the full paper, too! Have thoughts on Paula and Ryan’s? We’d love to hear them!

Here’s the video presentation of the talk that Deborah Wythe, head of the Brooklyn Museum Digital Collections and Services, gave at their 1stfans meetup, on the same evening as the Common Ground community-curated event.

She discusses Brooklyn’s first curator, William Henry Goodyear, and the Paris Exposition of 1900. This a terrific talk about lantern slides, equipment, digitization, colorization and so much more. The insight into Brooklyn in the late 1800s/early 1900s is fantastic. It’s less than 10 minutes long, and worth the time to watch.

443 images made up the slideshow from the fantastic inaugural community-curated event, Common Ground; users voted for their favorites images from each of the (then) 27 Commons’ institutions.

Indicommons’ blog editor Stephanie Fysh exclaims,

The George Eastman House event was small but well-fed (Rochester has the best sandwich place *EVER*) and intimate in a good way. Loved meeting *so many* of the people who make GEH work!

Media Coverage

• Projecting a Northwest Image – Corvallis Gazette-Times on the Oregon State University event
• Projections of the Past – ABC Sydney on the Powerhouse Museum event.
• Common Ground i St Karin – helagotland.se on the Swedish National Heritage Board event.
• Promo piece from Effie Kapsalis of the Smithsonian Institution (thanks, Effie!).
• Promo piece from the Collections Australia Network.

Photographs from various Common Ground events:

We had terrible weather so we relocated to the courtyard cafe but the meetup was great. – Paula Bray, Powerhouse Museum.

Getting ready for Common Ground

But that didn’t stop people from having a good time with their cupcakes! Great night, good to meet up with fellow minded photographers. – Sutto 007

Cupcakes

Common Ground: thank you Flickr community – a blog post by Paula Bray of the Powerhouse Museum.

Commons babycakes

Flickr’s Dan Bogan showed up for their event – Nom Nom Nom!

Listening

Oregon State University Archives has a few sets of photos up about the event, including many pink and blue ball sightings!

Dot head Doug next to the dots…

A huge shout-out to Ryan Donahue of George Eastman House for developing the voting application and creating the Powerpoint slideshow presentation for the event! Congratulations to all the institutions who hosted the first global community-curated Commons event and to all the supporters.

You can view the photographs selected for Common Grounds right here on our blog at the Common Ground 2009 page. You can also view the show directly on Flickr in full screen here.

Photos and videos from arkland_swe, Powerhouse Museum, sutto 007, Paul Hagon, waferbaby, Brooklyn Museum and the Oregon State University Archives.

Are you a Commons fan living in Sweden? Join the Swedish National Heritage Board to celebrate The Commons at their Common Ground event in Visby on the Baltic Sea on Saturday Night!

in Visby, Gotland Municipality, Sweden :

Are you a Commons fan living in upstate New York? Join George Eastman House to celebrate The Commons at their Common Ground event in Rochester this Friday!

in Rochester, NY:

Are you a Commons fan living in Oregon? Join the Oregon State University Archives to celebrate The Commons at their Common Ground event in Corvalis, Oregon this Friday!

in Corvallis, Oregon:

Are you a Commons fan living in New York? Join the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library to celebrate The Commons at their Common Ground event in Brooklyn this weekend, part of the Target First Saturdays series.

in Brooklyn, NY:

The State Library of Queensland, Australia invites you to be a special guest for their screening of Common Ground in Brisbane, Australia. The event in Brisbane will consist of a large projection onto the screen in the State Library’s stunning Queensland Terrace using a slideshow of content from the Commons on Flickr accounts that is curated by its community of users – making the Flickr Commons go ‘live’ through a connected slideshow. This special event will include images from Picture Queensland – the State Library of Queensland’s image library.

Light refreshments will be served.

When 6pm, Fri 2 Oct
Where Queensland Terrace, level 2
RSVP to heritage [at] slq.qld.edu.au (acceptances only by Mon 28 Sep)

in Sydney:

in Brisbane:

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Don’t forget your camera!

[updated to reflect new information]