Lewis Wickes Hine
Work with schools, city history clubs : history club meeting… 1910s
New York Public Library: 434285

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!

At Indicommons, we’re big fans of the Museums and the Web conference, but while MW2010 gets underway in Denver, Colorado, tomorrow, we’ll all be where we usually are — and following along on Twitter.

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!

Earlier this month, George Oates spoke to the Society of Archivists‘ annual conference, about The Commons and Open Library. Now you can see her talk too — in 163 slides, about sharing (and more):

The last day of the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis saw a full morning of demonstrations, including two on museum-based social tagging, and an afternoon of papers, including one from the Powerhouse Museum’s Paula Bray on Flickr’s Commons, paired with a paper about Ontario Science Centre’s YouTube meetups.

Here’s a taste of the Saturday chatter:

@briankelly: At. Museum Pipes demo at #mw2009. Cool. Must subscribe to museumpipes.wordpress.com Thanks Piotr Adamczyk

@publichistorian: Sending in artifacts for GOAC: some players found Smithsonian intimidating; others excited to have items they made “accessioned” #mw2009

@zbartrout: Loving the buzz ArtsConnectEd is generating. Dozens of museums inquired about how to their content in ACE. Seems like a good sign. #mw2009

@georginab: We’ve seen people having Meet Ups in our museum, and have been dying to know how we can insert ourselves into the process #mw2009

@georginab: 999GlobalEvent (http://www.youtube.com/user/999globalevent): I hereby promise to try and get the Smithsonian involved in this! #mw2009

@KPfefferle: On Institutions and User Participation: “We’re looking for a fling when we should be thinking about marriage.” #mw2009

@kresin: What constitutes quality of life for museum visitors? How to help them to have a better experience & benefit in their real lives? #mw2009

Closer to home:

@Timh01: Powerhouse on top of things with their Tyrrell collection of images on Flickr Commons – well done guys need MV on the Commons ASAP #mw2009

@nikkitimmermans: powerhouse on flickr commons: Tyrrel sales didn’t drop, general sales increased slightly #mw2009

@KPfefferle: I love the concept of embracing controversial content and facilitating conversation – even seeding with multiple viewpoints #mw2009

And everyone was talking about this!

@Vexus_Nexus: Metadata sounds nicer when Finnish people say it #mw2009

The “backchannel” talk on Twitter also veered off into its own territory: What does all this digitization to make so many of these things possible cost, anyway?

@frankieroberto: Wondering how much it costs to ‘digitize’ a single archive photo? Would ‘first person pays’ model work? #mw2009

@sebchan: @frankieroberto we do the first person already. Still expensive if you bring in perm staff costs. #mw2009

@NancyProctor: @sebchan @frankieroberto Good point; would it be useful to compare per-image costs across museums&share tips on economies-been done? #mw2009

If you’re curious about just what it takes to get a photograph from a file or wall in a museum onto the Internet or even just into digital storage, keep an eye on Indicommons! More on that soon.

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!

Yesterday, we peeked in on a day of pre-conference workshops (and wifi hunting) at Museums and the Web 2009 in Indianapolis. Today the conference got off to a big start with what word on the #mw2009 Twitter feed says was an opening plenary address by Maxwell Anderson, from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, on “moving from virtual to visceral”. The plenary address will be published, but in the meantime, here’s a teaser …

@kevinvonappen: Museums online can let visitors be voyeurs of staff? Cool #mw2009

@kresin: museums should teach how to practice connoisseurship & help people be more judicious in life choices. #mw2009

@5easypieces: Anderson: “I think museums are afraid of emotion.” #mw2009

And of course …

@mia_out: Brooklyn Museum, Te Papa ‘build a squid’, Flickr Commons getting some love in #mw2009 plenary

After that, attendees had to start choosing from four parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon, before an “unconference” portion of the conference began. (Don’t know what an unconference is? You’ll find out before long if you’re a regular conference goer!)

A Park Ranger, John Harlan Warren, presented to the conference (about video podcasting) — a first for Museums and the Web and a fresh perspective for the more traditional museum crowd, who also apparently like his hat.

But we know you want to hear about Flickr’s own Aaron Straup Cope. Aaron presented today on geocoding and storytelling, showing attendees new ways to think about user-generated data, and showing them the concept of shapefiles. Here’s what some people in Aaron’s audience learned and thought:

@frankieroberto: Aaron: “we boiled the Earth a little. Using a country > region > county > locality > neighbourhood model.” #mw2009

@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009 ‘Every place has layers of unseen history, I’d like to believe that’s where the value is.’ Museum mapping session

@zbartrout: #mw2009 astraub of Flickr showing the inaccuracy of geocoding. Tags often reflect what people are looking at rather than where they are.

@sebchan: *Beautiful* inaccuracy aka complexity of geocoded data – Flickr shape files fantastic for community projects. #mw2009

@sebchan: Aaron Straup-Cope is hassling Guy Debord. #MW2009

@nikkitimmermans: aaron introducing the word “psychosynthography”… do not underestimate the value of geo and photosynth #mw2009

@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009, place ‘names become the bridge between experience and the memories that we have’

Sold on geotagging yet?

More from Museums and the Web tomorrow — mini-workshops and professional forums, exhibits, and the Best of the Web Awards!

If we had our druthers, we’d be in Indianapolis this week. Not for the Pacers-Broncos game or to see Art Garfunkel with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (though we’ll admit to being tempted by a play called “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot”), but for the 13th annual Museums and the Web conference — “the largest international conference devoted to the exploration of art, science, natural and cultural heritage on-line”.

Today’s schedule was made up of full- and half-day workshops, introducing museum staff to, for example, RSS/Geo-RSS tools and using Drupal as part of integrating remote data — like, perhaps, those tags users add to Commons photos. We probably would have ended up choosing the two workshops offered by the Powerhouse Museum’s Seb Chan: one on social media, leading to greater interaction in user communities, the other on how to know if what you’re doing online is actually doing anything.

But since we’re not there, it’s a good thing Twitter is popular in the museums 2.0 world!

Interested in hearing what Museums & the Web 2009 attendees are learning (along with where they’re gathering for drinks after, and where the good wifi is)? You can follow along with the Twitter hashtag #mw2009.

Here are a few of today’s highlights:

@Auckland_Museum: It appears that geo-linked RSS feeds are more promising than ones based on passive cultural subjects, at #mw2009

@kevinvonappen: Last year , it was what social media tools were cool . This year, we’re asking each other WHY we’re using them. Progress! #mw2009

@smannion: @frankieroberto on levels of user engagement. Various models exist. Commonly spouted ‘rule’ is only 1% of users will contribute. #mw2009

There are photos, too! Check out the conference photo pool on Flickr. More highlights here tomorrow, from the keynote speaker on!

Museums and the Web is an international conference for “Webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centers, and archives” and “the professionals, companies, foundations and governments that support them”. The conference has been held since 1997.

This year, we’re very proud that The Commons has been nominated for a Museums and the Web Best of the Web Award, in the Online Community or Service category. The Commons has been nominated for bringing “photography from the archives back to life, and promoting their creative re-use through ‘no known copyright restrictions’ statements.”

The Best of the Web Awards, recognizing achievement in heritage website design, will be presented at the annual conference in April 2009 in Indianapolis.

Two other nominees in the Best Online Community or Service category are close to our hearts. The Brooklyn Museum is nominated for its website, Community Posse, and tagging games.

And finally, here at Indicommons and in our Flickr group, we’re incredibly grateful for our own nomination in this category, by Fiona Romeo of the National Maritime Museum. It’s only because of Fiona and many people like her — people with a passion for the living past, ideas about how to keep it living, and the know-how to make those ideas real — that we, the members of Flickr, are here at all, playing in The Commons. Thank you!