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!

The Best of the Web awards are just now being announced at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis! We posted here in February about the Flickr Commons–related nominations.

And now, among the Best of the Web are …

Best Online Community or Service:

• honorable mention: The Commons!
• honorable mention: Indicommons!
• Best Online Community: Brooklyn Museum Collection, Posse, and Tag! You’re It!

Best Exhibition:

• Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition (Brooklyn Museum)

Best Innovative or Experimental Site:

• honorable mention: Astronomy Photographer of the Year (plus complimentary digital astronomy services – National Maritime Museum)

Best Overall Website:

• The Brooklyn Museum!

See the full list of award winners here, and check back for more about the Museums and the Web conference!

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!