museumsandtheweb.com - open source

What’s On TAP? – Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

cmoad — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 06:06:49 +0000

MW2012

Charles Moad and Rob Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art, United States

http://www.tapintomuseums.org/

Abstract

In 2011, the New York Times published an article that reinforces what many museums are feeling as they scramble to keep pace with changes in technology. Entitled, “Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law”, the article cites a White House advisory report detailing the changes in hardware and software innovation in the past 15 years. The report notes that while the rate of change in hardware innovation is staggering, changes in software have vastly outpace even those impressive numbers.

Program Item Reference:

What’s On TAP? – Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

Open Innovation and Open Source: A Guide for Content Developers

bobk — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 03:07:20 +0000

MW2012

Robert Ketner, The Tech Museum, USA

http://thetechopensource.thetech.org

Abstract

There are clear advantages to working in collaboration with outside partners when developing exhibits and museum content. The actual structure of these collaborations can take many forms. This report outlines approaches to engaging with outside talent on three levels of commitment (Casual Contribution, Mentored Development, and Expert Networks) as may be required for different projects. Categories of methods for open innovation can be applied to create a manageable structure for the contributions (Orchestra, Creative Bazaar, Jam Session, and Mod Station models). A range of stages of completion, from ideas to completed content, can be expected from such collaboration efforts. Last, some findings from The Tech Virtual project are described.

Program Item Reference:

Open Innovation and Open Source: A Guide for Content Developers

Tate Online Courses

rcardiff — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:04:54 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Tate Online Courses

Keywords:

online courses

Keywords:

building community

Keywords:

informal learning

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

authoring tools

Keywords:

business models

Abstract:

Tate has been producing and running Online Courses for three years with the launch of the Artists Techniques and Methods Course in 2008 and a second Introduction to Drawing Techniques Course in 2010. There are over 1500 registered users on the Tate Online courses, many of them based outside the UK. The courses are based upon a unique model of trying to provide the equivalent of an online evening class rather than an accredited course. Each course consists of six tutorial units which are accompanied by a discussion forum and an image gallery. The course units are highly interactive and contain a lot of video and animation. The courses are designed to be informal and practical so that students can learn about techniques, try them out at home and then share the results with other students on the discussion forum and in the image gallery. Once a user has signed up to the course they have unlimited access to the course environment so they can spend as long as they like studying the material and can re-visit the course over a long timeframe. The demonstration of the online courses will provide a unique opportunity for museum professionals to have a look at the Tate Online courses without having to pay for them. The demonstration will also examine how to create a business model for producing and running online courses so that they generate revenue for your museum. The courses were developed using Moodle (a free open source LMS) and an inexpensive authoring tool called Articulate. The demonstration will show how tools such as these can be used to create online courses incorporating new or existing content, including video, animation and images. The Tate online courses were created on a very low budget, often re-using content that had been created for other projects. I will discuss how to build up an online community of learners and the benefits and disadvantages of providing an online tutor. I will also share the user research Tate has carried out to discover what students look for in an online course and which course features and formats work best with this user group.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations II

Site:

http://www3.tate.org.uk/learnonline/onlinecourses/

Authors:

rose cardiff

Creating a mobile app ecosystem - the Genera project for iOS

thesherrin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:26:06 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Creating a Mobile App Ecosystem—The Genera Project for iOS

Keywords:

iOS

Keywords:

mobile

Keywords:

app

Keywords:

development

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

collaboration

Keywords:

apps

Keywords:

Field Guide

Keywords:

natural science

Keywords:

code

Abstract:

At the start of 2011, Australia’s Museum Victoria (MV), published a Field Guide for Victorian Animals for iOS devices: iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The app currently contains information for approximately 650 Victorian animal species, including birds, mammals, snakes, lizards and frogs, as well as butterflies, snails, spiders and other invertebrates. Released for free, the app was downloaded over 20,000 times in its first 7 months.
In August 2011, Museum Victoria (MV) released the source code for the app under an open source license. Organisations and individuals have used the code to produce field guides for something specific as the frogs within a river catchment area, to the fauna of Papua New Guinea.
The field guide data structure and code is built for displaying information about fauna, however the presentation structure of the app is suitable for displaying information about a wide range of fields. This lead to the development of the Genera project for iOS, which, rather than requiring the data about an object to be supplied in a specific structure to fit the database, adjusts the the database based on the structure of the data supplied. This project can be used to create guides for flora, fauna, minerals or any type of object. The subject of the guide does not have to be a homogenous class of objects, but through the use of templates and identifiers can accommodate heterogenous classes (e.g. fauna and flora).
This paper discusses how the work done by other organisations and the experience of developing the field guide has lead to the development of the Genera project for iOS. Key to the project is the separation of the data, platform and presentation layers. A description of how other organisations can use the Genera platform for their own apps, and suggestions on issues to consider when developing natives app for reuse by other institutions are presented.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Mobile strategy

Authors:

Simon Sherrin

Elycia Wallis

Open Innovation and Open Source: A Guide for Content Developers

bobk — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:27:36 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Open Innovation and Open Source: A Guide for Content Developers

Keywords:

participation

Keywords:

co-creation

Keywords:

design

Keywords:

prototyping

Keywords:

collaboration

Keywords:

open source

Abstract:

The Tech Open Source museum project launched in late 2007 (as "The
Tech Virtual") with the goal to apply the latest in open source
collaboration methods and tools to the creation of museum content. It
is composed of an online platform (a website with user-generated
content) and modeling resources hosted in a 3D virtual world. Offered
as a resource for the museum community as a whole, the project was
funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and is hosted by The
Tech Museum in San Jose, CA.

The ambitions of the program include development of museum exhibits
and content through open contribution by a diverse community of
curators, experts, hobbyists, scientists, and thinkers. This is
accomplished by connecting with individuals, institutions, and online
communities internationally. Thus far the project has involved the
participation of over 20 institutions and 1300 site members, who have
generated more than 400 exhibit designs and video projects.

As part of the grant products we will present a report of these
methods for the museum industry in the form of a project white paper
at Museums and the Web 2012.

The paper includes descriptions of the methods in use and results
obtained by the project. These are summarized in a practical structure
which covers open source approaches for Casual Contribution, Mentored
Development, or Expert Network level contributors. It also explains
how to apply a range of open innovation categories to structure open
source projects.

The paper is meant as a guide for institutions considering open
innovation programs or open design projects.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Optimizing engagement

Site:

http://thetechopensource.thetech.org/

Authors:

Bob Ketner

What’s On TAP? – Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

rjstein — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:33:50 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

What’s On TAP? – Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

Keywords:

TAP

Keywords:

tourml

Keywords:

mobile tours

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

collaboration

Keywords:

mobile strategy

Abstract:

Perhaps most challenging for museums today are the changes occurring in the mobile industry. This leads to questions about how best to take advantage of mobile tools to promote access, interpretive content, and engaging experiences for the public – and at the same time, find solutions that are scalable and able to be maintained over a long period of time.

As described in (Stein 2011), the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) proposed a platform called TAP that envisioned a modular software framework in addition to a formal description of mobile tour content called TourML. The IMA released an initial version of the TAP and TourML framework in 2009, which has subsequently been adopted by a number of museums. While the initial TAP software proved stable and capable of serving a variety of needs in museums, it fell short of the ability to support the vision and needs of the community as expressed in several working meetings about the specification.

In 2011, the Institute for Museum and Library Services awarded a National Leadership Grant to a collaboration of museums, led by the IMA, to create and extend upon the TAP & TourML open-source platform to create a suite of interchangeable tools that can support the creation of reusable mobile experiences. This paper will discuss the goals of the project, the current state of the TourML specification (including its relationship to other open-source mobile projects), and will outline the software development roadmap for the project. Authors will describe the various components of the TAP system and how modules from the toolkit can be used individually or in combination to build a variety of museum mobile experiences.

Rather than being a stand-alone product, the paper will document the ways that TAP and TourML seek to integrate with existing museum authoring tools and commercial mobile systems creating a method for interchange and migration of mobile content between these systems. This same interchange method can help museums preserve and reuse the content developed for mobile tours and can potentially lead to the ability for museums to share and trade content elements between distinct mobile experiences.

Lohr, Steve. "Software Progress Beats Moore's Law - NYTimes.com." Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com. New York Times, 7 Mar. 2011. Web. 26 Sept. 2011. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/

Stein, R., and N. Proctor, TourML: An Emerging Specification for Museum Mobile Experiences. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2011. Consulted September 26, 2011. http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/papers/tourml_an_emerging_specification_for_museum_mobile

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Mobile strategy

Site:

http://code.google.com/p/tap-tours

Authors:

Charles Moad

Robert Stein

Release Your Local Species into the iOS Ecosystem

thesherrin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:16:35 +0000

MW2011

Simon Sherrin, Museum Victoria, Australia

Abstract

At the start of 2011, Australia's Museum Victoria (MV), published a Field Guide to Victorian Animals for iOS devices: iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The MV field guide uses data written by MV's science curators, and images and sounds exported from MV's collection management system. Museum Victoria has released the source code for the app under an open source license. This paper shows how any institution can use that code and their own data, images and audio to customize and publish a field guide for their local area on iOS devices.

Keywords: field guide, natural history, mobile, iOS, open source

Program Item Reference:

Release your local species into the iOS ecosystem.

Social Media Tactics for Culture Projects: Lessons from the Heritage at Play Project

colleen_brogan — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:40:03 +0000

MW2011

Colleen Brogan and Zachary McCune, Heritage at Play, USA

http://heritageatplay.org

Abstract

With the rise of the digital humanities, scholars are reconsidering how research can be done, shared, and experienced through new media technologies. But far too often, these approaches result in titanic, one-off media objects (such as interactive exhibits or databases) that fail to present scholarship in its true form: as a process. Documenting the process of production is something common in the art world, but generally avoided by scholars in favor of finished projects that seem to develop ex nihilo. Over the summer of 2010, Colleen Brogan and Zachary McCune traveled to Ireland to produce a documentary on the cultural life of Gaelic Games. They documented their process using several social media platforms, including Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps, and WordPress. This experiential documentation of scholarly process through social media doubled as a form of promotion and real-time project critique, informing the duo's research and humanizing the task of digital humanities work.

Keywords: media production, open source, open educational resources, documentary, sports & society

Program Item Reference:

Heritage at Play: Open-source Intermedia Solutions to Documentation and Knowledge Exchange

Open Source Collections Management

dbear — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:06:15 +0000

Type:

Session

Theme:

Exhibitor Briefing

Programs:

Open Source Collections Management: Miami Art in Public Places and CollectionSpace

Date & Time:

April 9, 2011 - 8:00am - 9:00am

Location:

Commonwealth C/D

open source

collections management software

Required fields are marked with a red asterisk (*).

A confirmation of your registration will be sent to your email address. Please print it out and bring it to the conference.

You will not receive registration confirmation by regular mail.

If you do not receive your confirmation today, please contact us.

Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914

Description

A briefing on one of Mediatrope's recent projects ....

Open Source Collections Management: Miami Art in Public Places and CollectionSpace

Laura Mann — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:12:18 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

collections management

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

Web applications

Keywords:

CollectionSpace

Keywords:

public art

Abstract:

Mediatrope's exhibitor briefing will present our recent collaboration with the Miami Art in Public Places (MAPP) program. Our work with MAPP includes the development of a unique map-based public website and an open source collections management system powered by the new CollectionSpace software.

Mediatrope is the first third-party vendor to work with CollectionSpace and our briefing will explore the opportunities and challenges for museums seeking to implement open source collections management software.

We will also describe the process of designing user interfaces - for the public and for MAPP staff - that support a geographically diverse public art collection.

Type:

Exhibitor Briefing - discuss your product. Confirmed Exhibitors only

Open Source Collections Management

Authors:

Laura Mann

The Drexel Digital Museum Project Revisited

martink — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:54:41 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

controlled vocabulary

Keywords:

historic costume

Keywords:

fashion design

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

interface design

Abstract:

This demonstration will describe the update of an established historic costume collection website in collaboration with CollectiveAccess, an open source tool for managing and archiving digital assets. The Drexel Historic Costume Collection (DHCC, is a teaching collection used for research by students and faculty of Drexel University and the fashion community. The Collection, containing 10,000+ items, represents over 200 years of historic costume and textile design. It offers artifacts to study not only Fashion Design and Costume History, but Sociology, Anthropology, Design and American History as well.

The Drexel Digital Museum Project (digimuse) was conceived to increase access to and to conserve the DHCC holdings. The online database, http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu, includes QuickTime panoramas and quality details of a garment’s construction and embellishment. Digital galleries of past exhibitions and links to other fashion collection websites enhance the value of the website as a research tool.

The best practices standards for archival image capture of the Museum Online California and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) have been implemented to insure long term preservation and high caliber metadata curation. OAI-PMH and Dublin Core schema elements have been combined and enriched with characteristics particular to fashion/historic costume to create an application profile for historic costume.

Implementation was realized by employing graduate students from the College of Information Science and Technology. The two year turnover of students required regular training of new students. The inconsistent programming quality created somewhat of a “Frankensystem” in the code. The interface is also in need of a makeover.

After reviewing various options we decided to work with CollectiveAccess (CA), an open source tool for institutional strategy, and for elaborating and managing projects involving intellectual property, asset management and archiving, digital imaging and licensing, publishing and standards. (http://www.collectiveaccess.org ) CA offers free web-browser based tools for a variety of types of collections in the museum community. Working with the CA team, we are configuring this cataloguing tool to provide an application profile to best serve the needs of historic costume/fashion and support the OAI/PMH metadata standards we have already implemented.

A significant feature of digimuse is the continued development of controlled vocabulary for fashion terminology. Our current system provides a category classification hierarchy, headed by the ICOM classification of body coverings, and descending to contemporary fashion terms. CA will allow us access a variety of additional data sources and to readily add source notes and rules for adding new terms to the existing hierarchy. It will be offered as a template in the CA configuration library.

Maintaining a contemporary online archive can be an expensive endeavor in both human and monetary resources. By choosing system design solutions that incorporate emerging image and data standards from the museum and library communities, we hope to help converge standards and continue to create an online collection and tool for scholarship that is extendable, portable, and accessible to a wide range of audiences. CollectiveAccess is providing us with the best tools, at the right price, to enable our vision.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstrations I

Site:

http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu

Authors:

Kathi Martin

Release your local species into the iOS ecosystem.

thesherrin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:11:26 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Release Your Local Species into the iOS Ecosystem

Keywords:

natural sciences

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

iPad

Keywords:

Field Guide

Keywords:

Wildlife

Keywords:

Animals

Abstract:

At the start of 2011, Australia’s Museum Victoria, published a Field Guide for Victorian Animals for iOS devices: iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The app currently contains information for approximately 650 Victorian animal species, including birds, mammals, snakes, lizards and frogs, as well as butterflies, snails, spiders and other invertebrates.

Museum Victoria (MV) has released source code for the app under an open source license. This demo will show how any institution can use that code and their own data, images and audio to customize and publish a field guide for their local area on iOS devices.

For a number of years now, museums have been investigating and trialing how to deliver content using mobile devices. Over the past year, there has been an increasing number of applications released that support onsite tours, an extension into the mobile domain of traditional single-purpose audio tour guides. This work has been accompanied by the development of standards and schemas to support tours, e.g. TourML. This type of tour application has often been developed by art galleries and museums and is useful within the walls of a museum. For natural history museums, mobile applications can also make the most of the wealth of its information that is valuable outside its four walls.

Traditionally published in book form, field guides contain information about animals or plants, including physical descriptions, biology, reproduction, ecology and distribution. They are usually rich with images, as images are the best method of identification. The MV field guide uses data written by MV’s science curators, images and sounds exported from Museum Victoria’s collection management system. Image and sound files sourced from Museum Victoria or external photographers and sound recordists.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstrations III

Authors:

Simon Sherrin

Installing the Collaborative Calendar

Rich Cherry — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:32:55 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Installing the Collaborative Calendar

Keywords:

Calendar

Keywords:

BPOC

Keywords:

drupal

Keywords:

CMS

Keywords:

open source

Abstract:

Like most cultural institution Web sites, the sites from BPOC member institutions have a significant emphasis on events – exhibitions, lectures, classes, tours, performances, etc. Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense. For example: the complexities of scheduling events on-line for museums and cultural institutions (e.g. a tour that takes place every other Monday, except for holidays, when it happens on Tuesday) often leads to either inefficient or, on the other end of the spectrum, overly complex calendaring software that non-technical staff are loathe to embrace and technical staff are loathe to support.

Balboa Park Online Collaborative has developed a calendar package for the Drupal platform that handles the complex date functions highlighted above and an additional layer for aggregating event content from multiple sites into a central portal.

This mini-workshop is aimed at anyone with a Drupal based website with need as outlined above and for developers that are interested seeing an installation with an eye towards recreating this feature set on other open source CMS platforms.

Participants in the workshop should expect to learn:

How standard Drupal handles events and calendaring
How to install the BPOC calendar backend on a standalone website
How to construct basic calendar views once the backend calendar is installed
The concepts related to sharing content between Drupal websites
How to install the BPOC calendar in a multi-institutional environment

The workshop will aim to be highly interactive with conceptual information balanced with practical application via hands installs in a live server environment.

Participants will require a laptop, ftp software and a general knowledge of Drupal or a similar CMS.

Type:

Mini-Workshop - teaches something or explores approaches

Mini-Workshop on Installing the Collaborative Calendar

Authors:

Bill Bostick

Larry Garfield

Open Source and Mobile Apps: the case of Open Images

JohanOomen — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:07:02 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Picture War Monuments: Creating an Open Source Location Based Mobile Platform

Keywords:

mobile

Keywords:

open source

Keywords:

iphone

Keywords:

layar

Keywords:

drupal

Abstract:

In the context of the national digitisation programme Images for the Future, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has designed and developed a complete technical architecture to support (mobile) location-based services for cultural heritage. This October, Sound and Vision will launch the first implementation based on this architecture in the form of an iPhone application that offers mobile access to relevant audiovisual heritage related to war monuments.

The architecture developed by Sound and Vision is based on a Drupal installation that connects to relevant open content repositories (for now: Open Images, Flickr: The Commons and Wikipedia) using their respective API’s, and enables the creation of (mobile) location-based services for cultural heritage. Locations in the real world are linked to digital heritage available online. By building a location-aware application that utilizes the location information and related audiovisual heritage stored in the Drupal installation, users can access relevant information – based on their GPS location to enrich their on-site experience. The architecture also supports applications to enable users to contribute comments and images to the locations themselves. Also, it offers access through the Layar Augmented Reality browser.

To promote reuse and further development of the architecture and to ensure that other institutions can easily participate, the complete architecture is based on open source components. Because all information and relations to the online content are centrally stored, it is relatively easy to develop applications on top of the Drupal based architecture. Because the content is separated from the application, this also makes the applications very lightweight. Applications can be an iOS based application (like our first iPhone application), but with a similar effort this can also be an Android of Symbian based application.

In this presentation, we will highlight the design choices and explain the business case for platforms based on open source components.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

Demonstrations I

Site:

http://www.openimages.eu/

Authors:

Johan Oomen

Maarten Brinkerink

David van Toor

Open Source Collaboration: New Models for Technology Development in the Museum Community

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:53 +0000

Wilde, E., & Mann L. (2010). Open Source Collaboration: New Models for Technology Development in the Museum Community. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

New Technology in the Museum: a case study of three museums in the Fluid community working together

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:51 +0000

Treviranus, J., Czajkowski J., & Mitchell J. (2010). New Technology in the Museum: a case study of three museums in the Fluid community working together. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:49 +0000

Morgan, R. (2010). How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

Developing Web Applications for Museum Professionals: A CollectionSpace Case Study and Status Report

biblio — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:10:46 +0000

Goodman, C., Schmitz P., Clark C., & Sheppard D. (2010). Developing Web Applications for Museum Professionals: A CollectionSpace Case Study and Status Report. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web.

Technologies, like Museums, are Social

jtrant — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:03:08 +0000

Bearman, D., & Trant J. (2008). Technologies, like Museums, are Social. Museums and the Web 2008.

Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums

jtrant — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:19:53 +0000

Chun, S., Cherry R., Hiwiller D., Trant J., & Wyman B. (2006). Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings.

Development of a Virtual Reality Interface coupled to a Knowledge dateabase: An interactive application aimed to museum's public

jtrant — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:34:28 +0000

Rochard, O., & Laroche F. (2005). Development of a Virtual Reality Interface coupled to a Knowledge dateabase: An interactive application aimed to museum's public. Digital Culture and Heritage. Proceedings of ICHIM05.Paris.

Facilitating Access: Empowering small museums

jtrant — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:56:06 +0000

Suliman, J. (2007). Facilitating Access: Empowering small museums. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2007. Proceedings.