Museums and the Web 2009

Every year, somewhere in North America, Museums and the Web is a major conference for tech and museum professionals to mingle, share ideas and exchange latest progress in the museum field. This year it's taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA from April 15 to 18. The Opening Plenary on Thursday summed up this year's theme - Moving from Virtual to Visceral. It is a call to bring the virtual world down to earth, so that museum applications, just like its physical venue will be usable by real people from all walks of life.

The writer personally cannot be there for this wonderful event, but a few members of the TEC-CH community are among the crowd. Please stay tuned and once they return there will be more on the conference.

For now, you can check out all of the papers and presentations online at the MW2009 conference site. Also whenever the conference is taking place, you will find a lively Twitter conversation going on in the background - participate in the conversation with #mw2009 or search it to see what people are talking about!

Scrapblog

Ever made a scrapbook when you were a child? Now the experience of cutting, pasting, stickers and creative captions can all be re-created online. Call it a fancy PowerPoint presentation or your own special digital album, whatever you like, Scrapblog allows you to use all kinds of fun gadgets to enhance your collections of online photos and memories. To throw in a geeky museum-related thought, one can create and interpret his own exhibition of travel photos, art works, or even hockey cards and share it with your friends for a private viewing. It will sure serve as a useful exercise if one day you are required to interpret images and write your own text panels.

ITSME slideshow (repost from slideshare)

From: itsmesrl,
4 days ago

Itsme A New Workstation To Exploit The Potential Of The Cyberspace 02

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 operating)

ITSME, a collaboration-friendly workstation

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, the TEC-CH programme jointly hosted a seminar with the Institute for Communication Technologies (ICT), featuring Prof. Giorgio De Michelis from the University of Milano - Bicocca. He presented a new open source initiative to develop an operating system that maximises the benefits of cyberspace, and that is sensitive to the context and interrelations of various items instead of the simple categorisations of folders and file formats. In the new interface, workstation content will be referred to as "venues" for contexts and "stories" for various formats of files. 

Considering current leanings towards open-source platforms, including big companies such as IBM and Symbian Foundation, the ITSME project presents much potential and possibilities than ever before. It is currently in the beginning of its development stage: while it may possibly be the solution for the dispersion of information and the inadequacy of file systems, its actual results remains interesting and yet to be evaluated.