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!

Pop Quiz at the Brooklyn Museum

To complement opening of the exhibition Unearthing the Truth: Egypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture, the Brooklyn Museum presents a pop quiz for all to test their skills on identifying genuine ancient artifacts from their modern reproductions. Besides telling apart a fake from an original, very often an artifact was also modified partly over its course of history, i.e. it is an original but someone pimped it at some point. See if you can tell the difference over the nine images of Egyptian/Coptic sculptures. A hint from yours truly: materials, colours, craftsmanship tend to reflect their origins in time. 

Do you think this is an effective means to promote an exhibition? Let us know in the comment box!

Good luck and happy quizzing!

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.