IST-Data Services Blog

I’ve recently returned from a great conference, Museums and the Web 2008, and wanted to share some highlights on DSBLOG. MW2008 was held in Montreal, April 9-12, and was attended by several hundred people from hundreds of institutions around the world. While the community is dominated by cultural heritage institutions, there is fairly good representation from science museums and archives. Sadly there were only a few natural history institutions present. The conference web site, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/, includes links to the papers presented through the list of speakers. The organizers encouraged online activity, and there was a fairly good amount of blogging and activity on Twitter and flickr. http://conference.archimuse.com/ is the ongoing home for this activity.

Thematically, there was much discussion about a set of familiar issues: how to engage the community, issues of authority and attribution, and the role and voice of museums and related institutions. Web 2.0 technologies figured prominently with several interesting experiments presented. Geospatial services and technologies also received a fair amount of attention. And a fair number of people are starting to work on different ways to aggregate large amounts of information and provide useful ways to search for, browse through, and understand or interpret content. One of the highlights here was a presentation by Michael Black (Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology) and Patrick Schmitz (IST-Data Services) on Delphi, the faceted browser and semantic corpus being developed for PAHMA. The combination of natural language processing, data mining, and semantic technologies is emerging as an important trend in the museum space.

Finally, I attended MW2008 in order to represent the OpenCollection project. We had a booth in the exhibits hall, right next to some of the larger vendors in the collections management systems market. The interest from this community and the response to our vision and goals was remarkable. In presentations as well as hallway conversations, the subject of open source solutions came up frequently. What makes an open source solution successful? What are the risks? What will make institution X comfortable enough to try open source solution Y? These discussions continued into the night.

All in all, Museums and the Web 2008 was an excellent conference. The level of discussion and engagement that included museum professionals and technical experts, public and private institutions and for-profit companies was very refreshing.

Tags: conference report, MW2008

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under Data Repository Management, Informatics Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.