February 22, 2008
Today is as good a day as any to revisit my dormant blog, because Omeka 0.9.0, CHNM’s free and open source software for publishing collections and exhibitions online, is public and popular (over 150 downloads)! I am so proud to be a part of this project, because not only do we have really smart and innovative people working together on this, but our goal to make affordable and polished websites available to museums, historical societies, academia, individuals, et al, is becoming a reality.
For about five years I have been tracking and analyzing how museums use the web to display and share content, and, as most of you know, history museums have been woefully behind in producing attractive, content-rich sites. The primary barriers have been money and lack of trained staff. After 10 years of working with various public history institutions, CHNM found that even well-funded, national organizations experience difficultly mounting inexpensive interactive online exhibitions. Omeka aims to break down those barriers by allowing institutions and individuals to share their collections and expertise with the world, and to help build communities around their objects.
Since Dan Cohen did such a great job introducing his readers to Omeka, I will send you to his Feb 20 post to read more. When you’re finished, head over to the download page and start playing.
Omeka features:
• Basic themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes
• Exhibit building with 12 basic page layouts
• Tagging for items and exhibits
• RSS feed for new items
• Drop box plug-in for batch adding items
• Contribution plug-in for collecting items from visitors
• COinS plug-in making all Omeka content readable by Zotero
• Geolocation plug-in for displaying items on a map
• Bilingual plug-in for adding language fields to item metadata
• Site notes plug-in for administrators to leave instructions for users
System Requirements:
• Linux operating system
• Apache server (with mod_rewrite enabled)
• MySQL 5.0 or greater
• PHP 5.2.x or greater
• ImageMagick
November 15, 2007
Two new projects are tackling physical exhibit design using virtual tools.
Nina at Museum 2.0 is working on a new project at the Tech Museum of Innovation called Open Source Museum that will invite many different people to collaborate on exhibition development through a Wiki first and then by designing exhibition prototypes in Second Life for virtual visitors to provide feedback. All designs would be available through Creative Commons licenses. This is definitely a project to watch as museums search for new ways to involve their communities using new media. Encouraging participation outside of museum staff is certainly a goal of this project, but I will be interested to see who is participating. Also when museums experiment with these free designs, will their brick and mortar visitors agree with Second Life participants as to effectiveness of design? Also will those same visitors, who may not have offered input via Open Source Museum, feel like they have participated in the shaping of their favorite museum’s identity?
Bill at Digital History Hacks offers some easy steps for creating exhibit mock-ups using open source tools Google SketchUp and GIMP. He shows over 3 posts (1, 2, 3) that creating a feel for an exhibit can be done without spending loads on expensive 3-D programs. See what you think of Bill’s final mock-up for his exhibit on the arcade game. Creating an exhibit prototype could prove a great assignment for history students, forcing everyone to think more visually about history.
November 8, 2007
The cool kids at the Brooklyn Museum have developed a way to share their art collection with Facebook users through a new application called ArtShare. According to Shelley Bernstein, they will share the application with other institutions.
I added the app on my Facebook page and already have 2 pieces of art from their collection rotating on my profile. Clicking on the image of “Knowledge Is Power” takes you to the Brooklyn Museum’s collections page with more detailed information about the work. I like experiment with art sharing on a social networking site, and I’ll be interested to hear if other museums use it and if site traffic increases from Facebook links.
For this application to be robust, though, you have to start with some online collection objects before sharing them. Perhaps, items uploaded to anOmeka-based system can be shared through a similar type of application in the future.
October 30, 2007
CHNM is preparing to release RC3 of our new system Omeka. Omeka is a simple, flexible system for organizations, cultural institutions, and individuals to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the web. We hope that this will provide smaller museums and organizations with an easy-to-use platform to help them share their collections and expertise online, but more importantly, build online exhibitions which many CMS–>Web programs do not do.
We are still in the early stages of developing and testing, but please visit Omeka’s blog where we will share news on our progress.
October 17, 2007
Last week, the world lost a wonderfully generous, humble, and brilliant person who also happened to be a distinguished historian in three fields, teacher, and an innovator in new media. Roy Rosenzweig, as many of you know, passed away last Thursday after vigorously battling lung cancer. There are no words to adequately describe how we at CHNM and the history department at Mason feel, but we certainly are less whole.
To remember him, CHNM launched a digital memory bank honoring his legacy. Thanks, Roy is a place where those who knew him can leave remembrances, anecdotes, and photos. He touched many people through his work and throughout his life, and this site is one way to keep his legacy alive and to help us cope.
October 10, 2007
In the latest episode of Digital Campus, Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, and Mills Kelly discuss museum objects and how they can function in physical spaces and online environments. They also highlight a few new systems looking to improve library catalogs and online museum exhibits–including one in development at CHNM, Omeka.
October 8, 2007
I was so pleased to discover in this week’s Washington Post, an entire section devoted to Museums. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but the annual section on museums used to hide in the magazine in the spring, and it was basically one big advertisement. I used to earmark money in the meager budget of my old museum’s foundation to buy the tiniest square of b/w copy because we felt we needed a presence in such a section. But unlike the Washingtonian’s annual guide to museums–also offering pricey ads, the Post’s never quite offered meaty or entertaining articles. While, of course, this section also offers special advertising from local museums, it published some great articles. Here are some highlights of this special report.
Huge growth in the museum world, both in new museum construction and expansions of older institutions, raises concerns for Blake Gopnik and 4 art museum directors and curators. Jacqueline Trescott examines the tremendous boom in museum building in the DC area. Since 2000, $1 billion has been spent on museum construction!
Museums in Second Life has been a topic of great discussion lately; for example see: Inherent Vice, Museum 2.0, and Museum News Sept-Oct 2007–members can read it online. The Post writes about the Newseum in Second Life
but within the context of attracting museum audiences in the coming years.
Finally, one of my favorite pieces asks local curators about their favorite artifacts. Nancy Pope from the National Postal Museum loves the mailbox designed to fit in the nose cone of a Regulus missile–so many odd things happened during the Cold War.
October 2, 2007
Ken Burns’s latest documentary, The War, has drawn quite a bit of attention now that it has finally aired (only after other attention due to his researchers’ and/or editors’ omissions of Latinos, in particular, from his big picture). I admit that I did not view all 15 hours of The War. What I saw drove me crazy, but this work will also provide a great case study for historians when examining the construction of the cultural memory of WWII in the 21st century.
I was actually looking forward to watching The War. I was intrigued by Burns’s convention of using 4 cities across the US as the homefront anchors. He then drew on stories from local figures who fought in and contributed to WWII in different ways. This grounding of WWII in the homefront I appreciated. No doubt he attempted to appeal to different audiences who might feel some attachment to one of these places. I was one of those also connected by place. I was born in one of the chosen 4 cities, Waterbury, CT, as were my paternal grandparents and my dad–in fact my dad was born in 1940 where the documentary figuratively (the pre-war period) begins. My relatives worked hard in the brass mills and time piece factories, fought in Europe and North Africa, my grandmother managed ration books through inventive cooking, and my grandfather ran a saloon where many workers went before and after work for a drink. Oops, I’m slipping into my personal history which is filled with collective memory of the War years as passed down from my family. This is easy to do while watching. Burns is no dummy.
Is he wrong to tap into the emotional side of history? Certainly not, but you have to recognize it for what it is–and that requires analysis. This was missing and I so wanted to hear it. I applaud Burns for using oral history interviews, especially because he found some great people to talk about their experiences. He highlights many voices, some who talk about unpleasant things, particularly a Japanese-American woman who still tears up when recalling her experience of being sent to an internment camp. These are voices are utterly important, Portelli would agree, but they cannot exist without other context. I don’t think that an infantryman serving in Algiers could know the course of the North Africa campaign from his position in the field, particularly knowing about communications and military structure at the time. Another example was when a privileged white woman living in Mobile recalled and state emphatically how “everyone” got behind Roosevelt immediately after Pearl Harbor. Everyone? This was what she believed to be true, which is good to know. The scene felt empty for me, because it screamed for historical analysis. I’m a historian, what do you expect?
Will Burns get this generation interested in learning more about history? Maybe. Did he create compelling television? At times. I think I agree with the New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin that I’ve seen better war docs on the History Channel but that Burns does a very good job of exploring the many theaters of war.
I really want audiences to see how memory shapes our interpretation of history and how historical representations (monuments, memorials, et al) are shaped to fit our memories. This doc will be great to teach with, and educators will provide the missing analysis. The War will also make an excellent case study for scholars of memory, particularly when coupled with Ambrose, Brokaw, Saving Private Ryan, and the WWII Memorial in DC. I’m sure there is a book in the works!
August 29, 2007
By now, you’ve probably seen something related to the Katrina anniversary. Politicians and the news media all made appearances in the past couple of days to pledge continued support and to urge more community involvement in the rebuild of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. (I was glad to see Anderson Cooper reporting tonight from St. Bernard Parish– New Orleans’s less-glamorous neighbor yet equally, or perhaps more intensively, affected by Katrina.) Obviously, there is more to the anniversary story than New Orleans, but New Orleans’s struggles are certainly most troubling because it is hard to believe that a once-thriving city 2 years after a major storm cannot provide some basic services to its residents, including physical and mental healthcare, public safety, and infrastructure. Could this happen in Miami? Charleston? Hard to say. While a thriving cultural city pre-Katrina, it was also a relatively poor city with somewhat disengaged citizens. One thing that I’ve heard residents talk of repeatedly in these 2 days I’ve been here is how much more active its residents are now after the storm than they ever were before Katrina. It seems possible that change can happen because people are paying a lot more attention.
Today, I spoke at the Historic New Orleans Collections with our friends and partners from the Do You Know What it Means project from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. We were received quite well, but I was surprised that our audience hadn’t heard of HDMB. Darn. I thought we were doing a good job at local outreach, but then realized that local is local and often “local” pertains to a neighborhood or just a small group of people. Our UNO team has done a great job, but it reminds me that in these event-driven collecting projects, you have to continue the outreach and continue creating partnerships to keep these projects alive. It also seems that now, 2 years later, some people are more ready to think about and participate in a collecting project such as HDMB.
This has me thinking about the digital collecting process and our expectations of such projects. While we do need to kick in gear soon after a big event, we may also need to think in longer terms when planning our project goals and deliverables–especially if the event is more tragic than celebratory. Those affected often do not want to tell a story too soon after it occurs–there is too much emotion, but also in the case of these hurricanes, their “story” continues each day–and for some there is still no resolution. If you build it, people will not necessarily come, and even when you’ve built a decent-sized archive (HDMB is at 25K items) people still may not come. Frustrating, yes. Still worthwhile? Definitely, yes. I guess it’s all about managing your expectations.
Finally, if you get a chance, take a long weekend down here. NOLA really needs tourists to support the local economy–particularly outside of the French Quarter. You will eat some amazing food, sweat off some pounds, buy a cheezy souvenir, slow down a few paces, and drink some good coffee. And everyone will be really nice to you and will make you want to come back.
August 28, 2007
Greetings from a very quiet New Orleans. I arrived this afternoon in a rain storm, and in typical Gulf-coast fashion the relative humidity after the rain was near 95%. I’m staying at a hotel in the French Quarter, and I was really curious to see what the area felt like, since I keep hearing that it is back to normal particularly since it never sustained much damage after Katrina.
Well, Vieux Carre mostly looks the same structurally but it is missing the people. Today may not be a good gauge: it rained (but afternoon rains in August are common) and it’s a Tuesday in late August. Still, it feels really quiet. Many little shops and galleries seem to have limited hours; tourists shops filled with cheezy Mardi Gras-like souvenirs aren’t crowded; and even Cafe Dumond and the Central Grocery weren’t bustling. The airport van driver commented how slow their business has been because fewer people are flying into the city.
We’ll see what happens later tonight when I venture out for dinner. Tomorrow may be a completely different scene on Katrina’s 2nd anniversary and I’m also hoping to explore a bit especially because there is so much more to the city than the Quarter.
If you haven’t listened to any of the Voices of the Storm podcasts, we now have four available.
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