When decisions you make are justified as leading to a better user experience, how certain are you that this is actually true? Of course, some of this is intuition; but actually getting your project in front of visitors to verify this outcome doesn't happen as much as it should. Perhaps you thought it was too overwhelming, or maybe too expensive. But here's the secret: It doesn't have to be. In this workshop, we will arm you with the tools you need to add user testing to your everyday processes, and practice different methods on active projects of workshop participants.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

No matter where you are in your organization, or where your museum is in its digital evolution, you can play a leadership role in developing a meaningful digital strategy. But to do this well, you'll need to think first about people: Who are you trying to serve? Who do you need to communicate or collaborate with? And how can you best converse with those people? Maybe you have a formal strategy in place, but you need to be better at communicating it to leadership and your colleagues. Perhaps you're working on a digital strategy in the absence of a larger institutional plan. Or maybe you're just getting started in thinking about how to tackle the strategic planning process. There is no one right way to build a digital strategy, but there are frameworks, tools, and tips that can make the process smoother and more collaborative.

Join three museum technologists who are also in the trenches, building digital strategies for their organizations and learning as they go. Together, we'll discuss the importance of digital strategy as a process (not a document) and how a digital strategy fits into (or can catalyze) wider strategic thinking at your institution. Come ready to roll up your sleeves, share your experiences, and give and receive honest, constructive feedback.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Mobile audio tours have long been a staple of interpretation in museums, but even as we've entered a new era of mobile computing, many museum tours remain unchanged and unevolved. How can museums craft content that fosters engagement, interaction, and fresh insight? This workshop will provide the fundamental concepts for creating useful and accessible mobile content while considering fresh and novel approaches.

We'll spend a portion of our time reviewing exemplary audio content, and we'll examine what characteristics make a mobile stop truly successful. Participants will break into teams to write short content scripts, then regroup to present and discuss them. Finally, we'll cover strategies for how participants can implement new mobile tour strategies at their respective institutions.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Statistics show that more people now use mobile devices to view the web than use desktops or laptops. This is why Mashable has called 2013 the "year of responsive web design." By going responsive you can be "mobile-first" and make sure visitors have the best experience interacting with your institution's website on any device they use. Building a responsive website or adapting your site to be responsive requires a change in the way you think about building websites. Doing so can be a tool for museum professionals to rethink the process around their website because it forces project teams to democratize the way they think about design, content creation, and programming.

This workshop will explain what responsive design is and demystify all the jargon around it. Most importantly, it will give you the toolkit you need to decide if you should go responsive and when, as well as how to approach content creation and project management for successfully producing a responsive website. The workshop will also cover the templates and technology needed to create a responsive site in Drupal and WordPress.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Start your tour by exploring on your own the Biodome's five ecosystems of the Americas: The Tropical Rainforest, Laurentian Maple Forest, Gulf of St. Lawrence, Labrador Coast, and Sub-Antarctic Islands. Experience the faithful and complex way in which the natural environment is represented, and how the animal and plant species interact. Join the Biodome's director, Rachel Léger, for a special behind-the-scenes look at some of the many fascinating aspects of the Biodome's work, including the sophisticated seawater filtration systems, the veterinary clinic, and the animal kitchen. Make your way over to the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium (opened April 2013) where its director, Pierre Lacombe, will introduce a completely fresh and innovative approach to astronomy. Marvel at the building's bold design, which incorporates the strictest sustainable development criteria, and the use of cutting-edge technology to create a unique experience of the universe. Round out your visit with time in the permanent exhibition Exo: Our Search for Life in the Universe and two shows--the immersive and whimsical Continuum and the more scientific From the Earth to the Stars. A tour itinerary and transportation information will be included in the registration package for attendees who pre-registered.

Start the afternoon with a stroll on your own through the Mile End district, once the home of Montreal indie rock band Arcade Fire. Experience the visual art and café/restaurant scene this bohemian neighborhood is known for, and sample world-famous Montreal bagels and Genevieve Grandbois chocolates. Then, in the neighboring Outremont district, join two senior Moment Factory staff for a presentation and tour of this dynamic, multifunctional new media and entertainment studio. Since 2001, its team of more than 110 talented individuals has developed, designed, and produced more than 300 groundbreaking--often interactive--events, shows, and installations around the world for such clients as Cirque du Soleil, Disney, Nine Inch Nails, Céline Dion, Microsoft, Montreal's Quartier des Spectacles and Pointe-à-Callière Museum, and Madonna. Visit the cutting-edge industrial studios devoted to technology, content creation, scenography, and production, where video, lighting, architecture, sound, and special effects are combined to create remarkable experiences. In the black box test lab, you may even have the chance to see a live demo of a current project. A tour itinerary and transportation information will be included in the registration package for attendees who pre-registered.

Spend a stimulating afternoon in the heart of Montreal's Cité des Arts du Cirque, an international capital of circus arts and a benchmark for sustainable development through culture. To kick things off, put yourself in the hands of the trained circus professionals at ARTCORPS for active fun and challenge. In an exciting two-hour workshop, learn the basics of juggling, acrobatics, aerials, and pyramids using the ball, baton, ring, Chinese plate, diabolo (spinning top and string), fabric, hoop, trampoline--and your own body. Then head down the street for a guided tour. At the Saint-Michel Environmental Complex (SMEC), learn about its transformation from quarry to landfill site to future urban park--and the technologies used in its rehabilitation. At la TOHU, see the only circular performance hall of its kind in North America, and the prime circus venue for performance, creativity, and experimentation. View its different green elements and environmental design--including hybrid ventilation, green roofs, and recycled and reused materials--and take in the Jacob and William collection on the history of circus arts. A tour itinerary and transportation information will be included in the registration package for attendees who pre-registered. Please wear or bring workout clothing.

From the web's earliest days, digital professionals have been pressed to demonstrate that their online presence was contributing to their organizations, whether by increased revenue, a more finely-honed brand identity, or the profound ability to enhance their mission via content delivery to anyone with a web browser. "How does one measure success on the Web?" became the subject of a seemingly infinite number of books, blog posts, seminars, and yes, workshops.

A few years pass and along comes social media, connecting millions of people in ways never before possible, disrupting the landscape and breathing new life into the old questions: "Why is this important and how do we know it's working?" Only now, the answers are more complex. Today's landscape is a splintered collection of new channels, sublimely named yet inscrutable metrics, and a dizzying array of tools both free and paid, offering a dizzying range of possibilities with which to answer the classic analytics question, "What do I measure?" and its first cousin, "What does that have to do with our program?" The presenters will work with participants to refine and articulate this conversation through a series of examples, case studies, and recommendations.

Workshop participants need to have access to a Google Analytics account and basic knowledge of how GA works. Participants who would like their own versions of the Smithsonian custom dashboard should notify Brian Alpert in advance (alpertb [at] si [dot] edu) and be willing to add him as a User to their Google Analytics account.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Even in this age of networked computer systems, powerful database technology, and cloud computing, museums traditionally have been bad at managing and integrating their information in a consistent fashion. A typical museum now runs one or more of various "vertical" solutions. Each is typically designed to solve a single problem within the entire museum information picture. Data need to be replicated between different systems and databases and gets quickly out-of-date somewhere down the line, while efforts and costs to integrate different systems increase with each new component. Upgrading any software is a nightmare, as it involves modifying every middleware component. Staff need to be trained to use many interfaces, multiple licenses must be purchased, and maintenance costs skyrocket.

This workshop will introduce you to a new generation of content management framework, designed from the ground up to manage any type of information, as well as physical and digital assets, using a single, web-based, accessible interface. Instead of looking at an individual, vertical solution for each type of content, the workshop takes a holistic approach to how information typically flows in a museum, including the need to document, manage, conserve, insure, move, loan, sell, and exhibit, and to present information to multiple audiences with different needs and privileges.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Got a burning question about creating games for your museum? Got a playful project you need help with? Or a games idea you aren't sure how to proceed with? Want to have a go at playing the best games from other museums? This workshop is both a games clinic and games arcade, a place to get inspired and get advice. We will create a games arcade, pulling together the very best examples of games from museums, both blockbusters as well as some smaller works that may be new to participants. We also will hold a games surgery, inviting attendees to bring their games ideas, questions, and problems for our help and discussion. Participants are welcome to bring along any work in progress for discussion and critique.

Between us, we have commissioned and produced several successful games for the Tate, SFMOMA, and the Wellcome Collection, including High Tea, ArtGameLab, and Wondermind, reaching audiences of millions and winning several awards. This session is about sharing our experience, getting people excited about the potential of games, and provoking playful approaches to your audiences, collections, and content.

This year, all MCN Workshops are made possible thanks to the generous support of Google. They are offered free of charge but registration is however required since safety regulations require hotel conference rooms' capacity to be limited. You will be prompted to sign up for the workshop(s) of your choice when you register for the conference. 

Tina Roth Eisenberg will kick off MCN 2013 with the Keynote address. 

Did you ever think your side projects could completely change your career? They can! Tina Roth Eisenberg's labors of love have accidentally turned into businesses spanning from a co-working space, lecture series to a designer temporary tattoo shop. In her talk, Tina will share some core lessons she took away from her unusual career path and why she thinks every office should have a confetti drawer. 

A growing number of museums offer open access images of collections objects for which there is no copyright holder, often placing those images into the public domain with statements that they have no known copyright restrictions. Taking as its context more widely scoped discussions of open access policy and practice, this roundtable will home in precisely on actual implementation of public-facing delivery: the procedures and tools museums use to provide open access images to their users. This tight focus on the nuts and bolts of delivery, from technical infrastructure to interface and user experience, will enable attendees to learn how open access image providers are working to balance optimally efficient delivery (minimizing both friction for users and staff time needed to deliver an image) with the capture of meaningful metrics.

With the rise of touch technology, how do museums successfully and strategically integrate such devices into their galleries? The Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) has been working with a variety of museums in Balboa Park to implement interactive gallery technology that will engage audiences and enhance their experiences with the museums' collections. Learn from BPOC staff and specific project examples on how to incorporate touch technologies, such as iPods, iPads, Android devices, and touch tables, into your museum. This session will be a step-by-step walk through the process of planning the project strategically from an institutional perspective to support your mission, managing the project development effectively, and producing rich content. It also will suggest programming tips and tools for implementation.

This panel will explore the role of visitor-centered research in driving design decisions through the lens of three diverse museum projects. Its goal is two-fold: to share research results and actionable outcomes (what did we learn and what was its impact?) and to make a case for the importance of design research as a critical process in digital projects. These museums are using research to address very different issues: how to evolve an existing mobile offer, how to identify whether and how mobile might support specific audiences and organizational objectives, and how to reach an existing audience with new online resources. Their approaches vary significantly, but in each case the museum is using specific actionable outcomes from visitor research to design an improved service. This approach forces the technology to take a back seat to a larger view of the overall visitor experience. Each speaker will present her research process, results, and the impact on her museum's mobile and web projects. We'll then have a roundtable discussion on the whys and hows of using research to drive design decisions.

The keynote speaker, Tina Roth Eisenberg, will engage in conversation on themes from the morning's keynote presentation. This will be a great opportunity to delve more deeply into the concepts presented there. The session will include the audience in lively conversation.

DigitalCitizenship.net cites nine individual elements of digital citizenship: access, commerce, communication, literacy, etiquette, law, rights & responsibilities, health & wellness, and security (self protection). Cultural institutions are doing well in some respects, but what about other areas?

Could museum interactive experiences not only provide access to rich content, but also help increase the overall digital literacy of users? Might we design our technology initiatives with an eye toward vision health or mitigating repetitive stress syndrome? Can our digital projects travel parallel paths in pursuit of both curatorial mission and digital good? Should they?

#MCNPunks

The plenary session at Museums & the Web 2013 introduced the immersive, interactive theater event Sleep No More as a source of inspiration for designing story worlds for exhibition experiences in museums. It instigated lively ongoing conversations about a variety of models to investigate, from video game worlds to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, and highlighted examples of existing immersive experiences that range from the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, to Tino Segal's exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2011, to the Indiana Experience at the Indiana Historical Society.

Our panel will build on that presentation and subsequent conversations. We will explore models for enabling participation in exhibition settings, creating emotional experiences, and getting out of the transactional model of the museum visit--and into relationship-building that builds over time and has a high ceiling. We will examine how digital technologies can be used to create or enhance immersive experiences, and how to take advantage of their built-in social features. We will ask key questions about how to create these kinds of experiences: How do you create realistic and appropriate viewer expectations for a new kind of museum experience? How do you strike the right balance between providing scaffolding and freedom for visitors to control the flow of their own experience, enabling people to feel comfortable being a little lost? How do you create a relationship between the visitor and the characters in the story--and are those characters objects, artworks, or actors? How do you create opportunities for visitors to have shared experiences that don't break the immersion? When the curator is no longer simply the teacher, what is her or his role in this new type of exhibition experience?

Stop, don't shoot! This panel will look at storytelling, methodology, and the logistics of media content production today to figure out what that thing is pointed at. First giving an overview of the nuts and bolts of their production approaches, the panelists will then engage the conceptual dilemma that comes with the great quantity of content we produce for our museums today. Do we really need to produce the quantity we do? How is video actually used to augment the visitor experience? How can educational and marketing content be combined to create new styles of production? How can our understanding of quality content be shifted? When you start producing video for your museum, how do you manage to do so in a purposeful manner?

This discussion, though based in video production, will contend with a bigger issue: How does the content we produce actually function once it's implemented, and what can we do to make it more effective--and affective? Vickie Riley will address storytelling with small-scale production in the context of starting a video department from the ground up; David Hart will talk about working with a larger museum and the brand that comes with it, and how one develops production style in that context; and Emily Black Fry will open up our understanding of interpretive programming with video in the museum through a video-residency project she facilitated.

Museums are beginning to experiment with Google+ Hangouts on Air, a new video chat tool, to build online communities around learning, interaction, and the exploration of museums from all disciplines. It allows museums to engage directly with up to ten "windows" at a time. Hangouts on Air are auto-archived to YouTube and can be shared to Google+, embedded on websites, and shared via other social media. This session will look at experimental uses of Google+ Hangouts by museum educators. The presenters will talk about goals, results, challenges, and the wider implications of using this tool. Where can museums push this technology? How might it help drive relevance for our institutions as we progress in the 21st century?

This presentation will focus on Open Exhibits Research. We will have completed a whole set of research into visitor use of multi-touch tables, the novelty effect, and how these devices support social interaction (or don't), as well as a comparison to interaction with wall-based rather than table-based multi-touch. We'll also have data on accessibility issues based on testing with blind and limited-mobility visitors.

Every exhibition in every museum is rich with the untold stories of its audience. Digital platforms offer new opportunities for us to present the voices of the audience in publications, social media, and museum websites, as well as inside the museum itself. Looking at two recent projects--Anish Kapoor in MCA Publications and #MCANow--which were launched during Anish Kapoor's solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, I will discuss our approach to, and the potential ramifications of, these technologies in displaying, mediating, and interpreting audience stories. The exhibition offered an ideal context for these experiments, as the visceral perceptual effect of Kapoor's work on the audience poses a challenge for any traditional publication about his art.

The Interactive Technology Team at the Museum of Science, Boston has grown significantly over the past three years--not only in its size, but also in its diversity of technology and tools. This session will focus on how our team has been rethinking what interactive technology means as we move into a more digital and personalized world with more distributed and mobile technologies. We will explore the development and evaluation of digital exhibit experiences, and provide a blueprint of tools and methods that can be employed by other museums and developers. Topics will include development of the Hall of Human Life, capturing, aggregating, and visualizing large data sets via biometric devices for visitor data exploration; development of The Science of Pixar, and the challenge of developing digital interactives in a 3D modeling environment customized for ease of use by the visitor and flexible programming by developers; development and implementation of augmented reality applications around dinosaur exhibits; creating Museum Media for Everyone, developing accessible digital exhibits using emerging technologies for different modes of interaction (sonification, haptic, etc); and connecting indoor location-based services to mobile devices with ease and affordability.

The semantic web is rapidly becoming the foundation for internet query results, but until now there has been no easy, practical way for museums to participate. By repurposing Karma, a software utility originally created by USC for the scientific community, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has been able to prepare its 44,000 collection records and offer content formatted through SPARQL points as Linked Open Data for the semantic web. Based on this productive experience, USC and Eleanor Fink have invited other museums, both small and large, to participate in a collaborative which will bring American art into the forefront of shared information on the internet as a proof-of-concept project.

This panel brings together the visionary leaders of the initiative to answer questions and present results--from the big idea to the practical nuts and bolts of implementation. Panelists include the project creator, software architects, and museum staff. The co-chairs represent the perspective of small museums eager to shape their first collection online initiatives with this structuring in mind.

In a tale of two departments, there was a time not so long ago when a museum's Publications department would publish a book and Digital Media would put a picture and description of it up in the shop section of the museum's website, and maybe add a link to it from the exhibition page, and that was it. That was the extent of their interaction. The future for these two disciplines is instead increasingly interconnected, perhaps even interdependent. This session will include brief presentations by each of the panelists, as well brainstorming with the audience about common interests and concerns:

How is multi-platform content best defined and handled? Can our workflow be effectively and meaningfully reconfigured away from the false dichotomy of print versus digital? What do museum audiences and content generators assume about how and where print and digital information is delivered? How can we exceed or even overturn those expectations? As the line between print and digital increasingly blurs, who's in charge, and are traditional departmental divisions still meaningful? This is an opportunity to see what other institutions are doing, to learn about publishing tools and approaches that are working or not, and to start defining your own interdisciplinary digital publishing vision for the future.

Digital strategies are increasingly commonplace within museums today. High on ambition and wide in their scope, they are inevitably making a significant impact as digital permeates and disrupts all aspects of museums' activities. Bringing together past and present leaders in this area from Tate, the National Gallery, London, Imperial War Museums, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this panel will discuss the sometimes harsh realities of delivering a digital strategy within a complex organization.

This will be an opportunity to hear their experiences first hand, and to join the conversation as they unravel the complexities and touch on such issues as digital leadership and governance (How can we promote digital leadership in our organizations? How can we act to uphold the status quo while being agents of change? What happens when we attempt a hub-and-spoke model of digital governance?); internal structures (How do we recognize when existing structures need to change? What new structures and roles will be required going forward?); and staff (Why do we need to act as consultants, mentors, and facilitators? What help and support will colleagues need to navigate digital disruption? How do we identify and develop skills and competencies needed across the organization--is "Computer Club" the answer?).

Museums have been successfully managing object collections with a broad range of systems for years, but digital asset management remains a vexing issue. The proliferation of publishing channels for museums necessitates robust DAM solutions that enable museums to share their collections quickly and easily on their own websites as well as in gallery installations, mobile apps, and publications, and with third-party vendors. This panel will explore old and new challenges and possibilities for a diverse group of museums managing archival collections, audio, video, digital publications, and museum merchandise, in addition to digital image collections.

The Metropolitan Museum's implementation of a DAM has been in place long enough to see how workflows for digital collections have evolved beyond images of artworks to include mobile audio tours, digitized print publications, and non-object imagery such as event photography, library scanning, and historical photos related to exhibitions and other museum history. The library of the Philadelphia Museum of Art uses DAM tools to manage archival collections of ephemera and documentation of the museum building, and to serve internal research needs. Scott Sayre will present the recent results of a DAM needs assessment for museums in the United States. Conducted in collaboration with ARTstor, the findings are helping ARTstor examine the potential for Shared Shelf, its cloud-based media management software, as a DAM solution for museums and universities.

The Cleveland Museum of Art created Gallery One to welcome all visitors, offering them new possibilities to experience art in a participatory way through interpretive technology. Fifty-five art objects from the permanent collection are arranged in thematic groupings that cross time and cultures. Interactive, multi-touch screens interpret selected art installations, allowing visitors to engage actively with the art. The 40-foot Collection Wall, the largest multi-touch microtile screen in the United States, allows visitors to discover the full breadth of the collections on view and to shape their own tours of the museum. The ArtLens iPad app works in conjunction with the Collection Wall to provide visitors with rich mobile interpretation of art throughout the museum.

This session will address the three questions most frequently asked by colleagues: Is the concept behind Gallery One working? How can the museum sustain Gallery One? And what are the next steps? We will demonstrate the museum's new ArtLens smartphone app (available in iTunes and the Google store at the end of November 2013), which adds sleek augmented-reality and voice-recognition technologies to the ArtLens app family. We will also share our process in adapting the iPad app functionality and content to the smaller device. We will discuss plans for refreshed art installations and interactive technology in Gallery One. And we will show how the Collections Wall is being leveraged to promote major exhibitions, and as a tool for gauging visitor interest in themes under development for permanent collection installations, exhibitions, and educational program development.

A number of museums have launched mega-sized mobile projects in 2013. Multi-platform solutions, membership integration, in-gallery positioning systems, in-app purchases, dynamic content updates, and thousands of on-site devices: there's a lot we can learn from! Mega Mobile will be an opportunity to hear from these institutions about the strategies, functionalities, bruises, achievements, and futures of their mobile projects. Each panelist will give a brief presentation on the strategy, features, and implementation of her or his project, followed by a panel discussion on the key issues and guidelines learned through these projects. We'll address questions including how the project was implemented, and the use of in-house vs. outsourced resources; the lifecycle of the project, and anticipated updates over that time; the relationship between these projects and the institution's mobile web site; the role of museum-provided hardware and visitors' use of their own smartphones; and which parts of the project were money best (or worst) spent.

The session will be led by larger institutions, but these are questions all institutions are now exploring. Our aim is to identify the shared values and ideas that inform these projects and to forward guidelines for smaller and mid-size institutions to use in developing and implementing their own approaches to mobile.

Building on some of the goals established at the U.S. OpenGLAM launch in April, this panel will highlight and collect some of the work done by museums that have already taken the first step in incorporating open access principles into their work. Although many institutions have already made interesting strides, and even written good case studies, this panel will bring together people who have launched projects, generated results from opening up their museum content, and now--with at least one project under their belts--can both synthesize what they learned and share their vision.

Since openness is as much a change of mindset as it is a change of workflow, the presenters will discuss how they did the kinds of coalition-building, convincing, and strategic thinking necessary to move their museums to a new outlook on how we relate to the digital cultural data we produce.

With the rapid pace of cultural change in our society, museums need to learn how to nimbly try new ideas, astutely evaluate outcomes, and iterate results. This presentation focuses on the incorporation of experimentation, prototyping, iteration, and collaboration, drawing on several project examples from the Art Institute of Chicago. Whether it's prototyping gallery interactives using the OSCI Toolkit or using 3D printing to test new conservation practices, experimental techniques help us build a working culture that is more comfortable with risk-taking and, therefore, more agile in its positioning.

At the Cooper-Hewitt Labs we are trying to keep ourselves as nimble as possible. We often work on "one day projects" which allow us to wash away the day-to-day office work and focus on a single feature addition or concept. Oftentimes these days lead to some of our favorite site features. Examples of this include our addition of a QR code for every collection record, an SMS and voice system that ties into our collections API, a responsive footer design, search by color, and much, much more. In this talk I will cover a few more examples and talk about the importance of "shipping code." I'll explain a few ideas for doing rapid prototyping in a museum context and discuss how participants might build this into their institutional workflows.

User feedback has always been greatly valued by heritage institutions aiming at improving their service to users in an increasingly changing digital environment. Though web statistics are a rich source of information, visitor comments allow a deeper insight into the experience: What do users like or dislike, and what do they think about the museum? This panel will present perspectives from Italy, Canada, and the UK, where visitor feedback has been gathered via the web and social media.

In 2011, on the 150th anniversary of the unity of Italy, an initiative fostered participation and critical reflection on themes such as education, civil rights, and identity. Users posted comments through social networks and a digital interactive feature in the Palazzo Madama-Museo Civico d'Arte Antica (UNESCO site in Turin, Italy), and the data will be made public at MCN 2013. Since 2001, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) has been collecting and coding user feedback at the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC). To date, several thousand such messages have been catalogued, representing a valuable historic data source. This paper will look at changes over time in the types of comments received, ways in which we can look at those messages, what sentiment analysis can tell us, and what we can learn about changing user expectations. And in the UK, visitors who come to Tate post on social media about their experiences, sharing content and expressing opinions and feelings about their visits. We encourage the use of specific hashtags for each exhibition or big event. This data offers a great opportunity for museums to learn about visitors and their opinions. Case studies from Tate also will illustrate practical and methodological challenges involved in capturing and analyzing social media. A discussion will address methods of evaluation (what to do with the user comments?), various approaches (the web vs. social media), changes in time (how have museums changed?), and what this all means: What can we learn from user feedback?

Museums are increasingly trying to incorporate technology in their physical spaces in order to enhance visitors' experience. How can technology change a visitor's experience of the museum's physical space? As visitors consume more mobile content , new approaches are required for both content and software development.

Join the IMA and its partners from the IMLS Tap & TourML grant in a discussion that will provide unique perspectives on how processes in technology and content production have been adapted to meet the needs of their institutions and visitors. Learn how low-cost hardware and open source software can be used to track visitor movements through gallery spaces, allowing for interesting new approaches in content delivery and visitor information. This presentation will open discussion on how we can improve technology to empower visitors to engage more deeply with our content. This session will provide an opportunity to see what worked, what failed, and what comes next. Another case study will present the process of building the algorithms and tools for analyzing their performance as well as the use of a computer cluster at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that allows BHL to perform parallel processing of a large dataset. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss various approaches for improving access to large image collections.

In May of 2013, the first meeting of the NYC Museum MediaLab Meetup was held. Its purpose was to find ways in which cultural institutions and creative technologists can work together to Get Involved and Make Things(tm). Museums would bring to the table their collections, data, platform, and curatorial expertise. Technologists would bring their love of art, mad 5|<i||5, and laptops. Together we planned to build amazing, inspiring, sublime, ridiculous, and occasionally horrible apps, visualizations, 3D models, games, and other digital interpretations of our shared cultural heritage. We'd figure out how museums can do a better job of supporting advanced audience engagement. We'd help build the next generation of museum techies. Seven months later, how are we doing? Did the whole idea peter out? Did we anger our bosses and the community? Or did we really create a new model for museum interaction with the creative technology community? Is it a model that can translate to other cities and communities? When we wrote this description, we didn't know. Come find out with us!

Projet X is a community and participatory project developed by a group of Montreal graduate students in Museum Studies. It seeks to foster new forms of interactions between museums and their communities through participatory cultural projects and exhibitions based on new technologies and the particularities of the web. Guided by its core values of empowerment, social interaction, and bringing audiences together, Projet X aims to open up the museum, and to encourage individuals and communities to express and preserve their personal and collective heritage. Projet X takes the form of a turnkey toolbox adaptable to the needs of various museums and cultural institutions. Why "Projet X"? Because each experience is unique, creating a new incarnation of the project, which results in "X."

This case study will discuss the key issues, and resulting actions, that emerged in response to member feedback in the 2011 Digital Preservation Survey by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). CHIN produced easy-to-use tools that help museums assess their own needs for digital preservation, and guide them in developing digital preservation policies, plans, and procedures. The tools include a template, frameworks, decision trees, and other documents to develop, select, and implement an action plan. All these documents are accessible to museum professionals and volunteers who may have no formal training in digital preservation.

This case study will present the Digital Asset Processing Tool (ADAPT) developed by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. ADAPT is an innovative digital asset processing tool developed in conjunction with The Museum System (TMS) functioning as a DAM. In addition to managing assets, ADAPT establishes a series of processes and a workflow for producing and distributing digital assets, and maintains a record of use of assets. ADAPT consists of two interfaces: one for users that enables the selection, request, and delivery process, and one for managers that manages asset production, label creation, copyright clearing, and asset delivery. The presentation will offer a tour of the ADAPT interface and explain the use of ADAPT in the digital asset production workflow.

Information Technology Services at the Getty had outsourced user-support functions since 1997, when the Getty Center opened. This case study explains how we brought those support functions back in house against the industry trend of global outsourcing and best-practice advice. In an intense 12-month period, we evaluated, chose, and implemented a Knowledge and Incident Management system that enabled us to collect and memorize a rich body of knowledge for supporting all technologies at the Getty and allow a new team of support personnel, hired from local communities, to excel and deliver superior services to the Getty's technology users. By bringing the team back home, and through an intensive training program, we recreated our relationship with our user. We speak their language, and we know who they are and what they do. Our accomplishments also include cutting support cost in half while boosting customer satisfaction to a record high.

The goal: To engage and educate our youngest visitors and their caregivers by combining hands-on science activity with mobile technology and AR applications. As Toronto's only children's museum, KidSpark at the Ontario Science Centre is a popular destination for children eight and under, along with their caregivers. While the Science Centre's core strength has always been its hands-on interactive exhibits, we wanted to see if recent developments in AR and mobile computing could provide "new tools in the toolbox" for engaging our visitors in science learning. The result is a "virtual scavenger hunt" in which participants solve AR-delivered riddles and puzzles tied in to physical exhibits. Now being tested as a self-guided and a facilitated activity, the KidSpark Virtual Scavenger Hunt will be a fun, free way to get the entire family involved. Designing it as a rapid-iteration, rapid-deployment project, in-house developers are testing Layar, Aurasma, and Jenaio as options for this project, with an eye to extending this experience to other exhibit areas. This presentation will provide an overview of the concept development and production process, along with insights from evaluative feedback provided by visitors.

In July 2013, MoMA will launch a new version of the MoMA App. Created to replace the handheld audio wands distributed in the museum, the new app will offer tour audio, among many other useful and engaging features. The app will initially be available only to MoMA visitors on iPod Touch devices, with public launches on iOS and Android platforms in later months. The new app represents a complete rethinking and rebuilding of the existing MoMA App. We will discuss its features and design, present an overview of the new system's architecture, and delve into the design collaboration with MoMA's Education department and the agile process our development team used with partners at Pivotal Labs.

Over the course of the conference, we’ll hear a lot about great #musetech projects and issues facing the sector. But in this session, the Punks want to learn about the muses and inspirations outside of the sector that help fuel and inform some of most creative work from some of the most interesting #musetech practitioners.

What music, literature or extra-curricular activities inspire us? And how do those inspirations relate to our professional approach?

Extra-Curricular: Join the Punks at MCN Karaoke Night Out to hear some of their musical inspirations and share yours!

#MCNPunks

The goal of this untraditional session is to help people meet and interact with others whom they might not ordinarily get a chance to connect with. The setup includes multiple round tables. The time will be divided into multiple rounds. During each round, people interact with others at their table. At the end of the round, they get up and move to new tables. These short meetings will create connections that people can then follow up on at other points during the conference.

How do you get and use data about your collections out there for the public to enjoy? How do you reach the researcher? How do you make sure the information offered up for each artwork is correct and current, wherever and whenever it's used? How do you make sure one change in the data is reflected everywhere? It takes a "big picture" strategy to get it right! The Cleveland Museum of Art shares its holistic approach to artwork-related information--from metadata standards and systems development, to integration and user interface--and illustrates its effectiveness with eight short case studies from recent and current technology projects. The team will also highlight the back-end data flows that enable these projects, and share hair-raising, real-life tales of data run amok when projects temporarily lose sight of the "big picture."

After years of waiting for accurate, affordable, extensible, and sustainable location awareness technology for indoor use in museums, the Museum of Science (MOS) Interactive Technology team partnered with local Boston startup ByteLight to implement, test, and evaluate their LED-light-based technology for location awareness. Over the last year, the MOS has conducted iterative tests of this technology with excellent results and will do larger-scale tests of the technology in the coming months. We have been exploring many applications for the technology: customer service (wayfinding, location-based customer service information), interpretations and interactions (delivering location-based content and interactivity, exploring collections and exhibits), accessibility (delivering content to devices already fine-tuned by users for accessibility), analytics (understanding visitor traffic patterns, dwell times, interactions, preferences), and marketing (push marketing based on location and visitor preferences, mobile location-based ticket sales).

The trend of digitization has spread worldwide in recent years. Memory institutions are applying for digitization funding on national and international levels. Consortia of memory institutions with technical partners are built to be able to reach bigger international coverage and project funding, for example from the European Union. This process is followed by development of standards, protocols, cloud computing, portals with different search engines, and rights issues. Big portals with aggregator functions are one outcome, and new partners and data are required for the future development and creation of big hubs. But what usually remains unclear to memory institutions as data providers, particularly those not involved fully in such consortia, is: Where and what are the benefits for them? What interconnections and possibilities become available the moment their content is published/provided online? Two case studies that demonstrate those extended benefits are the EU-funded projects OpenUp! and Europeana Creative. This presentation of those case studies will focus on Natural History content from the National Museum in Prague and the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

The e-artexte digital repository was launched in February 2013 by Artexte, a contemporary art documentation center. It offers publishers in the visual arts, such as museums, galleries, artist-run centers, independent curators, and artists, the opportunity to self-archive their publications and critical writing in a thematic repository focused on contemporary art in Canada from 1965 to today. This presentation will describe the deposit process, using as a case study the Montreal-based, artist-run center Skol. Skol publishes a variety of documentation including catalogues, critical exhibition texts, and artists' publications. Like many publishers in the visual arts, they seek new ways to make their publications more widely available. Skol and Artexte worked together to deposit all of Skol's publications that existed in digital format into e-artexte. This presentation will describe the process of depositing publications in an open access repository, including licensing options, embargo periods, file formats, and other considerations for self-archiving. The questions raised in this process will be of interest to any institution interested in experimenting with open access publishing in the arts.

See a preview of the forthcoming mobile website that uncovers the history of the National Mall, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Histories of the National Mall uses the Omeka platform to showcase collections from different libraries, archives, and museums. Digital sources, such as images, articles, and video and audio clips, are plotted on historical map layers that demonstrate changes in this public space and its uses over time. People, sites, and events relating to the Mall's history from before 1800 to today can be browsed chronologically. Digital objects help answer exploratory questions that take users deeper into the collections. We will be testing the site and looking for feedback from the audience on their user experience in this session.

The concept of a technologically mediated docent has taken form across various devices and presentation formats in the past decade. This vehicle for interpretation continues to evolve along with the agile development and broad cultural acceptance of mobile media. This presentation will share the creation and implementation of a contextual storytelling application developed as a digital docent for the Blount Mansion, a small historic house in Tennessee. This first-person narrative tour, accessible on iPads, allows visitors to select from four tours of the house and grounds, each told from a different perspective--those of the Blount Family, the Blount slave community, Native Americans, and local settlers--for the period of 1792 to 1802. In each tour, visitors are guided through the house and given options for exploring topical material in each room. The stories illustrate lives and events at Blount Mansion, and together they represent experiences of many Americans of the Early Republic. This presentation will outline the development process, outcomes, and ideas for advancement including a vision of developing such tours for other houses based on this model.

Tweeting, Tumbling, snapping photos--how can we turn typical teen behaviors in the museum into meaningful learning experiences? At the National Gallery of Art, thousands of middle and high school students visit each year. Most are not pre-registered, do not participate in formal educational programs such as tours, and are set loose on their own to explore the museum. To reach and engage this audience, the Gallery created a printed guide to the permanent collection (called #atNGA) that encourages looking carefully at works of art, making connections between art and life, exploring art as historical and cultural expression, and reflecting on the creative spirit. What makes this guide different is that each work of art is paired with a social media prompt such as: take and share a photo (via Instagram), craft a text response (via Twitter), or ponder a question with a friend. By explicitly inviting and helping to shape teens' social media interactions with the Gallery, we hope to turn what might otherwise be a frivolous encounter into a learning experience. This presentation will share the results of our evaluation research and discuss the broader challenges and opportunities of connecting with teens via social media.

In order to document and share the soundscapes of our world, we built an online sound map in the summer of 2012 and asked the public to contribute to it with field recordings and sounds from their lives. The map was presented as a sound component to the MoMA Studio: Common Sense space, held in conjunction with the Century of the Child exhibition. There are now over 100 recordings on the map, and the sounds are rich and varied: wind turbines in Andalucía and Ireland, chanting from Japan, a manifestation in Madrid, various recordings throughout the streets of London, a soundwalk through The Museum of Modern Art, Cypriot goats, Californian owls, and Irish birds. The map is meant to draw attention to the sonic characteristics of various locations around the world, and it was therefore designed to have minimal visual information. We will briefly touch on the development process and plans for the future.

The year 2014 marks the Royal Ontario Museum's 100th anniversary. The centennial is not just a moment to celebrate our legacy, but is an opportunity to kick off the next century by building greater connections with our communities. ROM ReCollects is an online initiative that invites our most important partners--our audience--to help chronicle the history of the museum. Visitors are invited to submit their favorite memories, reflections, photos, and spoken words through the website. These will be collected and published in an interactive timeline and searchable online archive. The project is about re-collecting the personal stories that have made the museum we know today. Outreach to visitors, volunteers, summer campers, neighbors, donors, staff, and other key stakeholders with personal connections to crucial periods in the ROM's growth will continue throughout the centennial celebrations. By building this archive, we hope to make a valuable place for people to visit and generate discussion on the role of the Museum today.

Big Data is a topic of ongoing conversation in many circles, and we can watch in real time as gigantic linked repositories are created. While not new, cloud-based cultural heritage institutions, or GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) are proliferating and create opportunities for onsite curation and research. Do CloudGLAMs create opportunities for reuse, remix, revision, and redistribution of open content? Metadata aggregators like the Digital Public Library of America will change the landscape for Wikimedia Commons (which only hosts free content), as open source, free metadata makes it possible for bot operators and others to access the digital files on a direct, as needed basis, like a traditional lending library. Formerly, metadata was available by request and cooperation arrangements, but the DPLA allows users to "borrow" it at will. How many of the more than two million items in the DPLA can be considered open? How would developing consistent rights language across DPLA collections help determine open content? What methods are the most useful in mapping open content over large collections? If open content is highlighted by the host site, how will that change the content's usage?

Calling all Special Interest Group (SIG) members to join us for A Byte of Lunch!

All SIG members, and all curious newcomers, are welcomed to our second annual luncheon. Each SIG will have a table for free-flowing discussion, and table-hopping will enable you to join the conversation with more than one just one SIG. Topics covered by the SIGs include digital media, information technology, intellectual property, DAMS, and more. There also are Regional SIGs for California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Northeast. The SIGs play a vital role in extending communications and idea-sharing throughout the year. Come join us to give your comments and suggestions, or ask for advice--and have some fun with your colleagues!

Registration and payment of $20 can be made online or at the conference registration desk. MCN is underwriting 40% of the cost to lower your expense. This should be a fun event, so don't miss it!

In this discussion, Steve Jacobson will moderate a panel of guests from organizations that use either "unified" or "integrated" database systems. A unified system is a software program that serves multiple departments within the organization from one database. For example, museum advancement and ticketing would access a member's name and address from the same source data table. An integrated system is several different software programs, each used by a different area of the organization. These programs are tied together with middleware which updates information between the databases. The middleware may contain business logic to account for the museum's preferences in how departments share mutual information.

Both unified and integrated systems have advantages and challenges. Panelists will discuss their systems, why they chose the solution that they did, and the experiences they've had. Attendees are welcome to ask questions and contribute to the discussion as you learn about the most recent technological developments for museums and how some of your peers made their choices. This will give you a good start in thinking more deeply about your own systems and what will work best for your organizations.

How do you digitize a collection of 300,000 objects and artifacts? Where do you begin and what resources do you need? How has the digitizing landscape changed in the past ten years? What can you expect as the project progresses? What are the pitfalls to avoid and how do you measure success? Three museum technologists discuss their large-scale digitization projects, from the point of modest staffs and various funding models. Each of the three is in a different stage of progress with their project, and each has widely varying experiences to share--as well as surprising new connections that have come about as a result of working together on this panel.

From preparing to integrate object data into library and archive databases, to putting collections online, to accessing deep data used for research purposes, each speaker has a unique perspective that will be invaluable as you prepare for or continue your digitization project. Whether your collection is a larger or smaller one, you'll hear many useful concepts and ideas. Plenty of time will be allowed throughout the session for crowdsourcing dilemmas and ideas from the audience. Bring your puzzles and join us.

This session will explore how to use photogrammetry to create 3D models of objects and structures and demonstrate various applications for the data. The discussion will begin with an overview of 3D photogrammetry in the context of a case study. The group will discuss their trip to Havana, Cuba where they demonstrated the use of photogrammetry for the Office of the Historian (the agency in charge of restoring and maintaining the city's historic structures). The team will discuss their findings in Cuba and the implications for other historic sites, with a demonstration of photographic shooting methodologies for photogrammetry.

Billy Grassie's research explores the use of a multi-rotor aircraft to solve problems in shooting multistory historic structures. He will explain how to create those aircraft and demonstrate their use in capturing photogrammetric data. Mariano Ulibarri will demonstrate how to process the photogrammetric data and use 3D printing as an output for it. Megan Jacobs, Jonathan Lee, and Ariel Figueroa will discuss their collaboration with the New Mexico Museum of Art. The team captured 3D photogrammetric data from the Gustave Baumann marionettes, edited and prepared the files using Blender, and is working to use Unity and the Kinect to create a responsive experience that enables a museum visitor to "become a marionette." A discussion of the future of 3D imaging and photogrammetric data will conclude the presentation.

Did you know that you can play a murder mystery on your phone at The Metropolitan Museum of Art? Did you know that you can record geo-tagged stories and hear others' stories at the Smithsonian and make your own iPad modern art masterpiece at The Museum of Modern Art? Museums are educational spaces without the restraints of class time and state tests, where the most interesting things to be experienced are right in front of you: incredible places for learning games to be truly successful!

What is being built with games in museums? What are the goals of games in museums, and how do games achieve goals that other media can't? Join this dialog with four museum educators and game builders to learn more about the unusual and imaginative things institutions big and small are doing to engage people in learning, mobile storytelling, and play.

Collections of LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) form the perfect triangle of stories of American experiences. Museum collections and objects complement traditional and digital collections from public and academic libraries and archives. For the first time in the United States on a national level, the Digital Public Library of America showcases museum collections together with library and archival materials. Not only is the data showcased via the portal; it also is available for download and reuse through the DPLA's Application Programming Interface.

This panel will introduce the DPLA as the national digital library of the United States, discuss the goals of the project as portal, platform, and public option, and focus on participation by museums of all sizes and types. Emily Gore will introduce and briefly demo the DPLA portal and API. She also will discuss how the DPLA is partnering with museums and how open data provided by these institutions is being used to create innovative applications and exhibitions. Ching-Hsien Wang will discuss her experience in preparing and sharing data with the DPLA from multiple contributors at the Smithsonian Institution. James Shulman will discuss working with multiple art museums to contribute data to the DPLA through the ARTstor portal and Shared Shelf. After the panelists speak, there will be an open question-and-answer session.

Whether you are eager to learn more about existing or potential audiences, prototype an exhibit, or apply for grant or foundation funding, you may find yourself seeking the help of an evaluator. How do you know whom to choose? What qualities should you look for to best meet your needs? Can you afford it? Join in on a discussion about finding the right evaluation fit.

At the Museums & the Web conference in 2013, Rich Cherry and Robert Stein started an important discussion about what a museum technologist is nowadays. They stated that it's not just about technology, but that a technologist has become a jack of all trades. This presentation will continue and perhaps deepen and historicize this discussion. The project entails collecting video interviews with museum professionals who were or are implementing digital technologies in everyday museum practice. At the moment there are more than 20 videos representing countries from Australia to Brazil. Many of the interviews share the Russian experience. I will explain how the project works; go through the standardized interview questions; present data obtained through each question; share my first analytical results; and suggest how they could be used. I hope that they can help to define professional requirements for museum technologists, strengthen connections between job descriptions and educational standards, and perhaps even offer tips to head-hunters. Most of the interviewees were pioneers in the field of museum computerization and their stories present unique experiences. I would like to invite the audience to discuss the structure of the project and the data it gathered.

How can museums provide a useful, meaningful, and consistent online offering when their content is being accessed from a variety of different devices, in a variety of different contexts? Tate is currently rethinking how to approach this challenge. Our presentation will examine different approaches Tate is trialing in this area, based on our most recent audience research and strategic thinking. The paper will cover the challenges around content production and presentation, often offered via bespoke apps and multimedia guides, when attempting to move it into a web format where it is available to everyone, everywhere, 24 hours a day. It will examine the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, especially how responsive design has been used and how its user experience compares with that offered through mobile apps. Finally, we will discuss the impact of this change on our audiences and their consumption of Tate's content, and what can be learned from it.

The future of digital engagement will be built around three factors: location, context, and timing. This will require a variety of techniques, and in many cases it can raise the question of whether the audience is ready to adopt new ways of engaging with cultural content. The answer? Audiences have been ready for years. They're listening, watching, and waiting for institutions to step up and engage in new ways. To best connect with these audiences, cultural institutions must push towards a digital environment that focuses on niche engagements. Exposing and granting access to curatorial content is the mandate for cultural organizations; and even with locally-focused content, that mandate goes beyond local boundaries. Digital engagements extend valuable local content, making it available to the niche audiences who are looking for it. By creating a space for those audiences to come together, cultural institutions will drive the next phase of engagement. This presentation will discuss the strategy needed to move away from a static repository of content, towards a more engaging and effective use of digital tools.

Traditionally, museums have kept cataloging separate from interpretation tools and content, selecting specific items for additional research and display as needed. With the technologies available today, it is possible to connect, repurpose, and consolidate all of these elements to meet the different needs of curators, conservationists, visitors, and the public at-large. The advantages of this approach are many. For example, institutions can have all relevant information for collection pieces in one place; the public can have greater access to collections and interpretive content at all times; museums can reach out to targeted user groups through social media, etc., even when they are not currently offering exhibits tailored to their needs; and it will be easier to put content online and organize it in new ways and on new platforms as virtual exhibits, games, mobile apps, and more. In this presentation, we will showcase how different institutions are using parts of this strategy, and suggest how all of these tools can be consolidated into a global approach--creating a new digital reality for museums going forward.

This presentation explores the notion of museums and placemaking, and how digital technologies are enabling museums to mark their places in new and innovative ways. When museums think about technology today, they must also think about place. A few questions to ask are: What are the new places that museums are occupying in the digital age? How do museums act with their visitors in these new places? How do these "new" places connect with the "old" places? What new places are museum visitors occupying, and what are they doing there? How do museums "make" place, and is there a hub? Placemaking has existed from Stonehenge to the Acropolis, and to monumental buildings centrally placed within a community such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty Center; and museums historically have had branches or satellites, programs within the community, and community partners. What is new is how technology allows us to better understand the networked museum experience, to engage its global community of visitors and users, and to connect physical and online places, mobile and fixed experiences.

The U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) and Netherlands Metamorfoze Preservation Imaging Guidelines (Metamorfoze) are valuable, objective tools for assessing image quality in cultural heritage imaging workflows. The panelists will speak from their own experience using one or both systems of evaluation in their digitization programs. Representing collections that range from relatively small to large and across museum and library objects, the speakers will discuss their methods, challenges, and successes; the benefits of instituting these analytic tools into their workflows; and how they have adapted these tools to meet the needs of their specific collections.

The presenters will cover both the high-level conception and nuts-and-bolts implementation of these guidelines within their institutions. Facilitated discussion will explore the advantages of applying FADGI and Metamorfoze guidelines in the cultural heritage sphere, including potential benefits for responsible collection stewardship and for future aggregation of disparate image libraries. Attendees will gain an understanding of the practical value of implementing FADGI and Metamorfoze guidelines and the processes that entails, a better sense of how their institutions can implement the guidelines, and a list of contacts to whom they can refer for further guidance.

For a century, conservators have used photographic methods to document and highlight visible conditions and fabrication details of works of art, heritage sites, and museum collections. Likewise, conservators have returned to historic and archived images to attempt to understand the impacts of their conservation efforts and to estimate the rates of deterioration and damage at their sites and collections. The advent of digital imaging gave rise to new ways of sharing visual information with multiple users, as well broadcasting information to vast digital audiences. But a handful of scientists, engineers, programmers, and conservators understood that digital images were also potentially dense data sets and, more importantly, that data could be used to accurately detect and monitor small, incremental changes in objects if capture systems could be made truly quantitative.

Computational pathways are now making it possible to register, distortion-correct, and calibrate color space, normal reflection angles, imaging geometries, precise 3D position, and measurement values from multiple digital photographs, taken by different cameras, at different times, in different conditions and from different positions. This panel will consist of four case studies from museum imaging professionals who are breaking new technological ground in the computational development and crowdsourcing of quantifiable and comparative computational imaging. Developers will describe the remaining obstacles and challenges to this promising field, and a question-and-answer session will follow.

Open data promises to reposition collections information in new ways. Museums are slowly learning about the relevant techniques and standards. Developing best practice, and agreeing on standards, has been an international effort. A greater challenge is changing our practice at the institutional level to adopt an open attitude towards information exchange, including its makers, distributors and (re)users. Some institutions have gained visibility by opening up; but is that replicable in lesser-known institutions with less popular objects? What are the benefits of opening up and how can the effort be measured? Most heritage open data comes from art collections, but what does open data mean for (natural) science collections? And collections of modern art face what seem like impossible battles for rights clearance; so is open data relevant for institutions with collections made after ca. 1850?

This panel will present the experience of four institutions regarding the benefits, process of adopting, and meaning of working with open data. Their varied perspectives will offer evidence of the impact of open data as a rich contextual platform for discussing such issues as: What is the meaning of quantitative data on the use of open data (what does it mean to have millions of people seeing an image in Wikipedia)? What data do we have regarding increased access after opening up? How can management be convinced of the benefits of opening up? What is the validity, and what are the underlying issues, of perceiving CC0 as a threatening policy? What is the difference between metadata and scientific data, and is that distinction relevant? What has been done with open data and modern collections? What intellectual property rights do heritage institutions hold in collections information, and how does that relate to the social roles of museums?

Verso: Unveiling the Backstory, a digital publication for iPad, aims to reach a new generation of arts enthusiasts where they are: untethered to paper, in diverse countries, and seeking greater interactivity with news sources. Created by content experts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), Verso gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at art and the pursuit of artistic passions using multimedia content, image-rich storytelling, and self-guided exploration. Available for free in the iTunes App Store, Verso allows users to spin, pinch, and zoom images of artworks, hear insights from the curators' mouths, and watch videos that animate the art-viewing experience.

We will describe the strategic, creative, technical, and technological underpinnings of the museum's latest experiment in multimedia storytelling. Douglas Hegley, a member of the MIA's leadership team, will describe how Verso fits within the museum's strategic plan, which has ushered in a culture of experimentation and innovation that emphasizes audience engagement, globalization, and new ways to generate revenue. He will also talk about ongoing evaluation of experimental projects such as Verso. Kris Thayer, in-house content strategist for Verso, will discuss its conception and initial learning curve; content generation and story selection; the creation of interactive elements and multimedia assets; unexpected cross-departmental workflows resulting from this experiment; and possible coordination of digital and in-gallery experiences.

Over the last six years, the Institute for Museum and Library Services has funded two projects led by Michigan State University's Writing in Digital Environments Research Center and their partners at the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina. Our work is concerned with understanding whether learning, as many of us in informal science education define it, is possible in online environments and whether facilitation matters--especially in social media contexts. We wanted to see if we could find evidence that our online visitors were, as John Dewey might have put it, experiencing changes in their habits of mind as a result of the experiences we set before them. Our approach to creating, facilitating, and analyzing online experiences has given us evidence that learning is not only possible but likely under the right design and facilitation conditions. We have found that facilitation moves and what we call "groupness" matter. We understand the types of facilitative moves that are most likely to lead to learning outcomes. We also know that it is important to use the internet to get people off the internet and doing something experiential.

You'll hear about Experimonth: Mood, a blogging experiment; Experimonth: RACE, where we asked people to document and discuss their experience of race; and our most recent effort to get participants in a citizen science project, Project Feederwatch, led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to learn to become better "scientific noticers" through drawing the birds they observed. Following a brisk walk through our work, we'll sit in roundtable discussions so that you can ask questions and dig into the facilitation approaches and learning research. We hope these conversations will also help us make our work better or challenge us to think differently.

This session will showcase emerging technologies and their applications in interpretation and museum education as cited in the NMC Horizon Report > 2013 Museum Edition from the New Media Consortium.

This panel will present a comprehensive overview of the cultural heritage imaging standards movement to date. It will highlight the results of two formal studies: Current Practices in Fine Art Reproduction (Susan Farnand), a Rochester Institute of Technology study sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the CIE Recommendations on Color Capture for Digital Preservation (Robert Buckley). Following presentations on those studies will be an overview of ongoing efforts towards fostering the adoption of international imaging guidelines for cultural heritage, and how imaging standards relate to the overall museum infrastructure.

How do museums with rich content transform themselves to engage audiences through technology? Presenters from the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) will discuss how a collaborative partnership allowed the Timken Museum of Art and the Japanese Friendship Garden to incorporate technology and experiment in ways they normally would not. The Timken Museum of Art PlaceSticker and Japanese Friendship Garden Haiku Hunt projects are the result of collaboration between the BPOC, Information Services International-Dentsu LTD in Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan, the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experience program at the University of California, San Diego, and the museum partners. The Timken is the first U.S. museum to feature an Android-based mobile gallery guide using a location-based technology called PlaceSticker. The Japanese Friendship Garden continued its development and is the first museum to use a solar version. The prototype demonstrates a new location-based technology that is usable indoors or in areas without cellular coverage, provides easy deployment and flexibility in positioning for the user, and helps deliver metadata to audiences in an engaging manner. We will discuss the collaboration process and the project's goals, outcomes, and challenges.

Every year, over 2,000 beluga whales convene in an Arctic inlet to play, socialize, and mate. In partnership with the Canadian Museum of Nature and Arctic Watch, a wilderness lodge fifteen minutes from the inlet, bv02 wanted to bring the unique experience of viewing the belugas in this environment to a wider audience. The result was a live stream of the beluga whales during the height of their time in the Arctic, displayed both in the Museum's Blue Water gallery and via an online portal. This living exhibit was so well received by visitors that the Museum of Nature has kept it running beyond the full Whales exhibit. Matt Davidson, lead technologist on the Beluga Cam initiative, will examine how the success of this initiative speaks to wider trends in museums today: working with external partners, curating content, and curating via technology. Attendees can expect to gain a deeper understanding of the importance we should place on exploring new ways to integrate current, live cultural content into exhibits to ensure the continued achievement of each museum's goals.

The Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) launched Nature Nocturne, an after-hours evening program for adults, in January 2013. Nocturnes include DJ/live music, dancing, food, bars, and gallery access along with performances, art installations, interactive activities, crafts, and more. To promote the event and engage with the target audience, the museum tested social media and mobile device initiatives online and onsite. These included an SMS campaign, mobile-specific web pages, boosting (paid) Facebook posts, and the Sharypic live Photo Wall. The Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) Friday Night Live events are always busy on social media platforms, and last fall the museum sought to display crowdsourced photos in real time. Over eight weeks of Friday Night Live in fall 2012, 947 contributors shared over 2,000 photos onto one of the biggest interior walls of the museum. Sharypic allows our followers to post photos of their experience, and the museum receives real-time, visual feedback we can use to update offerings and make the visitor experience truly social. The implications of this technology for cultural institutions are fascinating as we start to incorporate the social, digital world into the fabric of visitor experience, and adapt to the way many people mediate the world through images. Allowing visitors to have a sense of ownership over exhibits and events through photography is a step in the right direction. We will look at these collaborative projects' challenges, goals, results, and wider implications.

With roughly 37 million biological and geological specimens, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the national museum of natural history of the Netherlands, maintains one of the five largest natural history collections in the world. To make this collection accessible to scientists, students, and nature enthusiasts worldwide, Naturalis is carrying out a large-scale program to digitize a cross-section of seven million objects ranging from mounted specimens and herbarium sheets to fossils and antique nature books, and from mammoths to mites. The results of these efforts are published online through Europeana and other aggregators, and from the end of 2013 through Naturalis's new online biodiversity portal. Museum visitors in Leiden can witness the process of specimen digitization, and even engage in it, in the exhibition space called LiveScience. We will introduce the program, its background, and its goals with a short video. Then we will elaborate on the concept of live digitization and the motivations for it, talk about the challenges we meet, and conclude by discussing concrete results we've harvested while digitizing collections in front of a live audience of visitors and getting them to engage in the digitization process themselves.

The societal institution of the museum, a pillar in American and global cultures for over 200 years, faces unprecedented challenges to its survival. As the creation and distribution of culture, media, information, and content shifts from longstanding producers to an ever-expanding world of producer-users (Benkler 2006), museums have struggled to adapt their practices. Museums, institutions designed to classify, display, and care for culturally and historically relevant artifacts (S. 3984, 2010), have long worried about how methods of massive publication could harm their status as authorities and distributors of these artifacts. Museums now can utilize open access methodology and open educational resources to create digital spaces providing unique and authentic interaction with cultural artifacts and experts. This presentation details one such experiment: a model for museums to engage in open online courses about collections or traveling exhibits. Using connectivism (Siemens 2005, 2008) as a learning theory and pedagogical model, these courses will utilize open platforms, communication tools, and resources to create a digital experience tied to the museum's mission. This case study discusses one museum's open online course as a supplement to a traveling collection. The museum hopes to see how that course affects interest in and patronage of the museum, online and in person.

Considering the nature of online community has been a focus of researchers since the advent of the Web. In the past decade, the emergence of social media as a cultural phenomenon steeped in the rhetoric of community propels old questions forward: What is the nature of online community? How is it built and sustained? What do users get from a sense of online community? These questions are of particular concern to museums in the early 21st century, as many seek to use social media to engage audiences in more meaningful and prolonged relationships. While the tools museum practitioners now use to do this are relatively new, the aims are old: museums began considering their audiences as communities in the early 20th century, when John Cotton Dana argued passionately to create museums that were relevant to their local populations.

This hybrid roundtable/Q&A will open by providing context for addressing these questions. First, it will explore the complex nature of community and consider the thesis of panelist Amelia Wong's 2011 dissertation, in which she argues that museums imagine community online largely in terms of public communication and that this limited definition has negative consequences for the success of museums' efforts with social media, as well as undermines the potential of social media to help democratize museums. Next, the panel will present the findings of preliminary research about the nature of online community as it relates to museums. These are the results from focus groups of social media users organized in the summer of 2013 by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of American History, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The panel will close with open discussion, with the aim of considering the direction of future research about museums' online community efforts and their social media efforts more broadly.

Following our conference theme of Re:Making the Museum, this panel will review how each of our institutions has scrutinized itself from the inside out and the outside in to emerge as a 21st-century museum--one prepared to give global access to collections in innovative and thought-provoking ways, while instituting methods and systems that are sustainable and maintainable. With each museum having completed strategic planning efforts in recent years, we will discuss how to formulate institutional goals and objectives. A discussion of challenges and solutions will segue into a question-and-answer session.

From 2010 to 2012 the Harvard Art Museums overhauled their IT operations, jettisoning most of their physical IT infrastructure, switching to purchasing commodity services from Harvard University, rethinking what IT means for the museums, and transforming the department under the banner of simplicity, openness, and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Created in 2010, The Henry Ford's strategic plan defines its goals as Relevance, National Awareness, Community Impact, and Sustainability. Legacy technology structures, processes, and thinking are being revamped to the core, and the web, digital experience, and technology itself are no longer the responsibility of IT alone. In 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art instituted a new strategic plan focused on engaging our audience, enhancing our visitor experience, activating our collection, and strengthening our commitment to our community. Technology functions were completely rethought. This presentation will cover the planning process, reorganization process, and ongoing challenges. In 2011, the Princeton University Art Museum performed an organizational structure analysis; in October 2013, a museum-wide strategic planning process will be complete. We will review that process, the importance of holistic planning and collaboration among departments, and how Information and Technology relates to other departments. Developed in 2011, the strategic plan for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art led to the creation of a new division of Content Strategy and Digital Engagement. Aligning IT with that division has been a key means of supporting our goals for audience information interface and engagement, with opportunities and challenges along the way.

Marshall McLuhan once proposed that new technologies introduce new habits of perception, new ways of seeing and interacting with the world. In this session, the Punks and their guests will tackle this theory head-on.

How do digital tools and technologies alter our habits of perception? What does it means to look at the world with one eye always glued to a screen? How is digital culture impacting our visual and written language, and are we cool with all of this?

#MCNPunks

This panel will feature representatives from traditional and non-traditional art institutions working on the challenge of art search, in all of its variations. Presentations will focus on projects seeking to move beyond traditional art search terms, based solely on tombstone data, to make art more easily discoverable and accessible. Subjects will include new visual and similarity search technologies; the challenge of finding works with no author or minimal tombstone data; the concept of access versus education; categorization projects such as large-scale tagging projects and taxonomies; the line between objective and subjective/interpretive search terminology; the hierarchy of meaning (the museum voice versus users' needs and expectations); the role of emotional and sensory reactions in search; the role of user-generated stories and experiences in museum education based on artists and objects; user expectations; crowdsourcing search terminology and user preferences; and what users want to be able to search for and with, versus what the museum wants or is able to create. All of which is to ask: Are we serving our users to the best of our abilities?

Memory institutions face a growing demand to make digitized content available online in a manner that is affordable to the institution and meets the needs and expectations of the user community. Coupled with ongoing pressures on budgets, this ever-increasing demand for online content has led to the growing use of compressed image formats, and in particular JPEG 2000, for archival and production masters. This panel will start with an overview of JPEG 2000 and the advantages and appeal it has for memory institutions, now and in the future. Following that overview, three institutions that have adopted JPEG 2000 for use with large, diverse image collections will describe their experiences in working with the format, integrating it into their workflows, and meeting user requirements.

Digital projects in museums are inherently cross-departmental, with team members who may come from a wide range of areas including IT, design, education, curatorial departments, and more. Each team member brings to the table her or his own experience, expertise, goals, and ideas, as well as varying levels of knowledge about the strengths and challenges that other stakeholders on the project may have. This panel presents three case studies of cross-departmental teamwork, including strategies and lessons learned.

Each group will discuss their experiences working across departments. Members of the departments of Education and Digital Media from The Museum of Modern Art will discuss the initiative called RISE (Reimagine Interpretative Support and Engagement), which was designed to help the museum think holistically about visitor experience and how better to support the museum's mission to help people understand and enjoy modern and contemporary art through digital engagement, live programming, and spaces for learning and participation. Members of the Digital Engagement and Curatorial departments of The Andy Warhol Museum will talk about their project Screen Test Machine, an interactive piece permanently installed in the film and video gallery, which allows users to create a Warhol-style screen test. Members of the Cleveland Museum of Art's Education and Interpretation and Curatorial departments will discuss their work together on the museum's collection-wide iPad app, ArtLens.

In recent years, the idea that the museum experience can become an active partnership between the institution and its visitors has become nuanced. Developments in the realm of accessibility have dovetailed with the concept of co-creation, whereby collaborative online communities, the open source movement, and other organic communication platforms have inspired a reexamination of authority within the museum. This new form of "open authority" aims to combine the expertise of cultural professionals with the insights and contributions of diverse audiences. The open museum blurs the boundaries between online and on-site environments, empowering museums to be more responsive to community needs and interests. It sees the visitor as a collaborator and active contributor in creating and interpreting content, and the curator as an engaged, expert facilitator. Through creative collaboration, active partnerships, and mutual trust, open authority creates unique, dynamic, and compelling museum experiences.

The panel will include leading thinkers about this developing model for museum authority, which is not so very new after all. They will discuss the theory and framework of open authority, along with challenges and successes in the broader effort for institutional change. The roles of diverse perspectives and community collaboration will be addressed, including examples. There will be time for questions after each presenter, and at the end to discuss emerging themes.

Two years ago, at MCN 2011 in Atlanta, we discussed our experimental process to create an online space where scholars could collaboratively research and discuss a 17th-century paintings inventory. We will give an update about how this project has grown into a much larger enterprise, with more collaborative research projects, a digital publication, and a new, customizable application for online scholarly collaboration called Scholars Workspace. Digital Melilli, the project all of this work began with, has become the first digital publication created from the Scholars Workspace. Created using Drupal, an open-source content management system, Scholars Workspace is meant to be a platform where images and archival documents can be uploaded, analyzed, and discussed. In addition to discussing big issues of scholarship and publication, we will address how to shape a scholarly project in a digital space, what team members and skills are needed to do this kind of work, how the design of digital publications and websites compare, and what technologists can learn from scholars and vice versa.

In 2009, the Getty Foundation brought together nine museums for the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) in order to explore how scholarly collection catalogues could be transformed by publishing them on the web. As part of OSCI, the Art Institute of Chicago endeavored to create a dynamic online publishing platform for scholarly collection catalogues, beta-launching in late 2011 three sample entries from the two original grant-funded volumes. We are now working on nine publications based on the OSCI platform, and these highly interdepartmental projects have been remaking our museum publishing program through the need for collaboration, agility, and strategic allotment of resources. This presentation will examine how core lessons from working on the first two volumes--for example, continuously reiterating workflows--have been pivotal in realizing the additional seven publications as a whole, and in each one's specific workflows. We will explore how scaling a publishing program to meet changing assumptions and expectations can in turn transform and remake a core activity of the museum from the ground up.

Museums have been publishing on the web for years by writing about events, discussing special topics with commenters on a post-by-post basis, and encouraging visitor interaction through social media. This demonstration will help participants reconsider the WordPress open-source platform as a means to create new kinds of digital publications beyond the blog--of aggregated content from different users and networks. We will share examples and best practices and build a replicable model for participants to try at their home institutions. This will demonstrate how a museum, library, or archive can aggregate, into one publication, feeds of digital materials related to specific events (public programs, symposia, meetings, conferences) at its home institution, along with information from professional associations or enthusiast communities. This can enable an organization to engage communities around mission-centered topics that attract individuals who may not meet "in real life," but who share similar concerns or passions.

Museums are increasingly producing a wealth of media content, but many still struggle with how best to organize and present that content online. Video and audio, often the most approachable content to the web user, can get buried and scattered all over the institution's web presence. This panel will explore the questions surrounding online media organization and delivery. Should you throw it all on YouTube? Build your own delivery system? Should all your video be in one place even if the content is disparate? Do you make it available for download? What about iTunes U? How do you make this type of content most approachable to the end user? Who is the end user?

Jesse Heinzen will moderate an open discussion with representatives from a few institutions that have taken a stab at organizing media content. They will talk briefly about their projects, and then attempt to make sense of the larger philosophy of the subject at hand. Kyle Jaebker will discuss ArtBabble; Nate Solas, formerly Senior New Media Developer and Head Technologist at the Walker Art Center, will talk about the Walker Channel; and Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli will discuss sharing educational content with iTunes U, as well as how BPOC used ArtBabble as a springboard to create Conservation Reel.

Over the course of its 180 years, the Boston Museum of Science has continually embraced new technology as a means to remain relevant and meet the needs of its visitors. As it is for many museums, a new challenge for the institution is the management of ever-growing volumes of digital data created from archives and new assets made from physical artifacts. This session will provide a first-hand look at how the museum has embraced a new scale-out, object-based appliance to easily scale and securely store its crucial information. Storage consolidation and data recovery are of the utmost importance for the Museum of Science as digitized archives and newly acquired digital assets are providing for a project that will enable creative new "live data" exhibits where visitors can interact with exhibits onsite as well as online. The project's benefits include continual affordability and investment protection that forgoes cycles of storage refreshing and fork-lift migrations. The move is expected to deliver scalable storage for large amounts of unstructured data.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture is developing new tools and processes to facilitate the selection, archival arrangement, migration, and preservation of born-digital files acquired from architectural firms. This presentation will introduce the tools we are developing for this. These include a harvester and a package preparation tool, programs to aid in the ingest of digital files, and a technical questionnaire sent to donors to insure that we have necessary information regarding the files. It also will give an overview of the various roles and workflows involved in acquiring born-digital material.

Although the documentation of conservation treatments has not changed in content over the years, the media it is recorded on has. Over the last decade, conservation documentation at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) has changed from being on paper-based media to becoming increasingly digitized, with images now born digital and treatment documentation stored as part of a museum-wide collection management program. This case study will discuss the challenges and advantages these changes have brought at the AWM and the importance of metadata for conservation documentation. How do we ensure that vital data produced during a conservation treatment is recorded in a way so that it can be preserved and found 50 years later? We will also explore the phenomenon of conservation information becoming an area of interest to the general public. More and more people want online access to all areas of museum work. What role can conservation information play in promoting a museum to its public?

This panel will explore the challenges, technologies used, lessons learned, and tips and guidelines in developing innovative mobile projects that engage diverse audiences. Since 2009, the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City (MCQ) has created four mobile apps to explore its exhibitions: Copyright humain (the development of human thought); MCQ (whose activities have evolved over time); Parcours LSQ (a history of Quebec for people communicating in sign language); and Colonie (on iPad mini). We will review the effects of these applications on the visitor experience, based on observations with different types of visitors.

The Ontario Museum Association (OMA)'s Discover Ontario Museums, a cultural tourist-focused resource for desktop and mobile users and an iPhone app, aims to maximize and leverage digital assets development and investments to help museums further reach, engage and attract visitors via multiple platforms. Content is contributed by OMA Members. Based on Drupal and MySQL, the project reflects a public/mobile-first approach with touch-friendly and responsive design to ensure longevity; Open Geocoding accurately places museums regardless of Google's mapping system. And since 2009, the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) has had a vision to hold a mirror up to the city and lead provocative conversations about its past, present, and future. This mandate was realized in a technologically innovative way with the Visible City virtual exhibit and mobile app. Using augmented reality, location-aware mobile technology, and interactive multimedia, it enabled people to go beyond the walls of a traditional museum and reflect upon the city as a living artifact. Topics will include its curatorial and engagement approach, database integration between the virtual exhibit and mobile app., and challenges and rewards of using emerging technologies such as AR to break down the walls of the physical museum.

The merging or stitching of separately captured portions (tiles) of an object into one unified digital image is becoming increasingly popular in the cultural heritage community. Maps, negatives, tapestries, and paintings that were once too onerous to digitize faithfully because of their physical size are now included in digital collections. This presentation investigates image-stitching technology and its application to libraries, archives, and museums. We will discuss stitching techniques and accompanying processes; highlight their pros and cons, use considerations, and metadata strategies; offer an overview of workflows for automated stitching, manual review, and amelioration in high-performance, low-tolerance production environments; share our views on image quality, software options, and analytical tools for stitching and error detection; address stitching performance with different content types; and assess current thinking on image-stitching guidelines.

Over the past half-decade, we have moved into an era of DIY creativity in cartography. The development of free, open source mapping platforms such as QuantumGIS, IndieMapper, and TileMill, combined with the increased availability of geospatial data, has allowed untrained individuals to operate in the world of interactive cartography. Along with unprecedented access to powerful cartographic toolsets and geospatial data comes an overwhelming amount of information. This presentation will provide a "101" tour of what it takes to produce an interactive map, with little to no experience in cartographic design or computer programming. We will explore intuitive cartographic toolkits; explore sources of free and reliable geospatial data; touch on some basic UX principles; and share some of the best and brightest inspirations from the field of contemporary creative cartography. Years of practice are required to become a professional cartographer, but we hope you'll gain some beginner mapmaking chops and a new appreciation for what a small independent team can accomplish.

One consistent challenge in non-profit institutions is documenting the activity of constituents in systems and programs outside of the normal tracking mechanisms of the donor database. The Cleveland Museum of Art has taken a giant step in creating a solution to this challenge. Working with specialists in systems integration, we have created a Central Table (CT) which contains account and ID data from all customer-based systems that exist in-house. When completed, the CT will provide a repository of information across ticketing, free events, online donor and membership activity, store and online purchasing, volunteers, visitor rentals, parking, and cafeteria purchases. The activity of constituents within different systems and departments can now be queried and analyzed. This can become a basis for creating customized services such as targeted appeals, special benefits, and individualized rewards and recognition programs. We will discuss CT strategy and implementation, including timeline and integration methodology.

In late 2012, the Ashmolean Museum commissioned Keepthinking to create an operational plan implementing their e-learning strategy. Keepthinking teamed up with Intelligent Heritage and Morris Hargreaves McIntyre to provide the required set of competencies. The grand vision was to understand how different audiences were looking at museum collections and how they would like any online digital activity to be developed and presented. The expected outcome was a feasible, realistic, and measurable plan to implement access to the collection online, and related interpretation material, over three to five years. This presentation will explore our findings in three key areas: what visitors want (and you don't necessarily know about), what visitors don't care about (although you may), and how to implement a digital strategy (including discussion of potential pitfalls).

It's time to reboot the relationship between museum curators and their digital collaborators. Once considered competitive or contradictory, the physical and virtual realms of museums are merging and overlapping more than ever, forcing curators and their digital counterparts to gain greater fluency in each others' domains. We will examine the relationship between curatorial content providers and their digital media colleagues now that the museum world has accepted the digital realm as a dynamic and important complement to the documentation, exhibition, and interpretation of material objects, not a virtual competitor. A brief history of the experience of the curator in the digital world will illuminate a broader understanding of the resistance to digital technology, the continuing challenges of incorporating intangible dimensions of material culture, and the reasons why museums remain delinquent in providing online accessibility to their collections. A new dialogue between curators and digital media colleagues may better fulfill the museum's mandate of providing access to the world's cultural heritage. This presentation will offer questions and strategies for how curators and media specialists may work together more effectively to build dynamic content.