Shapeshifters: the new creatives

Last night I went to the UTSpeaks event called Shapeshifters. I've been engaging with all of the speakers for some time now, but I still heard some useful and stimulating advice from them at this talk. So here are the thoughts that I noted during the event:

First up was Professor Kees Dorst. He said that after years of research into the processes used by the world's great designers that he has found that expert design behaviour centres around frame creation. Apparently good designers focus on the problem through frame creation. He says the process moves through these stages or phases: Archaeology (gaining a deep understanding of the problem); Paradox; Stakeholders; Problem arena; Themes; Frames; Futures; Transformations; and Connections.

His research led to UTS establishing a Designing Out Crime (DOC) research centre.  Frame creation is at basis of all DOC projects. For example to tackle traffic congestion problems during the Marathon in Eindhoven, DOC started with analysis of the environment and the participants. They widened problem and enriched it to solve it. They mapped all participants, gathered data and mapped the city. This resulted in spreading people all over city according to their interests to solve traffic problem but also much more.

Second to speak was Dr Jochen Schweitzer. He first stressed the need for UTS to graduate more entrepreneurs. To do that we need to provide students with opportunities to test ideas. He also said we should be in the business of surprising customers (I like this idea A LOT).  He went on to point out that innovation is held back by homogenous or non-diverse groups of people (ring any bells?) and said that a common language is needed for design (from designers) and that we need to use it more.

Dr Joanne Jakovich was the last speaker. She also gave some background on her work as a designer and researcher and then talked about her recent experience with u.lab.  She said that u.lab provided a playful creative space for an open design process, allowing for deep understanding from observation. U.lab practices iteration, failing, sharing, prototyping and doing (not just talking). She stressed the importance of initiatives like BikeTank that make connections to rediscover the innate creativity in all of us as a function of our capacity for shared humanity. BikeTank was aimed at making cities more human and she said that cities desperately needed innovation via collective creativity.

Joanne then gave us her 10 point manifesto:

1. Encourage creative collectivism 
2. Love the city 
3. Action first then stewardship 
4. Use creative altruism 
5. Reverse engineer the emotional experience of innovation (what makes people really join in and contribute?) 
6. Raise the bar of creative expression however you can (e.g. bribes and creating the best environment for it) 
7. Orchestrate extraordinary experiences (I love this!) 
8. Good ideas scale when dead 
9. Foster everyday entrepreneurship 
10. We must tap into diversity in our urban being 

In response to a question after the talks Kees said that after tapping into the top level layer of design knowledge he found that the things creative leaders do best is to create an environment in which creativity is encouraged, allowed and recognized. Leaders also need to market and communicate about that, at least in part for their internal audience.

Some thoughts about Apple (the Mac variety)

As you may have noticed, I recently returned from a hectic two-week trip to the US for an education and higher education conference (Educause09) in Denver Colorado and a race through various institutions (university libraries, state archives and factories) equipped with automated storage and repository systems (ASRS).
I have to add that I travelled with an iPhone (a work phone) and a new 13" MacBook Pro (my own). Both of these Apple devices proved to be robust, efficient and very reliable for the entire trip. I had no hassles staying in touch and making new contacts by email, Twitter, web, Flickr, SMS, etc. And I found connecting to what seems to be a pretty standard offering of free (or included) wifi access in my hotel rooms no probs whatsoever. Apple devices just work without any hassles.
I also visited a few Apples stores and ended up purchasing a cool purple acrylic protective cover for my new MacBook in Denver and some noise reducing headphones in San Francisco. There is something about Apple Stores that I find irresistible (quite apart from the fact that I am kind of addicted to the design and functionality of most Apple devices). In two different stores I found excellent customer service and easily processed sales where I stood with friendly staff on their hand-held devices. I even had the option (which I took) of receiving a receipt electronically by email. When back in Sydney I was alerted to the following post about the new Apple Store that just opened in NYC by one of the people I follow on Twitter: Apple: the "New Nordstrum".
The post explains it in talking about the opening of the new store in New York:

The beauty of the stores are effective but that’s not what’s ultimately driving sales. At the end of the day, the physical store is merely the visible manifestation of the Apple customer experience.

That is where I think we need to go with the services we offer in libraries.

accessCeramics: digital image collection using Flickr

Mark Dahl's and Jeremy McWilliams' presentation on accessCeramics was probably the most inspirational session that I attended at Educause09. I am an unashamed fan of Flickr and its possibilities and Mark and Jeremy explained just how they used it to its full potential. Many of us should be following their brilliant example as it shows just how an institution can use a Web 2.0 service to facilitate a collaborative project. You can see all 53 slides for yourself in the presentation link above. These cover: the history of the project, how they did it, who was involved, cataloguing issues, enhancements, lessons learned, gains, costs and future plans. And they are now using Twitter (@accessCeramics) as their news feed: another great idea.

Having been involved in a more traditional (i.e. expensive, never ending, painful and frustratingly complex) DAM program in a large museum recently that used commercially sourced software, I found slide #48 particularly illuminating. Yes, they had hurdles too, but nowhere near the issues endemic in the traditional models.

Recently, we've started discussions about a community-based project to develop a special collection as part of the UTS Library. We will certainly be looking very closely at accessCeramics.

Google Wave

Over the weekend I was reminded by a Tweet from a colleague of the importance of Google's demo late last week of Wave: quite possibly the future of communications on the web. It has been developed right here in Sydney too.

A reliable report comes from Tim O'Reilly and you can read that here. I know that sometimes it is hard to stay up to date with information management technology as new web developments are happening so fast, but it is important and for those of us in libraries I believe it is part of our professional obligation.

Wave seems like a pretty interesting, maybe even exciting development but perhaps the thing I found most interesting in reading Tim's post was a not-so-related comment a long way down that came about because Tim made reference to a book (Practical Internet Groupware) that he had published online. Someone has a go at Tim for making the book available online behind a "paywall" (i.e. not for free). Tim elegantly and gently reminds us that not everything on the Web can and should be for free. He makes two very wise statements:

It's urgent for the future of publishing for there to be economic models for digital publishing, or you will find yourself poorer, not richer, as a result.

And:

I'm all for free content when people can make it work, and all for paid content when that's the only way to make good things happen. You pick the hat to fit the head.

Our goal should be the creation of maximum value to society. Sometimes free creates more value, and sometimes paid creates more value. The smart person, and the smart company, knows how to use both.

Sometimes with blog posts the most interesting and sometimes even the most intellectual debate happens in the comments field and that is part of the real beauty of the social web. That kind of thing doesn't happen in traditional academic publications.

Can Sydney Surf the Digital Sunami?

These are my (rough) notes from a UTS Speaks presentation by Professor Tom Barker, 31 March 2009.

This is the second talk by Tom Barker that I've attended since joining UTS about 10 minutes ago. I am now beginning to understand more about his passion for "digital urbanism".

Interestingly, the first thing I noticed in the University's Great Hall was that the audience began and then continued to sit on the left hand side, in front of the screen that would carry his PowerPoint slides, not in front of Tom himself. What does that alone say about our preferred means of consuming information? Do we attach any importance to facial expression at all? Do we just ignore it and place it further down our list of priorities than whatever is served up on a screen? I just did what everyone else was doing: baaa, baaaaa.

Again, Tom started his talk with a movie clip, this time from Matrix, which featured the Sydney CBD. It was the segment that asked "what is real?"

Tom posed a few concepts that might be taken up once we are over the current credit crunch. He is all about creativity and innovation and he thinks that the new creative industries are now more resilient than many others and should survive the crunch pretty well. He also thinks Australia is well-positioned to be more "e-ready" than most of its neighbours, especially within our cultural environment. We do, however, lack decent Government policy and vision (compared with others like the UK and NZ), and business/consumer adoption. So let's look at his concepts, many of which have some relevance to our future library (hence its place in the Forums):

e-with everything

Here he referred us to a newly proposed environment in Singapore which has been designed for new creative businesses, working from home, new office spaces, new business districts, etc. It would become a hub of work, living and entertainment in one environment, mixing green spaces with business, office, residential, industrial and entertainment uses. The e-uses are no longer a separate community or space, they are integrated with everything else we do and everywhere we go.

He also described "intelligence" as our ability to adapt to different and changing circumstances.

giant clouds

Here he referred to computing clouds; creative collaboration that harnesses and exploits the power of enormous networks. They offer a tool for collaborative working. He said that the first big city to offer such a cloud will steal the march on all of the others.

global universities

Apparently we are not there yet and there is much further to go, but a start has been made (I thought about MIT and their use of DSpace here). He said that hierarchies simply do not work and that it all depends on connectivity, eg. EVO. Connections can be made and exploited in many ways, eg. the joint lectures currently being facilitated between UTS and RMIT. Student and post-graduate travel was also important in this light and he referred to a UK program where students are helping facilitate e-commerce ventures in under-developed Ghana.
He also introduced a "creativity rose" which I think he suggested using to measure the success of such ventures: the four points on the rose being economic, creative, social welfare and knowledge benefits.

banks 2.0 - try again

He showed a graphic in which Australian banks were compared to the size and value of major Western banks. The Australian banks had retained more of their pre-crash value than many well known US and UK banks which had suffered heavily from collapsed current values.
He introduced a rather radical concept of banks "trading" in currencies other than traditional stores of value (like money). Again, he mentioned a conceptual idea for the future use of London's derelict Battersea Power Station. Tom seems particularly keen on a proposal to set it up as the new home for the British Library (which is running out of space). But it would become much more than that, by becoming a "bank of culture", moving the British Library and the British cultural digital space into it. (This idea is in many ways similar to what we want to do with the new UTS library of the future next to the tower.) So, the new British Library plus new media and creative industries would become a bank of culture; a trading bank with its currency being "creativity". Perhaps we could apply a similar concept to the new UTS Library, our currency being knowledge?

gen-z kids

These guys are now under 16 years of age (so they are the clients of the library of the future). They are characterised by:

• continual partial attention (multi-tasking);
• always online or connected (but not always paying attention to any one feed);
  a social conscience;
• an environmental conscience and awareness;
• (something about the structure of their life, which I didn't get fully); and
• they are the first generation who have had parents completely familiar with web technologies.

"lymphatic systems"

These systems are important for waste disposal, energy and disease resistance. For the digital world I think he said something like "these systems are integrating when they are working and regenerating when they are not (starting from scratch)", but I'm not sure I completely caught his meaning here. He cited the London Eye and Melbourne's Federation Square as good public "urban" squares or spaces, but Sydney apparently has nothing like this in the open . . . yet. Another example is Berlin's amazing Potsdamer Platz. He said that in these spaces, technology (screens made of pixels) was being used to bring the spaces alive and to make them interactive, particularly after hours. He showed an example of SmartSlab technology that will be used to broadcast live media for 40-50 UK public spaces.

outdoor media

He referred to the progression of broadcast outdoor media from simple live broadcast, to living media, to "autonomous pixels", and finally to intelligent media (which is pro-active). UTS is involved in an autonomous pixels project for the Sydney Light Festival in May which will attempt to display uploaded facial expressions. I think their "face" will hang somewhere in the Rocks area. People will MMS photos of their face to the system and I think they will then be accumulated to show different expressions. The screen is made of pixels which are spherical, solar-powered eggs and the face itself will be shown in semi-3D. The same technology can provide a more interactive "2nd skin" for construction sites, so UTS could again lead in the use of such technology during its campus redevelopment.

Such technology is "esemplastic", a word coined by S.T. Coleridge to convey the ability to shape diverse elements or concepts into a unified whole. (I once witnessed some amazing British minds doing this in the UK Cabinet Office, preparing complex intelligence briefs for the UK PM, but that is a whole other story.) This would be a worthy aim for the library of the future.

"beaches"

No, not Barbara & Bette. This section was his environmental and sustainability component. Energy is obviously a valuable commodity. Construction costs are also rising with the cost of production materials, but the cost of of digital pixels has fallen (recently) by over 95% and when used to provide digital lighting he said it was 90% more efficient than other forms of lighting. So, for Tom, the Internet has better environmental credentials. The downside of the Internet is that most people involved in it still do a lot more flying around the globe to make projects happen.

summing up

Tom said he was most interested in facilitating the ability for individuals to be collaboratively creative. He referred to the Renaissance model of the patron, master and apprentice as a good model for us to follow too. He spoke of technology as part of the urban fabric as opposed to a device we must attach to it. It has the potential to be more inclusive and therefore, accessibility issues should be able to be addressed. Its downsides can be balanced.

Delighting or going beyond the ordinary: the ACO, Cedric Price, and SXSW

Anyone guessed what this is about yet? I often get a head full of new and somewhat confused ideas at ACO concerts and Saturday night at the Angel Place Recital Hall in Sydney was no exception. Well, actually it was in a way because I enjoyed the whole program and we were given two amazing encores. It was also the third in a series of experiences that I'd had in one week in which the underlying theme was delighting an audience.
Maybe I should start again at the beginning. That was going to a public lecture one evening this week by Tom Baker (who has never been a Dr Who to my knowledge) who is now Professor of Innovation, Design and Architecture in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at UTS. There, in a fast-paced review of digital urbanism (the melding of the physical and virtual [cyber] worlds), he spoke quite a bit about the role architecture and design has today in providing extraordinary experiences for people in our cities by designing buildings, urban environments and dwellings that while being functional and efficient (from a use and energy consumption perspective) also delight us. It seems that one of his inspirations in this field was Cedric Price. Tom introduced us to even more exciting ideas that we might be able to use on and within our new library building such as energy saving initiatives, creation of a community space, using large digital media screens on the outside of the building, etc. Maybe we should ask him to talk to us specifically about what might be feasible for our new library?
Next came reading a blog post by Jeremy Keith (the web developer and microformats advocate from the UK) about his recent attendance at the recent SXSW Interactive. His most recent post is a great review of what he saw and heard at SXSW for those of us who could not attend. What caught my eye was his reference to a talk by a colleague of his (Paul Annett: Clearleft's visual designer) about putting "the delighters" back into web design. What a fantastic concept! So I went over to Paul's blog hoping to find out more and he described his talk as being about "putting delightful and entertaining niceties into the websites you design". The talk was titled something like "Oooh, that's clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)". He continues:
Find inspiration for innovation. See technological quirks as opportunities. Try something previously unheard of with your site design. Laugh in the face of convention. Use and abuse CSS in ways never before imagined. Get away with it. And if it doesn't work, try something else instead.
I think that is brilliant, and not just for website design. So when I read that, having heard about him only a couple of days ago, I was immediately reminded of Cedric Price. But wait, there's more, my journey continues . . .
For some years (nearly 10?) I've subscribed to the ACO series of concerts in my former home town of Canberra. But late last year I was really lucky to be offered a new job at UTS in Sydney. For those who don't understand "lucky": no more war; no more Canberra. I'd had enough of both. There are small patches of delight in Canberra, but there are not enough (for me anyway), I'd seen them all and they don't change or grow much. I'll miss some people, but that is about it. So what was I to do with my 2009 subscription? I'm not sure yet, but as my music friends are away in South America, I managed to swap my ticket to go to the brilliant Inner Voices concert given by the ACO under guest conductor and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto at Angel Place. The members of the orchestra play so well under Pekka that I believe he is probably penciled in as the next artistic director should Richard Tognetti, who this year celebrates 20 years as the ACO's artistic director, ever move on. The music of Sibelius, Bach, Andrew Ford and Timo Alkotila wasn't at all ordinary and the whole performance was a real delight. Pekka began the night with a warm and humorous welcome for one of the composers, Andrew Ford, who was in the audience. (Bach and Sibelius were not there: I checked.)
Under Richard Tognetti the ACO plays with an infectious enthusiasm, especially for new chamber music and with guest performers. They do the same under Pekka. And I've seen it before when he was out here last time. Pekka plays glorious music and he isn't afraid to flaunt his obvious love of Finnish folk music and a long Finnish fiddling tradition. That alone probably horrifies some of his chamber music audiences, but it delights me. Like a skilled ballet dancer, he makes his playing look both graceful and easy.
So what does all this mean for me? Well, I've moved out of the museum and the strictly-cultural sector into a university library and I'm not yet completely sure, but would it be a bad thing if we all tried to delight our users occasionally? (Maybe we already do and I've witnessed some people doing just that on the client service desks in the Blake and Kuringai libraries.) Soon we are to build a library of the future on Broadway and maybe that new building will do it. Perhaps, as the university's cultural hub, it could have one of those really cool small performance spaces that well known artists ask us to perform in? Maybe it will also be a bit of a showpiece for digital urbanism, alerting and showcasing what goes on inside the building on some of its external surfaces? Nevertheless, as we begin planning for it this year, I think that aiming to delight our clients, to laugh in the face of convention and to provide an extraordinary service in that library are decent and worthwhile objectives.
That's all!

Libraries and building communities

These notes come from a talk I attended earlier today at the National Library of Australia on building online communities. The speaker was Chrystie Hill, Director of Community Services at WebJunction.org, from Seattle, WA.

It was interesting to hear about her journey as she spoke using stories, and didn’t just regurgitate facts.

She spoke of the shift in services for things like reference – both physical and in the virtual world. She experienced this when being educated. She has worked in the Seattle Central Library and says that the space is now much better to work in. Then she introduced her four seminal realisations (my term, not hers):

See The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg is about connections between people: pubs build communities.

She also spoke of John Seely Brown and The Social Life of Documents (on FirstMonday): documents build communities.

And Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam and the decline of civic engagement & social capital in US: capital and networks build communities.

Is your library relevant to you (& your needs)? She said hers wasn’t (at the time) and her most important need was to know what her friends were doing: individuals build communities.

Libraries were not accepting their role as community builders (maybe they still don't understand that role at all?). But US public libraries became carriers for public Internet access in the 1990s. Eventually home and work use of the Internet also grew. People soon began to find themselves on the web – publishing, subscribing & sharing. It became a story of communities and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Now libraries (& librarians) have to be involved to stay relevant. It is about conversations. It is about people who are saying “here is what I am doing”. People sit behind all the tools and experience. It is also about what your friends are doing. So many tools are now available that it can seem overwhelming, so step back and look at what is behind it all.

So, where is the library?

People are finding their own answers easily on the web themselves. Library use is going down while use of email, online bookstores and search engines is going up!

Can libraries cope where the stuff isn’t completely organised or controlled? Probably not. Many public libraries are closing in the US because they lost their relevance and then they lost their funding. See Content, not Containers (an Information Format Trends report from OCLC, 2003).

Do libraries just = books? Do our users think of us for other information needs? Do we just stop making it feel like church?

She then went back to the new Seattle City Library (image appears above in this post) and said it is what a library should look like (if only!). Real visitation went up 300% in its first year. Public access computer use quadrupled. Its spaces are very inviting and its services are very innovative: multi-lingual programs; online assistance; teen services (via MySpace) – with 50% boys participating!. They are building communities daily and get 1,000s of teens involved.

She said we must do better jobs in all libraries. Online tools help us to see our roles as connectors, facilitators, and community builders.

Currently, Chrystie is writing a book and blogging (one of several). She spoke for a while about the work of Webjunction.org – helping to build relevant vibrant, sustainable libraries in every community. Most content comes from members and partners. All of it is wrapped around social engagement. Public access computing and personalisation services were key to this and to building real communities.

What do they do?

They connect, create and learn:

Connect: using wikis, del.icio.us (others follow this without it being promoted, they just find it – they just use one tag to share stuff for all, eg. we could use AWMWSG or AWMRC), micro-blogging (they use Twitter), phone, Flickr groups, Facebook groups and events, and alternate spaces (eg. LinkedIN, engaging widely!)

Create: blogs and wikis, blip.tv (I suspect schools might find this easier to find than our content on www.awm.gov.au or our blocked content on YouTube), and staff are encouraged to contribute elsewhere (blogs, publications, etc.)

Learn: active learning is encouraged, staff/members are surveyed - What was your greatest achievement last year? (part of bi-annual member survey on webjunction.org – results were visually presented in a tag-cloud), speaking engagements, blogging internally and externally encouraged for all staff.

So what does this mean for us at the Memorial? I think we are heading in the right direction. We are not there yet, but we've made a good start and even though we might complain about some restrictions placed on us by out IT staff, they have already facilitated much more freedom and innovation in our organisation than many, may others (judging by the tone of questions asked of Chrystie). Our management too have been both supportive and visionary. How many national cultural institutions can boast that they now have these words as their first listed corporate priority for the 2008-2011 period: "Enhance online access through use of emerging web technologies and improved web content"?

Preservation, Web 2.0 and chamber orchestras (2) - following the lead of the Australian Chamber Orchestra with our cultural digitisation programs

This is most of the text for my recent "provocative paper" at the 2008 Museums Australia Futures Forum in Canberra. The rest of the text was made up as I talked to the slides I used, so if you wanted to hear them you should have come the the forum. My slides are now up on Slideshare (see the post above).

The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) brings old music to life with their live performances. Sometimes they challenge the audience with new interpretations or even "mash-ups" of old and new music. Museums succeed in giving their own well-interpreted performance when they go beyond just shovelling huge amounts of scanned material on the web. I think it is a bit like the ACO breathing new life into old music.

Parallels (does anyone know a neater way to include a table in Blogger?):

Orchestras	Museums
Instruments, music	Collections
Performances	Exhibitions & curatorial interpretation
Tours & media broadcasts	Touring exhibitions and content on new online networks
Recorded music	Digitised collections

I think there is a further parallel in what the public expects from both orchestras and museums: a professional, engaging and enthusiastic performance. I think the ACO is a better example than a full scale symphony orchestra as it is easier for curators to identify with the artistic leadership given by Richard Tognetti, who usually leads the ACO from his violin, than the more formal orchestra conductor waving a baton from a podium.

Museum curators need to manage and care for the collections resulting from our digitisation programs just as we manage our physical collections and museum curators need to be interpreting our online content by playing "our own instruments". That interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. I don't think we can just assume the public will find and use it on our rather static websites. Blogs, Flickr groups, social networks and applications like Art Share on Facebook, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples of the relatively new means curators should be using to draw attention to our digitisation programs and collections. They're a little like touring exhibitions or broadcast performances, on the internet.

We need to recognise that digitisation of cultural material for preservation is also good for access. Digital assets created and acquired by digitisation initiatives must be managed and preserved. I believe that the provision of free and open access to the digitised collections of public cultural institutions is also an essential part of the process.

Using new online technologies, we can now facilitate the addition of public descriptions to these files. We can even collaborate with the public in the development of online exhibitions. But, I would not go as far as to say that simply allowing our users (or the audience to use the orchestra analogy again) to generate most of the supposed content of our websites is going to please anyone. If we use the new technologies and social networks primarily to allow users to make comments all over our online catalogues then that is the same as the ACO (or any orchestra) inviting those who have paid to attend a concert to get up on stage and have a go themselves. I believe the public want and deserve more from us than just engagement and conversation. We are being paid for our professional skills in museums, libraries and archives and have an obligation to digitise our collections and provide well-interpreted access to them online as well as other rich content for our websites, just as the ACO performs its music on stage.

I am certainly a keen advocate for social networking and going beyond “metadata” and traditional forms of museology, but there is something more fundamental to do before that kind of "window-dressing" becomes the top priority. We still need to be developing and interpreting fundamental digital collection content.

Some of my colleagues attended the first national Summit on Digital Collections in Adelaide in 2006, but despite a draft National Framework being circulated, not much has since changed. So what we have are some words on a page, but no music yet and certainly no instruments to play it with.

What do we need now? I believe we need some kind of national centre of excellence that is capable of encouraging us in the digitisation of cultural materials. But it should also provide research, advice, and facilitate collaboration, cooperation and training. Perhaps it could also coordinate a shared digital repository service (like CAN) for the poorer institutions who cannot afford their own digital storage.

Much of the advice and research is also available online from UK, US and European sites but the situation overseas is vastly different from our own environment and culture. We have different funding models, differing public expectations, different uptake and spread of broadband and mobile coverage and in many cases our national cultural institutions are well ahead of our overseas counterparts. There is nothing in Australia that meets our specific needs or is close enough geographically for us to have shared conferences, seminars and workshops without paying far too much money on overseas travel.

There are many examples of individual Australian digital initiatives that would be the envy of many overseas institutions. A quick list includes the National Library’s Pandora web archive, the Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service, the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy, Picture Australia, and massive digitisation programs from the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia. Currently, something like a large shared digital repository and research service is really only being progressed in the Australian university sector for academic material in projects such as ARROW (led by Monash University) and Demetrius (at ANU). There is nothing like this in the Australian cultural sector.

Maybe we just need to set up an Australian partner centre under one of the international organisations, but we also need some local presence or we will all just keep moving forward in an uncoordinated manner and using vastly different file formats, standards, and even different preservation metadata. Sadly, I think too few institutions are planning for their digital future by setting up trusted digital repositories for their growing collection of digital assets. In the end, if the world decides that the only real digital repository is a certified “Trusted Digital Repository”, that is audited to standards being developed in the US (by OCLC/RLG and NARA) and Germany, will anyone in an Australian cultural institution have had a say in developing that audit checklist? That will make everything more difficult than it needs to be in the future. The “music” might be lost and even if it isn’t, we might not be able to play it.

Interview on the use of blogs from a curator's perspective

I did an interview with Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum over the last week. The interview covers our use of blogs at the Australian War Memorial, to share information about our exhibitions and collections. You can read it on his fresh + new(er). He has generously published all of it, so you may need some refreshments to help you get through it all!

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

Wow . . . just wow! Johnny Chung Lee is really clever. He has come up with a complete electronic whiteboard system that you can make yourself really cheaply. You can find the hardware and software instructions, including a very popular YouTube video and the software downloads on his Wii Project page here. You can also view a great demo of his new projects on TEDBlog here. (I tried embedding the video here using the code they give on TEDBlog, but for some reason Blogger didn't allow the video content to load.)

The only limits to what we might be able to use this for in museums are the bounds of our imagination.