The Curation of Collaboration: Experiments in Mobilizing Museum Archives

This guest post is by Gaurav Vaidya, Andrea Thomer, Rob Guralnick and David Bloom. Gaurav, a graduate student at CU Boulder, has been editing Wikipedia since 2002. Rob is a biodiversity informatician, museum curator and collaborative coffee consumer who sometimes inhabits Boulder, Colorado. Andrea is a graduate student in library and information science, and a former excavator of Pleistocene megafauna. Dave coordinates VertNet from his secret lair in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.

We live in a world that is increasingly digital. While museums are gradually adapting to this new reality, it is crucial that we complete ongoing digitization projects with minimal resources and a maximum of community engagement. Traditional ways of doing this are not going to be enough; museums need to be bold in their efforts to harness the power of readily available, but previously untested, resources, tools and techniques.

One technique we believe will become increasingly important in keeping costs down and public engagement high is “crowdsourcing”—using interested members of the public to contribute directly to cataloging, transcription and annotation activities on museum collections. A perfect example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, built from scratch over the last decade by millions of volunteers into the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. As an experiment, we decided to try to use Wikipedia’s own resources on a museum project to unlock valuable data about Colorado’s biodiversity in the first half of the 20th century.

Junius Henderson in 1904 at Arapaho Glacier, Colo.

Junius Henderson was appointed the first curator of the newly created University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (CU Museum) in 1902. He kept field notebooks containing handwritten daily accounts of his expeditions across the Rocky Mountains over a 26 year period. Henderson’s notebooks paint a vivid picture of a changing Colorado, as horses-and-buggies give way to cars, cities grow, and wild landscapes retreat. Although their primary value is to biologists and geologists, his notes will also be of value to historians, geographers, and anthropologists interested in this period of Colorado’s history.

Fast forward 50 years, when Professor Peter Robinson, himself a CU Museum Director and now Emeritus Curator, transcribed all 14 notebooks into Word files. The notebooks themselves were eventually scanned by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). As an experiment, we decided to publish them to Wikisource, an extension of Wikipedia founded in 2003 with the goal of crowdsourcing the transcription of public domain texts for permanent record. Although primarily focused on literature (from The Wind in the Willows to A Study in Scarlet), Wikisource already has a large number of historical texts, from George Washington’s First State of the Union Address to President Obama’s State of the Union Address last month.

We began with Henderson’s first notebook, covering the period from 1905 to 1907. We uploaded Henderson’s notebook scans to Wikisource, then used its built-in software to create an Index page for this notebook, which provides page-by-page access to the notebook (Wikisource’s software also allows each notebook to be displayed in a single page). In less than three weeks, we had copied all of Robinson’s transcript onto Wikisource, making making both the scans and text of Henderson’s first notebook viewable side-by-side and publicly accessible. Success!

Having scanned and transcribed notebooks was fantastic, but we wanted something more. In recording his observations of the species around him, Henderson had recorded a baseline against which we could compare the species distributions we see today: are birds once spotted by Henderson near the town of Florissant, Colo., still found there today? Or have encroaching human settlements and climate change forced them into higher, colder and more distant locales? Each of his field notebooks contain hundreds of species observations from the early 20th century, long before organized data collection became the norm for ecologists. We began annotating Notebook 1 by journal dates, locations and species names in mid-December, and—with the help of some anonymous contributors—had completely annotated all 112 pages a mere month later. You can see these annotated notes on Wikisource.

We’re pleased with what we’ve achieved in a very short period of time: transcribed, annotated notes available side-by-side online and reaching out to a community of existing users interested in trying to read scrawly handwriting scribbled during field trips to inhospitable climes. Now, we’d like to reach out to you: we’ve uploaded Notebook 2 and Notebook 3, and we’d love your help in transcribing and annotating them. We’d also love to see you upload your museum’s field notes to Wikisource, and to try out its infrastructure to build your own transcription communities and to annotate your own collections.

Most importantly, we’d love you to be bold, to experiment with new technologies, to trust your data to untrained strangers and to get involved in opening museum research to new communities of online visitors and citizen scientists. We’re looking forward to your feedback, suggestions and reports as comments here, on Twitter, or through blog posts.

Use the comments section, below, to lob questions to the authors about the project: logistics, challenges, outcomes, resources needed, etc. Or to tell us about crowdsourced collections projects of your own.


For updates on the Henderson Field Notes and broader issues related to museums and digitization, check out Rob and Andrea’s blog, So You Think You can Digitize, where “screwball comedy meets serious thoughts on digitization.”

Food: A Recipe for Successful Museums

I hope you’re planning to get together with colleagues to share “Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community,” CFM’s free webinar on Feb. 17, and explore food literacy, values-based food service and community building.

If you’re still mulling over the webcast menu, I bet this guest vlog (video blog!) from Eliza Fournier will convince you to join us at the table.

Eliza shares how the Chicago Botanic Garden uses its Green Youth Farm and other garden-based programs to integrate food into their operations, get visitors excited about conservation and mentor the next generation of museum staff. (Which, incidentally, also builds a more diverse staff, thus helping to address the demographic challenge facing museums.) She also explains why Feeding the Spirit (originally a symposium, now a webinar) is so useful. 

Are you interested in implementing a youth garden at your museum? Eliza shares the Chicago Botanic Garden’s “recipe for success” in the webcast’s discussion guide, the “Feeding the Spirit Cookbook." Here is a sneak peek, sharing Eliza’s recipe

Recipe for Success: Youth Engagement with a Side of Sustainable Farming 

Chef: Eliza Fournier, green youth farm manager, Chicago Botanic Garden 

Description: 

This tasty recipe will yield a holistic youth development program, using sustainable agriculture practices, that includes: cooking, nutrition, leadership development and work-readiness skills mixed in with a little old-fashioned farm work. 

The Chicago Botanic Garden has been involved in community gardening outside the walls of its Glencoe site for its entire history. Since 2003, it has deepened its connection with the community through its Urban Agriculture programs, which include the Green Youth Farm initiative for youth and the Windy City Harvest certificate program for adults. Green Youth Farm consists of four off-site sustainable agriculture (small) farms, each of which employs 20+ high school students mid-May through mid-October. Participants experience life on the farm while gaining an appreciation for how their food is produced, harvested and marketed to patrons of the Chicago Botanic Garden and members of their communities. 

Ingredients for Success:

• Leadership: No substitutions for this ingredient. You must have highly inspired and committed internal leaders to “raise the dough” and provide the institutional support needed to support this effort year after year.

• Space: You need fertile soil in which to grow your gardens (and students). This can be on-site or off-site on park/forest preserve, school or purchased land. Important ingredients include access to water, office space and fencing. If your space is on urban land, make sure to utilize raised beds to avoid growing in contaminated soil, which can spoil the recipe.

• Staff: At a minimum, one full-time/year-round staff member to run the program. This is a painstaking and complex recipe that takes committed and skilled staff whom you will want to have around for the long term. The best quality staff people for this recipe will have experience in working with youth, farming and team-building/program delivery. To serve 25-30 students on a ¾- to 1-acre site, we recommend one full-time/year-round coordinator, one full-time seasonal grower (six months) and two full-time seasonal interns (three months).

• Curriculum/plan: Fortunately, lots of people have made this recipe before, so there is a wealth of information and training available to people who are attempting this dish for the first time.

Instructions:

1. Raise the dough. This can be done through the institutional budget or through outside fundraising from corporate sponsors, individual donors, family foundations and/or government grants. A diverse mix of these sources will yield the optimal flavor balance.
2. Hire the staff. The pool of candidates with the right mix of personality, experience and education is ever-growing. There are many on-line resources that can help you recruit quality staff for your recipe, including ATTRA (or National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service) and Slow Food USA.
3. Gather available curriculum/program materials. Maybe even participate in some training with an experienced “chef” to make sure you understand the steps to this recipe.
4. Identify the land where you will create this recipe. Is it on or off-site? Does it have the key qualities listed above? Do you have long-term permission to use the space? (Note: Steps 1–4 can be performed simultaneously or in reverse order. Sometimes it’s best if step 4 happens first to avoid future conflicts!) If the land is off-site, identify community partners who may already be doing similar work and who may be able to help you: a) identify staff and/or students from within the community to participate in the program, b) help provide pieces of the recipe you do not feel so confident about, c) procure or share resources such as gardening materials, advice, etc.
5. Develop a site plan. Make sure to include raised beds if you are planting in urban soils!
6. Recruit students. Participating in high school career days or just setting up a booth during lunch are great ways to raise interest.
7. Build your garden. It is great to include high school students in the initial construction of the garden. (Note: Don’t fret about yields in your first year. The most important produce is your students and the built farm.)
8. Repeat and add your own special ingredients to make the resulting recipe your own unique blend!

Notes on Technique:

Recipe has the tendency to double, triple and quadruple! Sustainable food systems are a very popular topic right now, and if done right, people experiencing your recipe will undoubtedly want more. Consider how much you are willing to undertake before embarking on the adventure that is this recipe. 

The key ingredient in this recipe is staff. The right (and enough) staff with the right skill sets will help you avoid having to redo this recipe over and over. 

There are great opportunities for institutional synergies in this recipe. Youth participants can grow food for your museum’s café and support your museum’s gift shop through value-added products (food and other products, e.g., cookbooks, etc.). Today’s youth participants are tomorrow’s museum employees. Field trips for discussion with museum staff about careers help make our museums even more accessible to the communities we serve. Youth are advocates for our museums. They help inspire folks who previously may have never heard of our institutions. 

More Information:

• For the Chicago Botanic Garden’s interpretation of this recipe, visit www.chicagobotanic.org/greenyouthfarm. 

• For the original recipe (including curriculum and manuals) that we adapted for our use, visit www.thefoodproject.org.

Register for the Feeding the Spirit webinar now to ensure you receive the Feeding the Spirit Cookbook: A Resource and Discussion Guide on Museums, Food and Community. We encourage you to host a potluck at your museum and participate in the webinar as a group, using it as a jumping off point to explore how your museum can help improve food literacy, incorporate mission-related values into your food service and use food to reach new audiences.


This webinar incorporates content presented at the “Feeding the Spirit” symposium hosted at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, Penn. on October 13, 2011. The webcast is made possible by the generous support of our host, LearningTimes.

Feeding the Spirit, the symposium and webcast, is the result of collaboration between AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Public Gardens Association, Phipps Conservatory and Public Garden and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, with the generous support of presenting sponsor UPMC Health Plan and Sodexo.

IMLS Strategic Plan, 2012 – 2016: Creating a Nation of Learners

Last month IMLS released the IMLS Strategic Plan, 2012 – 2016: Creating a Nation of Learners. Recently I had the opportunity to sit with director Susan Hildreth and discuss how she sees the plan shaping the future of IMLS and the nation’s museums. Here are some nuggets gleaned from that extensive interview.

On changes in IMLS’ focus embodied in the plan

Our performance improvement model is the most significant difference.  We have asked projects for a number of years to develop outcome or output measures, but we haven’t looked broadly at all of our investments—our grant projects—to see what’s really working. Now we will look at how the investments we’ve made are working and use that knowledge to shape the framework of projects that we support in the future. The performance improvement model hopefully will make our investments more meaningful and show our funders that we’re really making an impact.

On the effect the plan may have on museums in 20 years

I think the strategic plan will help move museums into a place in their communities and also on the federal landscape where they’re seen as critical elements. We know that, on the ground, museums are the heart of the community. But at the federal level we have to be able to make the case that museums are integral to the educational ecosystem of a community.

On how the educational system in the U.S. might be changing

IMLS continues to support the evolution of education from a static model—one in which we’re presenting information that the student is supposed to be taking in—to an environment where students are becoming more adept at their own creativity, their own questioning, their own learning path, developing critical thinking skills and forming a relationship with the subject matter, their teacher, with student peers.

On how museums of the future might need to be different in order to meet the needs of their communities

Museums and libraries for many years were seen as repositories for information, for content, for objects, for paintings, and as places to go and experience things in a very non-interactive way. Now we’re in a world where it’s much more about your own experience of the information, the object or the art. I think the staff in museums has to be ready and willing to accept the role of facilitator of the individual or visitor experience. In a way, it’s giving something up—you don’t control the experience anymore. You try to make it useful and helpful but also flexible so that the visitor can really get what they want out of the experience not what you want them to have. It’s being willing to really walk in the visitor’s shoes and create experiences that are meaningful to them and allow them the opportunity to develop their own understanding and their own skills.

On potential collaborations between museums and libraries

It would be interesting if a museum and a library worked together to determine a couple of collections where the museum had a lot of visual content and the library had a lot of print content that they can bring that together virtually so people would get it all in one place. It would be really powerful! People just want to know about a subject, they don’t necessarily want to say, “Well, I have to go to this museum or that library.” How great would it be to have a library with a special local collection about an author or an event, and then for the museum down the street to have pictures and all kinds of information about that same subject? Why couldn’t we mash it all up so somebody would just find out all there is to know about that theme? Doing that virtually would only encourage someone to pursue their interest at the library or the museum.

On rethinking museums’ relationship to and investment in their buildings

I think in order for a museum to really be successful and relevant to its community, it’s got to engage with young people who can begin at an early age to understand what an exciting experience museum-going is—how it enriches their life and what they can learn from being in and experiencing a museum. I know it’s very difficult to afford the buses and the insurance to get kids to museums. Are museums anticipating that ultimately they may have to take materials out from within the confines of a building into the community? That goes on already—museums have traveling shows and exhibits. etc., and many museums are already light years in thinking ahead about that, but it’s something that museums as a whole have to face.

I think it is important for museums to look at their physical assets and how they will use those assets in the next 10 to 20 years. Museums and libraries represent a huge investment in built infrastructure in our communities. If the interest in the museum itself was completely lost, that physical structure could either fall into decay or into the hands of, say, a night club or a big events space—something social but non-cultural. On the other hand, museums could take advantage of their physical assets even if they don’t necessarily have as many visitors or enough support for all their exhibits and collections. What could museums do with their physical asset to make it more of a community convening place? In the long run, they might have to give up some of the space they are using now for the collection. I am strongly suggesting that museum staff be very proactive about thinking how can we use our buildings to become part of our community so we don’t end up in a situation where, if they’re membership goes down or if funding falters, they don’t have a Plan B, and find themselves taken over by some other commercial entity.

On how people view digital assets versus real experiences

There may be individuals who say “I want to go to the Museum of Modern Art. I want to see that stuff face-to-face. I want to have that experience.” But I also think that having material from the museum available digitally could really whet someone’s appetite. I would say it’s not “either/or.” It’s like when people say “There are eBooks. Why do you need a library?” You can have eBooks and you can have a library because in a purely one-dimensional virtual world you’re never going to get kind of added value or curation. Ultimately, there’s really nothing like the real thing.

Drawn Together: Drawing Club convenes at AAM Annual Meeting

Scott Stulen is the project director for mnartists.org, one of the programmers of the Walker Open Field Program, creators of Drawing Club and a visual artist. Here he gives us a sneak peek of something to look forward to at the AAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis Saint Paul, April 29–May 2. 

The creative process can be a private, solitary experience. Socializing within the art community can be an equally alienating activity, comprised of tedious networking at art openings and other awkward formal encounters.  In response to these challenges, mnartists.org, a project of the Walker Art Center, developed Drawing Club. The intent of Drawing Club is to use the simple act of drawing as a connective social platform for sharing and collaboration. Each week throughout the past two summers Drawing Club invites artists and the public to gather under the trees of Walker Open Field. Picnic tables are converted into outdoor drawing stations, outfitted with a generous array of art supplies. Atop the head table lays a working pool of drawings from prior weeks alongside fresh sheets of paper. Each participant is invited to either start a new drawing or choose a piece in progress from the pool to alter, edit and amend. Subject matter and materials are open; the only rule is that every drawing must contain the contributions of at least two people before it can be declared complete. The finished works are collected, documented and uploaded to the Web. While many wonderful drawings are produced, the intent of Drawing Club is to create a comfortable space for artists and non-artists alike to socialize and connect. It is in many ways the backyard bbq or local pub of Open Field—a balanced mix of regulars and new faces making work and hanging out.

The Drawing Club program is overwhelmingly popular attracting local artists and museum patrons, families and tourists. The scalability, openness and simplicity of the program make it an ideal model for recurring platforms. For instance, on busy family day Saturdays, every table is activated with paper and pencils, while the activity can condense to one station on the occasional cold and windy Thursday evening. Another contributing factor to Drawing Club’s sustained success is its roots within the local artist community. The program originated from and is managed by mnartists.org, a division of the Walker that supports the local artist community. Drawing’s Club’s weekly hosts are mnartists.org staff, who themselves are practicing artists. These rooted connections provide validity and comfort for established artists, while the format and anonymity of the process allow for participants of all levels to lose their inhibitions and participate without fear of exposing any artistic shortcomings. In a very simple way Drawing Club embodies one of the core principles of Walker Open Field program by converging the institution, artists and the public at the same picnic table.

Drawing Club at AAM

Drawing Club is bringing social art making to the AAM Annual Meeting this spring. Join fellow conference attendees and Minnesota artists in creative collaboration as part of the MuseumExpo™. Socialize; sketch, converse, debate and most of all enjoy yourself. The Drawing Club Lounge will be a perfect site to spend a few minutes or perhaps a couple hours, meet up with colleagues or just pass time between sessions. Drawing Club facilitators and host artists will be on hand to interact with participants and lead discussions. We are also working on some surprises for this special edition of Drawing Club at AAM which we will announce closer to the event.  Drawings will keep evolving during the conference so you can check back on how your contributions were integrated by other artists or view the completed drawings on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. No appointments, materials or talent is required to participate. Hope to see you across the drawing table in late April. 








Horizon Report: Museum Edition

For this week’s suggested reading we bring you the Horizon Report: Museum Edition. Released at the MCN Conference this past November, this report examines emerging technologies for museum education and interpretation. I encourage everyone to take a moment to read at least the executive summary for this year’s report, it’s an accessible overview of how museums are currently, and can in the future, use these technologies.

What is perhaps most gratifying in reading these trends is seeing how many have been popping up in the blog over the past year. You just need to read Perian Sully’s post on the Balboa Park Online Collaborative’s new image uploader and Elissa Frankle’s post on Citizen History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get a sense of how some museums are using these technologies.

Take a moment to compare the top six to watch over the next five years to what was suggested in last year’s report.

	2010 Horizon Report	2011 Horizon Report
Near-term horizon (within the next 12 months)	Mobiles	Mobile Apps
	Social Media	Tablets
Mid-term horizon (two to three years out)	Augmented Reality	Augmented Reality
	Location-based Services	Electronic Publishing
Far-term horizon (four to five years out)	Gesture-based Computing	Digital Preservation
	The Semantic Web	Smart Objects

It’s interesting to see how technology trends for museums, have shifted and what has come up on top. Mobiles and mobile apps are so closely connected, though now with all the abilities in location awareness (think about programs like Google Latitude where you can track the location of your friends at any moment), museums are able to tailor apps to visitor-specific locations. The Horizon Report uses the Balboa Park’s Mobile Apps and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum as examples of institutions that have begun to take advantage of the possibilities.

Another piece that intrigued me was the shift in the top “significant challenge” facing museums in adopting these technologies.

2010:

Far too few museums are crafting a following a comprehensive strategy to ensure that they can keep pace with even the most proven technologies.

2011:

Content production has failed to keep up with technology in an era when audiences expect to consume information whenever and wherever they want.

It appears that in 2011 it became more about the visitor than specifically about the museum.

My questions to you, readers:
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the top six technologies to watch over the next five years? What do you think is going to show up in 2012? And finally, do you think that the advisory board chose the correct top challenge facing museums?

-Guzel duChateau, CFM Program Coordinator

Innovation Ignites: Announcing the 2012 Lab Museums

Cue fanfare! I am so happy to share with you the names of the museums that have been selected to participate in the inaugural round of Innovation Lab for Museums. AAM is bringing Innovation Lab to the museum field through a partnership between the Center for the Future of Museums and EmcArts, generously funded by a $500,000 grant from MetLife Foundation. I will use this post to introduce you to the three funded projects, as well as six others recognized by the panel for their excellence. 

However, I want to start by sharing some of my observations from studying all thirty-one applications to the Lab, and listening to the deliberations of the selection panel. Here are a few things leapt that out at me:

• It seems that the biggest barrier to museum innovation isn’t financial, or logistic, or any lack of creative ideas: it is our own internal culture. Many of the applications said, in one way or another, “we have to find a way to break through existing mindsets, break down barriers between departmental silos. We have to give people an incentive to change, and get them on board.” There seemed to be a tendency for the proposals to originate in the education departments of the applicants, and often the source of resistance to change was identified as curatorial. Take that as you will.

• Many museums either don’t know, or take for granted, their own histories of innovation and experimentation. Our knowledgeable, experienced selection panelists (who are listed in the press release) often seemed to know more about what the applicants had done in the past than was reflected in the narrative of the proposals. Did the applicants not know or not appreciate their own track records of creativity?  As we well know, those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Even worse, (if they forget their successes) maybe they won’t repeat it.

• Maybe caution and innovation are antithetical. Several interesting projects were set aside by the panel as being too timid, too small to effect real change in the organizational culture. Innovation = risk = willingness to fail. And we, as a field, don’t have a culture of being supportive of failure. Sure it is nice to hear about successes, but wouldn’t you like to avoid the mistakes others have made, as well? I think AAM need to find a way to celebrate great failures. I’m open to suggestions.  

It was a struggle for our selection panel to choose among many highly qualified projects, but I am pleased to tell you that the three projects chosen by MetLife Foundation for funding, based on the panel’s recommendations, are:

The Levine Museum of the New South, for their project The Latino New South, which addresses how history museums can play a role in integrating Latino immigrants into community life. The Levine wants to develop a model that can be used in other parts of the country.

The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art for the project Beyond Museum Quality, which asks, how do we move our organizations from overvaluing accuracy and undervaluing populist perspectives to one that values both equally? What does this shift mean for the role of the curator? As the proposal notes, “Art museums in particular, are struggling with moving beyond bursts of participatory acts, to an institutional goal of engagement that values visitor participation as an essential part of the museum experience.”

And the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ project Youth Arts: Present/Future will establish a new approach and pathway for youth education, one which goes beyond merely making art to enable young people to become  “creative thinkers” and “social changemakers.”

Faced with so many worthy projects, the selection panel recommended that AAM recognize an additional six proposals as “Innovation Projects of Excellence”. These are:

• Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center: ARTeries: Creatively connecting teenagers and the arts, Los Angeles

• Birmingham Museum of Art: Making the Traditional Arts Museum Relevant, Ala.

• deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum: deCordova/Lincoln Nursery School Partnership, Lincoln, Mass.

• Oakland Museum of California: Applying Participatory Practices to Audience Development, Calif.

• Tucson Museum of Art: The Museum as Sanctuary: Expanding Museum Communities with Programming for Refugee Populations

• Valentine-Richmond History Center: Community Galleries Exhibit and Program Development, Richmond, Va.
  
  

It’s AAM’s hope that these projects may still be implemented in some form, even if that has to be outside the Lab format, and I look forward to telling you more them in future posts!

Watch this Blog, Dispatches from the Future of Museums and AAM’s Aviso for announcements regarding future rounds of Innovation Lab for Museums.

Go forth and innovate…

Questioning Assumptions: Museums in the 21st Century

I hope you have been following my posts on the Forecast of the Future of Museum Ethics being conducted by CFM and the Institute for Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University. CFM and IME staff are compiling the (copious) input provide by our Oracles and over one hundred public participants. While we wrestle this into a report for Oracular review and subsequent release, I want to share these thoughts from one of our Oracles, Fred Stielow, VP and Dean of Libraries, Course Materials and e-Press at the American Public University System (APUS). Fred recently shot us some observations from his Blackberry while flying at 30,000 feet, pushing us to question our deeper assumptions and (re)start from a radically revised understanding of “museum” in the 21st century.

AAM is currently attempting to forecast some 25 years into the future. The questions in the forecast are rooted in the defining National Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museums. My experience with the forecast to date reflects a solid exercise. The questions are appropriately phrased and the Likert scaling fits. 



Yet, something is also off-kilter—or at least for someone like me who operates virtual information systems within a fully online university. I think the forecast reflects a vision still rooted in the 19th century. In that century,  nationalistic forces (aided by an emerging mass press) enabled new social spaces for public "culture," edification and education. The idea of "museum" was soon split into independent archival, library and museum institutions.

Those creations still exist, but the underlying model and the justifications for it are changing. First-World countries no longer have the same burning need to establish and underwrite their legitimacy through public educational institutions. Equally important, we have entered a communications revolution on par with the introduction of print. The Web is not just another technological tool. It is immersive and all-encompassing. 



To project the future without an (alternate) starting point in the virtual realm simply seems questionable. The assumptions certainly are different if you start there. Applications on the Web are tantamount to publishing. They raise separate sets of ethical questions in terms of access, but also crucial economic and identity matters with ethical implications. 



The triumphal rise of Web 2.0 is similarly hard to ignore. The Web's Long Tail and community-building functions proffer a far different concept of membership than spatially-defined quarters with local identifications. 


On the Information Highway, comfortable walls between archives, libraries and museums vanish. Cultural institutions and massive projects that unite many institutions, like Europeana. There the drive is widespread digitizing and Open Access in the hopes of fostering a new Renaissance. Yet, such altruism can mask a myriad of ethical and identity issues--as well as economic opportunities. Such impacts may also merit review.

The wonk in me cries out for considerations of a near future with augmented reality. Ubiquitous computing is also on the horizon. Everything around you can become a source of interactive information and personalized for the receiver. And all of this has ethical implications.

In sum, I find the present survey adequate for what it is; however, the view from 30,000 feet suggests something more to truly address the future.

Do you have a 30,000 foot view of the future you would like to share with readers? Email me at futureofmuseums@aam-us.org to pitch your idea for a guest post on the blog, and comment on Fred’s vision below.