Re: [MCN-L] Posting to new groups.io list

[Ari Davidow]

I got a similar result - no message seems to have been broadcast, and the list 
claims that, so far, no messages. This may need some further tweaking and 
testing - glad to help, if so.

ari

> On May 19, 2021, at 8:37 AM, Richard Light  wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I tried posting to the new address from Thunderbird, but nothing
> appeared. There are apparently no messages at all, despite it having
> been 'up' for a month:
> 
> As a follow-up I tried submitting a message via their web interface, and
> got this message:
> 
> It will be interesting to see whether, and when, this approval happens. 
> At present, the new home for the MCN list has all the hallmarks of a
> non-operative setup.
> 
> Richard
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> *Richard Light*
> richardlight...@gmail.com
> /@richardofsussex/
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Re: [MCN-L] Happy Halloween

[Ari Davidow]

Great article! Hope you and your family are staying safe.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 7:00 AM Amalyah Keshet 
wrote:

> A little gift on a sadly saddened COVID-19 Halloween 2020, for the great
> minds and colleagues of the MCN community who have to deal with the horrors
> of managing copyright:
>
>
> https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_post/dracula-vs-nosferatu-a-true-copyright-horror-story/
>
>
> *Amalyah Keshet*
> *Copyright Management for Cultural Heritage, Jerusalem*
> *Senior Consultant, Naomi Korn Associates, London*
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Re: [MCN-L] Happy 20th Birthday, MCN-L!

[Ari Davidow]

It's been a very good start. Can't wait to see what we can do 20 years from now.

ari

> On Mar 9, 2016, at 9:25 AM, Rob Lancefield on lists  
> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Just for fun, it's worth noting that today is MCN-L's 20th birthday. The list 
> launched on March 9, 1996: back when HTML 2.0 was the latest, greatest 
> version, as were Macintosh System 7.5.3 and Windows 95. 1996 also was the 
> year when the first significant number of museum websites launched in all 
> their initial glory,* some using what was then cutting-edge, table-based 
> layout.** Which is to say, it was a long time ago--so long ago that it still 
> made sense to have an MCN Internet SIG!
> 
> If you're curious about the inaugural MCN-L post, it's in the archive:
> 
> 
> 
> It's pretty remarkable how much knowledge the MCN community has shared on 
> this list over the years, how many helpful leads so many people have 
> suggested and harvested here, and how useful the list continues to be as we 
> move forward--even as other information-sharing channels, spaces, apps, and 
> platforms flow and ebb, and often fade away. Imagine all the things thousands 
> of people have accomplished more effectively over two decades with 
> peer-to-peer, collegial help from this list.
> 
> Happy birthday, MCN-L, and many more.
> 
> cheers,
> Rob
> 
> * Several museum websites from 1996 are represented on this page: 
> 
> 
> ** This was so early in the history of the Web that the formal RFC for HTML 
> Tables actually wouldn't be published for another two months, but tables were 
> coming into use: 
> 
> -- 
> Rob Lancefield
> Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections
> Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
> 301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459-0487 USA
> rlancefield [at] wesleyan [dot] edu  |  tel. 860.685.2965
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Re: [MCN-L] Project management systems

[Ari Davidow]

There are a host of systems that do all of that and more in a Project
Management context, from Trello or BaseCamp (both can be free), on up to MS
TFS (part of Microsoft's Visual Studio) or Jira Agile. Can you tell us what
you're doing know and where you want to get to next? Is there a specific
Project Management methodology (e.g., waterfall with a PMP, Agile), or is
the focus on the obvious project management wins of having a central place
to store/find project documents and some basic messaging/commenting tools?
What does "better communication" mean in this context?

ari

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Tatum Walker  wrote:

> Hello,
> Anyone out there know of a great project management system that can manage
> workflows, file sharing, increase collaboration, and allows for better
> communication?
>
> Bests,
> Tatum Walker
>
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Re: [MCN-L] Version control of museum objects, especially photographs

[Ari Davidow]

We just tried to track a master and derivatives. Tools like documentum can 
automate some types of versions. If I ever get the chance, I'm going to see 
what I can do with a standard version control system like git and standardized 
branching. But until then, as far as I know this is untested (and VCS systems 
are not at their best maintaining info about binary files).

ari

 On Jul 21, 2015, at 7:47 PM, Emma Jones emma.jo...@awm.gov.au wrote:
 
 I would like to get an idea of who out there has found a  way to manage 
 multiple versions of a single object in their collections. No so much 
 multiple examples of the same object, rather versions of the same one.  As 
 our photographs collection has built up over the last 100 odd years, a 
 variety of versions have been created of the one object for preservation, 
 access and other reasons. However we tend to have the one catalogue record 
 to rule them all, which sadly does not truly reflect our holdings. There are 
 a number of ideas being put forward, but it would be great to hear how other 
 institutions have/haven't tackled this issue, especially in regard to how you 
 represent these versions in your CMS (we have XG).
 Thanks
 Emma
 
 Emma Jones
 Manager, Collection Information and Access team | Collection Services
 emma.jo...@awm.gov.aumailto:emma.jo...@awm.gov.au | t 02 62434476
 Australian War Memorial | GPO Box 345 Canberra ACT 2601 | www.awm.gov.au
 
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Re: [MCN-L] Google+ as internal collaboration tool?

[Ari Davidow]

Hmm. You've probably already run into significant problems keeping personal
and enterprise docs separate in Google Docs. Imagine the joy of discovering
that the grant proposal you need is owned by the staffperson who left
months ago, who also seems to have dropped off the planet; and then subject
your internal collaboration to the same stress.

In theory, if you are using Google for Non-Profits (hard, given the lack of
support, but I've done it) and are very careful, this could be a neat
toolset--and it is certainly a neat outreach tool. But there are also
issues.

Still, now I wonder. Who is actually using it for what? How is it working?
I'm hoping to launch some Google Hangout collaborations for a community
network later this month, but those collaborations will be between many
individuals and organizations

ari

On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Carissa Dougherty cdoughe...@mortonarb.org
 wrote:

 Hello, all...

 I was wondering if any of you use (or have attempted to use) Google+ as a
 collaboration tool within your institution.  If you have, are there any
 barriers that you encountered with the software itself?  Any surprises
 (pleasant or otherwise)? How well did your team members adapt to it?

 I'll admit that I'm a Facebook rather than Google+ user in my personal
 life, but I've done some research and it seems like Google+ has some
 features that could make it work as an enterprise social
 networking/collaboration tool.  Plus, gMail and gDrive are pretty well
 integrated into the digital culture here, so finding something that plays
 nice with those two tools is ideal.

 Sometimes I feel like I'm asking for too much from a single tool, and that
 using a suite of tools might actually get the job done -- but I also want
 participation to be as easy and as seamless as possible!

 I welcome any advice!

 Best, and happy holidays,
 Carissa
 --
 Head of Knowledge Management

 The Morton Arboretum  |  4100 Illinois Route 53  |  Lisle, Illinois 60532
 T  *630-725-2136* |*cdoughe...@mortonarb.org cdoughe...@mortonarb.org
 *
 |  mortonarb.org

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[MCN-L] Fwd:Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives

[Ari Davidow]

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[MCN-L] Cloud Computing (Cindy Mackey)

[Ari Davidow]

Try Confluence https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence from
Atlassian for a wiki. It fits the bill of being an easy to use and being a
wiki ;-)

If I didn't mention the Atlassian toolset, from Confluence to Jira, and
their many add-ons as a very robust alternative to Sharepoint, then I
should have.

Thanks for the reminder, Glen

ari


On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 9:22 PM, Glen Barnes glen at mytoursapp.com wrote:

 A few of my notes in answer to, and +1 to things raised in the responses:


  If the cloud server goes down, you have no ability to fix it. You just
  have to wait.
 

 Which is just the same as an onsite server. Amazon/etc. have teams of
 people dedicated to just keeping the servers running and to deal with
 security. Local IT person just can't compete with that. If you can find a
 local IT company who are experts at supporting your services running on
 cloud services then this is a much better proposition.


  When your data is off-site with a third party you don't have control over
  it. You will think you do though!
 

 I think this is a really important thing to consider. You often don't 'have
 control' over it if you host it yourself either. If you are help to ransom
 by 'IT' then this can be just as bad. I think a good disaster recovery and
 backup plan is essential. Consider things like Amazon Glacier for long term
 back ups. Mutli-availablity zones and local backups. Also look for services
 that let you recover from accidental deletions and can recover items.


  Having multiple users accessing the same files at the same time can get
  tricky with off-site storage


 Google Docs is an option for any of the Office style documents. Being able
 to collaboratively edit documents is a godsend. You can also easily share
 the docs with external people such as vendors and contractors and not have
 to email versions of Word docs back and forth.


 I am now exploring wikis, and especially Sharepoint (not a wiki, but a very
  useful way to organize files and related ephemera), looking for better
 ways
  to ensure that files are grouped together in ways that facilitate work,
  rather than adding to backup costs These, too, are sanest hosted in
 the
  Cloud.


 Try Confluence https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence from
 Atlassian for a wiki. It fits the bill of being an easy to use and being a
 wiki ;-)

 
  The file server is the hardest piece, because it is so dependent on your
  external internet connection speed (mostly) and latency (the time it
 takes
  your action to travel over the wires to an externally-hosted document).


 If you are storing content on Amazon s3 then check out the storage gateway
 (and its competitors) - http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/. This
 service
 has a local cache which means less data across the wire.

 And lastly even if you continue to host internally you should be thinking
 about how you can harness some cloud services for things like backup and
 caching. If you publish your collections online you will be amazed out how
 much better performance you get if you cache the images using Amazon
 CloudFront.

 Cheers from down under!

 --
 Glen Barnes
 Founder/CEO
 e: glen at mytoursapp.com
 p: +64 (9) 3600 617
 m: +64 (21) 0429 471

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[MCN-L] Cloud Computing

[Ari Davidow]

At JWA when I was there we moved everything but a local file server to the
cloud. Much saner. If I were still there, that final file server would head
to the cloud, as well (and for all I know, it already has).

For just about everything we did, from our email hosting (Exchange, in our
case) to CRM to all of the enterprise apps, backup, etc., the Cloud was
much cheaper and much more secure, overall. Web serving, obviously, was
also hosted in the cloud, but we were using an ISP from before I started--I
would hope that *nobody* is messing up internal network activity by hosting
web services locally.

The file server is the hardest piece, because it is so dependent on your
external internet connection speed (mostly) and latency (the time it takes
your action to travel over the wires to an externally-hosted document). On
the other hand, I have come to believe that file servers are the spawn of
the devil and infinitely expanded home of forgotten obscurity. Who can ever
find the file they wanted, especially if it's the file that Jane Doe worked
on two years ago for the ... which project was it, again? We've changed and
reorganized files on the server a couple of times since then

I am now exploring wikis, and especially Sharepoint (not a wiki, but a very
useful way to organize files and related ephemera), looking for better ways
to ensure that files are grouped together in ways that facilitate work,
rather than adding to backup costs These, too, are sanest hosted in the
Cloud.

Something that is worth considering and worrying about is how to keep work
documents separate from staff *personal *Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.,
accounts, and related security (both in terms of access and ensuring that
the file is still there when Jane Doe's replacement needs to find it).

Looking forward to hearing what other people are doing

ari


On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Cindy Mackey CMackey at currier.org wrote:

 Our IT department is investigating whether it is beneficial/cost-effective
 to switch all of our computer use to the cloud. Have any of your
 institutions completely switched over or is it a mix of cloud computing and
 onsite servers/software?

 Cindy Mackey
 Associate Registrar
 Currier Museum of Art
 150 Ash Street
 Manchester, NH 03104
 T: 603-669-6144 x137
 F: 603-669-7194
 www.currier.org



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[MCN-L] Flickr and digital collections

[Ari Davidow]

Interesting the emphasis on Wikimedia Commons and no mention of the Internet 
Archive. Is that because the former is simply more familiar when we are talking 
about image-only collections (granted, the bulk of what is out there, and the 
only medium usefully addressed by flickr)?

ari

 On May 19, 2014, at 10:42 AM, Bryan Kennedy bkennedy at smm.org wrote:
 
 Shelley Bernstein, the Vice Director of Digital Engagement  Technology at
 the Brooklyn Museum, posted some interesting thoughts on why they left
 Flickr entirely (even deleting their content and account) and moved over to
 WIkimedia Commons.
 
 Post
 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2014/04/04/social-change
 
 Relevant discussion in the comments
 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2014/04/04/social-change/#li-comment-19167
 
 Even thought I'm a big proponent of the cool URLs don't change mantra I
 have to say I find their focus on engagement-over-archiving refreshing.
 
 bk
 
 bryan kennedy
 director, exhibit media
 science museum of minnesota
 bkennedy at smm.org   651.221.2522
 
 
 
 On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Erwin Verbruggen 
 everbruggen at beeldengeluid.nl wrote:
 
 Hi Ellice,
 
 there's quite some literature on the subject from a few years back - see
 the list below. Main advantage of using Flickr over other social media
 sites is their policy of licenses: you can clearly indicate under what
 license the material is available - unless you take part in the Flickr
 Commons programme, where you need to indicate there are no known copyright
 restrictions. It's still curious why the company is doing such great
 advocacy work on Creative Commons but doesn't grant museum collections the
 same flexibility. When you use Pinterest or other services, their Terms of
 Service usually indicate some vague lines in which you basically sign away
 your rights of ownership to them. In practice, this is more of an ethical
 decision than a practical one.
 
 Europeana did publish a case study of how they - and museums involved -
 make use of the various sharing platforms last year - see:
 http://pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/1587205 and
 http://pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/1600355/
 
 Finally, another option to consider is Wikimedia Commons - less user
 friendly / shareable perhaps, but if you can publish materials under an
 open license it allows wikipedia editors to use the materials in erudite
 articles - see the GLAMWIKI projects for more info:
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAM
 
 Regards,
 Erwin
 
 
 Bray, Paula, Sebastian Chan, Joseph Dalton, Dianne Dietrich, Effie,
 Michelle Springer, and Helena (H) Zinkham. ?Rethinking Evaluation Metrics
 in Light of Flickr Commons.? In *Museums and the Web 2011: Proceedings*,
 edited by D. Bearman and J. Trant. Totonto: Archives  Museum Informatics,
 2011.
 
 http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/rethinking_evaluation_metrics_in_light_of_flic
 .
 Donahue, Ryan, and Aaron Straup Cope. ?Archiving Flickr and Other Websites
 of Interest to Museums,? n.d.
 
 http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/papers/archiving_flickr_and_other_websites_of_interes
 .
 Gardu?o Freeman, Cristina. ?Photosharing on Flickr: Intangible Heritage
 and Emergent Publics.? *International Journal of Heritage Studies* 16, no.
 4?5 (July 2010): 352?68. doi:10.1080/13527251003775695.
 Moortgat, Judith. *Taking Pictures to the Public*, 2009.
 
 http://www.den.nl/getasset.aspx?id=Website/Taking_pictures_of_the_public_NA.pdfassettype=attachments
 .
 Springer, Michelle, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David
 Reser, David Woordward, and Helena Zinkham. *For the Common Good: The
 Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project*. Library of Congress, 2008.
 http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf.
 Vaughan, J. ?Insights into the Commons on Flickr,? 2010.
 http://digitalcommons.library.unlv.edu/lib_articles/123/.
 
 Kind regards,
 
 *Erwin Verbruggen*
 Project lead RD
 
 *Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision*
 
 *Media Parkboulevard 1, 1217 WE  Hilversum | Postbus 1060, 1200 BB
 Hilversum | **beeldengeluid.n
 http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/l*
 
 
 ?
 
 
 On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 10:00 PM, Aude Mathey aude_mathey at yahoo.fr
 wrote:
 
 Hi everyone,
 
 That is a very interesting topic indeed.
 I actually got a question while reading your emails: why Flickr for your
 collections, instead of let's say Pinterest or Instagram? Especially if
 you
 want people to share and interact with them?
 
 Thanks for your answers!
 
 Aude
 
 Le Mardi 13 mai 2014 14h39, Perian Sully perian at emphatic.org a ?crit :
 
 
 
 Hi Ellice:
 
 A number of institutions I've worked with use Flickr for their online
 presence. In fact, when I was at Balboa Park, we worked with John Fox (of
 MemoryMiner) to develop a tool to help museums and archives put their
 materials and metadata onto Flickr: 

[MCN-L] Google Open Gallery or Google Cultural Institute, anyone?

[Ari Davidow]

I applied on Feb 13, and so far that acknowledgement that I applied is the only 
thing I've heard.

ari

 On Feb 27, 2014, at 9:03 AM, Candace Nast candace.nast at gmail.com wrote:
 
 Has anyone received their invite yet? I requested mine (for EKMHA.ca) on
 Day One and am getting antsy to try it out for our collection.
 
 Thanks,
 Candace
 On Jan 23, 2014 4:41 PM, Rob Lancefield on lists lists at lancefield.net
 wrote:
 
 Lenore and all,
 
 This should work:
 
 http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.ca/2013/12/online-
 exhibitions-made-easy-with.html
 
 best regards,
 Rob
 
 Rob Lancefield
 Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections
 Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
 301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459-0487 USA
 rlancefield [at] wesleyan [dot] edu  |  tel. 860.685.2965
 
 On 1/23/14 4:30 PM, Lenore Sarasan wrote:
 
 The link doesn't seem to work -- message says that it can't access the
 blog.  If you can send me some other way of getting to the information, I
 would be very interested in learning more about it.
 
 Lenore Sarasan
 
 
 On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 12:59 PM, Ari Davidow aridavidow at gmail.com
 wrote:
 
 I am exploring ways to pull LOD together. Someone at the delightful
 #drinkingaboutmuseums:BOS last night pointed me to Google Open Gallery.
 
 At first glance, it appears to be a less capable Omeka--a way to dump
 some
 data online, but without any underlying linked data? From the Google blog
 post on the subject,
 
 http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.ca/2013/12/online-
 exhibitions-made-easy-with.htmlI
 get the impression that this is an extension of the existing Google
 Cultural Institute, but now open to the public.
 
 To find out more, it looks like I have to request an account--it's not
 yet
 automated. Has anyone already worked with either of these tools? Anything
 to report, good/bad/indifferent? (If not, I'm prepared to be the
 reporter-back)
 
 Thanks,
 ari
 
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[MCN-L] Google Open Gallery or Google Cultural Institute, anyone?

[Ari Davidow]

I am exploring ways to pull LOD together. Someone at the delightful
#drinkingaboutmuseums:BOS last night pointed me to Google Open Gallery.

At first glance, it appears to be a less capable Omeka--a way to dump some
data online, but without any underlying linked data? From the Google blog
post on the subject,
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.ca/2013/12/online-exhibitions-made-easy-with.htmlI
get the impression that this is an extension of the existing Google
Cultural Institute, but now open to the public.

To find out more, it looks like I have to request an account--it's not yet
automated. Has anyone already worked with either of these tools? Anything
to report, good/bad/indifferent? (If not, I'm prepared to be the
reporter-back)

Thanks,
ari

[MCN-L] HIRING: Director of Technology and Digital Media, Dallas Museum of Art

[Ari Davidow]

Rob,

This sounds like a really neat position. Since leaving JWA I have been
focused on developing a consulting/strategy practice focused on how to
leverage the Cloud and Social Media to engage people, build community, and
to preserve cultural heritage.

The job you posted describes an opportunity to do this on a larger scale
than was possible at JWA (and with actual physical visitors!), in an
environment where lots of great work is already happening, in areas that I
find most exciting. The fact that it is in Dallas is especially intriguing.
(Did I ever talk with you about my years in high school in Dallas? At the
time, it was not pretty.)

I am off to think out a cover letter and apply for the position. I would be
most pleased if this sounds plausible to you, as well, and would look
forward to talking with you about the position.

Many thanks,
Ari


On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Robert Stein RStein at dma.org wrote:

 Director of Technology and Digital Media

 Reports to: Deputy Director
 Department: Information Technology
 Classification: Full-time, Exempt
 Available: Immediately
 Deadline: Open until filled

 The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is the largest museum in its region and
 among the most innovative and respected art museums in America. By offering
 free admission and membership to its local audiences and committing to a
 robust open access policy for the Museum?s content, the DMA prides itself
 on being accessible to a broad audience both here in Dallas and globally
 through it?s online initiatives.

 The DMA seeks a Director of Technology and Digital Media to manage a
 diverse range of projects and staff, joining a dynamic team to envision the
 future of digital media, and technology for the Dallas Museum of Art and to
 impact the field of museums.  Having direct responsibility for digital
 media projects spanning media creation, digital gallery interaction,
 electronic publishing, digitization, and mobile experiences, successful
 candidates will have significant experience leading others to succeed in
 innovative and fast-paced environments. In addition to direct supervision
 of Museum staff and projects, the Director for Technology and Digital Media
 will chair the Museum?s cross-departmental web team in the creation,
 management, and expansion of the Museum?s online presence.

 Reporting to the DMA?s Deputy Director, the Director of Technology and
 Digital Media will collaborate closely with the Museum?s senior leadership
 and a diverse staff from all departments. Successful candidates must
 exhibit creative approaches to problem solving and enjoy a deeply
 collaborative working environment.

 Primary Roles and Responsibilities include:

   *   Leadership and management responsibilities for the DMA?s Digital
 Media, Software, and IT departments and staff
   *   General supervision and leadership responsibilities for all
 technology-based projects of the Museum
   *   Manage and schedule collaborative digital project to successful
 completion
   *   Integrate and apply technology and digital media across the
 organization to achieve the overall strategic goals of the Museum.
   *   Manage departmental budgets, and capital projects to deliver
 exceptional results with good financial oversight.
   *   Create and maintain a strong IT infrastructure for the DMA focused
 on quality of service, reliability, and future-proof planning.
   *   Provide for a solid and reliable enterprise infrastructure that
 includes ticketing, retail, fundraising and financial systems and
 facilitates data-driven decision-making based on integrated reporting and
 analytics.
   *   Enhance the DMA?s leadership in the field by building strong
 collaborative relationships and partnerships across multiple sectors.
   *   Ensure that DMA?s work in technology and digital media also makes a
 significant impact to the larger cultural sector.
   *   Be committed to documenting the work of the DMA through scholarly
 writing, public speaking, and professional service.
   *   Manage the day-to-day process of digitizing the DMA?s permanent
 collection ensuring that the Museum?s online collections and achieves
 achieve the highest standards for quality and accessibility.
   *   Supervise the software development efforts of the Museum; lead an
 agile team to produce well-designed and modular tools to achieve
 significant field impact.

 Qualifications:

   *   Bachelor?s or graduate degree in computer science, information
 technology, or a related field is required.
   *   Must possess 5 or more years experience leading a technical teams in
 a fast-paced and innovative environment
   *   A thorough working knowledge of best-practice in Information
 Technology for mid-sized enterprise required. Experience or prior-work in
 the cultural sector is desired.
   *   Experience with current web development practice and agile project
 management experience required.
   *   Must demonstrate a proven experience to lead or contribute
 

[MCN-L] and a resume

[Ari Davidow]

Good thing I don't put pablum like detail-oriented on resumes, any more.

Hopefully, this time a resume is enclosed.

ari

[MCN-L] posting without coffee

[Ari Davidow]

Apologies to the list. Should not be at computer keyboard while not fully
present.

ari


On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Ari Davidow aridavidow at gmail.com wrote:

 Good thing I don't put pablum like detail-oriented on resumes, any more.

 Hopefully, this time a resume is enclosed.

 ari

[MCN-L] How simplifying pages is an easy way to improve the experience for your mobile users

[Ari Davidow]

Sweet uncommon sense reminder! Thanks, Andrew.


On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Andrew Lewis a.lewis at vam.ac.uk wrote:

 Dear MCN-ers

 can't get to the awesome MCN conference this year, but there in spirit.

 Here is a subject to mull over, on a Monday morning.

 The latest VA Digital Media blog post outlines how we did some targeted
 mobile optimisation on our visitor information pages and decreased page
 load time by 83% by simply making reducing the number of pages from six to
 one.

 Other quick-win benefits include simple page scrolling - much easier for
 single-thumb mobile use than linking to separate pages.

 The simple takeaway - targeting pages with heavy mobile use and making
 small changes can make quite drastic improvements with no special magic or
 shiny stuff. Just common-sense.

 More detail and data from OfCom, Culture24 Let's Get Real2 and
 stats-diving all included.


 http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/digital-media/making-mobile-users-experience-better

 Enjoy!

 Andrew




 Andrew Lewis
 Digital Content Delivery Manager

 Digital Media department
 Victoria and Albert Museum
 South Kensington
 London SW7 2RL

 020 7942 2373
 a.lewis at vam.ac.uk
 Digital Media blog: www.vam.ac.uk/digital
 http://linkd.in/andrewlewis
 @rosemarybeetle ( https://twitter.com/rosemarybeetle )



 Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900
 26 October 2013- 19 January 2014 at VA South Kensington
 Supported by the Friends of the VA
 Book now on www.vam.ac.uk/chinesepainting

 See the exhibition for free if you join as a VA Member
 www.vam.ac.uk/members

 War Games
 Until 9 March 2014 at VA Museum of Childhood
 Admission free

 Keep in touch
 Sign up for VA e-newsletters www.vam.ac.uk/signup
 Become a fan on Facebook.com/VictoriaandAlbertMuseum (
 http://www.facebook.com/VictoriaandAlbertMuseum )
 Follow us on Twitter.com/V_and_A ( http://www.twitter.com/V_and_A )
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[MCN-L] LODLAM Patterns - Call for Participation

[Ari Davidow]

How interesting. I have just begun exploring the question of where we can
go beyond bibliographic data in university press books. The wiki reminds me
that one starting point is certainly use of TEI.

Do you know of any presses that are adding extensive triples to their
books? I'm thinking of creating statements wrapped around both the obvious
foaf/location/time axes, as well as book index terms, but that would just
be a start, I guess. Would be a bottomless pit unless someone figured out a
pattern for how much data is necessary to ensure that a book's data are
found easily, and weaved in with other LOD-LAM data?

ari


On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Richard Urban richardjurban at gmail.comwrote:

 We invite you to join a collaborative effort to identify design patterns
 for Linked Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LODLAM). A LODLAM
 design pattern identifies common problems, solutions, and examples found in
 current LAM metadata standards and emerging Linked Data approaches.

 Participants are invited to use the LODLAM Proto-Patterns wiki (
 http://lodlampatterns.org/protopattern) as platform for identifying
 potential problems, solutions, and contexts. In the wiki these patterns can
 be edited, refined, classified, and further developed over time.

 The results of this study will be used to understand what patterns exist
 in our current environment and what patterns are desirable as we move
 towards Linked Data approaches.  In other disciplines, design patterns have
 proven to be useful for broadening the debate about technical standards and
 as instructional tools.  Your participation in this study will guide the
 development of a representation pattern library (http://lodlampatterns.org)
 that can be useful to Linked Data users, developers, students, and metadata
 creation professionals.

 Richard J. Urban, Assistant Professor
 College of Communication and Information
 School of Library and Information Studies
 Florida State University
 Florida's iSchool
 rurban at fsu.edu
 @musebrarian
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[MCN-L] Standards for home digital preservation?

[Ari Davidow]

At JWA, we have a page on our website giving people basic preservation
advice (http://jwa.org/stories/how-to/preservation ) and links for them to
learn more.

We recently added a paragraph on digital preservation (which reflects
advice I, personally, would not give, and will be modified soon). But I
want to be able to provide resources for people to learn more about what is
involved and what they should think of with their camera images, old word
docs, etc.

Anyone have good suggestions?

Thanks,
Ari

[MCN-L] Standards for home digital preservation?

[Ari Davidow]

This are great! Thanks, Erwin.


On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Erwin Verbruggen 
everbruggen at beeldengeluid.nl wrote:

 Hi Ari,

 home digital preservation has over the last few years received a trendy
 term: Personal Archiving. Searching for it online should give you a good
 overview of sources currently out there - for instance:

  * on the Library of Congress's website:

 http://www.**digitalpreservation.gov/**personalarchiving/http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/
  * on the conference which was last held in 2010:
http://www.personalarchiving.**com/ http://www.personalarchiving.com/

 A booklet I particularly cherish is in Dutch, alas, but Google Translate
 might help your understanding a long way, and is called Bewaar als... or
 Save as... in English: http://bewaarals.nl/

 Looking forward to your overview when it's done!

 Best regards,
 erwin

 Erwin Verbruggen
 Project Employee, Research  Development

 Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
 P.O. Box 1060, 1200 BB, Hilversum, Netherlands
 www.beeldengeluid.nl/research http://www.google.com/url?q=**
 http%3A%2F%2Fwww.**beeldengeluid.nl%2Fsa=Dsntz=**1usg=AFrqEzeYY4n4jf6_*
 *kMuxEiAUu6jGk81HxAhttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.beeldengeluid.nl%2Fsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFrqEzeYY4n4jf6_kMuxEiAUu6jGk81HxA
 


  Ari Davidow mailto:aridavidow at gmail.com
 December 6, 2012 4:01 PM

 At JWA, we have a page on our website giving people basic preservation
 advice 
 (http://jwa.org/stories/how-**to/preservationhttp://jwa.org/stories/how-to/preservation)
  and links for them to
 learn more.

 We recently added a paragraph on digital preservation (which reflects
 advice I, personally, would not give, and will be modified soon). But I
 want to be able to provide resources for people to learn more about what
 is
 involved and what they should think of with their camera images, old word
 docs, etc.

 Anyone have good suggestions?

 Thanks,
 Ari

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[MCN-L] Agile PM tools

[Ari Davidow]

-request at mcn.edu

 You can reach the person managing the list at
 mcn-l-owner at mcn.edu

 When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than
 Re: Contents of mcn-l digest...


 Today's Topics:

1. Agile PM tools (Ari Davidow)
2. Re: Agile PM tools (Ari Davidow)
3. Re: Agile PM tools (Mark A. Matienzo)
4. Re: Agile PM tools (Christina DePaolo)
5. Re: Displaying TGN terms (ddwiggins at historicnewengland.org)


 --

 Message: 1
 Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:48:11 -0400
 From: Ari Davidow aridavidow at gmail.com
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv mcn-l at mcn.edu
 Subject: [MCN-L] Agile PM tools
 Message-ID:

 CAF+xBDXKb52zFkQfTgVqinwgi1cUsZKCiN+GUgnZrWFA=z72hQ at mail.gmail.com
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

 We're at a point at our organization where two things are happening. A
 couple of us are moving more deeply into Scrum, and the rest of the
 organization is moving beyond spreadsheets as the sole project management
 tool.

 I know that I don't want to introduce anything as heavyweight as Microsoft
 Project (much as I love it). I need a way to help break stories down so
 that realistic time planning can be done. The tool has to make it possible
 to assign resources (esp. people) so that we can tell when someone has been
 given three person's worth of work all due the same week.

 What are other people using that works well enough that whole teams are
 comfortable? The ideal tool probably helps us manage this by looking at
 stories, story grooming, backlogs, and sprints, but I could be wrong.
 Maybe
 other approaches work better at this level of expertise ... what works for
 other Museums and Archives? What makes it work?

 Thanks,
 ari

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[MCN-L] Agile PM tools

[Ari Davidow]

We're at a point at our organization where two things are happening. A
couple of us are moving more deeply into Scrum, and the rest of the
organization is moving beyond spreadsheets as the sole project management
tool.

I know that I don't want to introduce anything as heavyweight as Microsoft
Project (much as I love it). I need a way to help break stories down so
that realistic time planning can be done. The tool has to make it possible
to assign resources (esp. people) so that we can tell when someone has been
given three person's worth of work all due the same week.

What are other people using that works well enough that whole teams are
comfortable? The ideal tool probably helps us manage this by looking at
stories, story grooming, backlogs, and sprints, but I could be wrong. Maybe
other approaches work better at this level of expertise ... what works for
other Museums and Archives? What makes it work?

Thanks,
ari

[MCN-L] Agile PM tools

[Ari Davidow]

Hi Megan,

I have used BaseCamp and found it too minimal for most purposes, but I'll
happily take another look and see how it has evolved. Maybe this is the
time to settle for minimal and let us evolve to something that better
supports Scrum later, after staff have outgrown BaseCamp (or maybe they
discover that I am being too ... something, and BaseCamp is the right tool,
period).

ari

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 1:50 PM, McGovern, Megan H mcgovernmh at 
cmog.orgwrote:

 I believe the Marketing department at my institution uses BaseCamp.  If
 you like, I can ask someone to give you more details.  All I know is that
 they use it as a department-wide project management tool.

 Megan


 Megan McGovern
 Digital Asset Specialist
 The Corning Museum of Glass
 607.438.5329 office
 607.684.5890 mobile
 607.438.5392 fax
 mcgovernmh at cmog.org



 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:48 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: [MCN-L] Agile PM tools

 We're at a point at our organization where two things are happening. A
 couple of us are moving more deeply into Scrum, and the rest of the
 organization is moving beyond spreadsheets as the sole project management
 tool.

 I know that I don't want to introduce anything as heavyweight as Microsoft
 Project (much as I love it). I need a way to help break stories down so
 that realistic time planning can be done. The tool has to make it possible
 to assign resources (esp. people) so that we can tell when someone has been
 given three person's worth of work all due the same week.

 What are other people using that works well enough that whole teams are
 comfortable? The ideal tool probably helps us manage this by looking at
 stories, story grooming, backlogs, and sprints, but I could be wrong. Maybe
 other approaches work better at this level of expertise ... what works for
 other Museums and Archives? What makes it work?

 Thanks,
 ari

[MCN-L] Forwarding e-blasts

[Ari Davidow]

We have just been through our annual trauma of getting an invite out to our
annual luncheon. The problem lies with message forwarding. Here are some
truisms:

1. If you send the information in a JPEG, no matter what happens (assuming
that the image isn't filtered out), people can read it, and it will look as
you intended. They won't be able to cut and paste, they won't be able to
add it to their calendars, etc., but they can read and print it (assuming
that they aren't using a mobile device that has enough bandwidth and
doesn't have too small a screen).

2. If you point people to the forward to a friend button (which people
seem to miss, anyway), they discover that they are limited to 3 or 5
forwards/hour--an alleged anti-spam setting (I say alleged because many
more sends could be allowed per hour to meet human needs and still avoid
worries of spam)

3. If you encourage people to forward using their regular email client, it
may get mangled--and is especially likely to get mangled on forwards of
that forwarded email.

As opposed to these options, we have just a few big donors who want to
forward the e-vite to just a few dozen of their best friends, something
that cannot be usefully accommodated.

So, we have gone with option (3), encouraging people to include something
in their forwarding notes that to send this on, use the tell a friend'
link at the bottom of this email so that you are forwarding a fresh copy of
the message. We'll see what happens.

How do other people handle this?

ari

[MCN-L] Development Tchachkes

[Ari Davidow]

That's pretty much where I am--I can think of what to put on such a
tchatchke as a tchatchke, but the nicely printed program seems essential.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 1:34 AM, Amalyah Keshet [akeshet at imj.org.il] 
akeshet at imj.org.il wrote:

 I think a lot attendees, especially in the major donor category, would
 be quite put off if handed a program on a usb drive, which they then have
 to fiddle with -- and who says they are all going to shlep a laptop to a
 luncheon? -- instead of a printed program they can see at a glance, set
 down on the table next to their plate, and continue to glance at during the
 event.

 Why make the most basic of immediately-needed information opaque until
 installed on something?

 If you want to give them a usb drive load with other stuff they can fiddle
 with, look at, read, or not bother with later, as they choose -- that makes
 more sense.


 Amalyah Keshet



 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: 23 January, 2012 10:52 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: [MCN-L] Development Tchachkes

 We have an annual luncheon coming up. There is a contingent suggesting
 that we replace our program with a usb drive containing a PDF and perhaps
 some other miscellany.

 My initial response is, meh. As in, putting PDFs on some medium and
 handing them out is so last decade or so Nineties. Or, where is the
 'wow!?'

 But I'm a techie. What do I know about the world of major donors.

 Is there anyone who has attended an event at the last decade, or who has
 friends/family who have done the same, who got such a tchachke and was
 excited? Am I just totally missing the attraction?

 ari
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[MCN-L] scanning, ocr, and BagIt

[Ari Davidow]

Ah, so that's the ABBYY folks here at the MCN conf have been discussing. Thanks!


On Nov 18, 2011, at 7:50 AM, Pittsley, Christine Christine.Pittsley at 
ct.gov wrote:

 We started out a few years back using Omnipage and found it to be buggy and 
 unable to handle the large number of pages we needed to OCR. Omni would crash 
 after 100 pages and the whole process of recognizing pages had the be 
 restarted. There were also problems with the file size and image quality, I'm 
 sure it has improved in the years since.
 
 We evaluated the other OCR products available at the time we found ABBYY Fine 
 Reader to be the best. We now have several copies and we even used it to get 
 our old Minolta PS7000 book scanner working again. FineReader has the ability 
 to scan almost any format and can produce a variety of pdf types and sizes as 
 well as creating e-books in EPUB, FB2 and Kindle formats. FineReader 11 also 
 has one of the few OCR engines that recognizes Hebrew. FineReader 11 runs 
 about $169, $20 more than Omnipage, and frequently goes on sale. We got our 
 last copy for $99. Even at full price it is worth it.
 
 Hope this helps,
 
 Christine
 
 
 Christine Pittsley
 Digital Collections Technician
 Connecticut State Library
 231 Capitol Ave.
 Hartford Ct. 06106
 860-757-6517
 Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/CtStateLibrary
 Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/LibraryofCt
 Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctarchives/
 
 
 
 
 
 On Nov 17, 2011, at 3:38 PM, Ari Davidow wrote:
 
 I have some interesting questions (interesting -- they weren't
 interesting to me at all until the subjects came up as solve this right
 now here at work).
 
 1. We are moving soon from a large office to a small one. One result will
 be the discarding of tons of paper. If feasible, we would like to scan some
 selected quantities of that paper, ocr the result, and then save the
 (hopefully) integrated image/OCR pdf in our digital repository which does
 know how to search pdf. We have a Xerox 7120 that could, in theory, be
 combined with Nuance Omnipage (Pro).
 
 a. Has anyone used Nuance Omnipage? Is it good enough for, say, scanning
 contracts, correspondence and the like? Do you wind up with searchable PDFs
 or something else searchable?
 
 b. If not Xerox 7120/Omnipage, are there combinations of scanner and
 software that do affordable (can lease for a few months, or cost relatively
 little to purchase outright) double-sided, multipage scanning, such that we
 wind up with searchable PDFs or equivalent?
 
 2. Our digitial repository is Fedora. We are currently working on a batch
 ingester that uses the CDL-developed BagIt format. This would be cool,
 except that we have scads of data waiting to be ingested that were gathered
 in CSV files. Does anyone have experience with BagIt, and if so, do you
 know of a way to automate going from csv to BagIt?
 
 Many thanks,
 ari
 ATT1..txt
 
 
 
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[MCN-L] scanning, ocr, and BagIt

[Ari Davidow]

I have some interesting questions (interesting -- they weren't
interesting to me at all until the subjects came up as solve this right
now here at work).

1. We are moving soon from a large office to a small one. One result will
be the discarding of tons of paper. If feasible, we would like to scan some
selected quantities of that paper, ocr the result, and then save the
(hopefully) integrated image/OCR pdf in our digital repository which does
know how to search pdf. We have a Xerox 7120 that could, in theory, be
combined with Nuance Omnipage (Pro).

a. Has anyone used Nuance Omnipage? Is it good enough for, say, scanning
contracts, correspondence and the like? Do you wind up with searchable PDFs
or something else searchable?

b. If not Xerox 7120/Omnipage, are there combinations of scanner and
software that do affordable (can lease for a few months, or cost relatively
little to purchase outright) double-sided, multipage scanning, such that we
wind up with searchable PDFs or equivalent?

2. Our digitial repository is Fedora. We are currently working on a batch
ingester that uses the CDL-developed BagIt format. This would be cool,
except that we have scads of data waiting to be ingested that were gathered
in CSV files. Does anyone have experience with BagIt, and if so, do you
know of a way to automate going from csv to BagIt?

Many thanks,
ari

[MCN-L] FW: today is the centenary of Marshall McLuhan's birth

[Ari Davidow]

It may be time to reread my copy of Understanding Media. At the same time,
I feel about his work the way I feel about the Incredible String Band. It
had such a profound effect on how I see the world and shaped my interests
deeply, but when I go back I realize how far we have all come since then.
Yet, of the many changes since his time, surely the web and how we use it is
uncannily close to what he was seeing 50, 60 years ago.

Thanks for the reminder, Amalya.

ari

On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Amalyah Keshet [akeshet at imj.org.il] 
akeshet at imj.org.il wrote:

 A bit late (it was Thursday), but worth noting.

 Videos and more at:
 http://futureofthebook.org/blog/
 http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/electric-age/


 Amalyah Keshet
 Head of Image Resorces  Copyright Management
 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
 Chair, MCN IP SIG



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[MCN-L] [NE SIG] We're on for July 15 @ the MFA, Boston

[Ari Davidow]

I got a wonderful number of responses. By far, the preferred date is July
15th. No date was acceptable to all, so that's the one we are going with.

I am going to review initial program suggestions this week. If you have
ideas that you have not yet communicated with me at adavidow at jwa.org, now is
the time.

Preliminary details:
NE SIG Meet @ MFA, Boston, 10am - 4pm July 15, 2011, no fee for the meeting
itself (parking, transportation, lunch are yours)
Tour (probably of the new MFA wing) to follow the meeting

I will post these details and program suggestions to the NE SIG page at
mcn.edu, http://www.mcn.edu/northeast-sig and keep it updated as we go.

Please spread the word.

Thanks,
Ari

[MCN-L] [NE SIG] Inaugural SIG meeting to be held at MFA Boston - what dates work best?

[Ari Davidow]

Excellent. Thanks for the feedback.

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Parsell, David david.parsell at 
yale.eduwrote:

 Meeting date preference;

 #1  July 15
 #2  July 8
 #3  can't attend
 #4  can't attend

 Interested in how museums are using and expanding collection management
 systems to meet the on-line collection delivery and data harvesting needs of
 today's world.

 The Yale Center for British Art has tried to meet these needs, but we feel
 constrained by our collection management system that is not keeping up with
 the times.

 I'm away for the month of June, but could participate if the meeting is
 held July 15. The July 8 meeting is a little too soon to prepare.

 The regional sig is a great idea. I look forward to attending.


 David Parsell
 Systems Manager Collections Information and Access
 Yale Center for British Art
 david.parsell at yale.edu
 2034329603




 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 11:04 AM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: [MCN-L] [NE SIG] Inaugural SIG meeting to be held at MFA Boston -
 what dates work best?

 Hi all,

 I am pleased to announce that the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, which
 recently opened a stunning new wing, has offered to host the inaugural
 meeting of MCN's also-recently-opened Northeast SIG.



 Why have a regional SIG and a regional SIG meeting? Partly we do it because
 the annual MCN conference comes once a year, and partly because it is far
 easier to attend a local networking/programmatic event than to take several
 days off to fly elsewhere in the country. As tech professionals at cultural
 heritage organizations there are few opportunities to meet/network with
 peers, find out what they are doing, learn current best practices, and
 otherwise catch up on what happens outside our local day-to-day experiences.


 We are currently putting together a program for the day, but have
 tentatively identified four dates in June or July (see below), each on a
 Friday, for a program that is tentatively scheduled to run from 10am to 4pm,
 followed by a tour of the MFA's new wing (or other MFA tour, tbd).


 Your mission, at the moment, is to respond to me asap:


   - indicating which dates work for you, ordered by preference, by this
   Friday, May 20;
Friday, June 10
Friday, June 17
Friday, July 8
Friday, July 15
   - along with any program ideas/preferences - especially areas where you
   would like to participate;
   - help spread the word.

 Although most regional events are closed to everyone but MCN members, we'd
 like this one to be open. Next year, we may be more stringent, but this year
 is for fun. If you are a techie at a Museum, Archive, Library, or other
 cultural heritage institution, we'd like to invite you to participate and to
 attend.


 Many thanks, and I hope to see you all soon at our first NE SIG meet-up,

 Ari Davidow

 adavidow at jwa.org
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[MCN-L] [NE SIG] Inaugural SIG meeting to be held at MFA Boston - what dates work best?

[Ari Davidow]

Hi all,

I am pleased to announce that the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, which
recently opened a stunning new wing, has offered to host the inaugural
meeting of MCN's also-recently-opened Northeast SIG.



Why have a regional SIG and a regional SIG meeting? Partly we do it because
the annual MCN conference comes once a year, and partly because it is far
easier to attend a local networking/programmatic event than to take several
days off to fly elsewhere in the country. As tech professionals at cultural
heritage organizations there are few opportunities to meet/network with
peers, find out what they are doing, learn current best practices, and
otherwise catch up on what happens outside our local day-to-day
experiences.


We are currently putting together a program for the day, but have
tentatively identified four dates in June or July (see below), each on a
Friday, for a program that is tentatively scheduled to run from 10am to 4pm,
followed by a tour of the MFA's new wing (or other MFA tour, tbd).


Your mission, at the moment, is to respond to me asap:


   - indicating which dates work for you, ordered by preference, by this
   Friday, May 20;
Friday, June 10
Friday, June 17
Friday, July 8
Friday, July 15
   - along with any program ideas/preferences - especially areas where you
   would like to participate;
   - help spread the word.

Although most regional events are closed to everyone but MCN members, we'd
like this one to be open. Next year, we may be more stringent, but this year
is for fun. If you are a techie at a Museum, Archive, Library, or other
cultural heritage institution, we'd like to invite you to participate and to
attend.


Many thanks, and I hope to see you all soon at our first NE SIG meet-up,

Ari Davidow

adavidow at jwa.org

[MCN-L] institutional image database

[Ari Davidow]

The Magnes has put a lot of material up on Flickr, as has the Jewish Women's
Archive which is also part of Flickr Commons. In general, use of Flickr has
been good for exposing images and drawing in more requests for licensing.
But, as you note, that is a way of improving access to the images--doesn't
substitute for a DAM or repository--although DuraCloud may offer a simpler
path to cloud-based repositories.

ari

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Travis Fullerton 
Tfullerton at vmfa.state.va.us wrote:

 There has been some interesting responses on this topic and it seems most
 institutions are using an in-house DAMs. I am wondering if anyone has
 explored online options for storage and distribution? Free services like
 Flickr, or pay services like Smugmug? Ideally the archive would still
 reside
 in a DAMs, but an online option might open up access and availability.
 Anyone?

 -Travis


 On 4/18/11 4:57 PM, SARAH PUCKITT visionary62000 at yahoo.com wrote:

  Does anyone currently use a database for keeping track of the various
 photos a
  museum takes/saves of its events, volunteers, programs, etc. If so, what
 do
  you
  use?
 
  Sarah Puckitt
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[MCN-L] Backup/Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity the Cloud

[Ari Davidow]

You know, there is nothing inherent in using cloud storage for a known
quantity of data increasing at a predictable rate that necessarily provides
more security, and it may cost more. You describe the sort of situation
where, assuming that you have the infrastructure to support the storage
facility, you may be better off building your own redundant facility as did
the Boston TV station WGBH (Courtney Michael, courtney_michael at wgbh.org ,
might be a good contact), or as some schools (Columbia is one--don't
remember who else is involved) in the Northeast have done.

Likewise, Boston College is involved in an archives preservation effort
through MetaArchive.org with half a dozen institutions that share redundant
data centers among themselves. They do use the cloud to host the
coordinating facility, for convenience, but the data centers are all pretty
conventional. Where small organizations such as mine pay about
$1.80/GB/year, the BU's consortium is paying about $1/GB/year.  Bill
Donovan, BC's Digital Preservation Manager, is a good contact person -
bill.donovan at bc.edu donovawf at bc.edu. The basic MetaArchive mantra is:
LOCKSS software is used to operate a network of 'preservation servers'; All
collections replicated on 6+ caches at geographically dispersed
locations; Preservation, not just back-ups.

Clouds, public or private, are most useful when you need to quickly
provision server services, or when bandwidth/data needs may change rapidly.
(This can include the services related to more stable systems; i.e., look at
the cloud-based solution artbabble.org sets up to process video as it is
submitted.)

Hope this helps,
ari

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Ballate, Leo lballate at sfmoma.org wrote:

 Greetings to all,

 SFMOMA is planning a $500m building and endowment expansion during the next
 four to five years. This expansion will involve, among other things,  a
 significant construction project as well as  temporary administrative
 offices and off site art storage facilities. In the context of this
 expansion,  we are proposing a private cloud solution in Sacramento (Raging
 Wire) for backup/disaster recovery and business continuity. Currently SFMOMA
 has about 20TB of data (combination of file system, virtual machines,
 databases, etc.) which is growing exponentially. I was wondering if any of
 you are using cloud based services for backup? If so, which service
 providers are you using?

 If you do use a cloud based service for backup, how does the service work
 with your disaster recovery and business continuity strategy (RTO, RPO)?
 Additionally, what is the pricing model for the services you use and what
 kind of bandwidth does it require?

 I realize this is a fairly broad inquiry, but any information you can pass
 on would be extremely useful for our planning. Thanks in advance for your
 feedback.

 Best,
 Leo Ballate
 IT Director
 SFMOMA
 151 Third Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
 tel: 415-357-4145
 fax: 415-947-1145
 www.sfmoma.org

 Check out our current podcast feature at http://www.sfmoma.org/podcasts
 and Explore Modern Art at http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/explore





 The information contained in this electronic mail message (including any
 attachments) is confidential information that may be covered by the
 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 USC Sections 2510-2521, intended
 only for the use of the individual or entity named above, and may be
 privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you
 are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this
 communication, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly
 prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please
 immediately notify me and delete the original message. Thank you.

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[MCN-L] COPPA resources/experts?

[Ari Davidow]

I asked this question more generally a couple of months ago, but have made
little headway since.

Our organization is working on an online program with Tweens (11-13 year
olds). We know that the kids will want to share some of what they do with
others. We also know that kids will want others to be able to log in to our
site to see/comment on their projects. What we aren't yet comfortable with
is what the limits are in terms of COPPA.

Our starting point was that the law restricts gathering personal info on
anyone under 13 and using that for marketing (and presumably any other
non-security-related purpose). No problem. Kids these ages (13) also can't
legally have accounts on Facebook and the like (which isn't to say that none
do, but that we can't provide direct affordances to connect the two).

So, what are reasonable ways to enable kids to share their projects (things
they create on our website, which in our case would consist of media albums
and blog posts) with people they trust and what burden is on us to keep what
from the general public?

Anyone have experience in this area? Know of good resources?

ari

[MCN-L] COPPA resources/experts?

[Ari Davidow]

thanks, Zoe,

That's what I would think, but the devil may be in the details--some of the
established parental permission routes (e.g., email) are so easily spoofed
that this my be more complicated than we'd like.

ari

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Zo? Salditch zoe.salditch at gmail.comwrote:

 Hello Ari,

 I'm not an expert on COPPA (learned a little about it through a policy
 course back in grad school). As long as you don't publish/share the kids
 personal info and secure the parents permission you should be fine. It's
 important that you make the privacy policy easily available and very
 prominent on your site as well.

 Have you seen either of this site?

 http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus51-you-your-privacy-policy-and-coppa-how-comply-childrens-online-privacy-protection-act

 A reasonable solution to enable sharing for these kids is to provide a link
 to their albums/blogs from your site to share on their social networking
 sites or personal blog or wherever. If you have a developer on staff they
 can create fancier apps that can be embedded into other sites as well. There
 shouldn't be anything illegal about that.

 If you are still in doubt, it's never a bad idea to consult with a lawyer.

 Hope this helps!


 ---
 Zo? Salditch

[MCN-L] IP and COPPA

[Ari Davidow]

We're launching a project in a few months that will involve tweens - kids
ranging from 11-13.

1. The age of the participants puts us square into COPPA territory. We'd
like not only to provide a secure environment for the kids, but to make sure
we do it according to COPPA. Does anyone have a favorite site walking us
through dos/don'ts, beyond just reviewing the law a few times?

2. If one of the kids uploads an image for her private use (since these are
tweens, there is no such thing as public use on this site, although there
will be ways for parents, friends, family to get viewing privs), how heavy
do we need to be about IP? We'll start off making sure that kids and their
parents are aware that on the web is not the same as free for you to
appropriate and remix as you choose, but we don't want to police IP
unnecessarily (we sure as heck want to be sure we *are* policing as needed,
of course).

3. If a kid uploads work that she/he has created--image or video,
usually--does COPPA provide any means of sharing those items, presuming
parental permission in the specific, with the wider world, even, dare I say
it, unto sharing on Facebook (where, legally, none of these kids have
accounts; practically, if our focus groups are to be believed, most do).

Thanks! It's another brave new world
ari

[MCN-L] Digital recorder for teacher/classroom use

[Ari Davidow]

The TechSoup bundle is for two older Flip cameras. When we looked into it,
we realized that we wanted something more recent.

The Flip that we did get is =great=. Easily records two hours of video,
totally simple to use, saves in a reasonably high-res mp4 format. I recently
took it on a trip where on one night I recorded a live band, and at other
times got several hours of my mother reminiscing. Sweet.

For audio recorders, I echo those who note that recent iPod Touches, along
with most smart phones, come with audio and video recording ability. That's
a reasonable place to start. There are a host of excellent audio devices
used by oral historians, etc. A great site to read reviews is Jay Allison's
transom.org. He covers everything from apps for iPhones to wonderful
devices like the recent Marantz audio recorders, Edirols, and the like.

ari

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:38 PM, dlewisarfm at aol.com wrote:


  I've never worked with the myself -- but I've head GREAT things about the
 ease and usability of the Flip Video Cameras.   and Tech Soup is
 offering a two-for bundle, -- two cameras for $175 (normally they're about
 $150 each).

 See:
 http://home.techsoup.org/stock/pages/category.aspx?category=FlipVideo




 - David -
 David Lewis, Curator
 Aurora Regional Fire Museum
 www.AuroraRegionalFireMuseum.org




 -Original Message-
 From: James Keeline keeline at yahoo.com
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv mcn-l at mcn.edu
 Sent: Wed, Jan 5, 2011 12:05 pm
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Digital recorder for teacher/classroom use


 Last July my wife and I organized and hosted a successful convention to

 celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Tom Swift series of books about a
 young

 inventor.  The first five stories were published in 1910 and since that
 year

 there have been 105 books in five series.  The first three of these series
 were

 produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, also responsible for Nancy Drew and
 the

 Hardy Boys among many others.



 As part of this convention we produced two live performances based on a
 book

 from each of the first two series.  Tom Swift and His Airship was from 1910
 and

 public domain.  Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X was from 1961 and
 in the



 public domain because the owner failed to renew the copyright.  The shows
 had

 voice actors from San Diego's WriteOutLoud (http://writeoutloudsd.com) and
 the

 script, direction, and sound effects were accomplished by the talented and

 resourceful Scott Paulson (http://ScottPaulson.info).





 Scott engages in performances like these to provide sound effects for stage

 performances like the recent It's a Wonderful Life at the Cygnet Theatre in
 Old

 Town San Diego for the Christmas season.  In this version, the performance
 is a

 1940s-era radio show with a live audience, voice actors who step up to the

 vintage-looking microphones, and Scott as sound effects artist on the side
 of

 the stage.



 He has also provided sound effects and movies for silent films through his
 Teeny



 Tiny Pit Orchestra.  Recently these have been shown at New Village Arts in

 Carlsbad in the northern part of San Diego county.  In these, as with many
 of

 his performances, he gets the audience involved by passing out noise makers
 and

 then gives direction to how and when to use them in the program.  Some of
 these

 are cheap items which can be given away and others are vintage sound
 machines

 that he collects at the end of the performance.  In our Tom Swift and His

 Airship show, bubble wrap was used for gunshots and cellophane for
 crackling

 fire.  As usual, he also had machines that made ratchet sounds and other
 devices



 for use in the program.



 Here are a few clips to give an idea of how this worked:



 2008 clip about Scott discussing sound effects devices

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szyht9jc8PE



 Tom Swift and His Airship performance at UCSD library

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88EuLHIfWg



 The performances of Airship and Visitor from Planet X were highlights of
 our

 convention.



 Looking at your project, it appears that you initially asked for an audio

 recorder to gather the sounds and build your performance.  Of course, many

 phones, including the iPhone, come with voice recorder apps which are
 fairly

 effective and save files in .WAV format.  This is useful because it is not

 compressed at this stage and easier to edit with free tools like Audacity.



 Another device I own which could work in this fashion is a voice recorder.
  Mine



 is an RCA model number RP5030A.  It was purchased at Fry's Electronics some

 years ago so I don't know what the current offerings are.  It also stores
 audio

 in .WAV format.  For my purposes, one of the key features is that the USB
 plug

 that connects to the computer.  It shows up as a USB mass storage device on
 my

 computer (Mac) so I can simply copy the files over and then use them in an

 editing program like iMovie or 

[MCN-L] Research on whether or not engagement matters?

[Ari Davidow]

We're working on a grant proposal for a new project that facilitates
online collecting using mobile devices.

Has anyone done research, or is anyone aware of research that points
to whether/the degree to which getting people to actively use things,
or contribute new items, improves engagement and/or longer-term
interest/commitment? Intuitively, this would seem to be the case, but
if there is anything worth citing, I would love to explore said report
or study and cite if it makes sense.

ari

[MCN-L] Anyone else using DonorPerfect for CRM/Gift Management?

[Ari Davidow]

Are we the only people who are having very spotty results with
DonorPerfect support? When they are good, they are very good. Overall,
I suspect that we could do a lot with the product. But the
documentation is not adequate, and we can go weeks at a time with
nobody responding as support tickets pile up. I cannot build a
long-term relationship this way. I am really tired of paying someone
to do work she can't do because there is nobody on the DP side
answering questions or helping figure out bugs.

Ari

[MCN-L] Northeast SIG-in-formation ready to go

[Ari Davidow]

I am pleased to report, after a lively lunch this afternoon, several
of us have agreed that forming a new location-based SIG catering to a
broad definition of US northeast (going as south as philadelphia,
and absolutely including upstate NY and New England). The goal would
be to hold 1-2 regional gatherings that are focused on subjects like
storage and new LAM projects of interest.

I hope to follow up with additional emails to NE MCN members after
this conference, but in the meantime, if you are interested in helping
form the group and plan a first event (spring? summer? 2011), please
contact me.

ari

[MCN-L] slides from today's Project Management workshop

[Ari Davidow]

are now online at http://www.slideshare.net/aridavidow/adavidow-projmgm

Many thanks to all attendees.

ari

[MCN-L] CMSs, DAMs, and preservation tools

[Ari Davidow]

I kind of understand this subject, but, embarrassingly, I'm not sure I
know it well enough to speak accurately about the difference between
Collection Management Systems (CollectionSpace, et al), Digital Asset
Management systems, and digital repositories (fedora, dspace, et al).

Part of my confusion stems from the fact that my cultural heritage
experience is at a digital-only archive, so there are many issues that
we miss:

1. Collection Management Systems - systems to manage everything from
acquisition history/provenance to physical location and digital
representations of an institution's cultural heritage assets. Most
ColMS systems seem to assume collections that are primarily physical?

2. Digital Asset System - often the digital equivalent of the ColMS,
above? A way for tracking not just the primary high res digital
representation of an image (or video), but the derivative assets--web
versions of these media, etc.

3. Digital Repository - Effectively a DAS that is designed to enable
preservation action over decades, so there is the same sort of
tracking mechanism (although perhaps without the ties to the original
physical media, where such exist?) covering provenance, general
taxonomic and preservation metdata, etc.

None of these systems necessarily connect to a CMS (content Management
System), although several of them offer web components so that if you
have the main asset management system you often have the tools to
manage the appearance of those assets publicly online.

The reason all of this matters is when it comes to small archives,
such as my own, with limited resources. What are we generally missing
if we connected Fedora to Drupal (repository and web content
management)? Do we absolutely need the ColMS or DAS? What
functionality do we lose? How are other organizations tackling this
issue?

Yet another thing to discuss at MCN.

ari

[MCN-L] Omeka vs. DSpace

[Ari Davidow]

I can't imagine thinking of Omeka as a repository or archiving
tool--it is a neat way of getting digital assets online quickly with
limited browsability and limited metadata with no notable asset
management tools and certainly no long-term preservation or
repository-ish capabilities.

 My two cents.

ari

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Susan Fishman-Armstrong
sfishman at westga.edu wrote:
 We are an archaeological repository, with primarily collections acquired
 through Cultural Resource Management projects. ?We are currently at the
 beginning of creating a digital collection. ?We have received funds to
 create a digital archive of one of our larger collections. ?We will be
 scanning photos, documents, and 3d images for researchers and the public to
 use. ?The long-term goal is to use this new digital database for the rest of
 our collections after this project is completed, so I am thinking in terms
 of the future.

 I was wondering if anyone would be able to give any advice or your
 preference of using Omeka vs. DSpace for management of digital collections
 and posting it on the web? ?Does anyone know or have an example site we
 could look at?

 Thanks,

 Susie

 +
 Susie Fishman-Armstrong
 Laboratory Coordinator
 Antonio J. Waring, Jr. Archaeological Laboratory
 University of West Georgia
 Carrollton, GA 30118

 678-839-6303 (office)
 678-839-6306 (fax)
 www.westga.edu/~ajwlab/





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[MCN-L] Best YouTube practices

[Ari Davidow]

We have been putting video up on YouTube this past year. Our channel
consists primarily of those uploads, along with some favorited
fellow-traveler videos.

Things are at the point where it seems like it would be good to do
more linkages between some of the videos--put them into the equivalent
of flickr sets or collections, for instance. Does YouTube have such
tools (beyond the use of folksonomic tagging, which I assume matters,
but can also be pretty generic)? I am thinking about a way to link
several videos from one concert, or conference, or department, or
whatever.

While I am at it, does YouTube have forums for the people uploading
video--the equivalent of the flickr forums? I haven't found such so
far, but I starting at no knowledge.

ari

[MCN-L] YouTube video linking

[Ari Davidow]

Here's what I don't get. That video about using annotation claims to
be part of a series. I can't find the series from the page on which
that video appears on YouTube. I was hoping that there is a more
obvious way to tie things together!

ari

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Stephanie Weaver
sweaver at experienceology.com wrote:
 Ari,
 You'll want to begin using the annotations feature in YouTube.
 Mashable featured a great series on this a while back. Here's one I
 bookmarked:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9lgh-ENzSsannotation_id=annotation_221423feature=iv

 Best,


 Stephanie Weaver
 Visitor experience consultant
 experienceology: Because happy visitors return.
 San Diego, CA
 Ph/Fax: ? 619-284-5473
 Cell: ? ? ? ?619-279-6779
 E-news: ? http://www.experienceology.com/newsletter/

 For information on our book, blog, podcast, upcoming classes, and e-
 news, visit www.experienceology.com or follow me on twitter.com/
 experienceology. See samples of my classes here: 
 www.youtube.com/experienceology
 . Watch the free archived version of my class on the visitor
 experience here: http://bit.ly/NlunE

 Upcoming presentations:
 Heard Museum  Phoenix Zoo: October 6, 2010
 Western Museums Association: October 17-20, 2010

 Past presentations:
 Downey City Library: August 2010
 AAM Online conference: June 2010
 American Association of Museums: May 2010
 Tijuana Estuary docent training: April 2010
 Ass'n of Partners for Public Lands: February 2010
 UCLA Extension: January 2010

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[MCN-L] archival video format(s)

[Ari Davidow]

We have a lot of video, original created using a miniDV camera, that
we downloaded to .avi files and are archiving in that format.

We recently did a project where the videographer, using a couple of
the new HD cameras (sony Z7U, Z1U) and working on Mac hardware is
getting the downloads in .mov format. She is asking whether she should
save those raw .mov files for our archive, or process them into
ProRes files (still a .mov format?) or what? Conversion to .avi
sounds either unfamiliar or potentially just taking the time to
exchange one wrapper format for another.

This is a time when HD formats are pretty up in the air. My question
is how we want to store this video so that 10 years from now we can
re-edit it and/or regenerate our web files. What are current best
practices or thoughts?

Many thanks,
Ari

[MCN-L] rss feeds today

[Ari Davidow]

Hi Richard,

In the end, the chorus of people who preferred to have the entire post
in the RSS feed was so strong, primarily in the use case you describe
(reading on mobile devices), and the prevalence of using the entire
post so common, that we're just going that route.

I think that eventually we'll have a summary of what is happening on
jwa.org feed, which will include synopsized blog posts, but for now,
it seems pretty clear that for most people there is a very strong
preference for the entire post, html, image and all, via rss.

This may speak in part to how poorly we (and most people) make our
sites accessible via mobile devices, but clearly there is more going
on.

Many thanks to everyone who responded.
ari

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Richard Urban rjurban at illinois.edu wrote:
 Hi Ari,

 This is just my personal opinion, but may be informative.

 I do most of my blog reading these days in little snippets of off-time via my 
 iPhone, while on or waiting for the bus, etc. ? ?What I've noticed is that I 
 tend to stick to blogs with complete texts on my iPhone and save blogs with 
 truncated posts for reading on my computer. ? I find that on my iPhone 
 switching in and out of my Google Reader view is too much of a hassle, 
 especially if I have to do this for every post on a particular feed. ?I'd 
 prefer to stay in the accordion interface that GReader provides, as I find it 
 a more efficient way of reading posts from lots of different blogs. ?In 
 several cases, I have blogs organized as a group and don't read them 
 individually. I also share posts with a close-knit group of friends on Google 
 Reader, ?which has it's own sharing features that are different than the ones 
 included on the bottom of JWA posts.

 Maybe just me...I wonder if there are any good studies out there about blog 
 reading habits on mobile vs. non-mobile devices.
 Is there any way to configure Feedburner to allow users to select short vs. 
 long posts? ? From my perspective that would be a better solution than 
 limiting them to one choice.

 Richard
 rjurban at illinois.edu



 On Aug 25, 2010, at 3:34 PM, Ari Davidow wrote:

 I just got a complaint from someone about our truncated RSS feed.
 Back in the day, we dutifully read the RSS 2.0 spec and put just a
 synopsis, or the first part of a post, into the feed.

 I do note that I am seeing lots of posts where the whole thing has
 made its way into the RSS. I'm not fond of it--I liked being able to
 treat RSS more like a TOC and not have to wade through post-length
 text in which I wasn't interested. But I'm also old enough to pass as
 fuddy-duddy.

 What are other people doing? Just put it all into RSS? Are you
 including HTML markup as well, or still sticking to plain text? Does
 it break anything?

 thanks,
 ari
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[MCN-L] rss feeds today

[Ari Davidow]

Well, it's the next phase of an ongoing experiment. If you are already
subscribed to our feed from http://jwablog.jwa.org
(http://feeds.feedburner.com/JWAblog) then you are now getting the
whole feed. If you want to check it out, the subscription address is
http://feeds.feedburner.com/JWAblog

Enjoy, and many thanks for the feedback
ari

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Hoover, Joseph Joseph.Hoover at mnhs.org 
wrote:
 I have to agree. I do most of my blog reading from my iPhone on bus rides 
 back and forth to work. I general skip blogs that are truncated, since 
 reading the complete post requires me to switch over to a web browser and 
 leave the RSS reader app. However, that is a personal reading habit, and I 
 agree with Richard's thoughts. I wonder if any institutions have set up blogs 
 with truncated posts and blogs with complete texts and have done a comparison 
 of mobile traffic of both.



 Joe Hoover

 Digital Technology Outreach Specialist

 Minnesota Historical Society

 Historic Preservation Department

 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. 55102

 (651) 259-3461

 joe.hoover at mnhs.org

 www.mnhs.org/lhs



 -Original Message-
 From: Richard Urban [mailto:rjurban at illinois.edu]
 Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:57 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] rss feeds today



 Hi Ari,



 This is just my personal opinion, but may be informative.



 I do most of my blog reading these days in little snippets of off-time via my 
 iPhone, while on or waiting for the bus, etc. ? ?What I've noticed is that I 
 tend to stick to blogs with complete texts on my iPhone and save blogs with 
 truncated posts for reading on my computer. ? I find that on my iPhone 
 switching in and out of my Google Reader view is too much of a hassle, 
 especially if I have to do this for every post on a particular feed. ?I'd 
 prefer to stay in the accordion interface that GReader provides, as I find it 
 a more efficient way of reading posts from lots of different blogs. ?In 
 several cases, I have blogs organized as a group and don't read them 
 individually. I also share posts with a close-knit group of friends on Google 
 Reader, ?which has it's own sharing features that are different than the ones 
 included on the bottom of JWA posts.



 Maybe just me...I wonder if there are any good studies out there about blog 
 reading habits on mobile vs. non-mobile devices.

 Is there any way to configure Feedburner to allow users to select short vs. 
 long posts? ? From my perspective that would be a better solution than 
 limiting them to one choice.



 Richard

 rjurban at illinois.edu







 On Aug 25, 2010, at 3:34 PM, Ari Davidow wrote:



 I just got a complaint from someone about our truncated RSS feed.

 Back in the day, we dutifully read the RSS 2.0 spec and put just a

 synopsis, or the first part of a post, into the feed.



 I do note that I am seeing lots of posts where the whole thing has

 made its way into the RSS. I'm not fond of it--I liked being able to

 treat RSS more like a TOC and not have to wade through post-length

 text in which I wasn't interested. But I'm also old enough to pass as

 fuddy-duddy.



 What are other people doing? Just put it all into RSS? Are you

 including HTML markup as well, or still sticking to plain text? Does

 it break anything?



 thanks,

 ari

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[MCN-L] sms message services?

[Ari Davidow]

I am convinced that we have some content that would be of interest to
some of our members via sms. It's not a big deal, but it could be fun.
At the same time, I can't imagine figuring out how to set up something
that would handle subscribing/unsubscribing/changing something this
far outside of our expertise for this little return. I see my kids
texting back and forth all the time, but nobody talks about
subscribing to such a service (in my very limited window of
experience).

1. Are other people using SMS to stay in touch with
members/subscribers? What are your experiences?
2. Are there hosted services that will handle the sub/unsub/change
issues, or do you make it part of your general email/membership
experience?

Thanks,
ari

[MCN-L] Favorite Web 2.0 archives

[Ari Davidow]

I have been on a cumudgeonly tear about Web 1.0 archives--you know
the sites--they are heaven for one variety of traditional archivist
who delights that nothing has changed except that the items can be
vaguely browsed via the web. Sometimes you get search or even the
ability to look within date ranges.

But that isn't the sort of site that puts the digital artifacts into
people's hands, that helps people discover and explore stuff they
didn't know they were interested in.

A simple, non-archival web 2.0 interface might resemble something we
did for our online encyclopedia: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia where we
used tag clouds and javascript and other tricks to make (we hope)
discovery and exploration fun and natural.

The Smithsonian starts to do this on an archival level at sites like
http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/

If you were looking at a web 2.0 archival site that seems to invite
use, reuse, and general discovery/engagement, what site(s) would you
point to? What makes them work for you?

ari

[MCN-L] Google Apps

[Ari Davidow]

 After using Google Apps and Google Docs for a couple of weeks on a
 specific project, I have to ask:  Why on earth would anyone ever again
 spend a dime on Microsoft Office?

Well, one response is that we have MS Office and everyone knows how to
use it. Staff here have several times tried working with Google Apps
(and with Zoho Apps, which seem better-featured and less buggy) and
they hate 'em all. Hate the way the hosted apps track changes, hate
the way they handle comments. This isn't true of all staff, but of
enough, that this is still not an option for us.

For us, at least, until hosted applications replace the way we
currently do things with either a close functional equivalent, or
something that people generally like better (and find easy to learn),
it's still an ideal; not yet a realistic change.

ari

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Stanley Smith ssmith at getty.edu wrote:



 Stanley Smith
 Manager, Imaging Services
 J. Paul Getty Museum
 1200 Getty Center Drive, ?Suite 1000
 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1687
 (310) 440-7286



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[MCN-L] Switching to Gmail

[Ari Davidow]

And imagine never thinking about archiving (and
 retrieving archived messages!) spam, or user admin

This raises some interesting red flags. There is no SOA such that
storage on Google Gmail or Apps would constitute appropriate archiving
for SOX or other legal compliance issues. If you have no liabilities
looking ahead, then you are okay; if not, you still need some method
of archiving and preserving access to this stuff.

ari

[MCN-L] Project management systems for inter-organizational cooperation

[Ari Davidow]

Several people have mentioned Huddle to me - would love to hear from
people using it. It does sound good.

I have personally found Google Groups to be an even klunkier (who'da
thunk?) Yahoo groups - not my idea of group project management.

Our last couple of projects used Redmine (www.redmine.org) which
includes some decent project management tools, a wiki, files area, and
hooks to subversion.

We have also looked hard at www.zoho.com for all sorts of
collaborative work. Those parts we have tested (docs, spreadsheet)
have been more comfortable and less buggy than Google Docs. I'm
looking for an excuse to try out the MS Project hosted analog, too.
Very promising.

Hope this helps,
Ari Davidow

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 2:04 AM, Hanan Cohen hanan at mada.org.il wrote:
 Hello,

 We at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem are taking part in a
 number of international projects.

 Managing and participating in these projects using Email is becoming
 hard.

 We are considering two solutions - Google Groups (with other Google
 tools) and http://huddle.net

 Both have pros and cons.

 If any of you is using those tools for this purpose or use other tools,
 we would love to hear your opinions.

 Thanks,

 Hanan Cohen
 Webmaster
 Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem
 www.mada.org.il - Facebook - Twitter - YouTube
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[MCN-L] Small Museum SIG - report on the conference SIG meeting

[Ari Davidow]

In keeping with the dimunitive size of our organizations, the Small
Museum SIG meeting at MCN was likewise small. Howard Goldstein and I
were there to present on the findings from our recent survey about the
preservation needs of small museums, a group we tend to refer to as
the long tail of cultural heritage.

Some attendees talked about the extreme small budgets and difficulty
in just getting software that can be used to manage collections and to
begin a digitization project. I would guess that this issue affects
small museums and archives significantly more than other
organizations.

We also talked about the DuraSpace Small Archives solution community
on which Howard and I have been working with staff from the former
DSpace and Fedora communities (now known as Duraspace).

I think what we concluded is that it is critical is not just to come
up with simpler ways to install and maintain Fedora by non-technical
people, but that we need a Fedora installation which comes with a
light-weight digital asset management system, or better yet, gives you
the option of plugging in to existing systems (and into existing
content and collection management systems).

One possible collaboration moving this idea forward came from
conversation with Rich Cherry, of San Diego's Balboa Park consortium.
The consortium represents a diverse collection of 17 cultural heritage
organization and offers an interesting, potentially productive test
bed from which to implement, test, document, and make available
simplified Fedora installation with connectors to common DAM systems.
It also offers an opportunity to look at what a hosted solution might
offer--can one installation of Fedora support the needs of 17 diverse
organizations, each with its own content models, dissemination needs,
preservation plans, and front end. I think this is the sort of
situation that Fedora was designed for. It will be fun exploring this
further.

We did not adequately discuss how to stay in touch as small museums
throughout the year, other than to encourage all SIG members to make
use of the MCN-L list. I will turn further discussion on this issue
over to our leader, David Farrell.

Before I do so, I think that MCN as an organization may want to
consider ways to do better outreach to Small Museums--these are the
organizations with the fewest resources, and ones that both benefit
significantly from networking with peers and offer many of the
innovative ideas (we've been doing more with less since our
founding) from which other organizations can learn.

Many thanks to all SIG members, and in particular, attendees at this
year's meeting,
Ari Davidow

[MCN-L] last reminder - small museum sig meeting 12:45

[Ari Davidow]

On top of the usual session about Small Museum concerns, Howard
Goldstein will be presenting the results of the Fedora Commons survey
and small archives. Our concern? What needs to be done to ensure that
this critical, long tail of cultural heritage, gets preserved, and
that we ensure long-term access to our holdings? Can we build a
collaborative effort to move forward?

Bring your lunches, and we'll see everyone at 12:45 pm in Weidler/Halsey.

ari

[MCN-L] New England SIG-in-formation - meeting today, noon, Weidler/Halsey

[Ari Davidow]

Bring lunch and join us to share perspectives and talk about setting
up a New England SIG. Goal: one or two regional meetings during the
year and opportunities for collaboration.

ari

[MCN-L] slides from Project Management workshop at mcn2009

[Ari Davidow]

I have uploaded the slides from this morning's project management
workshop, Project Management on one foot to slideshare. They are
also tagged mcn2009.

http://www.slideshare.net/aridavidow/project-management-on-one-foot

Many thanks to everyone who attended.

ari

[MCN-L] Moving Drupal to the Cloud PDF now on slideshare #mcn2009

[Ari Davidow]

Charles Moad's excellent PDF on how to install Drupal on AWS is now on
Slideshare and available for downloading:
http://www.slideshare.net/aridavidow/moving-drupal-to-the-cloud

We'll have the slides from the workshop up later tonight, all going well.

ari

[MCN-L] Results from pres. survey at the Small Museum SIG lunch, Friday, Nov 12, 12:45-2pm, MCN2009

[Ari Davidow]

We have, I think, a special treat for the Small Museum SIG at MCN.
People who attended MCN last year may remember Howard Goldstein and I
on a panel talking about repository solutions for small archives and
museums. In the intervening time, we have been working with the Fedora
Commons/Duraspace folks on a solution community to address these
issues:

http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Small+Archives

Most recently, we conducted a survey of small archives and museums to
get a sense of who is trying to doing what with their repositories and
how such a community could best support such efforts.

We will be presenting the results of that survey as part of the agenda
for the Small Museum SIG lunch, on Friday, Nov 12, from 12:45-2:00pm -
meeting location to be announced soon.

We look forward to seeing everyone from Small Museums, or who is
interested in tools and support to enable long-term access and
preservation for such institutions. We are, as I enjoy pointing out,
the long tail of cultural heritage.

ari

[MCN-L] Interest in a northeast SIG at MCN? Let's meet Thursday, 12:15-1:30 in Portland

[Ari Davidow]

These are times when collaboration is important. MCN currently hosts
three place-related SIGs--one in Taiwan, and two in California.

Given the cultural density of the northeast, and the amount of really
amazing work being done here, I would like to propose a lunch meeting
of all those interested in such a SIG at MCN, at the same time as the
other location-oriented SIGs, Thursday, at 12:15-1:30. If you will be
at MCN 2009 and are interested in joining us, do chime in here or
email me privately. Most important, keep an eye on the message boards
at the conference as we figure out a place to meet.

It will be a pleasure not to go a whole year between seeing colleagues
in New England and New York. Let's share notes and talk about it a
week from today at MCN.

I should also note that it is still possible to register for the
conference if you are not already signed up to attend -
http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp?subkey=2424

See ya'll in Portland,
Ari Davidow

[MCN-L] Taiwan chapter - no mere SIG

[Ari Davidow]

My oops.

A few minutes ago I posted to the list suggesting that those of us in
the northeast who are interested in forming a SIG should meet this
coming Thursday at 12:15 at MCN.

Without thinking, I referring to the Taiwan chapter of MCN as a SIG.
My apologies for that; it is, of course, MCN's one international
chapter, after having started out as a SIG some years ago. To anyone
from the Taiwan chapter who saw the message, I want to apologize.

I will try not to make the same mistake again,

Looking forward to seeing everyone this coming week in Portland,
Ari

[MCN-L] Take 2: Preservation Survey - DuraSpace Small Archives Group

[Ari Davidow]

I apologize. I sent this e-amil out on Wednesday announcing a survey,
and did not have the sense to include a link to the actual survey. Let
me try again.
-

Small archives represent the long tail of cultural heritage. Most of
us are coping with inadequate resources available for addressing our
primary missions, and lack the time, staff, skills, and other
resources to address long-term access to that cultural heritage. This
includes the challenge of locating and securing tools and resources to
address the long-term preservation required to assure that access.

The mission of the DuraSpace Small Archives Group is to address these
needs. As a community, not only can we further preservation access and
foster knowledge ?sharing, but we can collaborate. This community is
intended for the thousands of small cultural heritage organizations
who lack resources to implement a solution on their own. For most of
us, a ?small archive? is a cultural heritage institution with one or
fewer software developers on staff, perhaps even without an active
webmaster.

To ensure that we are focusing on those concerns most relevant to
small archives, we would appreciate your responses to a short (10-15
minutes) survey to better understand what is being done, and what is
needed to ensure long-term access and preservation in small cultural
heritage institutions. ?We hope to share results of the survey at a
BOF session at the Museum Computer Network conference in ?Portland, OR
on November 11-14, 2009 and at the DISH conference in Rotterdam, The
Netherlands on December 8-10, 2009. ?We will also share results and
information online at our wiki home:

-- http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229DKEFJWUP --


You can find out more about the Small Archives group at:
http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Small+Archives

You can also participate by clicking:
http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/SA-Get+Involved!

We greatly appreciate your participation.

Many thanks,
Ari Davidow

[MCN-L] Twitter Analytics

[Ari Davidow]

Others have already mentioned that you can track how many people click
on links by using bit.ly as your link shortener (appending a + to
links gives you how many followed that link) and/or by  sending to a
URL with an argument such as ?source=twitter

We use Tweetdeck to keep an eye on messages and retweets, and also to
keep running searches going on subjects, hashtags that are relevant.

Those are the only metrics so far that we work with on a regular basis.

ari

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:21 AM, John Bedardjbedard at artsmia.org wrote:
 We are looking for a way to get Twitter analytics like we can get for 
 Flicker. It tells us which specific posts are the most successful and what 
 time of day people pay the most attention to us etc.

 Any Suggestions?

[MCN-L] Useful website metrics?

[Ari Davidow]

Oh, yeah! that's a great article, Seb. Thanks for the reminder.

You'll get no argument from me about the difference in credibility
between GA and log analysis. It may be my lack of time with the tool,
but I haven't found a good way to use GA to track downloads, though.

In our specific case, as an online-only institution, geographic
segmentation hasn't been of much use, other than when we talk with a
funder based in a specific locale, to show that use of our site is
local to them. But we could do much more with segmentation in general.

For social media, we do use some quantitative measures (followers and
fans; comments per post and retweets, referrals back to our home
website), but none of those numbers seem terribly significant so far.
I usually say that's an accurate reflection of the time we put into
using those media.

ari

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Chan, SebastianSebC at phm.gov.au wrote:
 Hi Ari

 I'd suggest you want to be segmenting these figures by geography at the very 
 least. And probably by source and entry point.

 GA will give you much more accurate figures than *any* log analysis tool - 
 100% 'accuracy' is not possible (and wouldn't tell you anything in any case!).

 In the social media world you probably want to emphasise qualitative activity 
 over the quantitative. Again, you'd segment by intention.

 My paper from MW08 is still reasonably valid - 
 http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/chan-metrics/chan-metrics.html

 Seb

 Sebastian Chan
 A/g Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies
 Powerhouse Museum
 street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia
 postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238
 tel - 61 2 9217 0109
 fax - 61 2 9217 0689
 mob - 0413 457 126
 e - sebc at phm.gov.au
 w - www.powerhousemuseum.com
 b - www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog



 --
 This email and attachments are for the use of the intended recipient(s) only 
 and may contain confidential or legally privileged information or material 
 that is copyright of Powerhouse Museum or a third party. If you have received 
 this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and then delete it. 
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 distribute this e-mail without the author's prior permission. Any views 
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 and the Powerhouse Museum accepts no liability for the content of this 
 message.
 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu on behalf of Ari Davidow
 Sent: Fri 7/10/2009 4:50 AM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: [MCN-L] Useful website metrics?

 There are lots of things we can track about our websites and about the
 ways in which people interact with them. Here are some that matter to
 us:

 * Downloads of podcasts
 * Downloads of lesson plans and other website PDFs
 * New pages posted to the website: our blog posts, new articles
 * Ways to measure engagement or interactivity: comments/blog post;
 updates posted to our encyclopedia; blog comments/page views
 * Number of donations made to the organization online: how much
 raised, how many people contribute online, mean and median online
 contributrions
 * Subscriptions to our e-letters; turnover on the e-letters; % of
 e-letters opened; % of e-letters that leads to clicks
 * Site visits: unique visits, unique visitors, time on site
 * Links to site (google link:); Links to blog posts (technorati)

 External sites (these numbers should get big enough to be worth tracking!)
 * Mentions on twitter; RTs on twitter; followers on twitter
 * Fans of Facebook page; activity on Facebook
 * Fans, activity on Flickr exhibits

 Etc. We are relying on Google Analytics for most numbers (except for
 the absolute site visit numbers, where we continue to use older log
 analysis software for now--bigger numbers, and not yet comfortable
 that we are capturing everything on GA)

 What metrics do other people use? Which provide best info for funders?
 What helps you understand best whether or not you are doing a good job
 of getting people engaged on the website--or on other relevant social
 platforms?

 ari
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[MCN-L] Useful website metrics?

[Ari Davidow]

There are lots of things we can track about our websites and about the
ways in which people interact with them. Here are some that matter to
us:

* Downloads of podcasts
* Downloads of lesson plans and other website PDFs
* New pages posted to the website: our blog posts, new articles
* Ways to measure engagement or interactivity: comments/blog post;
updates posted to our encyclopedia; blog comments/page views
* Number of donations made to the organization online: how much
raised, how many people contribute online, mean and median online
contributrions
* Subscriptions to our e-letters; turnover on the e-letters; % of
e-letters opened; % of e-letters that leads to clicks
* Site visits: unique visits, unique visitors, time on site
* Links to site (google link:); Links to blog posts (technorati)

External sites (these numbers should get big enough to be worth tracking!)
* Mentions on twitter; RTs on twitter; followers on twitter
* Fans of Facebook page; activity on Facebook
* Fans, activity on Flickr exhibits

Etc. We are relying on Google Analytics for most numbers (except for
the absolute site visit numbers, where we continue to use older log
analysis software for now--bigger numbers, and not yet comfortable
that we are capturing everything on GA)

What metrics do other people use? Which provide best info for funders?
What helps you understand best whether or not you are doing a good job
of getting people engaged on the website--or on other relevant social
platforms?

ari

[MCN-L] A good 3rd party credit card transaction handler?

[Ari Davidow]

At my organization we use Acceptiva for all of our online credit card
transactions. I like working with them. They actively try to make
things work better for us, they're responsive, and reasonably priced.
(They have limitations in terms of form layout, but nothing we can't
live with at our size/needs.)

I've been talking with some other folks who have been suggesting
Google's service (Google check-out?) for annual memberships in another
organization. I'd like to steer clear of Google because they require
that everyone be a registered user, logged in, before they can pay.
This is a pain for people who might give us money once or twice a
year--or in the case of say, the organization in question, renew
membership once and, if lucky, attend an event or two during the year.

What is other folks' experience? If you're not hosting it all yourself
(and I hope nobody who isn't forced to by an idiot board and isn't a
bank is doing so), what works best for you? What flexibility in
handling transactions do you get that makes one service work better
for you than another?

ari

[MCN-L] Website surveys - the good, the bad, the ugly

[Ari Davidow]

I apologize for the cross-posting.

We really want to get a sense of how well people feel our website
serves them. (Don't get me started on what serves them well means.)
I'd like to find someone, preferably based in Boston, who can help us
put together a good survey so that we can better understand site
visitor satisfaction, and perhaps, understand a bit better what draws
the people currently visiting our site there. We don't need
technology--we can use Survey Monkey, or put together something in our
CMS--but I want someone who understands statistics and what questions
to ask to best solicit useful information for a non-profit online
site.

Any suggestions? War stories?

Many thanks,
Ari

[MCN-L] from flickr to our website

[Ari Davidow]

We are exploring using Flickr and our website in tandem. I thought I
remembered that Flickr provided all sorts of neat templates for taking
our content from Flickr and posting it to our website. Instead (as I
might have expected had I thought about it) I am seeing only flickr
badges. Has anyone come up with a nifty way to share content between
their website (we use Drupal if that helps) and Flickr such that the
same images don't have to have metdata attached twice?

ari

[MCN-L] re desktop applications and Susan's idea for conference round up

[Ari Davidow]

Robin,

There is nothing to stop you from running a local web server, on the
computer that your visitors will be using at the park. You could, at
your discretion, mirror new daily content overnight to a site more
easily accessible, but that may not be the point.

I have Apache (as one example) and a database (MySQL) running on my
laptop all the time as part of my personal development environment so
that I don't need to be on the Internet to work on web issues. No
reason not to take advantage of the plethora of web technology
available and set up a similar local solution for your visitors.

ari

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Robin White robin at mediacombo.net wrote:
 Thank you to Mark Paradis and Ari for your thoughtful suggestions. We
 can't use a web interface here - the park only has dial up connections!

 Susan,
 I'd love to hear about SXSWi, Webwise and ASTC for sure.

 Best,

 Robin

 Robin White Owen
 Web 2.0 Strategy  Implementation
 M: 917/407-7641
 T: 646/472-5145
 E: robin at mediacombo.net
 www.mediacombo.net



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[MCN-L] Re looking for a desktop application

[Ari Davidow]

 The part that has us stumped is finding one desktop program that will
 capture the sound.

I bet you could capture the sound easily with Audacity on a Windows
machine. How to then save the sound and get it uploaded is a different
issue.

Why not just hook up a webcam. People can choose to be visible or not,
and then you pipe the results--audio only, or audio-video--to your
website as a blog post or something similar.

ari

[MCN-L] new Fedora SIG - Small Archives at MW BOF breakfast, Apr 17

[Ari Davidow]

Hi all,

I have been talking with Thornton Staples, of Fedora Commons, for the
last couple of months about a new Small Archives for Fedora. The
problem we're addressing is how to gain small archives access to
repository and long-term preservation facilitaties, given that most
small archives have limited budgets, limited technical staff, and
limited resources, overall, with which to figure this out.

At the Jewish Women's Archive we have been working on setting up a
repository for over two years (and in fact, I will be talking about
that Repository, including why, for our particular needs, Fedora) in
a session on Technology Strategies on Thursday morning). My
organization now has a starter repository in action, and we are
gradually loading it up with data and working out policies,
procedures, and long-term preservation strategies. It's a fragile
process, interrupted frequently. The obvious solution is to be working
actively with other small cultural heritage organizations, something
that we are just starting to do locally, and need to be doing more
broadly.

The thing is, I am pretty sure that we small archives are the long
tail of cultural memory and cultural heritage. Even if every large
cultural heritage institution had the pieces in place for great
long-term access and preservation, that would still leave most of our
planet's cultural heritage without such protection. The question
Thorny and I have been asking is that if we pool resources, can we
agree on common content models, and set up one repository? Is the work
that JWA has done with MediaShelf enough (maybe in conjunction with
the University of Hull's Hydra project) such that many small
repositories, with minimal help--some through this SIG/Community of
Practice, can set up and maintain their own repositories and create a
richer cultural heritage ecology? What, in the end, does setting up a
repository need and require, and how does that fit the reality of a
small archive? What models best fit the needs of our organizations?

Thorny will be joining me at MW Friday morning for the Birds of a
Feather breakfast where we'll be hanging out with other Small
Archives/Fedora feathered friends. Between that session, and our
combined noise and discussion at the conference, I am hoping that
we'll feel comfortable formally starting the SIG. Folks interested in
or using other repository frameworks are also welcome to join in the
discussion.

We look forward to seeing everyone in Indianapolis in a few weeks.

Ari Davidow
Jewish Women's Archive

Resources:
Museums and the Web, Apr 15-18, Indianapolis, IN -
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/
Fedora Commons - http://www.fedora-commons.org/
other FC communities of practice -
https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Home

[MCN-L] Share bookmarklets on online collections

[Ari Davidow]

We do it through a block or some such embedded in Drupal--it is the
sort of thing that should be controlled by your CMS because the
underlying code has to be able to send the page URL as part of sharing
(as different from just using an include statement). If ya'll are
using Drupal, I can ask our web developer which module (or what code)
he is using and pass that along.

ari

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Perian Sully psully at magnes.org wrote:
 Hi everyone:



 Has anyone implemented the use of sharing tools on individual item pages
 within their museum's online collections? I want to request a bunch of
 share links to del.icio.us, Zotero, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit
 and I think there are some tools to help do this (code easily embedded
 into the page), but I don't recall the names of them right now.



 Has anyone had any experience with doing this and can provide some
 advice? Any other sites I should be able to share on?



 Thanks in advance!



 ~Perian



 Perian Sully

 Collections Information Manager

 Web Programs Strategist

 The Magnes

 2911 Russell St.

 Berkeley, CA 94705

 Work: 510-549-6950 x 357

 Fax: 510-849-3673

 http://www.magnes.org

 http://www.musematic.org

 http://www.mediaandtechnology.org



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[MCN-L] Confidence in Online services?

[Ari Davidow]

Well, you just answered the question, only storage.

If you are going to rely on one one storage source, then online tools
such as Google Docs are probably more secure (especially in the sense
of having uncorrupted data) than your local non-profit
bargain-basement non-RAID, not-backed-up file server.

But, of course, that is still fundamentally insecure and a horrible
idea. All backup and disaster recovery plans have to include more than
that--preferably at least on+offsite storage using more than one
medium, with a replicated copy in another geographic area entirely for
disaster recovery). Whether or not having your primary storage
online or offline depends on lots of factors, but given the overall
quality of Google data services vs. what most of us can afford
locally, that isn't necessarily a bad place to start.

(If people here could stand working with Google Docs, vs. say, our
relatively old MS Office, we'd probably do it. But so far, we have yet
to have a project started using Zoho, Google, or anything else stay
there--those apps are still not fitting the hands of our particular
users.)

ari
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Kathy Amoroso
kamoroso at mainehistory.org wrote:
 Hi All,

 I have been reading about so many people moving things to Google Docs or
 Flickr. Aren't you afraid that they could just fold someday? I am nervous
 to rely on third-party solutions since there is no guarantee. We tell
 contributors to the Maine Memory Network NOT to use our servers as their
 only storage system since the future is not guaranteed.

 Kathy

 
 Kathy Bolduc Amoroso
 Director of Digital Projects
 kamoroso at mainehistory.org or kathy at mainememory.net
 Maine Historical Society, 489 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101
 (207)774-1822 x227 |  www.mainehistory.org | www.mainememory.net


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[MCN-L] Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia - online ed Mar 1; beta this Monday, 2/17/09

[Ari Davidow]

Dear Friend,

We are pleased to announce that on March 1, 2009, the Jewish Women's
Archive will launch the free, online version of Jewish Women: A
Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Previously available only on
CD-ROM, the Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive source on the
history of Jewish women and includes more than 1,700 biographies, 300
thematic essays, and 1,400 photographs and illustrations (minus a few
for which we do not have web display permission). The Encyclopedia
nearly doubles the content available on our website (jwa.org) and
gives Internet users all over the world free and easy access to a
wealth of information. A press release is attached. We encourage you
to forward it to your friends and colleagues.

For the next two weeks we will making final pre-release adjustments.
If you are interested in participating in the Preview/Beta, please
email adavidow at jwa.org ; if you would like to get a sense of who is in
the Encyclopedia, or to find out more, please visit
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/preview

Our formal press release follows (from
http://qa.jwa.org/press/2009/2009-0202-encyclopedia.html ):
--

FOR RELEASE: February 2, 2009
UNPRECEDENTED RESOURCE GOES ONLINE MARCH 1, 2009
Jewish Women's Archive Gives Free, Global Access to Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) announces the launch of the first
comprehensive online source for the history of Jewish women. On March
1, 2009, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia?which
includes over 1,700 biographies, 300 thematic essays, and 1,400
photographs and illustrations?goes live on JWA's website, jwa.org.

Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia represents a
huge advance for the fields of history and women's studies, said Gail
Reimer, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Jewish Women's Archive. The
Encyclopedia was previously available only on CD-ROM. Reimer notes,
In its CD-ROM form, the Encyclopedia was expensive and not widely
accessible, so we are delighted to make this important resource
available online and usable at no cost. We've taken history out of the
locked vaults of physical repositories and put it into the hands of
Internet users all over the world.

Reviewers hailed the CD-ROM version, published in 2006 by Shalvi
Publishing Ltd., for its easy navigation and for the wealth of
information it contains. The online edition has an improved user
interface, which provides thematic and visual links and extensive
cross-references, along with many new Web 2.0 features, including the
ability for users to discuss and update current biographies and to
submit new ones.

Edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University and Dalia Ofer of Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, the Encyclopedia contains content from over
1,000 independent scholars on a wide range of Jewish women through the
centuries?from Gertrude Berg to Gertrude Stein; Hannah Greenbaum
Solomon to Hannah Arendt; the Biblical Ruth to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for students, educators,
researchers, and the general public.

Gloria Steinem praised the Encyclopedia as user-friendly and
thoughtfully compiled, as much a joy for the casual browser as for
those who come with a purpose. Whether you are a scholar in search of
the past, a journalist in need of facts in the present, or a young
Jewish girl looking for role models for dreams of the future, the
encyclopedia is a treasure-trove.

The mission of the Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) is to uncover,
chronicle, and transmit to a broad public the rich history of North
American Jewish women. A national non-profit organization founded in
1995 and headquartered in Brookline, Massachusetts, JWA disseminates
educational materials, conducts original research, hosts public
programs, and maintains an innovative website. Through web exhibits,
online collection projects, and oral histories, JWA shares the
stories, struggles, and achievements of North American Jewish women
spanning many generations. In 2007, JWA produced the film Making
Trouble, a prize-winning documentary about three generations of Jewish
women in comedy, from Molly Picon to Gilda Radner.

Contact:
Jordan Namerow
Jewish Women's Archive
138 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446

Tel: (617) 232-2258
Fax: (617) 975-0109
http://jwa.org/contactus

More details: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia

[MCN-L] Museum librarian blogs

[Ari Davidow]

I take your point, but in our case, at least, it isn't that management
is against such discussion, but rather that the blog is seen as an
outreach tool, and staff haven't been interested in adding the meta
dimension.

I am curious as to whether the library bloggers you notice are their
main institutional bloggers, or if they are blogging on their own time
about their craft. I seem to have a long list of bloggers I follow
from general cultural heritage institutions--in most cases, though,
they blog outside the institution--Seb Chan at Australia's Powerhouse
being one notable exception as I try to think on my feet and fail, yet
again.

ari

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Eric Johnson ejohnson at monticello.org 
wrote:
 Hi, Ari--

 That last point is very much at the heart of my inquiry.  I find it 
 intriguing that museum librarians and archivists (and related information 
 professionals) who are engaged in the day-to-day work of helping connect 
 people to information spend so little time talking among themselves about the 
 meta-level questions of what they're doing.  There are certainly plenty of 
 librarian blogs out there that address librarianship as such, but not many 
 that I've found doing so with a focus on the museum world.  I've seen quite a 
 bit of discussion of museum/information connections, but it seems to be lead 
 primarily by academics and programmers, with curators throwing in their 
 occasional two cents.  I'd like to see more sharing of information from other 
 museum information practitioners (spoken of broadly, as the lines are often 
 quite blurred).

 I suspect you're right about the institutional reluctance to support that 
 kind of blogging, as it may result in negative reflection on the way things 
 are being done at a given institution.  But I don't think that negativity 
 necessarily has to be the case at all, nor does the conversation really have 
 to revolve around a single site.

 In any case, more food for thought.  Thanks!

 --E.

 Eric D. M. Johnson
 Web Services Librarian
 Jefferson Library, Monticello
 P.O. Box 316
 Charlottesville, VA 22902
 Phone: (434) 984-7540 | Fax: (434) 984-7546
 http://www.monticello.org/library/
 ejohnson at monticello.org





 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of 
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 2:35 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Museum librarian blogs

 Interesting take on the subject. The Jewish Women's Archive blogs at
 http://jwablog.jwa.org but mostly we blog about current events and how
 they relate to our collections, or just about current events. Very
 little meta discussion about the archive, itself. There has been
 resistance here to using the blog that way. In fact, I blog at
 Musematic when I have something to say about the tools we use or the
 philosophical issues we face.

 ari



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[MCN-L] Hosting hardware requirements

[Ari Davidow]

This question is one of the reasons why we set up our repository on
Amazon Web Services, and why we are moving are general websites in
that direction. We just don't want to be in the business of sinking
capital we need in hardware that we may need. Moving to metered
service in such a situation lets you pay for what you need, and
removes the cost of forecasting and maintaining the physical servers.
It also makes it easier to move away from the metaphor that every
significant application requires its own server--you use virtual
servers (the sort of situation that VMWare supports, as one good
example; AWS has its own virtualization software) instead.

It is also critical that you think not in terms of a single production
set, but that you accomodate development and staging sets, as well.
(You never want to be in a situation where you are manually updating
your production server--you would stage changes, ensure that they are
okay, then automatically update production; similarly, you want your
development environment entirely out of the path of regular staging
and production.) This becomes significantly more affordable when all
of these servers are virtualized (which may or may not happen on AWS,
although we are now moving in that direction).

Beyond that, attempts to right-size your physical infrastructure
depend on the database traffic and webserver traffic, something that
you can triangulate by looking at your average and peak load averages
on the servers and the response time degradation when you move from
average to peak.

Building for future growth should probably not be a large factor
unless you are, in fact, experiencing significant growth in traffic
(or have reason to believe that it will happen), or if you are adding
significant new content and believe that the new content will lead to
significant growth.

In our experience, for those operations still based on physical
co-located servers, we have generally been able to move periodically
to faster servers with larger hard disks every year or two, for about
the same cost as we had been paying for the previous services. At
times we are paying for servers far in excess of need, but worth
purchasing that level of service because the price is reasonable and
lets us sleep at night.

Hope some of this helps,
Ari Davidow

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:10 PM,  JonathanC at ag.nsw.gov.au wrote:


 [Sorry if you receive this twice. I sent it 24 hours ago but it still
 hasn't appeared.]

 I'm the website manager at a mid-sized art museum (220 full-time staff,
 1.35 million physical visitors pa) in Sydney, Australia. Currently we host
 our websites externally (in a hosting facility in the USA, for cost
 reasons) but it is clear that our server is now underpowered. So, we are
 considering hosting internally on TWO, more powerful servers, one for the
 application and one for the database. The company that provides support for
 our content management system (Squiz.net) also manages our server in the
 USA remotely, so they could continue to do that. We would just need to
 upgrade our Internet connection.

 The question I have is this: How powerful a system do we need?

 Squiz.net have quoted for 2 quad-core dual-Xeon commercial-grade servers,
 running at 2.0 GHz (detailed specs below). Our network manager believes
 this is MASSIVE overkill. I COULD ask Squiz.net to provide details of
 other, comparable organisations and THEIR web server specs, but since
 they'd probably all be their clients too, this may not be a strong argument
 for management.

 So, I would actually appreciate answers to ANY of the following 3
 questions:
 1. From your own experience, do these specs seem reasonable, allowing for
 some room to grow?
 2. If your institution and/or websites are comparable to ours, what are
 your server specs... and are they adequate?
 3. If your hosting setup is similar to what we were recommended, how big is
 your website (or websites)?

 To give you a better idea of our needs, here's what we have now:
 * Total web traffic: approx. 150-200 GB per month
 * 1 main website + 8 smaller, CMS-driven websites + 9 static HTML websites
 * 2 content management systems (1 phasing out the other) + collection
 management system customised web interface
 * Monthly email newsletter: approx. 150,000 subscribers
 * Online video: New content (~ 25 minutes, 55 MB) weekly, currently hosted
 on internal server
 * Online audio: currently 2 audio-tours, but set to expand, currently
 hosted on internal server

 And here are the detailed specs we were recommended for each server:
   Dell PowerEdge 2950 Dual Xeon Commercial grade server
   Dual Xeon 2.0 GHz (1333MHz Bus) Quad Core (8 Cores Total)
   Memory: ECC Registered DDR 8GB
   * Application server: 2 x 73 GB SAS/SCSI Hard Disk - RAID 1
   * Database server: 6 x 73 GB SAS/SCSI Hard Disk - RAID 1+0
   Intel 10/100Mb Network Card
   Intel 10/100/1000mbps TX Network Card
   Red Hat Enterprise Linux

 Thanks.

 Regards,

 Jonathan Cooper

[MCN-L] Hosting hardware requirements

[Ari Davidow]

We are moving about 6TB of data, mostly audio and video, to AWS. I
think we're only about 500GB in, though--it's a long project since we
invested in a T1 and everything has to upload through that pipe.

We have found no serving issues--this is the same service that
delivers Amazon's own web pages. The way that pieces fit together is a
bit different from what is done in a non-virtualized environment. The
security issues are probably on the same level as with your ISP in
terms of hackability--maybe somewhat less, depending on what you might
introduce in your own configuration. Integrity issues (the other
security headache) have been non-existent--we have no data gone
missing or corrupted--but that doesn't mean that we don't have our
local RAID server backup. I actually like the slight decrease in worry
when I compare AWS's staff and 24/7 likelihood vs. our remaining
ISP--which has been good, but is still much smaller and much more
vulnerable to disaster (however unlikely disaster is, overall, in this
context).

We are actually also using AWS to backup our network drives--the
day-to-day working files of the Archive, via an inexpensive utility
called JungleDisk.

I believe that the Indianapolis Museum is also using AWS--Rob Stein is
speaking on the subject at Museums on the Web this spring. Not sure
who else

ari

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Parsell, David david.parsell at yale.edu 
wrote:
 Ari,

 Your statement about using Amazon as a repository is very interesting.

 Can you discuss the size of the images you are sending to the repository and 
 how many MBs or TBs you are storing each month?

 How is the speed on ingest and retrieval?

 I've been looking at Amazon as well, but have concerns about the speed and 
 security of the images. We have approx. 200mb images to store and will have 
 approx. 10tb by the end of 2009.

 Are any other museums using Cloud computing as a repository?

 Thanks,  David




 David Parsell
 Systems Manager
 Yale Center for British Art
 1080 Chapel Street
 PO Box 208280
 New Haven, CT  06520-8280

 203 432-9603
 203 432-9414 f
 david.parsell at yale.edu
 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of 
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 8:06 AM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Hosting hardware requirements

 This question is one of the reasons why we set up our repository on
 Amazon Web Services, and why we are moving are general websites in
 that direction. We just don't want to be in the business of sinking
 capital we need in hardware that we may need. Moving to metered
 service in such a situation lets you pay for what you need, and
 removes the cost of forecasting and maintaining the physical servers.
 It also makes it easier to move away from the metaphor that every
 significant application requires its own server--you use virtual
 servers (the sort of situation that VMWare supports, as one good
 example; AWS has its own virtualization software) instead.

 It is also critical that you think not in terms of a single production
 set, but that you accomodate development and staging sets, as well.
 (You never want to be in a situation where you are manually updating
 your production server--you would stage changes, ensure that they are
 okay, then automatically update production; similarly, you want your
 development environment entirely out of the path of regular staging
 and production.) This becomes significantly more affordable when all
 of these servers are virtualized (which may or may not happen on AWS,
 although we are now moving in that direction).

 Beyond that, attempts to right-size your physical infrastructure
 depend on the database traffic and webserver traffic, something that
 you can triangulate by looking at your average and peak load averages
 on the servers and the response time degradation when you move from
 average to peak.

 Building for future growth should probably not be a large factor
 unless you are, in fact, experiencing significant growth in traffic
 (or have reason to believe that it will happen), or if you are adding
 significant new content and believe that the new content will lead to
 significant growth.

 In our experience, for those operations still based on physical
 co-located servers, we have generally been able to move periodically
 to faster servers with larger hard disks every year or two, for about
 the same cost as we had been paying for the previous services. At
 times we are paying for servers far in excess of need, but worth
 purchasing that level of service because the price is reasonable and
 lets us sleep at night.

 Hope some of this helps,
 Ari Davidow

 On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:10 PM,  JonathanC at ag.nsw.gov.au wrote:


 [Sorry if you receive this twice. I sent it 24 hours ago but it still
 hasn't appeared.]

 I'm the website manager at a mid-sized art museum (220 full-time staff,
 1.35 million physical visitors pa

[MCN-L] Annual reports online

[Ari Davidow]

We do make sure that we have rights to put images online, as well as
in print for the annual report. I think in our case most/all of the
images come from the archive, itself. There are donor privacy issues,
but for the most part, donors want to be acknowledged as much as we
want others to see who is donating. It's something the development
department has to keep in mind when preparing the report. And almost
all public search engines (as well as our website's search engine)
index pdf these days, so that is not an issue.

ari

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Weinstein, William
WWeinstein at philamuseum.org wrote:
 No image rights issues?  Donor privacy issues?  Can your pdfs be indexed
 for searches?


 William Weinstein
 Director of Information Services
 Philadelphia Museum of Art
 PO Box 7646
 Philadelphia, PA 19101
 215-684-7741
 wweinstein at philamuseum.org


 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Harper, Lucy
 Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 4:50 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Annual reports online

 We have cut back the print run for our biennial report by putting full
 color pdf online.

 Lu Harper
 Librarian/Webmaster
 Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
 lharper at mag.rochester.edu

 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Weinstein, William
 Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 4:42 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: [MCN-L] Annual reports online


  I am trying to get a sense of policy for posting annual reports online.
 I see many institutions do this and they range from plain, no image, and
 sanitized finances to the full color pdf.  I would love to get responses
 on why and how people are doing this along with any problems.

 Bill




 William Weinstein
 Director of Information Services
 Philadelphia Museum of Art
 PO Box 7646
 Philadelphia, PA 19101
 215-684-7741
 wweinstein at philamuseum.org


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[MCN-L] Annual reports online

[Ari Davidow]

We provide a PDF. Our Development folks say that it is helpful to have
it available. Ours isn't overly fancy, but it is typeset, and is a
PDF: http://jwa.org/aboutjwa/annualreport/

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Weinstein, William
WWeinstein at philamuseum.org wrote:
  I am trying to get a sense of policy for posting annual reports online.
 I see many institutions do this and they range from plain, no image, and
 sanitized finances to the full color pdf.  I would love to get responses
 on why and how people are doing this along with any problems.

 Bill




 William Weinstein
 Director of Information Services
 Philadelphia Museum of Art
 PO Box 7646
 Philadelphia, PA 19101
 215-684-7741
 wweinstein at philamuseum.org


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[MCN-L] Podcasting Advice

[Ari Davidow]

Space is dirt cheap these days, so I'm not sure I buy the idea that
there is no room for an occasional podcast. To the best of my
knowledge, however, you =could= use MySpace as a place to upload the
podcasts, and they could be downloaded from there. I do not know what
limits might exist space-wise. I could have sworn that several museums
are using MySpace though, so someone will likely chime in soon.

My sense is that an okay mp3 averages about 1MB/minute, with
considerable variance depending on the quality settings.

In theory, any mp3 can just be linked from your webpage or blog and
that will be treated as a podcast. In reality, mp3 doesn't stream
well, and the experience of listening via Windows Media Player,
RealPlayer, or Quicktime can be distracting. We use a modified version
of one of the flash media players that we found on one of the
opensource sites, and that gives us some control over look and feel
(no weird backgrounds, no ads). Years ago it was important to use a
streaming server such as Apple's Darwin, or the Real's Helix server.
If you use a reasonable flash player, the user experience should be
quite good, and barring a circumstance where you get lots of
simultaneous hits, there should be no bandwidth issues, nor any other
issues that would merit maintaining the separate server. If you had a
lot of media files, or if they were very popular, chewing up lots of
bandwidth, that would/could change, though.

ari

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Lauren Zalut
Zalut at wagnerfreeinstitute.org wrote:
 Hi,
 I am new to the Museum Computer Network and I am looking for any advice 
 regarding podcasting. I work for a small natural history museum with a very 
 limited budget and we are looking to make podcasts of past museum lectures 
 available to the public on our website. I have been told by senior staff that 
 we do not have enough space on our website, I wonder if anyone knows how much 
 space a 60 minute podcast would take up. Also, what kind of technology would 
 be required to post a podcast on our website?

 The museum has a myspace profile, and part of the reason we established it 
 was the possibility that the podcast could be downloaded from there. Is that 
 really a viable option? We do have a completely edited podcast ready to go 
 and hope to have it up and running by the summer. I would appreciate any 
 suggestions or advice, it would be very helpful to hear about others' 
 experiences with podcasting in museums.

 Thank you in advance.

 Sincerely yours,

 Lauren Zalut
 Museum Educator and Communications Coordinator
 Wagner Free Institute of Science
 1700 W. Montgomery Ave.
 Philadelphia, PA 19121
 phone: (215) 763-6529 ext. 17
 www.wagnerfreeinstitute.org

 Become a fan of the Wagner on www.facebook.com!

 Follow us on www.twitter.com!




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[MCN-L] hosting/collaborative infrastructure

[Ari Davidow]

Eric Siegel has written an interesting blog posting covering the
transition of the NY Hall of Science from their former
mail/collaboration system to Google Apps:
http://conference.archimuse.com/blog/esiegel/hostingcollaborative_infrastructure

I'd be interested in hearing from other folks who are using Google
Apps or other hosted services to replace the more familiar
office-based suites (MS Office, Lotus Notes, Groupwise).

I also confess that we tried Google Apps last year, but could not get
staff comfortable with Google Docs for collaborative writing vs. MS
Word. We have had a little more success with Zoho, but still are
nowhere making such a transition, ourselves.

ari

[MCN-L] Go to page number

[Ari Davidow]

The problem with a goto pagenumber function is that page numbers
tend to be totally unintuitive. I have worked on magazines where we
had a goto number. It made it easy for readers of the magazine get
to a specific page once they are on the website, and spared the
editors from having to know in advance what a URL would be. Other
benefits included the ease of printing a bold number vs. a URL.

But, for bookmarking purposes, you don't want those numbers, because
then there is nothing to indicate to people what they have bookmarked
(although the page title is often an excellent balance to that), and
no easy way for people to recover if they type in a wrong URL (also
not necessarily less of a problem with URLs unless you are using very
simple, human-readable URLs and site presentation architecture).

So, page numbers can be good ways to get people from print to a
location online, but they should be used as redirects, not as final
destinations, in my experience. And, even when not used as redirects,
they are still closer to human-readable than the garbage presented as
URLs by many CMSs--so you aren't necessarily hurting anything by
implementing them, you just aren't making things as easy on site
visitors as possible.

ari

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Hanan Cohen hanan at mada.org.il wrote:
 Shalom,

 Since this is my first post to this list I will introduce myself.

 My name is Hanan Cohen and I am the new Webmaster of the Bloomfield
 Science Museum Jerusalem, Israel. http://www.mada.org.il/en/ . I am
 new in the sense that I have been a short time on this job and also in
 the sense that I am new to museums as a professional.

 One of the issues I have been thinking about since starting here is how
 to connect the physical world to the web. We know there is a problem of
 directing people from paper to web and also from speech to web. At the
 most, we direct people to a top directory and they somehow manage from
 there.

 The Bloomfield Science Museum strives to be an educational resource for
 its visitors - the general public and the formal education system.

 Writing long URL's on paper in order to propose content on our site to
 our audience  is a problem.

 Then I had an idea.

 Every page on our site has a unique, short ID.

 I have created a new box that is displayed on every page.

 The box says go to page number:, has an input line and below that
 current page number: wxyz

 When I want to direct someone to a page, all I have to do is see in what
 page number I am at and write or say a short number.

 The recipient just has to type a short number and go directly to the
 intended page. No need to type a long URL or click through menus.

 Now, we at the museum, will have to learn how to use this feature in our
 publications, displays and daily use of the website. It's a whole new
 way of thinking which we will have to develop. I hope the new feature
 will really solve the problem it tackles.

 I would be grateful for any feedback on this solution and its
 implementation.

 Currently, there isn't much English content on the site. To get a better
 experience of the page number idea, I suggest visiting the Exhibitions
 section.

 Thanks,

 Hanan Cohen - Webmaster
 Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem
 http://www.mada.org.il
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[MCN-L] FTP Server for image retrieval?

[Ari Davidow]

Flickr has no problem with Hi-Res photos--click on images and you'll
find a button for available sizes or some such.

But it isn't going to provide the permissions control you are talking
about. My experience would be to find a cms - for your environment,
Sharepoint might be ideal - and let people download using http (or,
using ssl, https). Easier on your users, and Sharepoint would fit
right in with Active Directory. This approach makes it much easier to
find familiar tools.

Other people can chime in with their experience, but I just don't see
FTP (or, assuming security matters, SFTP) as a useful way to go
forward, given that the percentage of internet users who know what it
is continues to drop. Let FTP servers join their gopher and wais
brethren in retirement.

ari

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Chris Heazell cheazell at glenbow.org wrote:
 Thanks Ari,

 If we are talking Hi-Res Publication materials Flickr probably isn't an 
 option though I don't know what file size limitations there are on it.

 This issue isn't so much security as it is delegation of ftp user account 
 management. What I'd like is for each area to be able to manage their own 
 group of users and passwords. Eg. Our Archives sells photos on the website. 
 I'd like for them to be able to create and maintain some accounts such as 
 photoorder1, photoorder2, photoorder3 etc. These would be handed out to the 
 purchaser with an appropriate generated password. This would remain active 
 for say 48 hrs so they could collect their image. I'd then like that account 
 to be reset and a new password issued and the directory purged. Since this 
 box isn't in our Active Directory as it lives in our DMZ this would need to 
 be done with local accounts which isn't as elegant. I'd also rather the 
 various departments not remote into a desktop of the server to do this.

 What I am interested in is whether anyone has faced similar issues and what 
 they came up with. Was it abandoning FTP and creating a php portal or using 
 3rd party apps or going to a hosted solution.

 Thanks and Merry Christmas,

 Chris

 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of 
 Ari Davidow
 Sent: December-19-08 4:24 PM
 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
 Subject: Re: [MCN-L] FTP Server for image retrieval?

 You raise some interesting issues. For starters, of course, no
 application for which security matters should be using FTP--it is
 fundamentally insecure because logins and passwords are exchanged in
 clear text. So, you might use SFTP or FTP over SSH if you really
 wanted to go down that path.

 By the same token, fewer people every year understand FTP or its more
 secure brethren. They aren't protocols in common use compared to HTTP
 or HTTPS, and a shocking number of people don't have FTP clients on
 their computers.

 It might be worth considering things differently. What if, for
 instance, images were uploaded to Flickr, with those that could only
 be downloaded by appropriate password-enabled folks doing so by being
 made part of a given flickr group? I'm not sure how well this would
 work--we now use flickr for all press image distribution, for
 instance, but don't use controlled access for anything but internal
 use.

 In a pinch, using IIS to mediate access locally, however you wish to
 do so, with permission to download similarly controlled by password
 access might make more sense. IIS in conjunction with Sharepoint might
 be all you need.

 Apologies for answering a question not quite what you asked,
 ari

 On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Chris Heazell cheazell at glenbow.org 
 wrote:
 Hello fellow MCNers and Season's Greetings,

 I am wrestling with something that many of you may well already have figured 
 out. We host our own ftp server and currently we have setup a number of ftp 
 accounts which various departments utilize to make images available for 
 publications etc. What we want to do is deliver images that the public order 
 on our website and make them available for them to download from our ftp 
 server. Now this in and of itself isn't difficult but we want the department 
 selling the image to manage the user name and password administration and 
 this is where I'm scratching my head. Our server is a windows 2003 box using 
 iis and the ftp service and it is sitting in our DMZ and therefore not part 
 of our Active Directory. What I really want is some form of portal that a 
 super user could log into to admin say a half dozen user ids and generate 
 passwords. This they could do on either a daily/weekly basis or on demand. 
 What I don't want is for them to have to Remote into the server or be an 
 admin of th
  e
  server to assign passwords. I'd rather a front end portal or similar that 
 they could use.

 If any of you have suggestions or ideas about how you and your organization 
 deliver images to your public I'm all ears.

 Thanks,

 Chris


 Chris Heazell, MCSE, CNA

[MCN-L] FTP Server for image retrieval?

[Ari Davidow]

You raise some interesting issues. For starters, of course, no
application for which security matters should be using FTP--it is
fundamentally insecure because logins and passwords are exchanged in
clear text. So, you might use SFTP or FTP over SSH if you really
wanted to go down that path.

By the same token, fewer people every year understand FTP or its more
secure brethren. They aren't protocols in common use compared to HTTP
or HTTPS, and a shocking number of people don't have FTP clients on
their computers.

It might be worth considering things differently. What if, for
instance, images were uploaded to Flickr, with those that could only
be downloaded by appropriate password-enabled folks doing so by being
made part of a given flickr group? I'm not sure how well this would
work--we now use flickr for all press image distribution, for
instance, but don't use controlled access for anything but internal
use.

In a pinch, using IIS to mediate access locally, however you wish to
do so, with permission to download similarly controlled by password
access might make more sense. IIS in conjunction with Sharepoint might
be all you need.

Apologies for answering a question not quite what you asked,
ari

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Chris Heazell cheazell at glenbow.org wrote:
 Hello fellow MCNers and Season's Greetings,

 I am wrestling with something that many of you may well already have figured 
 out. We host our own ftp server and currently we have setup a number of ftp 
 accounts which various departments utilize to make images available for 
 publications etc. What we want to do is deliver images that the public order 
 on our website and make them available for them to download from our ftp 
 server. Now this in and of itself isn't difficult but we want the department 
 selling the image to manage the user name and password administration and 
 this is where I'm scratching my head. Our server is a windows 2003 box using 
 iis and the ftp service and it is sitting in our DMZ and therefore not part 
 of our Active Directory. What I really want is some form of portal that a 
 super user could log into to admin say a half dozen user ids and generate 
 passwords. This they could do on either a daily/weekly basis or on demand. 
 What I don't want is for them to have to Remote into the server or be an 
 admin of the
  server to assign passwords. I'd rather a front end portal or similar that 
 they could use.

 If any of you have suggestions or ideas about how you and your organization 
 deliver images to your public I'm all ears.

 Thanks,

 Chris


 Chris Heazell, MCSE, CNA
 Network Administrator
 Glenbow Museum
 p 403 268 4241
 f 403 265 9765

 http://www.glenbow.orghttp://www.glenbow.org/


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[MCN-L] MCN Archives

[Ari Davidow]

Yes, it's posted at the bottom of every message, including yours:

The MCN-L archives can be found at:
http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Chad Petrovay
cpetrovay at thewalters.org wrote:
 Does MCN have an archive of messages sent to the listserv? If so, where
 do we access it at?



 Chad M Petrovay

 Collections Database Administrator

 The Walters Art Museum

 600 North Charles Street

 Baltimore, MD  21210

 P: 410.547.9000 x266

 F: 410.837.4846

 cpetrovay at thewalters.org mailto:cpetrovay at thewalters.org



 www.thewalters.org http://www.thewalters.org/



 Exhibitions:

 Bedazzled: 5,000 Years of Jewelry on view through January 4, 2009

 Mummified on view through November 8, 2009

 The Special Dead: A Medieval Reliquary Revealed on view through January
 18, 2009



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[MCN-L] What is a CMS supposed to manage?

[Ari Davidow]

When you write CMS are you referring to the content management
system that is used to manage web content, or the collection
management system that would be your primary collection/asset
management tool?

ari

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Kathy Amoroso
kamoroso at mainehistory.org wrote:
 At Maine Historical Society we have 3 online resources for people:
 PastPerfect Online (http://mainehistory.pastperfect-online.com/) for
 museum inventory and cataloging We pay yearly for PPO; Minerva for books
 (http://minerva.maine.edu/), and then our big project Maine Memory Network
 (www.mainememory.net). Maine Memory actually came before all of these at
 MHS (2001). It is a custom built system, all grant funded.

 
 Kathy Bolduc Amoroso
 Director of Digital Projects
 kamoroso at mainehistory.org or kathy at mainememory.net
 Maine Historical Society, 489 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101
 (207)774-1822 x227 |  www.mainehistory.org | www.mainememory.net


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[MCN-L] 2008 MCN Conference Proceedings

[Ari Davidow]

I didn't have much of a slideshow for my demo, but you can find my
notes on musematic.

ari

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Edson, Michael EDSONM at si.edu wrote:
 A few shows are up on slideshare and associated with a Museum Computer
 Network 2008 group created by Richard Urban

 http://www.slideshare.net/event/museum-computer-network-2008




 -Original Message-
 From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of
 Jeanne Kessler
 Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 4:49 PM
 To: mcn-l at mcn.edu
 Subject: [MCN-L] 2008 MCN Conference Proceedings

 Will conference proceedings (papers, summaries, powerpoints, etc.) be
 made available at some point?

 If they have already been posted somewhere, could someone point me in
 the right direction.

 Thanks!

 Jeanne Kessler
 IT Project Manager
 The National WWII Museum
 945 Magazine Street
 New Orleans, LA 70130
 Phone: 504/527-6012, ext. 228
 Cell: 504/723-0765
 Fax: 504/527-6088
 Jeanne.Kessler at nationalww2museum.orghttp://www.nationalww2museum.org/

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[MCN-L] What is a Collections Management System supposed to manage?

[Ari Davidow]

I don't know if this is affecting ya'lls discussion, but remember that
CMS is a common acronym for Content Management System--a bird of a
slightly related, but very different color.

ari

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Morgan, Amber MorganA at warhol.org wrote:
 We are addressing some concerns regarding our collections management
 system.  Something that has become clear is that our staff is not in
 agreement as to what a CMS is and what it should do.



 We are attempting to address the needs of our education department.  It
 would be very helpful to know how other institutions maintain what could
 be considered educational content.  If anyone out there would be willing
 to answer a few questions, I would be very grateful!



 Do you store label copy in your CMS?

 Do you use your CMS to manage detailed information about artists,
 events, places, etc?  If so, do you limit it to information specifically
 about your collection, or do you also maintain information about related
 materials held elsewhere?

 Does your institution collect any user-generated content, and if so,
 does it go into your CMS?

 And finally, if you're feeling up to it - what, in your opinion, is a
 collections management system; what should it do and what should it NOT
 be expected to do?



 Many thanks,
 Amber

 the warhol:
 Amber E. Morgan
 Associate Registrar
 117 Sandusky Street
 Pittsburgh, PA 15212
 T 412.237.8306
 F 412.237.8340
 E morgana at warhol.org
 W www.warhol.org

 The Andy Warhol Museum
 One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

 Email newsletter http://members.carnegiemuseums.org/email
 Membership http://members.carnegiemuseums.org/SupportCMP





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[MCN-L] JPEG2000

[Ari Davidow]

JPEG2000 doesn't solve any problems experienced by web users, nor does
it provide anything extra for print. It =does= solve myriad problems
for archivists (but requires some extra investment to take advantage
of those solutions--you really need a JPEG2000 server), so I don't see
it going away--perhaps slowly getting some support in tools, and
slowly replacing TIFF as the archival format of choice.

ari

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 9:46 AM, Fournier, Melissa
melissa.fournier at yale.edu wrote:
 I'd like to throw out a quick query to the list about JPEG2000.  Although 
 there is mounting support of the format as a preservation standard, in terms 
 of access it appears that it is still not widely supported in consumer 
 applications and viewing applications such as browsers.  Does anyone see this 
 changing?  Other thoughts pro/con?

 Melissa

 Melissa Gold Fournier
 Associate Museum Registrar
 YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
 melissa.fournier at yale.edu

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[MCN-L] NTEN - Non-Profit Technology Network?

[Ari Davidow]

I find NTEN good for networking about general day-to-day small
non-profit IT questions, but not at all relevant to museum- or
archive-specific issues. There seem to be fewer really experienced,
knowledgeable IT folks in the organization than in MCN. NTEN seems to
attract more ideologues, as well. More questions than I'd like are
answered not to the point, but with a what you really should be doing
is This is especially true with regard to commercial vs. open
source technology. I don't always want religion when I am asking
technical questions, even when i share the dominant religion ;-).

I'm on both lists, but find myself participating more on this one (and
never enough on either--I have this full-time job thing)

ari

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:44 PM, John Bedard jbedard at artsmia.org wrote:
 Does anybody have experience with NTEN, Non-Profit Technology Network?  If 
 so, is there anything it offers that MCN does not? Or any recommendations 
 about joining or not joining?



 John R. Bedard
 Director of Information Projects and Services
 The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
 2400 Third Avenue South
 Minneapolis, MN 55404
 Phone: 612-870-3268
 Fax: 612-870-3004
 Email: JBedard at artsmia.org
 www.artsmia.org
 www.artsconnected.org
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[MCN-L] open source OpenEdit DAM

[Ari Davidow]

Cool! Anyone out there using this? How well does it meet your needs?
What do you like about it? Would you recommend it to others?

Thanks,
ari

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Julie Riley OpenEdit julie at openedit.org 
wrote:
 Hi,

 I came across Ari's blog regarding open source digital asset management
 or the lack thereof... I'd like to introduce our open source software,
 OpenEdit DAM. http://www.openeditDAM.com

 OpenEdit is a JAVA based 100% pure web DAM solution and can be run on
 any platform. We have been working with corporations and organizations
 in need of DAM for several years which has allowed us to develop a
 robust digital asset management solution.

 OpenEdit DAM users include single users as well as those needing an
 enterprise-wide DAM system. OpenEdit DAM allows you to manage and share
 all of your digital files, you can upload, download, search, share,
 etc., it's a very feature rich application.

 OpenEdit is free to download, install and use, technical support is free
 via our online user forum.

 Please take a look at OpenEdit and let me know what you think!

 Regards,

 Julie Riley
 OpenEdit
 http://www.openeditDAM.com


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[MCN-L] Strategic Technology Plans

[Ari Davidow]

It took us a couple of months to draft the first plan. Now we spend a
couple of weeks a year updating it. The technology plan built on an
existing Strategic Plan for the organization. There is a
reasonably-long (~15-20 pages) exposition of what we're trying to do,
then appendices mapping to our strategic plan, very simple budget,
etc. Note that we are a very small organization and that we didn't
have to cover standard IT stuff--just mission-related IT
(preservation, web, databases, etc.). The primary participants were me
(Dir. Online Strategy), and senior management, with me doing the
writing, others turning it into non-technical wording, and our COO
helping with the budget.

The goal is specifically to figure what we want to be able to spend,
what our contingencies are (if too few funds), what we'll use to
measure whether we are reaching our goals, etc. We use this doc to
show to potential funders when we want them to understand where their
money is needed.

For all that, I don't know that any funders have ever seen the whole
document. Usually I roll a 1-2 page summary for specific purposes.
In-house, however, this is the document that helps us hold the what
did we accomplish last year? Is that what we meant to accomplish? Is
it what we should have accomplished? How does this change where we
expect to see ourselves next year, two years from now, in 5 years?
conversations that are vital (and help us also hold conversations
like, what happens if this building burns down. how do we recover our
digital assets.

Hope this helps,

ari

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Narda McKeen-LaClair
nmckeen-laclair at shelburnemuseum.org wrote:
 Hello all,

 Our organization is just starting the discussion about developing a
 technology plan.  It is obvious from the first conversation that there
 are varying visions for what this plan will include and how long it will
 take us to craft it.  Would anyone be willing to share their wisdom and
 experiences in developing this document?  Specifically I am interested
 in knowing who was involved and how long did it take?  What was the
 scope of your plan?  If anyone is willing to share a copy of their plan
 I would be thrilled. My email is listed below.

 Thank you in advance,
 Narda

 Narda McKeen LaClair
 Technology Administrator
 Shelburne Museum
 PO Box 10
 Shelburne, VT, 05482
 (802)985-3346 x3196
 nmckeen-laclair at shelburnemuseum.org


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[MCN-L] Asset storage, what is enough redundency??

[Ari Davidow]

having three separate RAID systems (RAID 6!!) several miles apart
sounds fine. Having one of those systems hundreds of miles apart could
be better, but you are in good shape.

I would not consider tape or optical media sufficiently reliable at
this stage for archival backup. Optical media are nixed because they
are inherently unreliable. Tape is relatively slow, and the tape
drives tend to get funky unpredictably, meaning that you have to test
frequently.

We're making do with one RAID 5 system and cloud backup using Amazon's
S3, which I'd take over two RAID 5 systems, but is still beat by three
of a kind :-).

ari

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Parsell, David david.parsell at yale.edu 
wrote:
 Hi all,

 We are preparing to install a Digital Asset Management System, which has led 
 to a debate regarding what is enough redundant storage to keep the digital 
 assets safe from disaster.

 Initially we specified production and mirrored on-line storage at different 
 physical locations on campus with tape backup to get the assets off-line.

 The on-line storage would be raid 6 (two spare drives), and about eight miles 
 apart, which should be enough to protect at least one copy of the data from 
 disaster short of nuclear war.

 Also, we will be sending the images to another on-line campus system called 
 the Digital Preservation Repository.

 In total,  that makes three on-line copies of the same images, not to mention 
 whatever redundancy and backup the DPR will incorporate.

 Now, we are debating whether it is worth the investment to include tape 
 backup, which seems to be tedious, error prone and technology that needs to 
 be upgraded frequently to keep it current.

 Has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis for tape backup verses redundant 
 on-line storage?

 Can you point me to any web sites/documents that discuss this issue?

 How are you handling data redundancy of digital assets at your museum?

 Thanks for your help.


 David Parsell
 Systems Manager
 Yale Center for British Art
 1080 Chapel Street
 PO Box 208280
 New Haven, CT  06520-8280

 203 432-9603
 203 432-9414 f
 david.parsell at yale.edu
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[MCN-L] Converting Cassettes to Digital

[Ari Davidow]

The default audio inputs that come with your computer are probably not
very good, so you need to have an audio card to which you would plug
in your cassette player. These are relatively inexpensive, as is the
audio capture software you would want to use. We use Adobe Audition,
but on my Mac at home, I use a Limited Edition version of Peak with
considerable success.

I would not go crazy worrying about perfect settings--you are, after
all, capturing from cassette tape--not a high fidelity medium.

Our naming scheme for similar work has been to incorporate the name
and the date of the recording, with a -# to indicate which tape in a
multiple tape recording, e.g., for Jane Doe's interviews, a folder
called Doe_Jane20050314 (or Doe_Jane_2005-03-14, or whatever is
convenient), and then files called Arditti_Rita20050314-1.wav, etc.

We save files in .WAV format--WAV is a reasonable wrapper that should
preserve the fidelity of the original. We then generate MP3 files for
presentation--putting things on a CD for playing in a CD player or
uploading to a website. But you don't want to go straight to mp3
because one day, when there are better tools, you will be stuck with
the degraded, lossy mp3 file you settled for initially. What yo want
is to be able to regenerate files every few years to whatever standard
is then current, up to the fidelity limits of that originally captured
file.

You can comfortably use CD-ROM or DVD for working copies of files, but
they are emphatically not preservation media. For that, you pretty
much need live storage--a local RAID array and, preferably, two or
more remote live disk systems for redundancy and disaster recovery.

Metadata should include data on the contents, including geolocation,
date or dateTime, as relevant, original media--Dublin Core provides a
very reasonable starting point for descriptive metadata. And, any
repository or DAM software should be able to pick up technical
metadata automatically (file format, size, checksum or other file
integrity check). Preservation metadata can be expressed using PREMIS,
but you would have to figure out what is appropriate. At a minimum,
that would include information on what you have done with the
original, what derivatives have been created, any migration info as it
accumulates, etc.

That's probably the minimal basics--and even a bit more, depending on
the actual project. Someone doing more work in this can probably chime
in to point you to the relevant current specs. I'd see what is posted
in the MCN digital media SIG page which should cover this and other
subjects (but for all sorts of good reasons, starting with busy people
and our lives, may not).

Hope this helps,
ari

P.S. When we did a large project of this sort, we actually hired
someone who had a disk/tape transfer studio in his photo studio to do
the transfers for us very inexpensively. We lucked out--he was very
attentive. We also weren't terribly worried since, as I said at the
beginning, we =were= starting from cassette tape, and barring utter
malfeasance, there was little the transfer process was likely to add
in the way of noise.

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Heather Marie Wells
hmwells at springdaleark.org wrote:
 Hi all,

 I'm wondering if any of you have worked on converting cassette tapes to
 digital files and what procedures you decided to follow in doing so.

 Specifically:
 How did you store the digital?  Burn it to CDs or DVDs, if so did you make
 it data discs or a playable audio CD?  Did you store it on a hard drive,
 if so as a .WAV file or .MP3?

 What kind of naming scheme did you use for the digital file?

 What metadata did you include?

 Thanks,
 Heather Marie

 Heather Marie Wells
 Collections Assistant/Podcast Producer
 Shiloh Museum of Ozark History
 118 W. Johnson Ave.
 Springdale, AR 72764
 Phone: (479) 750-8165
 Fax: (479) 750-8693
 http://www.springdaleark.org/shiloh/

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[MCN-L] Use of Ning and similar Community of Practice tools

[Ari Davidow]

Ning came up during discussions at MCN this week. I thought I would
summarize what I got out of this discussion of a few weeks ago as a
starting point for further discussion.

1. First, I note that the comments I received, and other items
discussed on the MCN-L list, can be searched. The URL is at the bottom
of each message on this list. You can also go to
http://www.mcn.edu/resources/index.asp?subkey=80 to find out more
about this resource

2. Several people have joined some group on Ning. No person who
responded to my query or the subsequent discussion spoke of this as
being of particular significance. Ning is being used, but isn't
generating excitement. This accords to what I thought I was hearing
going in.

Two Ning groups that were mentioned:
a.  online museum group, The Museum Educational Social Network (MESN)
on Ning for a few years at: http://mesn.museumpods.com
b. Museum 3.0: what will the museum of the future be like? -
http://museum30.ning.com/

Facebook is often used, to equal lack of effect. The obvious Facebook
group is us--the Museum Computer Network:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18561723800 and a host more.
Once one joins a group on Facebook or Ning, what then?

I also have to mention archimuse, maintained by the folks who do the
essential Museums on the Web conference, among other projects. There
are almost 1500 registered users. If we at MCN could learn to do as
well by our presenters, it would be a major step forward in terms of
making conference materials accessible and part of ongoing discussion.
The site is built with Drupal--the same tool used by many of us at our
own institutions. In between conferences, there is an ongoing stream
of news and information of interest. http://conference.archimuse.com

Speaking of Drupal, Howard Rheingold recently opened his Social Media
Classroom. Combining wiki, forums, chat, and other media, it is worth
requesting participation at http://socialmediaclassroom.com - but,
even more than archimuse, there is no social networking aspect to the
site. Something that would be most helpful to those of us looking for
peers in specific geographic areas or with specific skills, interests,
job titles, hair spray brand, whatever.

Finally, one person mentioned www.museumprofessionals.org which uses
web-based forums (vBulletin).

I feel that there are lots of interesting things happing to support
Communities of Practice, ranging from social networking sites to
group-edited wikis. If someone puts the right combination of these
pieces together, something very exciting will be possible. I wish I
knew what combination and to what purpose ;-).

Hope this helps,
ari

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Ari Davidow aridavidow at gmail.com wrote:
 Is anyone using Ning or grou.ps to help pull together intranet
 activity or Community of Practice (or general community)? I keep
 hearing about these tools, but have no sense how they are being used
 or which, of the many issues I am grappling with, they address (if
 any).

 In theory, having a single place to gather resources and do many times
 of sharing and discussion would be great. In practice, I wonder if
 wikis, on the one hand, or Facebook at another extreme, aren't doing
 enough of what we want.

 Thoughts?

 ari

[MCN-L] Session notes from MCN2008

[Ari Davidow]

I am posting notes from my own session at MCN2008 on the blog. If
anyone else has notes that do not have an immediate online home, or
that want to be online in an MCN-associated area (if I may be
permitted to ascribe human feelings to said notes), I would be pleased
to post them to the Musematic blog.

Feel free to email me or to spot me at various sessions. There are
other MCN channels (SIG leaders who can post to their SIG areas,etc.)
that can also be used. I am hoping to facilitate the knowledge sharing
process that begins at the conference, but want to emphasize the
importance of getting those notes online--not on getting them online
via my services.

People who have posted notes elsewhere could/should? also post that
information to this list.

Thanks (and thanks to everyone who has been presenting at MCN2008),
ari

[MCN-L] Use of Ning and similar Community of Practice tools

[Ari Davidow]

Is anyone using Ning or grou.ps to help pull together intranet
activity or Community of Practice (or general community)? I keep
hearing about these tools, but have no sense how they are being used
or which, of the many issues I am grappling with, they address (if
any).

In theory, having a single place to gather resources and do many times
of sharing and discussion would be great. In practice, I wonder if
wikis, on the one hand, or Facebook at another extreme, aren't doing
enough of what we want.

Thoughts?

ari

[MCN-L] Use of Ning and similar Community of Practice tools

[Ari Davidow]

I should clarify--I wasn't looking for a Museum or Cultural Heritage
site CoP, per se--I love archimuse and several of the others that have
been mentioned here. I was asking specifically about use of Ning (or
related services such as grou.ps) for various networking and CoP
purposes. For those who have used Ning, and the like, what problems
were you trying to solve, and did/does Ning solve that problem?

ari

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:38 PM, j trant jtrant at archimuse.com wrote:
 hi Ari,

 there are now more than 1400 users registered at
 http://conference.archimuse.com -- the online site we've created with drupal
 for the museums and the web conference community.

 while contributions are cyclical, related to the rhythms of the meeting, the
 traffic on the site, particularly the bibliography of past papers, is
 constant.
...

 At 12:20 PM -0500 11/10/08, Ari Davidow wrote:

 Is anyone using Ning or grou.ps to help pull together intranet
 activity or Community of Practice (or general community)? I keep
 hearing about these tools, but have no sense how they are being used
 or which, of the many issues I am grappling with, they address (if
 any).

[MCN-L] MCN SIGs - am I too clueless to participate?

[Ari Davidow]

As long as I am asking convoluted questions

At the last MCN conference I attended, two years ago, I was very
interested in several SIGs and thought that I joined. Here it is two
years later. I can't recall any SIG discussions that I have had in the
intervening time (other than the IP-SIG, for which Amalya posts
frequently and noticably), and those particular SIG pages, including
the related resource pages, do not look like they have changed since.

Is this people's general experience? Did I most likely just not make
my interest known such that it was captured and acted on (as in, be
part of ongoing discussions)?

And, of course, am I the only person who suspects that a wiki, perhaps
among other CoP tools, might be a better way to capture and maintain
information in these SIGs, as generated, rather than what appear to be
the current static, unmaintained html pages?

Is there more we can do with SIGs that would be useful? Which ones are
meeting at MCN (I think I noticed two or three SIG meetings--IP SIG,
plus California and Taiwan? in the calendar)

ari

[MCN-L] MCN SIGs - am I too clueless to participate?

[Ari Davidow]

Hi Rob,

Good! I'm not totally out of it, and many thanks for providing the
information I was fishing for (the PDF has much more info than the
webpage schedule, which, at least when I looked at it, was light on
details of SIG lunches).

ari

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Rob Lancefield on lists
lists at lancefield.net wrote:
 Hi Ari and all,

 This is just my personal 2 cents as a former MCN SIG (Special Interest
 Group) chair, but I'd say your experience is not at all atypical and in
 no way a symptom of cluelessness--rather, a sign of accurate radar. Most
 SIGs do fall fairly dormant for most of the year, with a few exceptions.

 That said, and in the spirit of transparency, inclusivity, and our MCN
 conference this week (three good things!), two thoughts I can float:

 1. This cyclical slide into semi-dormancy is something the SIGs have
 struggled with forever, to a first approximation; and a SIG is really
 only as active as its members make it. (By the way, to note this isn't
 to diss our SIG chairs, but quite the opposite: they're the leaders in
 this struggle against entropy.) So, I'd encourage conference attendees
 who feel that they have common interest with any of the SIGs to drop by
 a meeting or two, speak up, and maybe spur--and run with--an idea. The
 conference schedule (see At-a-Glance, pp. 7-9, for SIGs) is online at:

 http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp?subkey=2093 .

 And for a list of all SIGs, please see: http://www.mcn.edu/groups .

 2. Great ideas re: other approaches to maintaining electronic space for
 SIG content. MCN's entire assemblage of electronic services is a key
 area of reassessment and work for MCN, so I'd encourage you--and anyone
 else who may be interested--to keep sharing your ideas, so we can fold
 them into that process. The annual general meeting (Thursday, 3PM) will
 offer a chance to see who's leading MCN committee work in this and other
 areas, and to hear truly brief updates on what those areas of work are.

 Hope this may help, and that it didn't veer too far off into boosterism!

 thanks,
 Rob
 __
 Rob Lancefield (rlancefield [at] wesleyan.edu)
 Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections
 Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
 301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459-0487 USA
 860.685.2965
 Vice President / President-Elect, Museum Computer Network (MCN)

 On 11/10/08 3:00 PM, Ari Davidow wrote:
 As long as I am asking convoluted questions

 At the last MCN conference I attended, two years ago, I was very
 interested in several SIGs and thought that I joined. Here it is two
 years later. I can't recall any SIG discussions that I have had in the
 intervening time (other than the IP-SIG, for which Amalya posts
 frequently and noticably), and those particular SIG pages, including
 the related resource pages, do not look like they have changed since.

 Is this people's general experience? Did I most likely just not make
 my interest known such that it was captured and acted on (as in, be
 part of ongoing discussions)?

 And, of course, am I the only person who suspects that a wiki, perhaps
 among other CoP tools, might be a better way to capture and maintain
 information in these SIGs, as generated, rather than what appear to be
 the current static, unmaintained html pages?

 Is there more we can do with SIGs that would be useful? Which ones are
 meeting at MCN (I think I noticed two or three SIG meetings--IP SIG,
 plus California and Taiwan? in the calendar)

 ari
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[MCN-L] Offsite Digital Image Archive Options

[Ari Davidow]

We're probably the folks who brought up S3 back when. We have a RAID server
in-house that will ultimately hold about 6GB (which is enough for current
projects once we get them all in manageable, preservable forms) and are
backing that up to S3. My experience with removable media and/or optical
media is sufficiently negative that our policy is first back up to RAID
inhouse, then S3, then LOCKSS with other media as convenient (in our case,
probably DVD and minimal tape). We are also using this with Subversion for
the accompanying documentation (transcripts, interview logs, metadata
descriptions), etc. I'll be presenting on the subject at the upcoming
conference in Washington, DC--do come by!

We are currently working on a minimalist Fedora install that is going to be
based on Amazon's services so that we never have to purchase (or maintain)
yet another server for this purpose. The bandwidth/usage charges are not
s cheap, but the result, at least in this phase, is a server that is
easily accessible, easily secured, easily re-imaged separate from the server
content (that archive on S3 and other online services) and for which we
don't have to write useful specs at a time when we're not sure what the real
requirements will be once things (if things) stabilize to where a commodity
physical solution (and its upkeep) is more economical.

I am hoping to avoid ever again to be putting in a hard disk that has been
sitting around for six months (or six months) hoping to find a way to get it
unstuck and working, or hoping that the last copy of the three we had in
separate places on separate optical media will work. But we're at least a
year off having enough of this implemented in enough places that I'll be
able to sleep easily on this account. I may change my tune by then ;-).

ari

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mary Bloodworth MBLOODWORTH at 
folger.eduwrote:

 I am writing to ask if any of you -- like us here at the Folger
 Shakespeare Library -- are at small institutions and without major
 digital asset management or IT infrastructures but nevertheless are
 engaged in active digital imaging?



 If so, are you willing to talk (offlist or on) about your backup /
 archiving schemes? We are working on establishing scalable systems
 architecture and backup strategies for digital images of collection
 materials, and would love to compare notes with others who have some
 version of a 2-3 tier backup strategy.



 Our current situation is this: For each digital image of collection
 material, our Photography and Digital Imaging lab produces a minimum of
 two images: a ca. 100-120 mb unretouched master, and a ca. 80-100 mb
 cropped  color-corrected derivative. We are looking for a solution that
 will permit us to archive the masters offsite. We're currently running
 tape backups and taking them to a staff member's house. However, tapes
 sitting on the bookshelf in a Folger staff member's house isn't good
 enough anymore.



 What we'll need is at least 1.5 - 2 TB of space. This can be a dark
 archive because we won't need frequent access, though infrequent access
 would be necessary. I looked at the MCN-L archives and found one thread
 from November, in which some spoke of Amazon S3. Any thoughts on this,
 or a different service that's cost-effective?



 With thanks in advance,
 Mary Bloodworth

 Head of Information Services

 Folger Shakespeare Library

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