Friday links

It's been a while between drinks but here are a couple of interesting projects and sites I've come across lately...



Have you heard about this exhibition? We're quite excited about it in Collections. It's called 'Move: Choreographing You - Art and Dance' and it's on at the Hayward Gallery in London. Using interactive sculptures and installations this show explores the intersection of dance and art over the past 50 years by encouraging people to actually dance there way through the exhibition.You can check out more about the show at this great microsite.

Caboodle is a fun kids/museums/digital project.You can read more about it here and here but basically it's a great way of getting kids invloved with collections by visiting museums, talking to curators, taking photos and uploading them to the Caboodle site. They can also become part of an online club and it is used both by schools and individuals. Kids don't have to interact with collections they can also draw, build, find something they want to photograph and upload.

The site where I found out about Caboodle is also worth a look. It's called Culture24 and it's run by a not-for-profit group working across the areas of arts, heritage, education and tourism in the UK. If you haven't come across it before it's definately worth exploring and being inspired.

Floorplanner - free exhibition layout tool.

Exhibition designer Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has hit upon a great easy, free online tool for producing 3D exhibition layouts. It's called Floorplanner and you can read a post about it here. It looks like a great tool for mocking up exhibitions/events/displays that don't necessarily have their own design budget but that need that little bit of extra visualisation. 

Did you know that the 1st of September (Wednesday just gone) was 'International Ask A Curator Day'? It's not quite clear who made it so but 17 Australian museums and galleries seem to have jumped on board joining 100s of other organisations from 22 different countries to answer any questions the general public wanted to throw their way.

The aim of the project was for the public to have access to curators via Twitter for the day. Some organisations like Powerhouse decided to use Facebook instead as it let them answer questions more fully and is already their most active social networking platform. (This interesting post from the fresh + newer team gives you more insight into their involvement and how it fits in with their overall social media strategy). It's a bit early to tell yet how successful it was but if it becomes an annual event perhaps we could jump on board next year?

How to Make History Interesting...

It's not always easy to think of ways to make history engaging for kids...

Tate Online

While we await the new version of our EMu Intranet site, it may be useful to take a look at The Tate's online database. This operates in a very similar manner to the IMu set up we will be using, and includes many similar design features.

Have a test drive here

The overall look and feel will obviously be different, but the built-in functionality is very similar; simple search and advanced search tabs, and the saved objects (known as My Collections in our version).

Tate also use a really interesting Subject classification page - which allows users to browse without any prior knowledge of the collection content. Our "Browse Collections" functionality will be implemented using the Narratives records to provide multiple ways for users to discover our collection overviews.

Also of interest on the Tate website is a detailed explanation of their ongoing digitisiation project - Insight: digitising the Tate Collection - which is well worth a read.

Experiments with Learning

Whilst exploring the Powerhouse blog Fresh + New(er) on a boring tram journey, I stumbled on another interesting post by Seb Chan on their recent experiment with using QR codes on Object labels. Similar to barcodes, QR codes are those little square pixelated codes which are used by mobile devices to photograph or 'scan' an embedded code which looks up an URL (much easier than typing a hideously long url).

What struck me in this post was the powerhouses willingness to experiment and test a new process so that the organisation can learn from the mistakes they may make - rather than just outsourcing the mistakes and the learning... read his comments here.

As Nick recently suggested, it might be useful for us to include Registration Numbers on our Object Labels, and in time when the whole EMu catalogue goes public on the Web, we could consider adding URLs to the labels as a way to provide visitors with access to more detailed information. This would also help redirect people to our website and raise awareness of our collections online facility.

Key to the City

Photo: Louis Armstrong House Museum

Key to the City is a clever project created by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. To be part of the project members of the public are invited to go (with a friend) to a kiosk in Times Square. Here friends bestow keys on each other and the adventure begins. The key may be for a back door, front gate, community garden, graveyard or museum in all five New York buroughs. The keys open spaces usually not accessible to the general public.

Imagine all the interesting doors you could open in the Arts Centre?