Research Roundup
Date: February 23, 2009

 

Tools for the future:
  • Are podcasts the future of museums? A quick look at the MuseumPods museum podcast directory—which lists dozens of on-demand audio presentations from museums around the world—says “maybe.” Now, MuseumPods has joined with Creative Commons to offer new tools that make it easy for museums to distribute podcasts under the Creative Commons license (an open-source alternative to traditional copyright).
The near future:
  • On March 11, 2009, the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies hosts the latest installment in the G. Brown Goode Smithsonian Education Lecture series. The speaker will be Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His topic: “Through the Looking Glass: Museums and Internet-Based Transparency.” The lecture will be webcast live from 2:30-4:00 p.m. EST. For more details, visit http://museumstudies.si.edu/webcast_031109.html.
  • This summer the city of Toronto will co-sponsor an international conference on “Placing Creativity.” According to the local Globe and Mail newspaper (Feb. 11, 2009), the event is being billed as “major gathering of international thinkers” and will focus on “the geographic discipline of ‘cultural mapping,’ which looks at the way artists and art institutions cluster and the effect they have on neighbouring businesses. Rita Davies, head of the city’s culture department, says the conference will examine, among other things, how rapid gentrification can harm arts communities.” Conference organizers include creative economy guru Richard Florida and the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Read the full article here.
  • In the latest issue of The Nonprofit Quarterly, Paul Light ponders “Four Futures” for the nonprofit sector, ranging from “the rescue fantasy” (generous private philanthropy and/or government support offsets the current economic crisis)  to “an arbitrary winnowing” (where nonprofit organizations with robust marketing budgets and intense community engagement prosper while many others merge or “simply melt away”).
  • For another perspective on the role of nonprofits in the current economic crisis, see the latest survey from the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University: “‘Shovel-Ready’ but Stalled: Nonprofit Infrastructure Projects Ready for Economic Recovery Support.” According to this report, America’s museums and other nonprofits have more than $166 billion in “shovel-ready” projects that could put people to work at short notice, contribute to the nation’s economic recovery, and help build stronger communities. The survey (conducted by the Listening Post Project in partnership with AAM and other organizations) identified more than 250 specific museum projects with a combined budget of more than $3.2 billion—and that’s just a sample.             

Social trends, etc.:
Research Reports:
  • The Association of Research Libraries has a new report on the role of libraries as digital repositories:  The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Services. The topic sounds narrow—except that the ARL report tackles a variety of big issues that also affect the museum community, including “long-term archiving and migration of content, dissemination and access management, metadata and format management, search and discovery tools, publishing, data mining, etc.” (in short, the entire connection between users and digital content).

Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest:
  • Springwise, the trendwatchers’ website, describes the DigiWall as “computer game meets climbing wall."
“Designed for use in public places like museums and shopping malls, DigiWall is a climbing wall with high-end surround-sound whose grips include both lights and sensors that react when they are touched. A variety of games, contests, challenges and creative experiences are possible on the wall as a result, using a combination of visual and audio feedback and body movements. … When not in use, DigiWall becomes a decorative sound and light installation.”
Read the rest of the article here or visit the Swedish manufacturer’s website at http://www.digiwall.se/
  • A favorite topic of these Research Reports is robots and museums. This time, we direct your attention to Masahiro Shiomi, et al., “Interactive humanoid robots for a science museum,” Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction (2006), at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1121241.1121293. The full text is limited to subscribers and members of the Association for Computing Machinery, but here is the abstract:
This paper reports on a field trial with interactive humanoid robots at a science museum where visitors are supposed to study and develop an interest in science. In the trial, each visitor wore an RFID tag while looking around the museum’s exhibits. Information obtained from the RFID tags was used to direct the robots’ interaction with the visitors. The robots autonomously interacted with visitors via gestures and utterances resembling the free play of children. In addition, they performed exhibit-guiding by moving around several exhibits and explaining the exhibits based on sensor information. The robots were highly evaluated by visitors during the two-month trial. Moreover, we conducted an experiment in the field trial to compare the detailed effects of exhibit-guiding and free-play interaction under three operating conditions. This revealed that the combination of the free-play interaction and exhibit-guiding positively affected visitors’ experiences at the science museum.   

Useless Time-Wasters:
  • Antiques Roadshow 2550!  (Note that this link will eventually lead you to CollegeHumor.com, which sometimes features crass or sophomoric content that may not be suitable for all workplaces.)  
  • 16,200 sticky notes + one presidential birthday = 2 giant portraits of Abraham Lincoln. See the Springfield (IL) State Journal-Regist for more details.
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