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Building Communities of Interest with Museum Collections, Libraries, and Archives

Page history last edited by Effie Kapsalis 13 years, 4 months ago

Session title: Building Communities of Interest with Museum Collections, Libraries, and Archives

 

In brief:

As more content is shared in increasingly engaging environments, cultural institutions are challenged to attract visitors to engage with their collections and staff. It is no longer enough to digitize and describe. We are being challenged to be wide-open, participatory, and relevant. This panel will take you through some of the Smithsonian’s recent projects which seek to engage online audiences with its collections that cross art, history, and science. We will be open about the surprises and sometimes painful challenges that these projects can create.

 

  •  Biodiversity Heritage Library 
  • Flickr Commons
  • Smithsonian Teachers Night

 

View intro Presentation  
 

Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (www.biodiversitylibrary.org) has sought new audiences for taxonomic literature through the use of social media, and an open framework of APIs and web services. Exposing vast amounts of taxonomic data have inspired users to create new interfaces and applications to what, at first glance is a standard digital library.


Flickr Commons (www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/VIEW PRESENTATION
The Smithsonian Institution was the 4th partner to launch on The Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons) which presents photo collections from national and international organizations. This project was the first large-scale, pan-Smithsonian effort at social media outreach with digitized collections. The project presented staffing, metadata, and process challenges due to the dispersed nature of the collections. However, with the nearly 2000 images SI staff uploaded, we attracted new audiences, enhanced our collections data, and inspired creativity.

VIEW RESULTS OF THE SMITHSONIAN'S PARTICIPATION IN THE FLICKR COMMONS: FlickrCommons_Overview.pdf

 

Center for Education and Museum Studies Online Conference Series


“Smithsonian Teachers Night” is an annual event designed to celebrate education and to strengthen bonds between local audiences and Smithsonian experts. In an attempt to scale up this experience by connecting experts with collections, and making those connections visible and interactive, SCEMS developed a series of online interactive education conferences examining one topic through the diverse historical, artistic, cultural, and scientific collections and expertise residing within the Smithsonian. These conferences provide a unique perspective on topics such as Abraham Lincoln (examining not only history, but artistic interpretations, and scientific explorations that defined this period), but also provide an opportunity for new communities within the Smithsonian to form, for example, bridging together the often-segregated professional worlds of art and science. These new communities proved to be a powerful draw as they connected with communities of interest, students and the general public, from more than 100 counties participating.

 

LINK TO ONLINE TEACHERS CONFERENCES: http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/professional_development/professional_development.html 

 

Abstract:

 

As more content is shared in increasingly engaging environments, cultural institutions are challenged to attract visitors to engage with their collections and staff. It is no longer enough to digitize and describe. We are being challenged to be wide-open, participatory, and relevant. This panel will take you through some of the Smithsonian’s recent projects which seek to engage online audiences with its collections that cross art, history, and science. We will be open about the surprises and sometimes painful challenges that these projects can create.

 

This session will be about 40 minutes presentation and the rest, brainstorm and Q&A. For the brainstorm portion of the panel, we will also ask people to get in small groups to list communities of interest and where they hang out, both online and in the world.


click! photography changes everything (click.si.edu)


Organized by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative (SPI), click! photography changes everything invites the public to consider ways in which photography enables us to see, experience, and interact with the world. As a deliberate challenge to the traditional one-way, curator-to-visitor dynamic, in March 2009 SPI opened a nine-month period during which the public was invited to submit their own stories and photographs for possible inclusion in click! In Summer 2010, SPI will conclude active collecting for click! photography changes everything, allowing it to exist as an archive of written and filmed commentaries from over 100 participants, each investigating how photography has changed the progress and practice of their diverse fields.

 

Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (www.biodiversitylibrary.org) has sought new audiences for taxonomic literature through the use of social media, and an open framework of APIs and web services. Exposing vast amounts of taxonomic data have inspired users to create new interfaces and applications to what, at first glance is a standard digital library.


Flickr Commons (www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/)
The Smithsonian Institution was the 4th partner to launch on The Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons) which presents photo collections from national and international organizations. This project was the first large-scale, pan-Smithsonian effort at social media outreach with digitized collections. The project presented staffing, metadata, and process challenges due to the dispersed nature of the collections. However, with the nearly 2000 images SI staff uploaded, we attracted new audiences, enhanced our collections data, and inspired creativity.


View Results of Smithsonian's Participation on the FlickrCommons_Overview.pdf

 

Center for Education and Museum Studies Online Conference Series

“Smithsonian Teachers Night” is an annual event designed to celebrate education and to strengthen bonds between local audiences and Smithsonian experts. In an attempt to scale up this experience by connecting experts with collections, and making those connections visible and interactive, SCEMS developed a series of online interactive education conferences examining one topic through the diverse historical, artistic, cultural, and scientific collections and expertise residing within the Smithsonian. These conferences provide a unique perspective on topics such as Abraham Lincoln (examining not only history, but artistic interpretations, and scientific explorations that defined this period), but also provide an opportunity for new communities within the Smithsonian to form, for example, bridging together the often-segregated professional worlds of art and science. These new communities proved to be a powerful draw as they connected with communities of interest, students and the general public, from more than 100 counties participating.

 

 

Session Info

  • Type: Full Panel
  • Keywords: social media, outreach, strategy, interdisciplinary, museum, libarary, archive
  • Relevance: This presentation targets museum media/web managers and practitioners. It is relevant to museums, libraries, and archives who have a viable pool of digitized collections and are seeking to create outreach programs using the collections.

 

Bios

 

Effie Kapsalis, chair of this panel, has recently joined the Smithsonian Institution Archives as the Head of New Media. Formerly of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative (SPI), she oversaw programs that brought the diverse photography collections at the Smithsonian into a contemporary discussion about visual culture and literacy. click! photography changes everything was one such program that gathered experts from a variety of fields to talk about how they use photography in their fields of discipline. She is a contributor and co-editor of THE BIGGER PICTURE, a blog about visual archives, and leads the Smithsonian’s effort on the Flickr Commons and Wikipedia. She recently completed "summer developer camp" at the Center for History and New Media where she and 11 other "digital humanists" developed Anthologize, an open source tool for creating books from blogs (She will give an MCN presentation on the Anthologize development process as part of the Open Source Panel). She has more than 15 years experience managing, designing, and developing content for online environments in museum, corporate, and educational settings. She received her master’s degree (Masters Industrial Design) focusing on pervasive technologies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2003.

 

Martin R. Kalfatovic is the Assistant Director, Digital Services Division at Smithsonian Institution Libraries. The Digital Services Division oversees the Libraries digitization efforts which include digital editions and collections, online exhibitions, and other website content. Current projects include work on metadata, standards, intellectual property issues. As the Smithsonian's coordinator for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), he oversees the Smithsonian's contributions and serves on the BHL Technical Committee. Current research focuses on the Biodiversity Heritage Library project (www.biodiversitylibrary.org) in terms of linking texts with taxonomic intelligence and other analysis tools; and the data curation and related issues that surround the publication of Smithsonian Contributions and Studies series (www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions) in an electronic format. He is a frequent contributor of articles and reviews and the author of three books; his M.S.L.S. from The School of Library and Information Science, The Catholic University of America, in 1990. He has an inordinate fondness for dodos.

 

Darren Milligan is the designer and director of digital media projects at the Center for Education and Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, USA. There he produces digital learning resources, manages social media initiatives, and directs websites including the two-time People's Voice Webby-Award-winning digital portal for education at the Smithsonian, smithsonianeducation.org. He served as art director and producer of the Institution’s teacher magazine (Smithsonian in Your Classroom) and integrated online interactive IdeaLabs, distributed to every primary and secondary school in the United States (more than 80,000 schools serving 30 million students). In 2008, he also worked on the team that established the Smithsonian as one of the founding institutional members of the Flickr Commons (flickr.com/commons). Prior to the Smithsonian, he developed digital citizen-science projects and online mentoring communities at the nonprofit Purple Martin Conservation Association (www.purplemartin.org). Darren is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the American Association of Museums Media and Technology Committee, and serves on various Smithsonian committees focused on education and web/new media strategies.  Darren is also an amateur photographer and manages the blog, www.printedprimate.org, focusing on pre-photographic images of primates in western cultures.

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Effie Kapsalis has recently joined the Smithsonian Institution Archives as the Head of New Media. Formerly of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative (SPI), she oversaw programs that brought the diverse photography collections at the Smithsonian into a contemporary discussion on visual culture and literacy. click! photography changes everything (click.si.edu) was one such program that gathered experts from a variety of fields to talk about how they use photography in their fields of discipline. She is a contributor and co-editor of THE BIGGER PICTURE (blog.photography.si.edu), a blog about visual archives, and leads the Smithsonian’s effort on the Flickr Commons and Wikipedia. She has more than 15 years experience managing, designing, and developing content for online environments in museum, corporate, and educational settings. She received her master’s degree in pervasive technologies and social media at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 2003. 

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