We started off at the Indiana State Museum, a very impressive museum just from the pure breadth of it – art, science, history, music, anything relating to Indiana – not to mention their stunning new building. We jumped right into collaborative mode with a presentation on IN Harmony, a project the ISM completed last year in cooperation with Indiana University, the Indianapolis Historical Society, and the Indiana State Library to digitize and catalog a searchable database of their extensive sheet music collection.
Funded by a grant from IMLS, the project has been widely considered a success despite the challenges of collaboration (especially with institutions with differing definitions of success) by implementing a strict standards-based system to prevent errors, ensure uniformity, and reduce costs (the work can be done by interns). Creating a shared goal and looking to commonalities allowed these normally disparate institutions to work together and, now that the system has been established, could theoretically be replicated in the future.
Some of the challenges they faced:
- Different goals. Museums and libraries have different needs and practices, as well as audiences. While museums see objects as artifacts to be preserved, libraries see them as resources that need to be accessible.
- Long timeline. It took 18 months to complete the digitization process after the three years that IU spent developing proprietary software. I asked if there wasn’t software already in existence that could have been used, but apparently it was very important to the folks at the university to create something that they would own completely and could use in other applications. The resulting interface is functional and browseable by many different fields.
- Incompatibility. Even after all the time spent in development, the IN Harmony database proved to be incompatible with MIMSY that the ISM uses. In the end, the ISM benefitted primarily from having all of their material scanned, which they said they probably would not have been able to accomplish on their own. It is searchable, but everything had to be recataloged in the IMA system.
We also had a behind the scenes tour of their collections (Lincoln’s chair, Amish quilts, mastodon bones, oh my!). They are right in the midst of digitizing. We had lunch in the L.S. Ayers Tea Room, which was installed in its entirety in the museum after the original location closed. I was not kidding about the breadth of this place.
Next we visited the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and the Western Art. It is a beautiful museum and the premiere repository of contemporary Native American art in the nation. They have strived to make their website a fully interactive and sensory experience to accurately reflect the brand they have created for themselves in their physical space. They incorporate lots of flash elements, embedded YouTube videos, pod- and videocasts (a project started with <$1000 and <$400, respectively), and allow comments on most site elements. The tech-savvy education department has started using modal windows to escape some of the limits imposed by their content management system.
The Eiteljorg will also be launching a microsite for the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Art in the near future, which will have a forum and a very neat “community gallery” feature that will encourage the public to submit their own art to the site. They have their own facebook, flickr, and twitter pages, as well as their own customized YouTube channel. A good tip: you can register as a nonprofit with YouTube and have more latitude on the customization of your channel as well as larger-than-normal storage limitations.
After that presentation, we got a sneak peek of a demonstration of virtual restoration that will be presented at the conference on Saturday. A collaboration between computer scientists from Purdue and curators/conservators, the project "restores" items virtually by projecting an enhanced image onto a damaged object in a way that makes it appear new again. Still kind of clunky, since you have to have three huge projectors set up in front of the object and it takes several hours to configure, but definitely an interesting and potentially valuable idea.
Finally we went over to IUPUI to their Advanced Visualization Lab, where they showed off some of their cool stereo viewing technologies, 3-D modelers and 3-D printer. According to the academics, Web 3.0 will be 3-D. If that happens, we'll have to redigitize everything, won't we? Better not to think about it.