In November, 2009, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative took 16 members and staff to Portland, Oregon, for the Museum Computer Network's 37th annual conference. Check out the official MCN site for the complete program. If you weren't able to attend this year, or if you wanted the skinny on what went down in those pesky concurrent sessions, check out reflections from BPOC members below!
Workshops
Focus on the Bottom Line: Image Licensing for Sustainability: "The Image Licensing, provided information regarding rights and reproductions and how museums utilize their resources to contribute to their bottom line." - Luanne Kanzawa, Japanese Friendship Garden
Project Management "On One Foot", so nice it was reviewed twice: "Participating in the discussion...really drove home for me how I could help my group be successful and what and how I needed to communicate to my Director and Board." Erin Harm, Museum of Man
Promoting Small Museum Content with Digital Social Networking Media: "This made me realize with the advances in technology how vast our reach can be around the world with or without a physical location." - Lovelynn Hansen, Japanese Friendship Garden
Digital Asset Management Forum for Heritage and Culture: "It wasn’t difficult to demonstrate the relevance of a DAM for any institution interested in organizing, managing and controlling the rapidly growing image assets and document libraries... The benefits as well as the costs are great." - Cary Canning, San Diego Natural History Museum
Sessions and Case Studies
Making the Call: Evaluating Mobile Projects in Museums: Whether you go high-tech or low-tech, evaluation is a key part of creating the kind of memorable experiences that visitors want to have.
User-Generated Content: What Good Is It? "We hope that...innovative use of user-generated content will help museums evolve with the changing attitudes, interests, and learning styles of our public." - Amber Lucero-Criswell
ArtBabble: Play Art Loud! ArtBabble was conceived, initiated, designed, built, sculpted, programmed, shot, edited, painted and launched by a cross-departmental collection of individuals at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). It is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives.
Ramping Up while Scaling Down: Strategic Innovation in Challenging Times President's Roundtable: "In institutions where cash is limited, the ability to demonstrate a project’s impact on the organization as a whole is a great tool to achieve approval from the decision makers in most institutions. - Christian Deleon, Hall of Champions.
Questions from the Business World: Are you Evaluating Visitor Engagement? How will Metrics Define Success? This panel shared the methods each of their organizations is using to measure visitor engagement with their programs, primarily online, such as websites. - Julianne Markow, San Diego Museum of Art