"A Walk in the Park: The Balboa Park Online Collaborative First Year Report"
Abstract
Balboa Park Online Collaborative is a collaborative
technology project involving 17 museums, performing arts venues, gardens, and
the San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park, San Diego. This paper will present the
challenges we faced in managing the creation and execution of a common strategy
and framework during our first year. We will share the successes and lessons
learned as well as the compromises required to move the institutions of Balboa
Park forward and manage the project effectively. Read More Slides
Museum Commons. Tragedy or Enlightened Self-Interest?
Abstract
There has been an exciting surge of interest in the museum sector in expanding access to museum data through the classic idea of creating a commons. A Web-based multi-institutional museum commons could open up public access to collections, deepening contextual knowledge of objects and helping museum professionals recognize the unseen value of their own collections. For example, collections items that seem orphaned or fragmentary in one institution may enjoy a rich life on-line, once reunited with relevant collections and data from other institutions in an on-line commons environment. Commons-oriented intellectual property policies should also enable content sharing for educational and other non-commercial uses, or they may be used to facilitate new innovations or for-profit businesses beyond the scope of traditional rights-and-reproductions activities.
The Smithsonian Institution and the Balboa Park on-line Collaborative (BPOC) are both large, multi-part organizations with diverse research and outreach missions: together they provide a unique opportunity to explore the potential of the commons model. Read More Slides
Building a cultural calendar
Abstract
This mini workshop will focus on the calendar sub-project of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative’s multi-institutional, Drupal Web site deployment. Like most cultural institution Web sites, the sites from BPOC member institutions have a significant emphasis on events – exhibitions, lectures, classes, tours, performances, etc. Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense. Additionally, the complexities of scheduling events on-line for museums and cultural institutions (e.g. a tour that takes place every other Monday, except for holidays, when it happens on Tuesday) often leads to either inefficient or, on the other end of the spectrum, overly complex calendaring software that non-technical staff are loathe to embrace and technical staff are loathe to support. Finally, in a multi-institutional environment like Balboa Park, there is significant need for a centralized, automated calendar system that will streamline workflows for marketing and publicity staff by simplifying the data entry process and allowing the institutions to both coordinate events with their neighbors and distribute accurate event information to other media outlets and social networks en masse.