Beyond the Button

I recently had the pleasure to speak the IMLS WebWise conference about some of the work that we have been doing with Science Buzz. This was an interesting meeting because it mixes the world of traditional museum with a wise group of people from the library field as well. For those of you who don't already know, those librarians are about 5 years ahead of museums when it comes to sharing authority with their visitors. Many of us thinking about new ways to use technology in our museums are looking to the library world for leadership.

Here are few of the coolest projects that I learned about in Miami Beach (oh yeah did I mention that the conference was in Miami Beach...poor me).

George Mason University's Center for History and New Media is an exciting group of talented software developers and that blend a unique approach to education and learning around history. They talked about two projects:

• Zotero - A firefox plugin that gives you an iTunes style tool to track, tag, and archive to various nerdy academic resources you need to follow as you research weavers shuttles of the Appalachian Mountains, Tractors of the Upper Midwest, or the personal stories told around Hurricane Katrina. As more and more academic research moves online I am sure that Zotero will become more and more of a standard for researchers of all ilks to manage their many academic resources.
• Omeka - Think of Omeka as the WordPress of "Collections Online." After some initial configuration Omeka will be a simple content management system to build collections based websites. I am particularly encourages to see the Omeka team focusing on smaller museums and building some community tools right into the software.

My other favorite discovery hits close to home. As a matter of fact I walk past this museum on my way to work every day. The Minnesota Historical Society is experimenting with GIS resources in conjunction with their collection of historical maps and aerial photographs. On their True North website you can overlay interesting data sets like current agricultural land use and historical Indian land use before European settlement. I really like this project because it exposes a set of map based tools to the general public.

TwineMany of us in the museum world have been thinking about the "semantic web" for a long time. Scientists and educators alike need a more natural and standardized way of linking all the knowledge about different topics out there together. However the discussion around these tools is inherently academic and suffers from a serious popularity problem. Ask a few science educators about initiatives like the NSDL (The National Science Digital Library), Dublin Core Meta-Data, or The Internet Scout Project's CWIS system and you will get some seriously blank looks. For any of the heralded benefits of the semantic web to take hold we need a killer app that appeals to a wide range of users including science educators.

Nova Spivack thinks that his soon to launch web app Twine will be just this, "the first mainstream Semantic Web application." I haven't been able to check out Twine first hand yet but it looks pretty rad from reviews and screenshots.

From what I can tell it will be a tool for teams of people to build knowledge networks like on a wiki. However, tools will help you "tie it all together" using concepts that librarians will love from the semantic web and learning artificial intelligence systems. Who knows how this will actually take off but I get excited any time I see a useful tool start to bubble up on the popular media sites that talks about the nerdy world o the semantic web. I'll report here when I get an invite to join their beta test.