David Alexander’s Blog

My company finished a site that launched last week:  Capital Neighbourhoods.  The site is another virtual exhibit for the Virtual Museum of Canada and features the stories of seven neighbourhoods in Ottawa.  Using an interactive map (Google Maps), visitors can explore the neighbourhoods, read the stories and post stories, images, video or audio of their own.

From the home page, visitors select one of the seven communities featured on the map of urban Ottawa or can choose a featured story. On the neighbourhood page, visitors will learn about the general history of the community from founding families to modern day institutions. The page includes “then and now” photographs and links to video oral histories. Visitors can then click through to the neighbourhood map where they will find a series of sites highlighted including historic homes, churches, educational institutions and also well known local shops, parks, statues and streetscapes. Each link includes photos and a brief history. The site is intended to appeal to a wide range of audiences by providing content in a number of formats, from basic text and photographs to video and audio clips to 3D videos. The virtual exhibition not only explains a building’s architecture, but also tells the story of the people who lived there and the important events that took place at that site.   It’s only been live a few weeks and already people are adding their own stories.

Two new Victoria-centric Facebook pages to mention today - the Royal BC Museum has entered the social media age with a new Facebook page and Secret Victoria is a new Facebook page set up by *ahem* me to discuss some of Victoria’s hidden gems.  It’s modelled after similar sites in Seattle and Vancouver.  Give them both some love if you are in the area.

Museums at Night is a big cultural event organized by Culture24 in the UK.  Over 80 museums are participating in the event that runs from May 14th to the 16th and it looks like it would be a huge amount of fun:

A great favourite of Museums at Night 2009 will also be returning as the Old Operating Theatre invites visitors to taste the unforgettable atmosphere in the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe. Hidden in the roof of St Thomas Church, this is where nineteenth century amputations were carried out by gaslight in 27 seconds flat.

Another popular event last year was the Cabinet War Rooms sleepover, which will be offering offer lucky visitors the chance to spend the night in Churchill’s atmospheric World War Two shelter beneath the streets of Whitehall. Visitors might even be able to see if the dummy of Winston does it’s fabled ‘mysterious move’ during the night!

There’s a similar wartime theme in Weston-super-Mare where the Helicopter Museum is going ‘Back to the Blitz’ complete with air raid sirens and giant searchlights that will illuminate the exhibition hangar. Fifty flight simulators will link up to recreate a gigantic air battle over the bombed ruins of London.

We don’t have a huge amount of museums in Victoria but if you included the libraries, encouraged restaurants to take part and added some of the tourist attractions such as the Royal London Wax Museum and Buchart Gardens, we could have a really interesting culture night.  It’s a good way to encourage residents to visit their local museums and galleries and bring in businesses for an interesting tie-in.   Ok, I’ve chucked the idea out, now someone run with it!

I remember attending conferences four-five years ago and everyone talked about Second Life and how it was going to change the museum world.  There were the how-to conference workshops for newbies to the program but also these really specific conference sessions on making money, developing and strategizing in Second Life.  And then it just sort of vanished.  I haven’t heard anything substantive about Second Life until this week.

Second Life (Linden Lab) announced a major upgrade to it’s viewer.  It is now simpler to use and more browser-like, I presume getting past the difficulties first time users had navigating the program.  The interesting piece is that users can now “drop Web pages, video, Flash content, and other media onto any surface in Second Life”.  A nod to the business world - and really Second Life, done well, could be a great training venue for larger organizations.

As a concept, Second Life is amazing - it expands everything we want to do into a world of imagination and without bounds.   Practically though, I found it cumbersome.  Maybe it’s time to give it a second try.

The British Museum has launched a new site aimed at kids.  Young Explorers has a bunch of features that kept me, no longer a kid, completely engaged.  Ok, I’m not a kid, but I have the attention span of one, so the fact that I was on this site for about an hour today was impressive.   One of the features on the site is a time traveler choose your adventure type game with smaller interactives embedded within.  I am currently (yes, I am multitasking) in ancient Mexico trying to find a skull but in the process have found a mysterious statue I have to pull back together.  It all smacks of early days Habbo without the dating element but it’s really slick, challenging and way more entertaining than I would have expected.

The New Scientist has a piece on how fragile our knowledge system is in the article: Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge.

A couple of pieces I thought were interesting:

In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had “forgotten” how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responsible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme.

Ouch!

What’s more, what is likely to survive the longest from today’s digital age is not necessary the most important. The more copies - backups - there are of any piece of data, the greater the chances of its survival, discovery and retrieval. Some data is much copied because it is so useful, like operating systems, but mostly it is down to popularity.

That means digital versions of popular music and even some movies might survive many decades: Abba might just top the pop charts again in the 22nd century. However, there are far fewer copies of the textbooks and manuals and blueprints containing the kind of distillation of specialised knowledge that might matter most to those trying to rebuild civilisation, such as how to smelt iron or make antibiotics.

I could make a bunch of jokes about this and the nature of our society, but looking at the hard drives of both my desktop and laptop, there isn’t a huge amount of useful post-apocalyptic knowledge.  If the apocalypse involves Zombies or a pop culture deficiency, they might have something.

Perhaps the most crucial loss will occur after half a century or so, as any surviving engineers, scientists and doctors start to succumb to old age. Their skills and know-how would make a huge difference when it comes to finding important information and getting key machinery working again.

I’ve seen versions of this time and time again with clients in the cultural sector.  People retire and take with them a generation of information and stories - the history of artifacts, donors, the bit players in acquisitions - all the really interesting data that surrounds a painting, an artifact, a historical figure.  Collection management systems can collect some of this, but generally only in a shallow way.  If we have this much trouble with information now, imagine the troubles if an apocalypse got in the way!

The whole world is talking about the iPad and there are lots of really brilliant people going into in great deal.  So, if you are looking for a technical analysis, shoo, but if you want a fluffy David analysis - you came to the right place.  I’m not super excited about the product itself - I haven’t adopted e-reading, I still like dead trees to crawl into bed with, and would maybe see myself reading a magazine or comic on the iPad.  I have an iPhone which has all the same features as the iPad - albeit in a smaller package so the features are - for the most part - not new to me.  So, the device itself doesn’t get my heart a flutter.  But what does get me excited, really excited is this will be the first shot in the evolution of the tablet (notice I am ignoring anything that came before).  Imagine the iPad with handwriting recognition.  The best of my old Palm with the best of my iPhone = power.  I could take notes, sketch, create - that get’s the pulse racing.  So, lots of potential and just the beginning but not enough that it would get me standing in line for one.

For a glimpse from Scobleizer as to where the product could go - click here - that is exciting!

Two items caught my attention this week and fueled my ongoing rant that the libraries that don’t adapt will die.   This, the week that I also officially enter the library world as board member.  I’ve been a user - all my life, an employee and now I’ll be a trustee on the Greater Victoria Public Library Board.  Looking forward to making a difference from a whole other side this time.

A Bar in a Library

What an awesome idea.  The Globe and Mail had an article on changing libraries and includes the following on Toronto Libraries new salon:

It’s not the only reason Toronto’s public library system just had its busiest year ever, but it helped: A bar opened last fall in the downtown reference library.

The canteen in the branch’s new 16,000-square-foot “salon” serves wine and spirits while opera stars, celebrity chefs and baseball executives deliver talks that compete with the best of the city’s cultural event circuit.

It’s that much easier to attract the community when you have a welcome space with wine and beer.  And to those that worry red wine and books don’t go together (really, there were legions of library staff where I worked that were terrified of the idea of food in the library!):

Food and drink hasn’t hurt the collections or the computers, as fusty, traditional library lovers might fear, said Barbara Clubb, the chief executive officer of Ottawa’s public library.

“We haven’t lost a computer to a coffee cup yet!

Skiff Reader

This looks like the next generation of Kindle - a flexible product that mimics paper.  Something you can take to bed or lie on the couch with, something you can read on the train - basically paper with a whole lot of added benefit.  It doesn’t look like it is interactive though.  That’s where an e-reader will bite into books.  When I can read a book, look something up, have a conversation about a paragraph in the book, find similar paragraphs - when the act of reading a book becomes interactive, that’s when the art of reading changes forever.  Are you listening Apple?

8.5 Million people visited the Louvre in 2009.  This is like the entire population of New York City visiting the Louvre.  Or 4 times the population of greater Vancouver visiting.  I know, this is what you *do* when you go to Paris - but really, these are awesome numbers for museum visits.  The public, however fickle, however much in love with tv and Fox News, however enamored by their snuggies and comfy couch - will go to a museum.  Granted, 15.3 million visited Disneyland Paris the same year - but I still remain hopeful.

LibraryThing has come out with Local Books - an iPhone application for book lovers.  It’s a bit like Urban Spoon but with libraries and bookstores.  The best thing - it actually has bookstores and libraries in my area!  I always expect an American-centric app when I download something from an organization that is based in the States so it’s a big surprise to see that people get that Canada exists and is a viable market.