Papers are out for Museums & the Web 2007, including:

Urban, R., Marty, P., & Twidale, M. (2007). A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 31, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html

I’m in Kansas City all week for the Visual Resources Association Conference, but look forward to getting back next week and reading the posted papers.

Yesterday I tried to login to Second Life from home on my iBook to join a meeting of “SL Archivists” to find out what they were up to. I was able to teleport to the meeting for a few seconds before the SL client crashed horrifically – again. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Today I went out and acquired a new graphics card for my PC (which had taken up residence in the back of my closet). When I first started exploring SL in 2005, it had the guts needed to login. Sometime since August 2006 LL must have bumped up the requirements, making the geForce2 card insufficient. Ka-ching – $64 bucks later and I’m cruising around Second Life like a native instead of a gangly teenager. For reference:

Dell 8100 Dimension
1.28 Ghz Pentium 4
384 Mb RAM (yes, weird, but have you tried to by VRam lately?)
Windows XP Home
and a new EVGA e-GeForce 6200 LE

These are just above the minimum requirements to run Second Life on a PC. Performance so far has been great.

I find it disappointing and a little disturbing that my 6yr old PC can run Second Life (with a little bump in the graphics) better than my 1yr old iBook. Granted, it was a bare bones model that my new PhD student budget could afford but I think it raises questions about how easily Sl can be adopted for classroom teaching environments. The GSLIS LEEP distance program has tried to keep requirments minimal so the greatest number of students can participate. If SL were mandated for classes, some students would be left out in the virutal cold.

There are some who will argue that if your computer doesn’t support SL’s requirements then you should “go play somewhere else.” I think there are few educators, public libraries or museums who can afford to adopt this attitude. We have worked hard to make our websites accessible, to provide alternative access points when a user can’t support fancy content (e.g. Flash) and want as many people as possible to enjoy what we build with our small budgets. (and in many cases state or federal grant funding would demand accessible content).

I raise this issue not to discourage people from exploring Second Life, I do beleive that those who do will be ahead of the curve. However, I think some of our excitement about the possibilities needs to be tempered by the barriers to entry. And I think this is something that Linden Labs needs to consider if it really wants to capture the education market. I’m guessing that we are a minority of current users and may only generate a small amount of hard cash. But to fulfill the possibilities that many foresee, SL will eventually need to stabilize and find ways to lower technical barriers to entry on both platforms. I haven’t seen any news since LL open-sourced the client, but a more efficient OS X client would be welcome here.

Anyway, Aeth should me making more frequent appearances in-world now that he can do so from the comforts of home.

I was reading a DLib article about the Asset Actions Experiment that was conducted here at the University of Illinois with several other CIC members (it was actually going on a few steps from my old desk.). To enable annotations of images, they lifted the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) image schema.

Several museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum have created MySpace pages, Picture Australia and Brooklyn have leveraged and I’m a member of the Spurlock Museum‘s Facebook group.

A variety of web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. or popular blogs such BoingBoing make it easy for me to associate myself with them (if I choose). Either they provide an easy-to-use service, or give me the code to put a chicklette on my site.

So how many Museums offer people the opportunity to affiliate themselves with the museum online? e.g. here’s a quick piece of code that lets you post the museums calendar on your site, or an authorized image. Museums already have “friends” groups, what if I could declare my friendship to a museum online? Would people take the bait? Would I like the friends I found online?
What could my friends network tell me that I didn’t already know? How else might museums put themselves in the middle of interesting social networks?

Thank god for Boing Boing, which amazingly has provided exceptional coverage of all matters cultural heritage. Last week they reposted a message from Rick Prelinger’s blog about the decision by Society of American Archivists to NOT save the archive of its listservs dating back to 1993. An archivist responded to the post noting that it is common practice in the archival community to dispose of “routine correspondence.” (and I did dispose of lots of “routine correspondence” while processing collections in my archival days…)

Having recently spent a lot of time conducting research on the history of museum computing, I would love to have access to this sort of routine correspondence from my community of interest. Hell, I’m still pissed that MCN operated a listserv for years that didn’t even have an archive of messages (which we corrected upon moving to Mailman). John, if you’re listening, I’ll also be happy to personally take the archives of Museum-L off your hands if you decide it needs to be deleted!

However I argue that the listserv of any professional community is more than “routine” correspondence. Within those messages are the history of how a community has developed and changed. What are the major arguments the community went through? What were the issue of the day? Who was talking about them – who was responding? While within a larger corporate archives, or even within my own personal archive of e-mails I can see the value of pruning to eliminate duplication, or developing a strategy to eliminate irrelevant messages. This kind of appraisal usually requires a fair amount of labor. Is the cost of that labor even close to equal to the cost of storage (the SAA Council suggests it lacks sufficient “evidential or informational value”)? Probably not. Are there appropriate places and times to expunge routine correspondence – you bet. Is the Archivists listserv that place. No.

Rick mentions that the Internet Archive has some information from the publicly available archives – but just think of all the other parts of the “hidden web” that have been missed.

What is even more frustrating is that the message Rick posted was dated March 13, only a matter of weeks before the archive will cease to exist. SAA, I’m disappointed.

Off to a meeting, so I’ll have to leave these thoughts unfinished.

“Collective Intelligence” is all the photos on Flickr, taken by individuals on their own, and the new ideas created from that pool of photos (and the API).

“Dumbness of Crowds” is expecting a group of people to create and edit a photo together.

“Collective Intelligence” is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.

“Dumbness of Crowds” is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough.
(It’s not always the averaging that’s the problem it’s the blindly part)

“Collective Intelligence” is about the community on Threadless, voting and discussing t-shirts designed by individuals.

“Dumbness of Crowds” would be expecting the Threadless community to actually design the t-shirts together as a group.