Mendeley & Publishing for Museums,Libraries Archives Collection Research

These thoughts were initiated after coming across the new start-up PEERJ – which presented a new model for peer reviewed contributions relating to science and medicine.

In response to what it saw as a narrowing of publishing options and increasing number of problematic monetising models of peer review  PEERJ set up a new model - one which allows contributors to subscribe once and publish many times. As a museum curator I thought the PEERJ model looked like a really interesting solution to some of the problems I faced when I set about submitting museum based research to peer reviewed journals.

Unfortunately when I got in contact with Peter Binfield at PeerJ he informed me that they were not ready to expand into broader areas relating to Social Sciences and the Arts. Instead they were focussing on the physical sciences and medicine as a first point from which to start. He did list some other options I might follow up but they all required a down-payment to the journal before they would review it. In the Public Service, where many museum professionals are employed the paperwork and justifications needed to get this money for a ‘perhaps it might be published’  is always a difficult pathway to negotiate. On the other side some free options require the signing of rights to publishing houses that are in direct conflict the openness and sharing of public information that is fundamental to the modern museum.

But it all got me thinking that perhaps we could manufacture our own solution. Museums employ professionals whose expertise covers a wide range of the sciences and arts. What if we came up with a shared Museum based publication model that utilised this workforce as both contributors and reviewers of their peers?

Nice idea but making it work in practice - not so easy.

While I will go into a bit more detail about current publication structures and some of the options for where museums, libraries and archive professionals can place their research I’d like to suggest getting involved in an experiment to see if we can globally kick off something using an existing online site - Mendeley - where I have set up a group Museum, Library and Archive Research and Collections which I thought could be used to add collections based research including: papers, journal articles, and web based material.

Importantly we could also try adding drafts to this group and then send a request  out to other members to ask for peer review. I was thinking that given the range of expertise in our cultural institutions we should be able to cover most subject areas if we get enough members on board.  So feel free to send me a request to join or pass on the link and my email to anyone you think may be interested.

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

Reference Manager - Generate citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and LaTeX.

Read and Annotate - Open PDFs and capture your thoughts through sticky notes and highlights.
Add and Organize - Import and organize PDFs from your computer, EndNote™, Papers or Zotero.
Collaborate - Connect with colleagues and securely share your papers, notes and annotations.
Backup, Sync and Mobile - Access your papers on the web, iPhone or iPad.
Network and Discover - Discover papers, people and public groups.

Anyway I thought I would clear up my primary motivation for this blog before we got into any more detail.

Sot let’s start with a basic question. If museums want to publish research papers on museology and their collections could a peer reviewed, online and freely accessed option be something Museum institutions globally would want to participate in?

For the sake of this argument I’m going to presume the answer yes and lay out the following steps needed to work toward a workable model

Peter Murray-Rust has produced a series of posts about his issues with the current peer review model which he believes has been seriously broken by forces which have nothing to do with science. In Peter’s words … Unless the process of scientific publication is rapidly and effectively revised there will be a catastrophic crash. It will be unpredictable in both its timing, speed and nature. It will destroy some of the current participants. It will change parts of the scientific process and will change academia. … The academic system (in which I include public funders) has, by default, given away a significant part of its decision-making to the publishing industry. 1

Jonathan M. Gitlin in  July 19 2011 clearly outlined some of the issues in his post Do we need an alternative to peer-reviewed journals? Here he cites Stuart Lyman's letter to Nature Biotech on how the price of access has become a problem for private sector research and how for small or even medium-size companies, the costs of institutional subscriptions to journals quickly adds up. Gitlin also alerts us to the fact that a single journal can cost a library six-figure sums while non-institutional users can expect to be charged around $30 for a single article, as can academic users whose library doesn't subscribe to the Journal of Obscure Factoids. … If you've spent your life in well-funded research institutes, this might not seem like an issue. But, for those at smaller schools or from less-affluent countries, this can be a substantial barrier to being able to participate in the exchange and dissemination of scientific ideas. These paywalls also stand between taxpayers and the research they've supported.

On the other hand Gitlin also says there are a number of open-access journals where the publication costs are met by the authors, not the readers (authors had been paying fees to publish in some journals anyway) have also been started up. This effort to make publicly funded discoveries publicly available has also been gaining ground. From 2008 onwards, recipients of NIH funding have been subject to NIH's Public Access Policy, which requires that any publications that arise from its funds appear in either open-access journals or be placed in PubMed Central within 12 months. Similar policies have been implemented by other national funding bodies and private foundations, as well as individual institutions.

Paying for peer review is another vexed issue covered by Gitlin. Part of the price of a journal covers the process of peer review, which not only costs but can lead to extended delays between submitting a paper and having it accepted. A common criticism is that peer review is biased towards well-established research groups and they are unwilling to reject papers from big names in their fields out of fear, and they can be hostile to ideas that challenge their own, even if the supporting data is good. 2

Giltin also believes journals act as gatekeepers as they screen submissions for interest or importance as well as just the veracity of the work. The open access journal PLoS ONE attempts to address this by taking the first part out of the equation and rather than submitting to what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them). 3

The problem with this is the sheer volume of publications already makes this almost impossible to manage so there's … always going to be a place for highly selective publishing outlets for work deemed "important"—that's just human nature. 4

A new model.

Peter Murray-Rust has constructed a set of axioms which look pretty reasonable and which should apply to the creation of a museum model as well as a science journals. They are:

Science and scientists have a need and a duty to publish their work.
Funders rightly and increasingly require this in a formal manner.
This work should be available to everyone on the planet. Ideally the costs incurred in doing so should be invisible to the reader.
The purpose of publication in whatever degree of formality is:

To establish priority of the work
To communicate the work to any who wishes to consume it
To offer the work for formal and informal peer-review and to respond to discourse
To allow the work to be repeated, especially for falsifiability
To allow the work to be built on by others
To preserve the work

Apart from PeerJ there are a number of other new publishing models listed in The Future of Scientific Publishing : Is Here, Now by Luis Ibanez which attempt to address these points. But unfortunately none of these as yet work exclusively for museums and many are linked to more formal Scientific and Medical publications.

Personally I think a museums model should be able to ingest a range of contributor styles from formal academic articles to more informal posts and reviews and Mendeley is one platform able to do much of this right now. While publishing is currently spread across so many different parts of the web, from blog posts, journal, e-publications, linkedin discussions groups and the list goes on  and on much of this material can be aggregated in Mendeley.

However it would be interesting to get some feedback on whether it would be worth developing a specific site to act as a repository where research based work could be made freely accessible under a cc license. The more formal peer-reviewed articles could exist quite happily within the same space and once reviewed by professionals and published in this museum specific space could then be open to re-publication in other spaces as well. In fact publishers could be encouraged to visit the site to enquire about the re-publishing of these and other articles rather than museum professionals seeking out individual publications.

Currently the open access journal PLoS ONE manages what it refers to as an editorial board and this is the kind of model that could work within the museum sector as well. This is an A-Z list of people who are able to do reviews and lists their area of expertise and their institution.# It is also a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) which is a forum for editors and publishers of peer-reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication ethics. It also advises editors on how to handle cases of research and publication. 5

A final problem area is the way journals feed metrics, impact, and tracking within the scientific community. While this currently has a greater impact on the physical and medical sciences than perhaps in the social sciences and arts arena where museums reside, it is something which can influence and affect careers within the Museum sector as well. As Gitlin puts it
.. for better or worse (and I think there's a very strong case for it being worse), academic career progression and research funding are explicitly tied to where a scientist publishes their work. This is done through the use of impact factors …  they're a very imperfect measure. Journals that publish reviews as well as research articles can increase their impact factor, and publishing retractions or corrections does so as well. We have the tools to do a better job now, thanks to the move online. There have been experiments with algorithms like PageRank, and one could easily see something that works like Facebook's "like" or Google's "+1" being used. But as a researcher's funding success and promotion remain tied to their publications, what's to stop them from gaming the system? (I envision researchers organizing teams of undergrads to +1 their bibliography.

Although publishing will remain critical, it's hard to escape the sense that it's increasingly trailing behind the scientific community. Twitter, FriendFeed, Mendeley, and now Google+ have become venues where serious discussion about scientific work takes place. We're already seeing friction at some conferences; not everyone is happy having their talk live-tweeted, and the backchannel can be cruel to speakers at times. But social media isn't going anywhere, and neither is academic blogging. 6

One interesting approach I came across is evolutionary pharmacologist, and Fellow at Princeton University, Ethan O. Perlstein’s online research lab which utilises a variety of social media to publish ongoing research. The home page is made up from feeds from his twitter account @eperlste and synopsis of posts from the blogs. When you visit these pages we can see comments by others on the research and links to papers and definitions relating to the discussion. This is essentially a blog site but Perlstein has chosen to upload real scientific research, rather than wait until it is complete and then publish in a traditional academic journal.

Certainly within the museum sector this model would be easy enough to be modified to put people who are researching similar areas, (such as Sevres porcelain, or astronomical instruments to name some I’ve worked on recently) in contact with each other and this happens already on numerous blogs, wiki-spaces and sites around the globe.

Ethan’s model allows for researchers on the project to join as members of the Lab team while those that have worked on the project in the past are also listed. Certainly technologically there is nothing complicated or even terribly innovate going on - instead Perlstein is doing what I like most, recycling existing technology to resolve practical problems and at the same time opening up new opportunities for others to rethink the way they use existing models.

Another interesting model which may be more appropriate for educational resources in museums rather than for collection research publishing in the TakeControl ebook model. On July 20 2012 Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor and Forge, announced that all of their ebooks would now be available DRM-free (Digital Rights Management-free) from Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, Google, and most other major ebook retailers. The Publishers stated .. It’s clear to us that this is what our customers want. … We see it in the success of SF publishers like Baen and Angry Robot that have preceded us in going DRM-free. To the best of our knowledge we’re the first division of a Big Six publishing conglomerate to go down this road, but we doubt very much that we’ll be the last.7

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, universal digital formats taxidermy pataphysics

Loved this video - Twiggy used in video for psychedelic band The Chocolate Watchband's 'Sweet Young Thing'.

Art - An interesting interview with Mega-Patron Simon Mordant on Remaking Sydney's MCA & taking Charge of Australia's Venice Biennale Pavilion.

Nice resource - Review of and sort-of guide to the Universal DIgital Format Registry which was intended as a single, comprehensive source for information about file formats, with particular attention to requirements for archiving and preservation. It draws on the well-regarded PRONOM from the UK’s National Archives and the ill-fated Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) from a number of institutions, including OCLC and Harvard.

Global Innovation‬ Index 2012 full report pdf

http://www.museepata.org/oracle.html

A fantastic coincidence this week was stumbling into Alfred Jarry's mad world of pataphysics for the first time in many years. The first was an exhibition of the works of 5 patamechanical practitioners at Musee Patamechanique - amazing stuff - the second was a listening again to'Dub Housing' by Pere Ubu which I had last owned about 20 years ago - again simply amazing


Book- Open-Source Everything Manifesto Robert David Steele. "What all this boils down to is that normal average human beings, when they share information openly with one another and engage in respectful deliberative dialog, always, without exception, arrive at better conclusions than experts or elites who rely on “secret” information and generally have hidden agenda enabled by secrecy combined with public ignorance and apathy." Robert David Steele.

Book - Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting, by William T. Hornaday and W. J. Holland, 1894. A Project Gutenberg EBook. "The rapid and alarming destruction of all forms of wild animal life which is now going on furiously throughout the entire world, renders it imperatively necessary for those who would build up great zoological collections to be up and doing before any more of the leading species are exterminated. It is already too late to collect wild specimens of the American bison, Californian elephant seal, West Indian seal, great auk, and Labrador duck. Very soon it will also be too late to collect walrus, manatee, fur seal, prong-horn antelope, elk, moose, mountain sheep, and mountain goat..."

This was kinda nice - Small Business Uses Crowdfunding; jellybeans to spread tolerence message.Diversity Jellybeans look like ordinary jellybeans, but they have a secret “You can’t determine what is on the inside by simply looking at the outside.” A red jellybean might taste like licorice and a black jellybean might taste like coconut. It’s always a surprise with thirty-six flavor and color combinations. “Many schools use them as part of their anti-bullying and teaching tolerance curriculum,” said Tracy.

This week I went to the Social Media Day event here in Sydney organised as a global event by Mashable. It proved to be an interesting day and I enjoyed the @TimNoonan talk about Fleksy a text input system designed for people with visual impairments ‪and also his comments about the importance of implementing web and media design for those with visual and hearing impairment now but also because there is a vested intrest for all of us as we are also rapidly growing old and may need to access these features to continue using the web and social media in the ways we have become accustomed.

http://www.gizmag.com/case-of-bass-upcycled-luggage-sound-systems/23134/

I thought these were a really good example of re-design - brothers Ezra and Alex Cimino-Hurt up-cycle old suitcases into stylish and powerful Case of Bass boomboxes.

Paper - Urban Planning - Addressing concentrations of disadvantage: policy, practice and literature review - Australia. Looks at the processes that lead to concentrations of disadvantage, particularly the roles played by housing market processes and by government policy or programs (‘causes’). Secondly The processes that contribute to spatial disadvantage—that is, the negative consequences for residents of living in an area of concentrated disadvantage (‘consequences’). lastly urban policy responses to concentrations of disadvantage.

Post - Urban Planning - The History of Adventure playground and its arrival in 70s & 80s by James Trainor

Post - Education - Gaming - While game-based learning is gaining market share in discussing educational change there is still some confusion about how we define the different terms associated with the use of games and game principles in the classroom. This post by Lucas outlines some of the main points of discussion while the older blogs cover plenty of other areas related to gaming and learning. see more

Japan has found a large deposit of rare earth minerals in its Pacific seabed, enough to supply its hi-tech industries for more than 200 years, a scientist said. see more 

I thought this was a really nice design solution to a problem - the lack of bone marrow donations, particularly given the need to match types exactly for transplant - Graham Douglas comes up with placing a sign-up kit in Band-Aid box so when cut your finger you dab blood on swab drop it in envelope and post it off to be tested for donation possibilities at a centralised agency ... see article

Australia’s Digital Future Museum Apps and Uncanny Valley

Voyager has departed solar system with a map to where we are & an anatomical chart of our meaty bodies.Wait! Maybe not such a good idea? Howard Rheingold - @hrheingold

A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050 report.
A world-first, the report reveals information and communications technology (ICT) enhanced with ubiquitous high-speed broadband is becoming Australia’s new utility – as historic and game changing as electricity or telephony.

Written by Phil Ruthven, Founder and Chairman, IBISWorld, and commissioned by IBM, the report looks ahead of existing research to examine how Australia can harness this new utility to transform our lives, our cities and the way we interact.

The report rates all Australia’s industry classes (509) against the impact of the new utility. Ruthven and his extended Industry Impact Panel assessed the prospects of the 509 classes of industry in the Australian economy over the next 40-50 years.

The report predicts that 10 per cent of Australia’s 509 industries, accounting for 23 per cent of the nation’s revenue, will not function without this new utility. A further 23 per cent of industry revenue will use it to drive step-changes in their business. 15 industry classes are likely to demise if they do not reinvent themselves to embrace the digital future; and some may simply be unable to do so.

The report finds that Australia will no longer be known for its dependency on the export of natural resources over the next half century. It will become known as much an exporter of services such as tourism, business services, health and education services. The export of tourism alone could match the 2012 mineral exports totalling around $175 billion by 2030.


John Hodgman, comedian and resident expert, "explains" the design of three iconic modern objects.

Museum app - Exploring old Sydney: The Rocks (Free)
This week Nico, Einar and I finished another museum walking tour app for android and IPhone. Exploring old Sydney: The Rocks is a self-guided walking tour of The Rocks features a selection of historic images and maps from the Powerhouse Museum collection.

A really nice idea - PeerJ - lifetime Peer review Publishing Model
PeerJ provides academics with two Open Access publication venues: PeerJ (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (a 'pre-print server'). Both are focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences, and together they provide an integrated solution for your publishing needs. Submissions open late Summer.

An Uncanny Mind: Masahiro Mori on the Uncanny Valley and Beyond. A post in which Norri Kageki interviews Masahiro Mori, who, as a professor of engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology in the 1970s, proposed the now-famous concept of the uncanny valley. [Read the first authorized translation of his seminal article here.] Mori's insight was that people would react with revulsion to humanlike robots, whose appearance resembled, but did not quite replicate, that of a real human. He called this phenomenon bukimi no tani (the term "uncanny valley" first appeared in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt.

Do we need specialist curators?
Commented on Giles Miller's post on Do we need specialist curators where he makes a case for the continued employment of specialised curators to manage museum collections.As a curator I agree with his sentiments but I do think that there is no one size fits all solution - different museum collections are curated in different ways and perhaps a range of curatorial styles is a better approach for some of these. I also think resourcing is an issue for large diverse collections like the ones here at the Powerhouse and as a result specialised curators in one area can also lead to no curators in other areas. While I would love to think just employing more specialised curators to cover all collection areas would solve some of the problems museums face I think the solution may be a little more complicated.

David S. Linthicum CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs slideshare on Redefining cloud computing again - what cloud computing is, and what it should be. The way it’s defined today, and how should be defined tomorrow.


Immediately thought there could be all kinds of uses for this great idea - Evian introduces smart fridge magnet, schedules deliveries of water.


My post on Photographing the 1874 Transit of Venus looks at the 1874 transit and how it led to some major advances in the use of photography for astronomical observations.

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media Bell Labs etc - open source zombie gnomes

"We've evolved from being a pack of monkeys to being a pack of monkeys with a dream" Terence McKenna

Nikola Tesla comments in 1926 on wireless "the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain connected by instruments carried in vest pockets."



'Lawn of the Dead' - Zombie garden gnomes chow down on a pink flamingo - being sold on Etsy - great idea wonder why no one has done this this earlier




An interview with Jon Gertner on Bell Laboratories which from the 1920s to the 1980s was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. These ingenious, often eccentric men would were responsible for some of the major innovations of the twentieth century and Jon talks about how they aided in the development of radar, lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.

Australian Heritage Strategy is nearing its closing time for public consultation - given this is the first review in 20 years you have until next Friday to put in a submission.

A Free Mandelbrot Fractal Generator Application for iphone and PC's

The opportunity to make a submission to the UK consultation on open standards has closed. But Glyn Moody's introduction entitled Open Season on Open Standards is still well worth a read - "In the face of the continuing move to such open standards, there has been a rearguard action by traditional proprietary software companies to push FRAND - Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory - as an acceptable default for "open" standards. Except that it is not, as I have discussed at length before ...."



My favourite album this week has been Electric Moon's Inferno. Melkezedek's review pretty much sums it up ".... Chock full of the prime spaced out explorations you expect from the trio, Lunatics Revenge is a perfect bridge to Inferno, where things get even meatier and a shade darker, and deeper..."

A new macrowikinomics video animation featuring some of the world's brightest innovators.

What To Do When Attacked by Pirates - The music industry fought the future and created a black market; book publishers tried another tack - an article on ebook publishing and responses to Piracy by Rob Reid.

A nice guide on how to chemically develop your own photographic film

Another nice pdf guide to Digital Archiving in the 21st century put out by Zotero

Post by Science Insider - Horizon 2020: A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access
by Jop de Vrieze on how the next installment of Europe's gargantuan research funding programs called Horizon 2020 will be on Open Access. Hopes ... the program will have "dedicated support to dissemination (including through open access to research results), communication and dialogue actions" and that "open access shall apply under the terms and conditions laid down in the grant agreement." read more

A nice post on the new features of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6)

Jean Burgess posted her slides for her presentation on the role of social media in crises and risk management during the Queensland floods at the 6th Annual Enterprise Risk Management for Government conference in Sydney.

Museum Exhibitions - a new approach to audience interaction

Over the last six months or so the Powerhouse Museum has been going through a major revitalisation project. One result of all this activity has been the opening up of some large exhibition spaces. Given International Museums Day is just around the corner and the current level of interest within the museum surrounding exhibition development I thought it could be an opportune time to blog about this vital area of museum work and see how museums in general have been approaching the issue.


One of the most noticeable changes is the number of new, and affordable, technologies now available for the exhibition tool-box. While essentially a good thing trying to grapple with their integration into existing museum exhibition development processes is not always easy. But over the last year the Powerhouse has conducted a few of its own experiments such as the Minecraft Trial Program which ran at Thinkspace over the 2011-2012 Christmas Holidays.

Developed to inspire the younger audiences and to provide experiences that will make them want to return to the Museum this program was a great initiative. The museum felt the basic principles of the link into a lot of the themes and processes explored in our exhibitions. This included architecture, design, construction, materials, engineering, community engagement and sharing.

Another was the Lovelace Exhibition which integrated wonderful physical design and lighting with the Museum’s first extensive foray into handheld content delivery in conjunction with the exhibition development.

But across the Museum sector exhibitions development has tended firstly to focus on, what are our exhibitions going to be about and how do we get them on the floor? While both are valid and necessary questions when it comes to upgrading the museum’s exhibition space, changing audiences, competition from other leisure activities, and new technologies have expanded how museums can approach interactions with their audience.

This is not to say museums are rejecting exhibitions, but rather, these tools are changing some well established notions about how museum objects are interpreted and interacted with. Personally I think this is a think a really positive development and one which has the potential to bring more museum collections into spaces which can accessed by the broader public. I’m sure the display of objects on the museum’s floor will continue to be the primary focus of audience interaction. But I’m equally sure these displays will increasingly incorporate digital tools and new methodologies before, during, and after the objects are displayed on the floor.

What follows are some samples of museums and galleries who have started to have a bit of a rethink about the models they use to take objects out of museum store-rooms and place them in locations where visitors to the museum can then get access to them.

First up is an exhibition titled Public Property by the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore. Created over December 2011 and January 2012 the museum used its ‘works of art’ site to ask the public to arrange and tag collections of artworks. The Walters’ exhibition team determined the popular themes (adornment, military, creatures and death) from these tags. They then held an online vote to decide on the exhibition theme ‘Creatures’. The museums then selected creature themed artworks for the public to vote on and 106 were selected to be part of the exhibition. The exhibition will be on from June 17–Aug. 19, 2012.

“Once the exhibition is open, there will be a variety of interactive elements to complement the chosen artworks,” said Walters Manager of Web and Social Media and exhibition team leader, Dylan Kinnett. “The exhibition vision, process and design are critical to changing perceptions and attitudes regarding museums by inviting civic participation in an intentional manner,” stated Manager of Family Programs and exhibition team leader, Emily Blumenthal. “We will also have a series of programs and events associated with the exhibition to invite visitors to become further involved with their community, their museum and their exhibition.”

Between Science Art and Design – Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver whose digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. Jorp’s focus is on the humanising data to encourage people to think about how the data they generate everyday carries weight in reality. Currently data is still seen as boring and opaque for those outside the domain of geeks and economists. But Jorp’s believes this should be broadened out to link Science, Design, and Art to create affirmative and lasting narratives. This has a resonance with the sessions on exhibitions development which were held here at the Powerhouse Museums which also focussed on our collections (another big data set) and the way we need to develop stories about the collections which include a combination of science art and design rather than only one of these elements.

One example of how this use of data is incorporated into displays can be seen in the design of the September 11 memorial at ground zero in New York. Here the names of the victims are not arranged alphabetically but by relationships such as partners or co-workers. The names are arranged according to a process and algorithm which was used to created “meaningful adjacencies,” based on “relationship” details which include proximity at the time of the attacks, company or organization affiliations for those who worked at the World Trade Center or Pentagon, and approximately 1,200 requests from family members. Software developed by Local Projects was used to implement this arrangement.



Wiki Loves Art Nouveau is Europeana’s first user-generated exhibition to explore some of the finest examples of Art Nouveau architecture from across Europe. For those haven’t already heard of it Europeana represents a cross sector and country solution to accessing cultural heritage in a digital form. Currently it provides s a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. The content is sourced from broad array European cultural and scientific institutions who have signed into Europeana as partners and this big picture approach is seen by some as the next step in opening up the discovery of the world’s knowledge and cultural heritage.

The International Council of Communication Design’s SEGD conference was held in March of this year in partnership with the V&A Museum. Keynotes for this symposium were David Adjaye (architect) and Kenneth Grange (industrial designer). The main theme for this year was how innovation and collaboration are radically changing design across many disciplines.

London was a bit of a stretch for my budget and so while I didn’t get to go to I do agree with their sentiment which suggests collaboration is a powerful influence in design today. Cybelle Jones, principal with exhibition design firm Gallagher & Associates and co-chair of SEGD’s International Symposium believes that while design teams are working across continents, cultures, languages, and disciplines they are also finding collaboration can lead to: unwieldy project teams, communication challenges, and dilution of design intent. While her thoughts are more focussed on product design the partnership with the V&A is clearly no accident as these changes to design processes also affect museum exhibition design.

Jones asks a question which could also resonate within the museum sector. Is design better and stronger created with one singular vision, or should it be democratic—bringing together diverse talents, expertise, and perspectives in a combined vision?

The winner of the 2012 TED prize “The City 2.0” reveals another interesting approach which could be applied to exhibition development. The suggestion here is that perhaps content could be developed and integrated across a city rather than just within the museum walls. This year the TED prize was not awarded to an individual, but to an idea, ‘City 2.0”. This is an envisaged city of the future … a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom promoting innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity. Reducing the carbon footprint of its occupants and creating a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.

Museums like the Powerhouse are an integrated part of the city’s infrastructure and as stewards of cultural heritage and promoters of learning are perfectly placed to collaborate to be a part of projects like this. City 2.0 gives grants to people around the world who are advocating on its behalf with the opportunity to collectively craft a wish which will make use of the $100,000 prize: a wish capable of igniting a massive collaborative project. Individuals or organizations who wish to contribute their ideas can submit a TED Prize wish on behalf of The City 2.0 or write to tedprize@ted.com

Many museum professionals believe the exhibition is the primary mechanism though which they broker their relationship with the broader public and visitors to the museum have traditionally been the focus group of the exhibition process. The question now is how much this relationship has changed and if so how are the digital and on-line experience constituting current visitor interaction with museum collections.

Finally there is another trend that will no doubt propel more and more collaboration across museums and communities. This is the loading of museum content being into third party sites which are not owned, or even managed by the museum. Examples of this include HistoryPin, Flickr, and Pintrest alongside making collection API’s available for third party development and integration into other platforms.

Geoff Barker, 2012

Sir Howard Grubb Parsons & Co. Scientific Instrument Makers

Thomas Grubb entered the scientific instrument business in the 1830s and quickly gained a name in the construction of telescopes. Largely self taught he ran his firm from Charlemont Bridge in Dublin where he developed both his mechanical and optical skills. As the market for telescopes was fairly limited it is likely Grubb made most of his money form his appointment as Engineer to the Bank of Ireland. He also appears to have made money from his patented cheap lenses.

By the 1850s the company had established a reputation for constructing quality telescopes and as early as the 1840s was constructing mirrors for refractors up to 15 inches in diameter. One of the firm's biggest challenges was the commission to construct a huge 48-inch reflector for Melbourne Observatory. This was to be the largest reflecting telescope in the world at the time and led Grubb to set up a separate workshop at Rathmines, Ireland. The workshop was developed by his son Howard Grubb after the retirement of his father in 1870. The build was not without its calamities however and at one stage the entire roof of the workshop went up in flames.

In 1887 astronomers from around the world embarked a massive new enterprise; known as the Carte du Ciel (Mapping the Stars) project, it involved photographing and measuring the stars in both hemispheres. In an attempt to standardise the photographs produced by different observatories telescopes with similar dimensions needed to be constructed to take the 20,000 plates the project was expected to produce. 

British institutions preferred to patronize a British maker and in 1888 Howard Grubb took on the work of constructing seven of the astrographs needed. These had photographic tubes with 13 inch object-glasses and were built especially for observatories at Cape Town, Greenwich, Oxford, Melbourne, Sydney and Tacubaya, in Mexico. 

In 1888 Melbourne and Perth requested complete Grubb telescopes while Sydney only requested the lens. The making of a lens was no simple matter and with other observatory's also requesting lenses Sydney Observatory did not receive theirs until 1890, some time after the casing and fittings for the 'Star Camera' had been completed. Melbourne's telescope also arrived in 1890. The Perth telescope arrived in 1897.

Contracts for large telescopes began to dry up in the later part of the nineteenth century and during the First World War the business began to focus to military optics. In 1918 Howard Grubb shifted the businesses to St Albans. Shortly after this the business, which was in financial difficulties, was acquired by Sir Charles Parsons and in 1925 was renamed Sir Howard Grubb Parsons and Co Ltd (known as Grubb Parsons). The new works were established alongside Parsons turbine works at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 

By 1955 the company was still a relatively small concern employing about 150 peopl and was a wholly owned subsidiary of C. A. Parsons and Co. Ltd, who specialised in making heavy electrical equipment. This company built optical components for a number of telescopes including the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring near Coonabarabran.



References
Glass, I. S., Victorian Telescope Makers; the Lives and Letters of Thomas and Howard Grubb, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 1997
King, H. C., The History of the Telescope, Dover Publications, New York, 1955
G. M. Sisson, 'Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons, and Company', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Vol. 230, No. 1181, June 21, 1955, pp. 147-157

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media etc - free education makerbot future cities

Our Future is the Future of Our Cities; the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam - Making a City
This Biennale was a call to action which invited architects from around the world to develop models for new urban developments. The main challenge the design of better living conditions for billions of people. But how to make these cities when also responding to urgent social, economic and ecological issues. The video made me feel that Museums need to be a little more active in this discussion if they want to maintain their relevancy in future urban centers.

BandResources.net is a free resource for the gigging band and musician. They are building a database of venues, recording studios, rehearsal studios and labels. None from Australia yet but hopefully that will change soon.

Shapeways CEO on how 3D Printing Will Fuel Creative Commerce

Peter Weijmarshausen believes Shapeways was one of the first companies to put a consumer spin on 3D printing. The startup’s website allows designers to upload their wares for printing and sell the results in an Etsy-like store. Those without design experience can tweak existing models to their liking before printing them in one of 25 different materials, including stainless steel, ceramics and sterling silver. Weijmarshausen says the company printed 750,000 products in 2011. He expects “many times more this year — millions.” The other company most often credited for the rise of the consumer 3D printing trend is



MakerBot, is a really cool new company which sells affordable kit-set 3D printers for about Au 2,200.

What engages students? 10 ideas compiled from interviews with 8th graders by HEATHER WOLPERT-GAWRON

Deconstructing Cinema - One Scene At A Time
By Patrick Samuel

This is a really nice project from Static Mass Emporium which each week takes one scene from a movie and deconstructs it to reveal what kind of an impact they’ve had historically and culturally. It started in September 2011 with A Place In The Sun starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor which looked at the stunning close-ups director George Stevens used for the party scene before moving on to Brian de Palma’s Hitchcockian intro for Snake Eyes, Chan-wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were next. Since then they have looked at key scenes from Remember Me, JFK, The Matrix and All The President’s Men.

The latest is a discussion on American Psycho ... check it out


Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson - False Resume Scandal -
This is just unbelievable no wonder employees find it hard to trust their bosses. Yahoo CEO and ex CTO of PayPal Scott Thompson was forced to apologise after being exposed for lying about false qualifications on his CV. According to Nicholas Carlson of the Business insider he ... wrote an email to staff, expressing his regret for the issue which saw a computer science degree he did not earn appear on his resume. Transcript from 2009 interview on his science degree contains the following ... Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part thing of being an engineer is you think that way.

and while we're on the subject ...

Megaupload's Kim Dotcom: Inside the Wild Life and Dramatic Fall of the Fat Nerd Who Burned Hollywood
by Daniel Miller, Matthew Belloni

Daniel and Matthew are right this reads like it was made to be a film. "Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, the 300-pound-plus, 6-foot-7 German hacker-turned-web mogul who founded Megaupload, the cyber-locker service that offered its 180 million users remote storage of movies, music and other files. The 13th-most-visited site in the world at one point, Megaupload was a pirates' haven -- a Napster on steroids, where members could share everything from Lady Gaga hits to Transformers movies with anarchists' abandon.

Part of the service's appeal was the antihero persona of Dotcom himself. The 38-year-old had become an online celebrity, as much for his over-the-top lifestyle of $400,000 supercars, supermodel hot-tub parties and the slick YouTube video he had made with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (in it, he raps about Megaupload: "It's a hit! It's a hit!") as for the popularity of his website. And during those two days of meetings with Batal, Dotcom, a self-professed "Dr. Evil" in a loose-fitting black jumpsuit and closely cropped hair, revealed his plan to expand Megaupload, a wildly easy-to-use service, into an empire that would rival that of his idol, Steve Jobs."

This is Big - Free online Accredited Course



MIT offered courses for free when it rolled out its MITx online learning platform last year. However, Harvard took notice of its efforts, and has joined MIT online to form the edX platform and offer courses and content for free on the web. There's no word on the available subjects just yet, but video lessons, quizzes and online labs will all be a part of the curriculum, and those who comprehend the coursework can get a certificate of mastery upon completion. edX won't just benefit those who log on, either, as it'll be used to research how students learn and how technology can be used to improve teaching in both virtual and brick and mortar classrooms. The cost for this altruistic educational venture? 60 million dollars, with each party ponying up half. The first courses will be announced this summer, and classes are slated to start this fall.

Jelly beans used by artist to recreate classic art masterpieces
California-based artist Kristen Cumings was commissioned by candy company Jelly Belly to produce several pieces of jelly bean art to add to its collection ‘Jelly Belly Masterpieces of Confectionary Art’.

Digital items archived from the Occupy movement
This is an interesting archival move - already over 15,000 digital items have been archived from the Occupy movement. They are seeking contributions through a number of different places so if you want to contribute some of your own or are interested in researching there are a number of links from this article

Australian National Cultural Policy delayed
Sydney Morning Herald article by Jacqueline Maley

"The Gillard government's long-awaited national cultural policy has been postponed because of a lack of funds, a casualty of the tight fiscal environment before the budget. The cultural policy, the first such document for nearly 20 years, is still expected to be released this year, but hopes it would be published to coincide with the budget have been dashed, given the government's pledge to return to surplus."

Australian Heritage Strategy - Open for public consultation - closing date 15 June 2012

United States shipwrecks from Battle of the Coral Sea now protected under Australian law
Australian Heritage Minister, Tony Burke, today declared the United States warships the USS Lexington, USS Sims and USS Neosho sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea as protected historic shipwrecks. On 7 May 1942 aircraft from the USS Yorktown and the Lexington sunk the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho just before noon. At about the same time, and in a separate engagement, dive bombers from the Japanese carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku sunk the destroyer USS Sims and left the US fleet oiler Neosho a crippled wreck.

Later that day a support group including the HMAS Hobart and HMAS Australia were attacked by another force of bombers, which were based at Rabaul in New Guinea. The battle continued on 8 May, when the two main carrier forces engaged directly for the first time, resulting in the loss of the Lexington with 216 members of her crew. Victory in the Coral Sea was the first major defeat for Japanese forces and the beginnings of the long and difficult road towards victory.

Plastimake
This looks interesting - it comes in balls but when you add water they become mallable and you can mold them into shapes. The plastic then hardens and becomes usable in any number of ways.

Apple's Internal Marketing Video comparing itself to WW2 1944 propaganda film Jobs as FDR, Mike Murray 'The General'

Courtney Love is having her first art show, and what do you know?

IKEA makes digital cameras out of cardboard