Comments for koven j. smith dot com

Comment on The Kinetic Museum by Sheila Brennan

Sheila Brennan — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:56:00 +0000

There are some examples of best practices that are usually stuck (meaning not necessarily searchable from Google) in grant reports and white papers from places like NEH, IMLS, and NSF. When applying for any of those grants, you also need to do a survey of what is out there and usually the grant committees can tell whether folks have really done a good scan of what is out there as models or as something not to replicate. Those “environmental scans” if you will should also be available in grant applications.

NEH and IMLS are getting better about publishing this material but it is definitely a good place to start when thinking about big issues.

There are also folks in the digital humanities sector researching some of these issues as well, especially with regard to preservation and access–libraries and archives are really ahead of museums on this, as I’m sure you know. Preserving Virtual Worlds might have good advice on preserving digital art forms (was a big grant from Library of Congress and a few universities): http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/

Enough of my ramblings for now. You’re asking good questions!

Comment on The Kinetic Museum by Koven!

Koven! — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:43:00 +0000

As usual, Nate finds the weakness in my argument But yes, Matt, your clarification is right on the nose. Where a best practice is a known quality and it’s more efficient to embrace it rather than ignore it, I’m all for it.

So maybe “best practices” is a bit of a misnomer–I was thinking more in terms of the research project we’ve all had to do at one time or another: “Go out and see how twenty other museums do this thing that you’re proposing before you get started, even though recovering from a bad decision will take less time than the research itself takes.”

Don’t think I won’t be stealing “dangerous experimentation in moderation” for the presentation, either.

Comment on The Kinetic Museum by Matt Popke

Matt Popke — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:03:00 +0000

As someone who just spent the better part of a year trying to fix a predecessor’s trashed data (thanks contractors!), I totally respect the use of best practices when those practices are clearly defined. Most of the really stupid and frustrating things we run into as developers are caused by people ignoring the “best practices” of thirty years ago. And the rest of our frustrations are caused by people not being up to speed with “best practices” that were figured out within the last couple of years.

I think what Koven is getting on about is those areas where “best practices” haven’t been defined yet; the new territory that we’re just now starting to explore. I think he means to promote the idea of putting working, publicly accessible prototypes for things that don’t have best practices yet out into the wild so we can talk about “best practices” from a practical rather than a purely theoretical standpoint.

I like the idea of dangerous experimentation in moderation. It leads to what we should be doing rather than what we think we should be doing. Too often we get together and try to define best practices only to discover we were answering the wrong question.

Comment on The Kinetic Museum by Nate Solas

Nate Solas — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:35:00 +0000

Devil’s advocate for wasting time on “best practices”: we just rebuilt the backend for the web component of our cellphone-based audio tour, and it took me about 2 seconds to find the TourML / TAP spec and realize my work was done. That’s how “best practices” / shared standards are supposed to work — even when it’s not an “official” spec, I know a lot of smart brains have done good work. Why should I make my own version of an audio tour data model?

Or maybe that’s what you meant? My point, I guess, is that we *should* burn some time defining best practices, as long as we share it very publicly. And, ideally, *someone else* should burn that time…. (Thanks IMA Labs!

The rest of it sounds stellar. Can’t wait.

Comment on What’s the point of a museum website? by A (personal) 2011 round up « museum geek

A (personal) 2011 round up « museum geek — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:07:15 +0000

[...] to be part of his panel at MCN2011 on the very subject that helped re-focused my PhD – on What’s the Point of Museum Websites? I had no money, and no immediately foreseeable way to get there, but I of course said [...]

Comment on What’s the point of a museum website? by What are the big trends in interactive exhibits for 2012? | Thinking about exhibits

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:29:47 +0000

[...] publishing models for digital content and making better web experiences (thanks to Koven [...]

Comment on What’s the point of a museum website? by Vad ska museerna med en hemsida till? « Kristoffer Soldal

Vad ska museerna med en hemsida till? « Kristoffer Soldal — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:51:30 +0000

[...] några månader sen gav Koven J. Smith ett inspirerande tal om nyttan med museernas hemsidor, ett tal som fick stor spridning i museikretsar. Hans [...]

Comment on What’s the point of a museum website? by Finding funding for MCN2011 « museum geek

Finding funding for MCN2011 « museum geek — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:39:29 +0000

[...] The main one is because Koven Smith has asked me to be a panellist on his panel asking “What’s the point of a museum website?“, which will pick up where his Ignite Smithsonian speech left off. This is an awesome [...]

Comment on Building a museum from scratch by Is content enough? What about wonder? « museum geek

Is content enough? What about wonder? « museum geek — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 03:42:35 +0000

[...] his blog, Koven recently asked what things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from [...]

Comment on What’s the point of a museum website? by Bruce Wyman

Bruce Wyman — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:58:00 +0000

By virtue of our presence in the real world, I think we have a leg up on authority in the virtual world. However, you need to actively participate in the virtual world to actually *maintain* that authority. If you just set the stage and expect everyone else to dance on it, nobody remembers you when everyone has gone home for the evening.

The online world is simple and follows the real world. Participate and you have authority. Don’t participate and you’re quietly forgotten.

Now, of course, the next step is to actually have something to say, but we’ll leave signal vs noise for another discussion.