Guest Posts

Guest post: Insights from NEW INC’s Museum Technology Track

News from the larger musetch community. This month, we’re delighted to feature a guest post by NEW INC‘s Director Stephanie Pereira. NEW INC is the New Museum’s incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design and technology. We recruit about 100 members each year through an annual open call process, and through our…

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MCN 2018 Through the Eyes of a Museum Educator, Museum Studies Instructor, and High School Teacher

By: Hillary Hanel Rose In November 2018 I had the honor and privilege of participating in the MCN Conference as a Scholar. I first learned about MCN in 2016 as I searched for resources to share with my museum studies students and have been eager to become more involved with the organization since then. Determined…

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Don’t Forget the Small Museums

By Kelli Huggins, Visitor Experience Coordinator, Catskill Center I am an accidental museum tech person. As a career small museum/non-profit employee, I have often found myself taking on social media, online exhibits, and other basic technology projects by default. They’ve never been the main part of my job, however, just something I ended up doing…

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MCN Field Trips Open up Dialog With Host-City Artists

by Marty Spellerberg MCN is all about facilitating connections for museum professionals. For the 2018 conference in Denver, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help introduce a new format, MCN Field Trips, that opened up opportunities for spatial and dialectic exploration. The day before the conference has always been an opportunity for attendees…

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Third Time’s a Charm

By Samantha Norling, Digital Collections Manager, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields   As an early-career archivist I found myself working as a “lone arranger” in an art museum—a setting in which I had no previous experience. Early on, I learned from my colleagues in departments throughout the museum about the many organizations and groups in…

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Looking back to move forward: Museum technology in the age of the BIG data

By Dr. Natalia Grincheva, Research Fellow, University of Melbourne   This audio blog is a series of short interviews collected from several speakers at the 2017 MCN conference, both academics and professionals while I was an MCN Scholarship recipient. They include brief conversations with former board members, newcomers to the conference, and those who already…

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Seeing Myself in the Museum Community

By Monique Lassere, Digital Preservation Librarian, University of Arizona Libraries   As a first-time attendee and black librarian, I did not know what to expect at MCN2017. I had applied to the MCN Scholarship Program with the dream that I, an outsider, would be able to experience the museum computing community for a brief period of…

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MCN: It’s all about the people

Ben Fast (@benfaster), Programs & Member Services Coordinator, BC Museums Association     MCN is all about the people. Don’t get me wrong, the learning experiences available from the remarkably diverse sessions and the fun times visiting local museums and galleries are great, but it all comes down to who you meet. From Day 1…

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Eye Opening Inspiration

By Kat Quigley, (@kathryncquigley) Senior Producer and New Media Lead, Lawrence Hall of Science     Attending MCN this year as a Scholar was not what I expected—and that’s because I really didn’t know what to expect. MCN 2017 was my first time attending a museum conference of any kind. Although I’ve been working at…

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MCN 2017 PoC Dinner

By Lourdes Santamaría-Wheeler (@musarian)   MCN took a bold step forward this year with three African American speakers, two of them women, on stage to keynote the conference discussing race and equity. Woah. See, lots of people talk the talk, but this year MCN wove the themes of reconciliation and equity throughout the conference. A…

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More Than a Conference: A Place that Informs, Engages, and Inspires a Community

By. Castle Kim (@HelpingCastle) Doctoral Student, iSchool at Florida State University   One of my favorite artwork is Irises by Vincent van Gogh, displayed at J. Paul Getty Museum. What I love most about the painting is the story behind it. Van Gogh did not truly ‘complete’ the painting, for him the painting was a…

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Feeling Welcomed and Paying Interns: The MCN Experience

By Courtney Titus, Former Educational Technology Coordinator, Blaffer Art Museum   As I walked into my first MCN session as an MCN Scholar, I was reminded of the days when I started a new school. The same anxieties bubbled to the surface about being the new kid and feeling uncertain if I would fit in…

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