Seeing Your Data Differently Through The Lens Of Linked Data
by Erin Canning, Ontology Systems Analyst at LINCS (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship); @eecanning on Twitter Linked data is a way of structuring data so that it can be connected to data from other sources and queried all together. For museums, this discussion often comes up in regards to collections data: how can different…
DEAI From A Museum Technologist’s Perspective
by Mark Osterman, Digital Experience Manager and Head of Education at the Lowe Art Museum, and MCN Board Member (@osterman_mark on Twitter) How should we as museum technologists think about and act upon diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI)? I am constantly grappling with this question in my current practice. Over the past 20 years—while…
MCN Insights: Making the most of our open source projects
By Andy Cummins, Director of Product Development at Cogapp, and MCN Board member. I’ve been thinking about what it takes for an open source project to fulfill its potential as a shared resource for the GLAM community. What do I mean by open source? When I say open source project, I’m not going to get…
MCN Insights: Let’s do better than “back to normal”.
By Nathan Adkisson, Director of Strategy and Associate Creative Director at Local Projects, and MCN Board member. After a brutal year, there’s no doubt that we’ve turned a corner. Vaccination numbers climb higher. We are spending more time outside, and beginning to travel again. Museums are cautiously reopening. Many of us have started going back…
MCN Insights: NFTs are a scam.
By Andrea Ledesma, Digital Product Specialist, The Field Museum, Jeremy Munro, Database Administrator, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Erin Canning, Ontology Systems Analyst, LINCS, University of Guelph and MCN Board member, and Claire Blechman, former Digital Asset Manager, Peabody Essex Museum. In recent weeks, the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the sale and distribution…
MCN Insights: A museum professional’s musings on job hunting in a pandemic.
Courtney OCallaghan joined the MCN Board in 2018 and is currently filling her time with MCN, consulting, homeschooling, bread baking, and gardening. A year and a half ago I was laid off from my full-time museum job. I had few concerns about finding another position as long as I had patience. In fact, I planned…
MCN Insights: Collaborative Social Media Campaigns
By Hilary-Morgan Watt, Director of Digital Engagement, Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, and Emily Haight, Social Media Manager, New-York Historical Society + Social Media SIG Chair. Whether you’re sending a #MuseumBouquet, dodging a virtual snowball, or chatting with a T. rex, nothing delights online audiences more than seeing museums “play” with audiences and each other…
Introducing MCN Insights, a new blog series for sharing thought-provoking ideas.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that 2020 will be remembered as one of the most challenging years in recent memory. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world as we knew it. And it’s changing us. As individuals, many of us are shaken to our core, bruised, uncertain about everything, and emotionally drained. The travel…
MCN Insights blog series. When Museums Embrace Zoom Our Brains Suffer
By David Nuñez, Director of Technology and Digital Strategy at the MIT Museum and MCN Board member since 2019. He publishes a weekly newsletter about emerging technologies and our cyborganic relationship with computation. I’ll just say it. Zoom has been a miracle for museums this past year. It is also an inherently dehumanizing interface. We…