This year MCN celebrates its 50th anniversary. Just as MCN has established a network of established and emerging professionals, #MCN50 Voices brings members together, old and new, near and far.
After chatting for half an hour, Susan Wigodner, Web & Digital Project Manager at The Field Museum, and Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager at the J. Paul Getty Trust, felt like they hadn’t arrived a “formal” interview. Instead, here they offer their list of their favorite museum digital projects, tools, books, and more… (GIFs!)
| Greg | Susan | |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Digital Publications Manager, J. Paul Getty Trust | Web & Digital Project Manager, The Field Museum |
| Project You’ve Worked On | I came to the Getty at the tail end of our Virtual Library project, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I love about museums. Thinking big about serving the public. Free downloads of 300+ books? Not something most publishers can or would do. | Audio tours for the 9/11 Memorial Museum. They include some pretty amazing personal stories, and I had a chance to meet many of those people (and a prep call with narrator Robert De Niro). |
| Open-Source Museum Project | +1 to ACMI’s audio guide! →
We were excited to see that one particularly because they used Jekyll, a static site generator, and we’re using static site generators to publish online, multi-format books. |
ACMI’s audio guide (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) |
| Museum Microsite | The Art Institute of Chicago’s Linked Visions comes to mind. A nice use of D3.js, and they took advantage of open source by building off another project. Smart! | It’s a little older now, but MoMA’s microsite for their 2015 Jacob Lawrence exhibition is one of my favorites. |
| Book You Keep at Your Office | RESTful Web APIs and Publishing as Artistic Practice | Content Everywhere, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher. I saw her speak a few months ago and am appreciating the perspective as we start a website redesign. |
| (Digital) Style Guide | I’ve been looking at the web accessibility guides from 18F and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh a lot this past year. Thankful for both. | I second Greg ←! And of course MailChimp’s if you haven’t checked that out already. |
| Web Platform/App | GitHub. (So intertwined in my work it took me a minute to realize it was a web platform/app I could cite for this!) | Zapier – which lets me connect all my other favorite web platforms together! Also: Airtable. |
| Gif | 
My amazing colleague @amelialikespie, keeping me humble, Slacked this to me. If you have Slack and Giphy integration, you can make your own by typing: /giphy #echo WHATEVER WORDS YOU WANT |
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| If I used only one social media site | ||
| Podcast | On vacation road trips this summer, we’ve been listening to Brains On! with the kids. Our favorite episode? “Fart Smarts: Understanding the gas we pass”. Naturally. | Startup often feels oddly relevant to my work in a 125-year-old museum. |
| Emoji |  |
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| Museum project I’m jealous of | The New Museum’s NEW INC startup incubator. | Crowdsourced visual descriptions for museum websites, like AMNH’s Project Describe. Also the Met’s born-digital map that’s being used across channels. |
| My best non-museum job | Pottery Barn – a company that was intentional about management practices and staff development. And yes, the discount. | The Container Store – great discount and working with fellow organization nerds! They also have a formalized and really ingrained company culture. |
| Top technical skill or tip | Everyone knows about the inspector tool in browsers right? I didn’t soon enough and it was a revelation → Ctrl-click (mac) or right-click (pc) on anything in your browser window, and select “Inspect element” | I recently learned how to take a full-page screenshot via the “inspect” function in Chrome and I’m really excited about it. |
| Pic of my phone homescreen | 
Default background, so sad. Also, not technically my homescreen, but the one I look at most. |
Weird background is a photo taken at the Renwick Gallery’s Wonder exhibition |
| Weirdest thing you’ve done for a museum job | Ha! I can’t compete → | Dressed up in an inflatable T. rex costume for a birthday video for SUE |
| Favorite MCN moment | That time I was shamed by a circle of six awesome #musetech nerds who simultaneously pulled out portable chargers from pockets and bags after I suggested I had to run to the room to recharge. Also, karaoke. All of the karaoke. Always. | Convincing my boss, @badunn, to come to MCN 2015 in Minneapolis, and having him say “We have to bring the whole team to this next year!” |