New Approaches to Museum Publishing

MCN2013: New Approaches to Museum Publishing Scholars Workspace: An Online Collaboration and Publication Tool for Scholars (Webcast) Time Saturday 23rd November 11:15am to 11:45am Place Grand Salon C, Live Webcast (except Friday morning), Hyatt Regency Montreal (map) Susan Edwards @jolifanta Sr. Writer/Editor, Web, J. Paul Getty Trust Will Lanni J. Paul Getty Trust This session will be live webcast at https://new.livestream.com/accou... Two years ago, at MCN 2011 in Atlanta, we discussed our experimental process to create an online space where scholars could collaboratively research and discuss a 17th-century paintings inventory. We will give an update about how this project has grown into a much larger enterprise, with more collaborative research projects, a digital publication, and a new, customizable application for online scholarly collaboration called Scholars Workspace. _ Digital Melilli, _ the project all of this work began with, has become the first digital publication created from the Scholars Workspace. Created using Drupal, an open-source content management system, Scholars Workspace is meant to be a platform where images and archival documents can be uploaded, analyzed, and discussed. In addition to discussing big issues of scholarship and publication, we will address how to shape a scholarly project in a digital space, what team members and skills are needed to do this kind of work, how the design of digital publications and websites compare, and what technologists can learn from scholars and vice versa. Scaling Up: Transforming the Museum through Scholarly Online Catalogues (Webcast) Time Saturday 23rd November 11:45am to 12:15pm Place Grand Salon C, Live Webcast (except Friday morning), Hyatt Regency Montreal (map) Amy Parkolap OSCI Project Coordinator, The Art Institute of Chicago This session will be live webcast at https://new.livestream.com/accou... In 2009, the Getty Foundation brought together nine museums for the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) in order to explore how scholarly collection catalogues could be transformed by publishing them on the web. As part of OSCI, the Art Institute of Chicago endeavored to create a dynamic online publishing platform for scholarly collection catalogues, beta-launching in late 2011 three sample entries from the two original grant-funded volumes. We are now working on nine publications based on the OSCI platform, and these highly interdepartmental projects have been remaking our museum publishing program through the need for collaboration, agility, and strategic allotment of resources. This presentation will examine how core lessons from working on the first two volumes--for example, continuously reiterating workflows--have been pivotal in realizing the additional seven publications as a whole, and in each one's specific workflows. We will explore how scaling a publishing program to meet changing assumptions and expectations can in turn transform and remake a core activity of the museum from the ground up. Re-Make the Museum Blog (Webcast) Time Saturday 23rd November 12:15pm to 12:45pm Place Grand Salon C, Live Webcast (except Friday morning), Hyatt Regency Montreal (map) Sheila Brennan @sherah1918 Associate Director of Public Projects, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Joan Troyano Project Director, PressForward, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University This session will be live webcast at https://new.livestream.com/accou... Museums have been publishing on the web for years by writing about events, discussing special topics with commenters on a post-by-post basis, and encouraging visitor interaction through social media. This demonstration will help participants reconsider the WordPress open-source platform as a means to create new kinds of digital publications beyond the blog--of aggregated content from different users and networks. We will share examples and best practices and build a replicable model for participants to try at their home institutions. This will demonstrate how a museum, library, or archive can aggregate, into one publication, feeds of digital materials related to specific events (public programs, symposia, meetings, conferences) at its home institution, along with information from professional associations or enthusiast communities. This can enable an organization to engage communities around mission-centered topics that attract individuals who may not meet "in real life," but who share similar concerns or passions.