only two days left to submit proposals for Montreal AVICOM Conference

Here is the form

  5:41 am  |   March 7 2012  

The AVICOM Committee’s 2012 Conference will be held in Montreal, Canada from October 9–12, 2012, during the same time as the AVICOM Committee’s annual meeting.

The Conference will be followed by the Festival international de l’Audiovisuel et du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine(FIAMP), a competition that salutes the best achievements of museums worldwide in a number of categories. Visits to various Montreal  museums are planned for the final day of the Conference, Friday, October 12, 2012. In addition, a “Guide to Suggested Activities” will be provided to those participants who would like to extend their stay in Montreal through the following weekend. From 200 to 300 AVICOM members are expected to attend. 

The Conference will provide the opportunity to hear presentations from specialists in new sound and image technologies from around the world who work for museums, design educational programs, head art conservation efforts, create content or are interested in mapping the future development of these new technologies.

  5:29 am  |   March 7 2012  

“

AVICOM, Long Needed…

Focusing on audiovisual and new technologies for museums, AVICOM is the resource museum professionals look for when dealing with issues of computerization of collections, maintenance of digital data and preservation of a digital memory.

Starting from today, ICOM’s international committee finally has a thematic commission affiliated to AVICOM: after a rather long process, Simona Caraceni, already a member AVICOM’s Executive Board, was elected as Coordinator of ICOM Italy’s thematic commission at a meeting of ICOM members and other interested people at MAMbo, the Modern Art Museum of the City of Bologna.

It was indeed long needed - digital documentation of collections does resolve many a problem in museum management and communication. It also gives birth to new ones, however: How is digital memory best to be preserved through time? How does it withstand technology change, obsolescence of both hardware and software? How can it be called to serve us, even after the technical setting that saw its flourishing days has long given way to a new, possibly very different one? How is a given solution to be integrated in a new, open source friendlier approach?

These issue - and many more - will challenge the youngest among the thematic commissions of ICOM Italy. There’s a lot to be done - but it is a good start, at last.

”

— Editor’s note, The Museum Studies Weekly (18 November 2011)

(Source: museumstudies)

  9:10 am  |   November 21 2011   |  8 notes  

I’m proud to show you the new AVICOM website

http://avicom.icom.museum/

You can find here all the previous section of the old website, and also Twitter and Facebook page.

More news will come in the next days, so stay tuned!

  12:17 pm  |   October 19 2011  

Relating to my previous post, I hope

that many of the major museums’ communication departments are starting to get the idea that communicating is a lot more than putting out a press release and that they are keen to be part of this new environment, this new conversation.

hstryqt:

Great post from @Kippelboy on @MuseuPicasso’s blog about his experience at the Communicating the Museum conference (Tumblr here). I pretty much want to pull quotes from the entire thing, so just read it. It’s a short read, but chuck full of important insight into the state of the GLAMs and Wikipedia.

As Victor Samra, head of digital media marketing at MoMA, said in his presentation: ‘In the past you were what you owned, now you are what you share.’

  10:14 am  |   July 27 2011   |  12 notes  

jeffdtaylor:

““If the 20th century was primarily about collecting, I believe the 21st is about programming. [Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream] is not about collecting anything. It’s about engaging in serious research that results in vibrant public programs. Our goal is not so much to be the change agent, but rather, to create the kind of conversation that might lead at some future date to change by addressing critically important problems that engage specialists within the field as well as a more general public.””

—

Glen Lowry, Director of Museum of Modern Art
in It’s Not Just a Museum, It’s a Think Tank (via Will Cary)

I liked very much this quotation of the interview, and I tried to relate to the aid that new technology can give to museum. The main effort I’m seeing here in Europe is about the use of informatics in collecting purpose. I’ll take the example of Europeana project. I lke very much Europeana, and a lot of friends are involved to. The work seems to be actually putting all the collections browsable via web, and to add metadata, change metadata, link the linked open data to make all the collection browsable in this huge and extraordinary project. Europeana in my opinion has some limitations, and the first one of that will be:

when we will have all the collections of all the cultural institution in Europe, what are we going to do with this think?

That’s also the question that some museums are asking to themself, because one day Europeana asked to all museum to irrevocably convert the license in which they gave Europeana the data from CC 2.5 in CC0, to allow the commercial reuse from everybody.

That started a big discussion between the ones that wanted to share all the materials with Europeana project also for commercial reuse, and the ones that preferred that the museum, in this moment of financial difficulties for everybody, can decide to use the heritage however they like.

In all this discussion that is, at the end, about collection, I think everybody missed the point:

What people is going to do with this on-line collection/archive? What kind of instruments are we going to offer to visitors? Where is the vibrant public program that we can create now, with our web collection on line? What kind of conversation can we start with our visitors in our wonderfull collection website?

I think that this will be our primary goal, instead run aground types of CC licenses, or metadata formats that are important I know, but the first goal must be thinking about “the big picture”.

The great discussion can become also how museum can change its staff, its organization, its “executive mind”, in order to reply to the growing need of technological communication for visitors? Are there museums that are ready to start using web 2.0 platform without any organization problem? Or are they acting as “I choose you, and you can do this (twitter, facebook, foursquare, app, … management) in your “spare time”, while you curate/restore/are in ticket office? In Italy we assist now in this situation, and there are very few museum with a web staff. And the “vibrant public program” remains a dream for many, a reality only for few museums.

  9:07 am  |   July 27 2011   |  4 notes  

In those months I appreciated a lot the museological discussion I have seen here in Tumblr by all the people I follow, and there were some posts that made me think a lot about some topics:

The first one was from Museum Meanderings and the necessity of an happy medium for museum (that I reblog). I admit here that I am passionate about baroque music, and the start of your post “Make some noise” was amazing. Glenn Gould started the movement called GPAADAK that was devoted to abolish all the (joy) manifestation during/after concerts and performances… what a cerebral and “unhappy” medium.

But your post made me think a lot about the use of social media for museums, and the possibility to increase participation, happy participation for visitors and all interested people.

The first thought I had was about augmented reality projects. Here in Italy we have Venice Biennale, and I am planning to go to make a thematic tour for all the Augmented Reality pavillons that are there (for example ….. ) 

Here a preview (that is instrumental to the rest of the post)

Here (Search for “Venice”), here

And here (Search for “Venice”)

Are we sure that Augmented Reality is an happy (technological) medium for museum? Here in Italy I’m also working on a very small project of an Augmented Reality shooting game in an University museum, but working on that, even if shooting games are very popular for young people, am I sure that it is a happy way to help museum communicate its heritage to a broader public, or is there a misunderstanding of the mean (technology) instead of the end (communicate heritage correctly)?

1. Augmented Reality means a very hard technological work in the backstage
2. it is dedicated only to people who have an Android or Apple smartphone, and exclude all the others
3. if you open some augmented reality layer outside or far from the museum, you don’t see anything or it malfunction, so people say it doesn’t work and have a bad feeling about that

Thinking at the birth of Augmented Reality concept (that is, I know I know, a tail of Virtual Reality resources started 20 years ago), thanks to MuseumStudies, I went back to Gibson’s “Spook Country”, and relating this book to museum experience and exhibition I’ve found that the project described in that is another thing:

1. it starts from people outside museum: it is crowd-generated, and not imposed as an abstruse way to consult a guide/an audioguide
2. it is strongly based on the idea of community, concept that I’m struggling to find in the most of the AR project I’m examining
3. it’s funny: there is the happiness to create something and to share with others

I personally find Twitter a Twitter is a low-tech feeling medium, very sophisticated, very revolutionary for museums, and for the variety of use that a broader base of public can do of that (not only IPhone or Android, soon Symbian possessor ones), but also for the fun of “hacking” it, and constructing some way to interact with heritage, and other people. 

In a Hi-tech-Augmented-Reality VS low-tec-twitter competition, who will survive in near future?

  6:35 am  |   July 21 2011   |  1 note  

museum-meanderings:

I used to study music. I spent hours trying to analyze Bach chorales, learning diction, memorizing German Lieder and cramming composer birth/death dates in my head. In the course of my Western musical education, I learned correct concert etiquette. Sit still, don’t clap at the end of…

  6:31 am  |   July 21 2011   |  7 notes  

I would like to write my first post in English in this blog, to come back and to start some discussions more related to my AVICOM executive board activity (and my scientific thoughts as a researcher at Planetary Collegium)  than the italian commission works. After a some-week-“sabbatical” I took from this blog I hope that you will appreciate them, and I ask to all my italian followers to be patient: I hope that the topics will be interesting for them too ;-)

  4:24 pm  |   July 20 2011  

(Source: museumuse)

  2:04 pm  |   June 22 2011   |  7 notes