MCN2012: Your ideas!

Questions for follow-on session on online collection aggregation platforms (growing out of Cabinets of Curiosity session in MCN2011): (Sheila Carey would like to help pull together a panel on this!)

•Which of these platforms can we (other museums) participate in?

•How are born-digital artworks served by/in these sharing platforms?

•What can libraries and natural science museums bring to this discussion? (they are largely past this sharing problem…)

•How can standards help us share?

•Is the end point not a handful of sharing sites, but everyone being able to scrape everyone else? (If we all have APIs, open search etc.)

•How do we measure the success of what we’re doing: are we meeting the needs of the audience, did it reach them and/or affect any change?

•How can we “use” the audience as a research body?

•What do museums want to get out of sharing platforms?

•What are the different audiences for online collections?

•Can MCN work with AAMD on a short survey of museum directors on their attitudes towards sharing images and basic info (assuming no cost overheads): what are the barriers?

•How does the museum manage providing content to multiple platforms and keep it all up-to-date?

•Would be useful to have Artstor in this conversation going forward.

•Let’s look beyond art, eg Digital NZ; making art more accessible by putting it in more generic places/platforms

•From the platform owners’ point of view, how will you deal with the other platforms in future? Will there be an aggregator of aggregators?

•What are the value-added services that museums can provide on aggregation platforms and environments (including google image search): how can we enhance the consumer experience?

I am thrilled and grateful that Liz Neely of the Art Institute of Chicago and Koven Smith of the Denver Art Museum have agreed to serve as Program Chairs for MCN2012 in Seattle. Please give them your ideas and support as MCN goes from strength to strength!