IMA Dashboard

The Indianapolis Museum of Art created a dashboard in order to measure the museum's performance in a variety of areas. According to the site,
"The goal of the Dashboard is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers and to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons."

Well, we're museums studies specialists, colleagues and patrons (hopefully), and I don't know how interested I am in most of the areas they're reporting on. They're giving me stats; stats with graphics and pretty colours, but stats all the same. Click on "more" for any of the sections, and you get more stats. So why should I care? What is the museum doing with that information? I'm sure they'll write a paper on about the dashboard before they've actually done anything with the data (as people so often seem to love to do), but the mere presence of the dashboard seems to me an opportunity to engage the community in a discussion about the dynamics of the museum within the city (afterall, most of the stats are about those people to begin with).

In all that the applications of things like blogs and dashboards are supposed to provide different ways for visitors to engage with museum material, so many of them end up being very one-dimensional, like this one. Apparently it's a new addition to the website, so maybe time is needed to figure out how best for the museum to use it, but I've yet to see why people are so excited about it.

The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan

All this talk about mass media reminded me of a song by Radio Free Vestibule called "The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan"



P.S. The little player works on some computers, but not others. You can also hear the song here:

http://webjay.org/iteminfo/550305/e155228f7d57945733f381dc65cb3767

"Marshall McLuhan, you're such a groovy thinker..."

Building a "Memory" for the National Science Digital Library

Interesting artcile:

http://www.npaci.edu/enVision/v19.1/memory.html

From the RCAAM listserv, re: AAM's Media and Technology Website

Hello everyone!
AAM's Media & Technology SPC is currently developing a new resources area on the Media & Technology website. The Resource Web (as it's currently called), is intended to facilitate the sharing of information regarding various subject areas of interest to the cultural heritage community. Written by museum professionals for museum professionals, a major feature of the Resource Web will be a wiki targeting such topics as imaging, preservation, blogging, Web 2.0, Second Life, video and audio podcasting, content management systems, data migration, and whatever else is useful! We are looking to launch the Resorce Web in early 2008, prepopulated with some topic areas in the wiki and some archival material from past Media & Technology Clipping Service issues.
The Resource Web wiki is intended to be useful to all levels of users, from the "accidental" techie to established museum technology professionals. Also, since many museum disciplines are dealing with the same issues regarding technology, please feel free to forward this to non-technology-related groups, such as CARE or EdCom.
We want to know which topics are useful to you and which you'd be willing to share your knowledge about! The survey is short and should take less than 5 minutes: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=1Z2uI7B0wZRBcDcjYyxTWw_3d_3d
Thanks everyone! (and apologies in advance for the cross-posting)
Perian Sully Collection Database & Records Administrator Judah L. Magnes Museum Contributor, http://www.musematic.org Board member, Media & Technology Standing Professional Committee