Draft Program

Sunday, April 2nd
5:00pm – 9:00pm

Tour

Join us for the an insider’s tour & the best views of Washington, D.C.!

• Alice Walker – Experience Designer, Creative Strategist & Business Development Leader @ Consultant | http://alicedowwalker/

Make new friends and network with fellow M&W DC attendees, on Sunday, April 2nd, the night before the conference starts.

5:30-7:00 pm We will take in views of the Potomac River, enjoy drinks and small bites, and an unforgettable sunset from Sands Capital Management’s Penthouse Rooftop.

7:00-8:15 pm We will board a private coach for an evening DC Monuments tour. Our guided tour will include some of the most iconic sites of DC:Abraham Lincoln Memorial, Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial
and Korean War Memorial

8:15 – 9:00 pm Our last stop will be ARTECHOUSE DC where we will take in their latest exhibition!

Fee: $100. Space is limited. Please RSVP. Once you RSVP, you will receive

Monday, April 3rd
8:00am – 5:00pm

Registration

The registration desk will be open from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Located in the Lobby of Van Meter Hall at George Mason University (Mason Square). 3351 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22201. The Parking Garage is located off “Founders Drive.” When you park your car, look for the sign “Van Metre Hall Elevator.” *Please note George Mason University has several campuses. So please make sure you are using the correct address.

Please pick up your name badge and reception ticket. Only full registers will receive the reception ticket for Tuesday night. Please coordinate at this registration desk for an extra ticket. An extra drink ticket is also available at the Registration Desk. We are not allowed for any cash exchanges at the reception. There will be no registration desk at the site.

Monday, April 3rd
8:30am – 11:30am

Workshop

• Lexi Cleveland – Executive Vice President @ ARtGlass
• Queen Thomas

This design workshop will teach attendees about implementing augmented reality experiences in museums and other cultural settings and walk them through the basics of making a viable tour. We will start by defining the field of extended reality and the challenges and opportunities that come with emerging technology and then workshop stories attendees feel can be aided by AR. We will close by sharing the ideas sketched out by attendees and demonstrate tour prototypes built with these ideas.

Monday, April 3rd
8:30am – 11:30am

Workshop

• Aaron Miller Forum One
• Christina Crawley – Managing Director, Marketing @ Forum One | http://tinacrawley/

Successful digital campaigns create the buzz you need to get awareness about your cultural institution’s mission. They can kick-start a movement, develop brand ambassadors, and implement long-lasting change. Digital campaigns have many moving parts and often have crazy schedules. Maybe you have a small team and wonder how to create a successful campaign that is manageable?

In this workshop, participants will learn about what it takes to run a robust digital campaign. What are the priorities? What are the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves? How do you even get started?

Monday, April 3rd
8:30am – 11:30am

Workshop

• Ece Özdil – Designer and Researcher @ Jüniör | http://ece_ozdil/

How does your institution research about and plan for your audiences? What if your as-is audiences are not representative of your future ones? What if your institutional actions and priorities could even guide and impact the behaviours of your audiences, thus the society and environment. 

Overall scope:

With this workshop, we’ll start a wider discussion on how we can build a more responsible approach on audience development practices and planning that goes beyond static audience-centric practices and considers the impact also our institutional actions and decisions on audience behaviours while developing audience development strategies and plans.

Monday, April 3rd
11:30am – 12:00pm

Social Event

Monday, April 3rd
12:00pm – 3:00pm

Workshop

• Valentina Miller – Interactive Designer @ Night Kitchen Interactive
• Michael Lapides – Director of Digital Engagement @ New Bedford Whaling Museum

When designing a digital interactive for a social learning space, one immediate indicator of of success is the buzz: whether or not visitors are talking about it! Get to know the best practices for building memorable multiplayer games that encourage conversation, cooperation, and social learning in the gallery. You will learn how to break away from “touchscreen tunnel-vision” to envision shareable interfaces and social interactions that are as fun as they are educational. Attendees are invited to bring their own ideas to adapt to this fun, playful framework!

Monday, April 3rd
12:00pm – 3:00pm

Workshop

• Nabil Kashyap – Software Engineer @ JP Getty Trust
• Daniel Brennan – Software Architect @ J Paul Getty Trust
• Jason Corum
• Adam Brin – Software Architect, Research Applications Development @ J. Paul Getty Trust

Description:
How are museums publishing and consuming linked data in the wild? Why use linked data in the first place? Software engineers from the Getty Trust will lead a workshop on the building blocks for using LOD to build digital applications and experiences. Geared toward museum technologists interested in implementing or supporting linked data within their own contexts, this workshop offers participants an understanding of the broad potential that linked open data offers museum collections, both as the basis for building traditional applications like search and collection pages as well as a foundation for more exploratory use cases. The workshop centers on using Linked Art, a linked data model created by and for the cultural heritage

Monday, April 3rd
12:00pm – 3:00pm

Workshop

• Barry Joseph – Principal @ Barry Joseph Consulting

Based on Barry’s 6 years at the American Museum of Natural History, the workshop will explore the Six Tools of Digital Design (user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up). This workshop is designed for anyone looking to increase the impact and reach of digital design within museums while learning best practices for negotiating the disruptions they can bring.  

Attendees will leave:
– Motivated to implement & further develop their new skills
– Inspired to explore new practices within their museum
– Confident about avoiding common pitfalls
– Armed with their own personal copy of Barry’s new book from AAM on the the topic

Monday, April 3rd
3:30pm – 4:30pm

Plenary

Affirming the Value of the Professional MuseTech Community

• Kathy Jones
• Paul Marty – Prof @ Florida State University

Drawing upon a collection of oral histories recently gathered from more than fifty museum technology professionals working in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia from the 1960s to the present day, this plenary session will explore the value of professional communities such as Museums and the Web for driving innovation in museum technology.

Many of the participants in this oral history project described how belonging to a professional musetech community helps individuals and institutions build connections between different groups, inspire new ideas, develop a sense of value, and provide a network of peers who understand and support your professional work.

Tuesday, April 4th
8:29am – 5:00pm

Registration

Located in the Lobby of Van Meter Hall at George Mason University (Mason Square). 3351 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22201. The Parking Garage is located off “Founders Drive.” When you park your car, look for the sign “Van Metre Hall Elevator.” *Please note George Mason University has several campuses. So please make sure you are using the correct address.

Please pick up your name badge and reception ticket. Only full registers will receive the reception ticket for Tuesday night. Please coordinate at this registration desk for an extra ticket. An extra drink ticket is also available at the Registration Desk. We are not allowed for any cash exchanges at the reception. There will be no registration desk at the site.

Tuesday, April 4th
8:30am – 9:30am

Demonstration

• David Francis – Senior Interactive Developer @ Bowdoin College Museum of Art

As a teaching museum closely connected to the curriculum of our college, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is always seeking ways to make our collections more relevant to our students and faculty. Our objects are well-organized and cataloged for museum use, but are far less defined in terms of subject matter. Lacking the internal resources to populate this new metadata for our collection of over 20,000 objects, the BCMA developed a crowd-sourced tagging system that allowed viewers of our online collections to suggest contextual keywords.

• Roz McNulty – Ms @ Fashion Innovation Centre

Monocle Prime, a 3D scanner using lidar for people and objects

I would like to demonstrate the Monocle Prime software beta that works with the iPhone and built in Lidar camera in the iPhone 12 – 14 models.

I have worked with Steampunk Digital in their development of Monocle Prime for years as a beta tester and I would like to show off the software by scanning people and things. I can then send a downloadable sample.

Although Monocle is available on the Apple iTunes store I don\’t know that Monocle Prime beta is ready for a commercial booth yet. It is still early days for commercial AR and scanning. But something a lot of museums ask for is an inexpensive scanner that could work for them. They might already have the beginnings of th

The Repository – Indian Textiles and Crafts (RTC), is a national knowledge portal being developed by NIFT under the Craft Cluster Initiative of the NHDP programme of DC (Handlooms & Handicrafts)Ministry of Textiles , Govt of India. This interactive digital platform will showcase the creativity and diversity of traditional Indian textiles, clothing and crafts thereby preserving and promoting the Indian textiles and crafts worldwide and benefit millions of craftsmen residing in all corners of the country. The repository will digitally archive both tangible and intangible knowledge resources on indigenous and contemporary textiles and crafts, research related to textiles and apparel, designer and artisan database, virtual museum, events an

Tuesday, April 4th
9:30am – 11:00am

Paper

• Maria Economou – Joint Curator / Lecturer in Museum Studies @ University of Glasgow (Hunterian Museum & HATII)
• Nathan. Mcconway

For many small and medium sized cultural heritage organisations, following the lead of larger institutions within the sector has been the only way to keep apace with burgeoning trends in digital audience engagement. These larger organisations tend to have the resources to ‘buy in’ appropriate technical and strategic expertise for all things digital, and so it makes sense that the case studies formed from such projects are packaged and promoted as ‘best practice’ for the sector.

Or does it?

Digital audience engagement has become markedly more important to cultural heritage organisations – and this was suddenly pushed to fore during the Coronavirus pandemic. The highlighted internally, the different levels of maturity in digital strateg

• Madhav Tankha The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Julie Turgeon – Product Designer @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Tabia Smith
• Elisabeth Pefanis

This paper will explore a number of qualitative practices that The Metropolitan Museum of Art\’s digital product design team employs to better understand its audiences, gauge the potential impact of its products, and iterate on its existing ones. Through multiple examples of research projects, it will present our learnings around the most effective methodologies to use per audience, product type, and project lifecycle stage. The paper will also discuss the practical application of these research projects: how our learnings gave rise to digital products and guided our process of ideation, design, and iteration.

To better understand the complex range of audiences that museums typically attract, The Met recently embarked on a seri

• Lorena Bradford – Manager of Accessible Programs @ National Gallery of Art
• Deanna Wood – User Experience Designer @ National Gallery of Art

Since the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 fully accessible textual descriptions of works of art in the National Gallery of Art’s collection have gone live, and they cover 60% of traffic to museum’s collection pages. Learn how we leveraged a large-scale, interdepartmental project to make this a reality, from documenting the process through publishing description guidelines, and focusing on all users through an inclusive design approach that supports the National Gallery’s mission for universal access.

Description is the cornerstone of scholarly interpretation, but in that context, description will be selective, and will always be in service to that interpretation. By developing a specific approach to composing descriptions for the sake of

Tuesday, April 4th
9:30am – 11:00am

Paper

• Andy Cummins – Managing Director @ Cogapp
• Ariel Weinberg – Digital Archivist and Collections Database Manager @ MIT Museum
• David Nunez – Director of Technology and Digital Strategy @ MIT Museum

MIT Museum’s new home is open and welcoming the diverse communities of Cambridge, Mass. This paper will detail how a new online home was delivered in parallel to the successful physical move to the museum’s new location at Kendall Square.

With the aim of laying solid digital foundations for the museum’s programmes to thrive in the coming years, MIT Museum, in collaboration with Cogapp, have developed a modern, accessible, API-based, headless, web frontend. Presented in its fullest form to date, the museum’s collection interface enables casual browsing and research on a level that, until now, has not been possible online. 

In this paper we will describe the thinking behind this approach as well as the benefits and learnings that we hav

• Chad Weinard Independent Consultant

A collecting museum cannot deliver on its mission today without an online collection. This argument begins with the first curator’s indecipherable scrawl in a leather-bound ledger, traces the handed-down human poetics of collection data, and ends at digital transformation. Along the way, the online collection allows objects to circulate through cultural networks, while safely stored away. Museums must preserve not just physical objects, but their stories and context as well—the traces of objects and ideas in contact with people over time and through space. The online collection is where such traces are saved and shared. Moreover, it’s where new paths are made possible: the online collection allows new context to be generated, in new places,

• Philip Leers – Project Manager, Digital Initiatives @ Hammer Museum
• Louise Cole – Production Director @ Cogapp

Hammer Channel presents over 1,000 recordings of programs, performances, and artist interviews from the last decade, and is a repository for more than 100 videos produced each year by the museum. The website presents the videos with features that encourage engagement with the content, such as full, searchable transcripts for every video, and a clipping tool that allows users to create and share their favorite moments.

Most videos in the archive are recordings of public programs held at the Hammer since 2005. They comprise a broad range of lectures and conversations featuring renowned artists, authors, musicians, scholars, and experts from a variety of fields. Compiling this wide-ranging collection together for the first time, the website

Tuesday, April 4th
9:30am – 11:00am

Paper

• Teina Herzer – Digital Engagement Manager @ MOTAT

Tell me about … ,  but wait, because as soon as you put fingertip to keyword and begin to write, you are throwing up barriers to access. Pre-readers – gone, early readers – intimidated,  visitors who don\’t know your language – excluded. MOTAT is a science and technology museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Our audience is primarily local families and schoolchildren. Our city is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world with the fourth highest foreign born population. Our science and technology topics are frequently complex. Our collection is often unknowable without explanation. The success of our mission to educate and inspire relies upon our ability to communicate facts, concepts, and context.

Are written words – the defaul

• Cheryl Fogle-Hatch – consultant @ independent professional

The Georgia Tech sonification lab defines sonification as representing data with nonspeech audio Studies show that sonification, combined with visual data displays increases accuracy for people with normal vision. Additionally, sonification, representing data with sound facilitates access for people who are blind.

There is a growing community of researchers, scientists and educators developing software to create sonification. With the exception of the Harvard/Smithsonian, sonification has not been explored for museum contexts.

This paper will give examples of sonification. Software can be developed using programing languages such as python. Sonification can be produced on websites using the SAS Graphics Accellerator or the IMAGE brows

• Winnie Lai – Curator, Learning and Interpretation @ M+
• Claudia Tsang – Assistant Curator, Learning and Interpretation @ M+ Museum

What does it mean to have an open storage in the middle of the galleries? What opportunity does it pose for to exploring digital and interactive element within the galleries?

In M+, there is a gallery where 40 panels displaying 200 paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes and are shuffled every two hours. There are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels, only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. It is The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery.

The inspiration for The Cabinet came from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the

Tuesday, April 4th
11:15am – 12:15pm

How-to Session

• Kevin Kane – Software Developer @ North Carolina Museum of Art

Kevin Kane, Software Developer at the NC Museum of Art, will discuss all aspects of kiosk style touch interactives from conception to exhibition opening and ongoing maintenance. Discussion will start with interpretation ideas, then move to architectural, accessibility, and content planning, software design considerations and production flow control, information technology requirements such as networking, operating system and BIOS configurations, and ongoing tech maintenance. Special types of kiosks like split-screen interactive touch tables, and immersive multi-display setups will also be covered.

This session is intended to be an overview of all requirements for interpretation technology development and maintenance. Ideal audience membe

Tuesday, April 4th
11:15am – 12:15pm

How-to Session

• Madlyn Larson – Associate Director of Education Initiatives @ Natural History Museum of Utah
• Barry Joseph – Principal @ Barry Joseph Consulting
• Tim Halstead

This how-to session will focus on the topic of developing a data-driven strategy for digital engagement. The topic will be explored through a case study of the Natural History Museum of Utah’s Research Quest, a free collections- and classroom-based program for developing critical thinkers. Working with outside partners, the Museum developed a new data-driven strategy for digital engagement to expand the reach and impact of Research Quest. Based on personas, journey maps, experience maps, expanded success measures, and rich data analytics, the Museum was able to make surgically precise design decisions, track the efficacy of marketing campaigns, launch a new national community of Research Quest boosters, and more.

This presentat

Tuesday, April 4th
11:15am – 12:15pm

Professional Forum

• Erin Huizenga – Co-Founder and CEO @ Desklight

Intended Audience:

Org leaders who are looking to lead with learning

Session Content:

This forum will inspire museum leaders to consider how they might leverage learning as a benefit to their institutions. Our message will encourage attendees to rethink their HR Learning and Development strategies by recognizing the unexpected inefficiencies that come from taking learning online rather than offering it synchronously offline. 

We will talk through the steps we took at Smithsonian Affiliations to prepare for innovation, the partnership with Desklight to build a learning hub for 200+ organizations, and our current work to build a community of practice that leverages the resources of the Smithsonian – all accomplished while meeting

Tuesday, April 4th
11:15am – 12:15pm

Professional Forum

• Silvina Fernandez-Duque – Future Projects Manager @ US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Since 1994, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has offered a program for area high school students that introduces them to the history of the Holocaust and encourages them to share its lessons with their family, friends, and community. Hundreds of students in DC, Maryland and Virginia, have participated in this program, Bringing the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education for the Community (BTLH), since its inception.

In 2020, the pivot to digital programming allowed the facilitators of BTLH to begin to conceive of how the program could be expanded nationwide. This session will share ideas on how museums can connect with students in digital environments in meaningful ways. The digital, national version of BTLH is currently in the prot

Tuesday, April 4th
12:15pm – 1:15pm

Social Event

Pick up your lunch box and meet up with your new friends! Check out the Emerging Professionals Networking & Mentoring table hosted by Linda Colet Senior Outreach Strategist, CollectionSpace (LYRASIS)!

Tuesday, April 4th
1:30pm – 3:00pm

How-to Session

• Greg Albers – Digital Publications Manager @ The J. Paul Getty Trust
• Erin Dunigan – Community Manager @ J. Paul Getty Center

Getty began development work on Quire, a multiformat digital publishing tool, in 2016. We have since produced 14 publications, with another 15 on the way. Each publication starts with a single set of files which we then output as an open-access website, a print-on-demand book, and a downloadable e-book, with the website serving as the primary version of the publication.

Beyond our own success with the tool, we have a growing community of users within the arts and cultural heritage sector and have recently launched version 1.0 of Quire as fully open source. Because Quire is so feature-rich and extensible, our community has used it to publish everything from collection catalogues and conference proceedings to journals, student research, an

Tuesday, April 4th
1:30pm – 3:00pm

Paper

• Vassiliki Spathopoulou – ARCHAEOLOGIST-MUSEOLOGIST- TOUR GUIDE @ IONIAN UNIVERSITY
• Georgios Papaioannou – Associate Professor @ Ionian University, Greece

Robots and robotics in museums first arrived at the end of the 20th century and comprise mostly a 21st-century development. Robots in museum settings can offer dynamic, constructive, educational, and communicative mechanisms between museums and their visitors. Robots have initially appeared as museum tour guides onsite and online. They then served as museum exhibits in the form of animatronics and within museum educational activities (Pang, Wong, & Seet, 2017). Also, as telepresence devices offering the opportunity to visit the museum remotely via a robot (Lupetti, Germak, & Giuliano, 2015). Studies on the role and integration of robots in exhibiting and promoting heritage in museums and cultural places are of particular i

Tuesday, April 4th
1:30pm – 3:00pm

Paper

• Katy Noelle Scott – Education Programs Director @ Monterey Bay Aquarium
• Jeanine Ancelet – Principal @ Audience Focus
• Emily Kotecki
• Davis Mendez
• Andrea Montiel de Shuman – Museums Education & Digital Experience Designer + Audience Evaluation @ Independent Contractor & Collaborator @ Audience Focus

While museums have been providing distance learning opportunities for over thirty years, the demand for online education programs skyrocketed in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental organizations faced the added challenge of moving outdoor education to digital platforms. The Monterey Bay Aquarium responded by rapidly developing English and Spanish self-paced online courses for PK-12 students and their caregivers.

In 2022, the Aquarium partnered with Audience Focus for an in-depth study of the online courses, uncovering the motivations and satisfaction of the courses’ main audiences. It also measured how well the courses met the intended learning outcomes, and how they impacted user affinity for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

• Craig MacDonald – Associate Professor @ Pratt Institute
• Elena Villaespesa – Digital Analytics Lead @ National Gallery of Art
• Danielle Kingberg
• Kyle Kisicki
• Rachel Jackson

To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack internal UX expertise, which means they need to partner with costly outside vendors to provide digital expertise, rely on internal staff and struggle through a process of trial and error, or do nothing and fall further behind in their digital offering. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the digital transformation of museums. Although many museums are welcoming people back into their galleries, visitors’ demand for enjoyable digital experiences will persist. Absent a foc

Tuesday, April 4th
1:30pm – 3:00pm

Paper

• Aynur Kadir University of Waterloo
• Susan Neylan Wilfrid Laurier University
• Emma Rain-Smith
• Helen Chimirri-Russell

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum collaborated with the local Indigenous community in the area and researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier on Dibaajimowin: Stories from this Land. The impetus behind this exhibit began with the removal of a series of murals, The History of Waterloo County, from public display. These 1950 paintings depicted an industrial and capitalist interpretation of local history and emphasized the settler experience over that of Indigenous inhabitants. Public artwork hence provided the opportunity to create a museum exhibit that might reframe the region’s history and better engage with Indigenous perspectives and historical representations. The researc

• Scott Gillam – Director, Design and Digital Experience @ Canadian Museum for Human Rights
• Lola Whonnock – Indigenous Inclusion Consultant @ Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning
• Steve McCullough – Digital Content Specialist @ Canadian Museum for Human Rights

This paper presents a case study on a decolonizing approach to creating an inclusive user interface, education, and content design. Witnessblanket.ca, a collaborative effort between Carey Newman, CMHR, Media One, Camosun College, and Animikii. A virtual extension that expands public access to the voices of the Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and emphasizes empathy through an inclusive content development process, trauma-informed design features, and various visual and auditory components. The case study reviews the technical and content choices, solutions, and impact measurement considerations while developing a relationship with the community.

Tuesday, April 4th
3:00pm – 4:00pm

Professional Forum

• Geoffrey Alan Rhodes – Assistant Professor @ School of the Art Institute of Chicago

John Russick and Professor Geoffrey Alan Rhodes will moderate a forum of forward-thinking museum administrators, exhibition designers, and media technologists to workshop the image of a \’future museum\’.  How can we imagine the future museum?

This forum will continue an ongoing series of lectures, discussions, and symposia hosted by the Future Museum Studio at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (fmmis.org).  Of particular focus are three essential questions: What is included in museums of the future?  How will they operate and for who?

Future Museum Studio discussants have included (and may include for this professional panel, depending on availability):

Mona Kim /Award winning exhibition designer and Director of Mona Kim Projects, Par

Tuesday, April 4th
3:00pm – 4:00pm

Professional Forum

• Robin White Owen – Principal @ MediaCombo, Inc.
• Brad MacDonald
• Gary Gonya
• Alexis Rapo

Our conversation is about how Web3 innovations can help museums address mission critical problems, such as community building, educational impact and revenue streams. We’ll look at projects from three museums to consider resources investment, unique value, and potential longevity. Brad MacDonald/Exploratorium in San Francisco, will talk about how they are exploring ways to gradually adopt Web3 practices as they upgrade their website to Drupal 9. Alexis Rapo/Museum of Science in Boston, will describe why they decided to launch their Mission Mars game on the webXR platform Roblox. Gary Gonya/Toledo Museum of Art, will discuss their new Web3 designed artist residency. Robin White Owen/MediaCombo will describe educational opportunities in Web3.

Tuesday, April 4th
3:00pm – 4:00pm

Professional Forum

• Max Evjen – Academic Specialist @ Michigan State University
• Scott Magelssen
• Amanda Dearolph – Collection Information Specialist @ Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Should museum professionals look to theatre for strategies for successful audience engagement? Why, or why not? This professional forum will be a highly active session. Four professionals with experience in both theatre and museums (Amanda Dearolph, Max Evjen, Alli Hartley-Kong, Scott Magelssen) will introduce themselves briefly, then lead four concurrent facilitated discussions around four provocative prompts designed to elicit knowledge production around the need for theatrical skills in digital museum practice.

Tuesday, April 4th
3:00pm – 4:00pm

Other

• Aaron Bare – Chief Marketing Officer @ Etix

You want to sell as many tickets as possible to your special events and exhibits, but are you taking advantage of the natural ebbs and flows of an event life cycle? In this session, we’ll show you how to provide the greatest return on investment by leveraging customer touchpoints during different time periods. Move consumers down the conversion funnel, maximize audience reach, and ultimately sell more tickets.

Tuesday, April 4th
7:30pm – 9:30pm

Social Event

• Shanita Brackett – Assistant Director, Visitor and Guest Services @ Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture
• Rich Cherry – Managing Partner @ Museum Operations

Please join us at the National Museum of African American History and Culture to celebrate our 26th Annual Conference in DC. 1400 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20560

6:30 pm – 9:30 pm – drinks and light refreshments will be served.

The bus is arranged from George Mason University at 5:30 pm and Residence Inn Marriott Arlington Ballston 6 pm.

Please bring your name badge and entrance ticket. One Day registration packet does not include the Reception Ticket.

Wednesday, April 5th
8:00am – 2:30pm

Registration

Registration desk opens at 8:00 am. The registration desk will be open until 2:30 pm.

Wednesday, April 5th
8:30am – 9:30am

Demonstration

• Michelle Strizever – Photography & Digital Content Specialist @ U.S. House of Representatives, Art & Archives
• Mackenzie Miessau

In this demonstration, we will discuss the research and decision making that went into building an open access portal. The Office of Art and Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives has rethought how digital surrogates of physical objects in the Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives are publicly disseminated. Currently, digital surrogates are shared via a lengthy permissions process. The Office of Art and Archives is moving toward distributing digital surrogates via an open access portal. While planning the portal, we have deliberately considered the importance of embedded metadata and made it an integral part of the design.

The purpose of embedded metadata in digital surrogates shared via an open access portal is to provi

• Kevin Kane – Software Developer @ North Carolina Museum of Art
• Felicia Ingram – Manager of Interpretation @ North Carolina Museum of Art

This is a demonstration of a digital interactive labels platform designed and built by staff at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Presenters will have UI wireframes, plans for casework fabrication, and the final interactive product for guests to try out.

The demonstration is in tandem with a how-to session already submitted called “Creating Digital Interactive Labels for Art Museums”

We will highlight the core features that allow this platform to extend beyond conventional print labels, including on-demand editing of published content, a multilingual user interface, and the ability to add streaming video playback and high-resolution magnifiable photography of collection objects. Additionally, we will have a station set up to show the

• Jesse Merandy – Director of the Digital Humanities and Digital Exhibitions (DH/DX) @ Bard Graduate Center

Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Through our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, and public programs we explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. During the pandemic, as our gallery went dark, a plan was developed to showcase the exhibition which was forced closed online. That work led to new path and process for not only bringing all of our future exhibition content online, but also developing new born digital projects as well. This demonstration will showcase these incredible projects and the digital tools used to bring them to life online!

Eileen Gray: https://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/majolicamania/
Majolica Mania

• Kevin Kane – Software Developer @ North Carolina Museum of Art
• Felicia Ingram – Manager of Interpretation @ North Carolina Museum of Art

This demonstration is for a split-screen touch table quiz game, called “Epic Journeys: Travel and Trade in the 1600s”. This game, allowing multiple players, covers the topic of travel and trade in 17th century Europe and how that influenced art during the time. The educational goal of the gallery is to highlight how global travel and trade impacted artist styles and practices across Europe. This game is intended to highlight the goals of the room in a “edutaining” style.

The game has two sections. The first game is focused on how artists traveled throughout Europe in the 1600’s. We show animations of historically accurate travel routes that were likely taken by three artists featured in our gallery at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Fu

Wednesday, April 5th
11:15am – 12:30pm

Professional Forum

• Cara Egan – Director of Marketing and PR @ Seattle Art Museum
• Corey Jones – Creative Director @ Forum One
• Charlotte Beall

Most often you see museum exhibits that have an online component to complement the already-existing physical exhibit. What if you were to turn the table and start with a virtual exhibit in order to learn what resonates best with your audiences beyond those who can easily visit your institution, and use those lessons to inform your in-person experience? 

In this session, we will share how the Gates Foundation’s Discovery Center embarked on a virtual exhibit journey to change the narrative about COVID-19 from one of trauma to one of resilience and how lessons from the virtual exhibit process and its outcomes informed their eventual launch of the in-person exhibit experience in Seattle, Washington. The exhibit shares first-person stories of

Wednesday, April 5th
11:15am – 12:30pm

Professional Forum

• Brendan Ciecko – Founder @ Cuseum

Proposal

Since March 2020, digital programming has become of critical importance to museums. With this, many new questions have emerged: how many organizations are monetizing digital programs? What types of virtual initiatives are bringing in the most revenue? What is the return on investment for digital programs? To understand how museums are generating revenue through virtual programs and the long-term outlook of digital, this session will share the results of a 2021 study of 500+ cultural professionals.

In 2020 and 2021, we witnessed an explosion of virtual programming in the cultural sector, including many experiments and attempts to monetize virtual programming. As the world returns to “normalcy” in many ways, the continued relev

Wednesday, April 5th
11:15am – 12:15pm

Professional Forum

• Helen Wechsler – Supervisory Grants Management Specialist @ Institute of Museum and Library Services

IMLS Funding Opportunities for Digital Projects

Wednesday, April 5th
11:15am – 12:45pm

Other

• Jaime McCurry
• Jessica Knight – Senior Advisor for Digital Ecosystem, Preservation, and Discovery @ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Casey Neary – Technical Project Coordinator @ PBS
• David Lipsey – Global Chair, Henry Stewart DAM Conferences @ Center for Advanced Studies in Digital Asset Management
• Neal Bilow – CEO @ Terentia

In this professional forum, industry leaders David H. Lipsey and Neal Bilow will lead a panel discussion on DAM for GLAM – featuring innovative practices from practitioners drawn from the National Capital Region.  Neal and David will “set the stage” with insights drawn from their work in the GLAM sector.  Their balanced perspective draws from David’s role in leading innovations for DAM and GLAM, including the benchmark measurement of DAM investment realized through a blend of Return on Investment and Return on Initiative – to help the GLAM sector realize and justify the value of DAM investments.  Neal’s groundbreaking work in DAM and Video for Museums through Terentia offers a way forward for the farther reach of engagement, including the h

Wednesday, April 5th
12:15pm – 1:00pm

Social Event

Pick up your lunch box and meet up with your new friends! Check out the Emerging Professionals Networking & Mentoring table hosted by Linda Colet Senior Outreach Strategist, CollectionSpace (LYRASIS)!

Wednesday, April 5th
1:00pm – 2:30pm

Paper

• David Newbury – Head of Software @ Getty

Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice.

Spoiler: they do.

However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began.  In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge.

These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data:
1. Authority: Providing a consistent w

• Josh Schnapf – Head of Creative Services @ Brandywine Museum of Art

Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code.

You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhap

Wednesday, April 5th
1:00pm – 2:30pm

Paper

• T. Leo Cao – Doctoral Candidate @ University of Texas at Austin

Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study explores the archive of the MuseWeb conference and conducts a content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. It traces how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years, demonstrating a gradual, albeit not definitive, shift away from an institution-oriented understanding to an access-oriented interpretation that increasingly centered on the needs of the public.

• Paul Mulholland – Senior Research Fellow @ The Open University

Many countries observe a participation gap in engagement with cultural heritage: people from lower socio-economic groups, members of ethnic minoritized groups and people with disabilities are less likely to visit museums and other cultural institutions. The UK Warwick Commission proposed that this is not due to cost but rather many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to their potential audiences.
This paper describes an initiative developed and used at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to help challenge the participation gap by enabling a broad range of communities to develop their personal responses to the IMMA collection and exhibitions, as well as contribute to curating the museum experience of other vi

• Radha Nagaraja – VP of Systems Development and Applications @ National September 11 Memorial and Museum

Modern museums rely on several disparate data sources to capture operational information such as visitor counts, revenue, ticket sales, demographics of visitors such as age and home location, times spent in different sections of museums, usage patterns of interactive exhibits, group/school visits, special tours, museum store sales, donations, and memberships. These data are of crucial importance to museums for tracking performance in terms of multiple metrics including financials, visitor engagement, outreach, etc. Analysis of forecast vs. actual numbers also feeds into tuning of predictive models used for planning and strategy development. These analyses play a crucial role in operations planning, future development, advertising, organizin

Wednesday, April 5th
1:00pm – 2:00pm

Professional Forum

• Andrew Lih Wikimedia

Originally submitted by email on Sep 30, 2022, 10:07 PM Eastern US:

Format: Professional Forum or Paper
This session discusses the experiences of three years of the Smithsonian Institution\’s Open Access (OA) program, covering its technical implementation, its role in furthering the Smithsonian American Women\’s History Initiative (AWHI), and its engagement with Wikipedia and its related Wikimedia projects. Since its launch in February 2020, the OA program has experienced positive outcomes and unusual successes that provide unique insights for other GLAM organizations.
Among the topics to be discussed:

An overview of the implementation and impact of the Smithsonian\’s Open Access program.

The benefits of Open Access con

Wednesday, April 5th
2:30pm – 3:30pm

How-to Session

• Martin Franzini – Managing Director @ Forum One

Many cultural institutions understand the value of speaking directly to their audiences. Your museum may even be planning some audience research in the near future. Who you talk to and how you structure your research has a significant impact on the findings you gather and insights you can take action on. What does it mean to conduct this research in an inclusive way?

Using the National Gallery of Art’s experience conducting ongoing audience research, we’ll discuss what inclusive research looks like and give you concrete tips for how you can ethically structure your research to ensure you’re designing impactful experiences for your audiences. Specifically, we’ll cover:

How to think critically when you consider the research participan

Wednesday, April 5th
2:45pm – 3:45pm

How-to Session

• Kevin Kane – Software Developer @ North Carolina Museum of Art
• Felicia Ingram – Manager of Interpretation @ North Carolina Museum of Art

In this how-to session, staff members at the NC Museum of Art will discuss how they created an expandable digital touch labeling platform for on site galleries in one year, opening with 15 exhibit locations. Education staff member, Felicia Ingram, will talk about brainstorming and ideation with a focus on creating buy-in from other departments, including the museum administration, curatorial, exhibits, still imaging, and videography staff members. She will also highlight the content creation process for interpretive text, images, and videos. Kevin Kane, software developer, will speak on designing and implementing content management and front-end software systems, hardware selection, and automation procedures for the gallery floor. We will h

Wednesday, April 5th
2:45pm – 3:45pm

How-to Session

• Megan Dattoria – Project Manager @ Smithsonian Institution

You’ve put energy and resources into digitization and providing online assets to the public, but the public isn’t engaging with them. What now? We all know the infinite potential of the resources we put out- for education, entertainment, creativity, play, and more. Our audiences, however, need to get excited. In this paper, I will present a number of use cases and suggestions for engaging the public with your data. This information comes through the lens of 3-D data via the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO), but the ideas can be adapted to all forms of online resources. I will present 6 general ideas for activating your audiences, as well as lived experiences in applying these concepts with 3-D data: catch them in the museum,

Wednesday, April 5th
4:00pm – 5:30pm

Lightning Talk

• Karen Drost – Manager Museum @ Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
• Maarten Brinkerink – Project manager @ Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

In the new Media Museum, visitors can experience how media have now become part of your everyday life, and how this came about. This huge influence of media on our daily lives is presented in five zones that focus on five universal human needs: Share, Inform, Sell, Tell and Play. The museum visit is a very personal one, reflecting the individual way we all interact with media nowadays. The lively, entertaining presentations in the museum give visitors insight into the workings of media and help us create a more media-literate society.

Abstract:

XR (Extended Reality) Technology has increasingly provided new possibilities for engaging with digital materials, specifically by how we interact or engage with educational content. The Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) Library is one of many educational institutions to provide XR technology as tools for faculty and students, which has also helped foster a strong partnership between the TMU Library and the Aga Khan Museum (AKM) in Toronto, ON Canada. This lightning talk will focus on how the partnership between the TMU Library and the AKM has allowed the introduction of XR technology within the AKM ecosystem, and has led to the integration of XR technology within various exhibits at the museum, including the “Remastered” Ex

Within the galleries we have a number of Breakout spaces to encourage visitor engagement. They were set up to create moments of pause in the visitors’ journey and prompt them to relate what they see to their present life. In response to the key messages of the exhibition, the Breakout Space is designed with different activities and display. One of the Breakout Spaces in the South Galleries of M+ houses a sonic multi-sensory installation, where the exhibition “Individual, Networks, Expressions” is presented.

The project titled ‘Sonic Topologies: Hong Kong’, is an aural cartographic interpretation of Yamazaki Tsuruko’s 1967 painting, Work, displaying at the South Galleries exhibition. In the bamboo-lined room, a table is placed at the cent