Last week, I was lucky enough to spend a few days in London at the 2010 Tate Handheld Conference where a group of really smart folks were gathered to plan and brainstorm ways that museums can take advantage of new advances in mobile technology.

Planning the Future of Museum Mobile Experiences @ Tate

Many of you may know that the IMA has been really active in building mobile content for our main website, our special exhibitions, and 100 Acres.  One of the things I love about working at the IMA is that we always try to give a little love back to our museum buddies when we undertake new projects.  That’s why we’ve made all the software for these mobile experiences available for free to anyone who’d like to play around with them.

While I’m happy that many museums can pick these tools up and use them for their own content, it won’t be the right solution for everyone.  In fact, it only solves just part of the problem.

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Filed under: Technology

So, we’ve been talking about TAP a lot recently and hopefully you’ve been able to get a good sense of our thinking and direction from our previous blog posts (Tap Into It, Tap Analytics, An Early Look at TAP) and from our descriptions on the Museum Mobile Wiki.

We’ve promised this for a while, and today I’m pleased to announce that we have released ALL of the materials and source code we’ve used to make TAP as open-source, and freely available to the museum community.  I think it’s clear to many of us that mobile content and interpretation is an incredible opportunity for cultural organizations and the role we play in engaging and educating audiences about our collections and programming. Our hope is that the contribution of TAP might spur collaboration and contribution from other museums to further develop a tool – owned by the community – that can power and deliver those mobile experiences to the public.

I think it’s important for us to explain some of the foundational ideas behind TAP, and why museums might choose this direction over so many of the other options.  In that light here are:

5 reasons why TAP should be your museum’s next mobile platform

1. First-Class Content Management
2. Open-Source, community owned, freely available
3. Open Standards (TourML)
4. Multi-Platform
5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

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Filed under: New Media, Technology

Ever wondered how web designers make those little icons up in the address bar? Can’t figure out how to make a glossy button, complete with faded out reflective web 2.0 goodness? Or how about how to create those little badges and buttons you see gracing the sidebars and footers of your favorite blogs? I’m here to help.

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Filed under: Design, Technology

Student using Global Origins

If you find yourself wandering through the Asian Art Galleries here at the IMA, take a quiet moment to follow the sounds of the Qin music. You will be led to a giant LCD display with a touch panel overlay and a hair dryer-esque sound dome above your head. Global Origins represents one of the first applications developed in-house by the IMA and marks a pivotal point in how the museum approaches technology.

I’ll step back a moment now and introduce myself. My name is Charlie Moad and I am an Applications Developer (a.k.a software developer) here at the museum. Now before you conjure up thoughts of suspenders and lisps, let me assure you I am quite the contrary. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons and I was only addicted to World of Warcraft for 6 months! I started at the museum 2 years ago and we have since hired another software developer and a graphics designer. Together we form what we call, the Applications Team. Traditionally museums outsource their technology which can be very expensive and time consuming. Each project requires bringing a new consultant up to speed on the basic operations of the institution. We allow the museum to retain knowledge and be more flexible when approaching technology.

Now back to Global Origins (GO). GO is an add-on to the NASA developed 3D world viewer, World Wind. Visitors are presented with a spinning globe and a series of stamps with works of art on them. Touching a stamp spins and zooms the globe to the respective origin and provides more information on the work and the culture. The application is meant to provide users with a visual orientation of where some of these works originated.

Global Origins using World Wind by NASA

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Filed under: Art, Technology