Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

I thought I would follow up Ed’s MW2009 preview with an after the fact look at the online remnants of the conference.

Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award.  A huge congratulations from all of us at the IMA for a well-deserved recognition. (Be sure to watch their virtual thank you.)  As if that weren’t enough, I totally missed the news that Brooklyn released an API for their collection.  Even better, someone has already created an iPhone app for them using it.  Open developer access to the IMA’s collection just got a huge bump in priority for me.

We had a great meetup with some of the tech staff of NYPL.  Their group is of a scale and quality that we are quite envious of.  We are greatly looking forward to future collaborations with them. (They’re an ArtBabble partner.)

In the presentation realm the IMA had a cloud computing talk, an evaluation of online video for museums, a solicitation for feedback for the Steve in Action IMLS grant, and an ArtBabble demo.  Other favorites from outside the IMA include alternate reality games, a galaxy of pop stars, and a massive update coming soon to ArtsConnectEd.

Our own Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO gave the opening keynote which you can watch in full on ArtBabble or at the bottom of this post.  It even inspired a great series on transparency for the Museums and the Web conference itself.

For a while now I’ve been interested in how we can do a better job of recording people’s thoughts and impressions about art online. Museums spend a lot of time caring for our collections and making sure that our information about art is “oh so perfect”, but when it comes right down to it, it’s really amazing the types and varieties of new insights you come across when you just ask people what they think!

That’s why I was pretty intrigued by a new tool called Moody that lets you “Mood Tag” your iTunes playlists with how these songs make you feel.

What a great idea! With this tool you simply click a colored square to assign a degree of “mood” to each song as you are listening to them. This morning I was air drumming along to “Lucretia MacEvil” on my way into work… Personally I’d tag that with Intense and Happy! However, chillin’ out with my Sunday morning paper and cup of coffee seems to be more in line with some Stan Getz bossa nova grooves (i.e. Calm, Happy).

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