It’s been several weeks now since the first Museum Mobile Summit was held in London at the Tate Modern.  As we told you in earlier blog posts (here and here), we had a good crowd in London and made some solid progress in our critique of the initial proposed TourML standard.  Notes from that meeting are available on the Museum Mobile Wiki and are interesting to glance through.

Since the meeting, we’ve been collecting thoughts and integrating the suggestions of the group into the formalized language description of TourML.  In preparation for the next Museum Mobile Summit on Wed Oct 26 in Austin, TX, we’ve updated and reworked the TourML specification to address the results of the first meeting.

I’ll say that TourML is feeling much more complete and much more like the real-deal.  As always, we’d love a lot of comment and input from the community, and would love to hear about ways you would like to use mobile tours in your museum.  We’re already seeing a number of museums building and creating mobile tours using the early version of TourML and the vendor community has been very supportive of the effort as well.

For those technical and metadata experts in the crowd,  you can download a new version of the TourML XMLSchema or browse it from the source repository for the TAP project you can also check-out a sample instance of some valid XML for a tour.  In the rest of this blog post, I’ll detail the changes that have been made to the standard, and will enumerate the reasons for those changes and some questions that still remain for discussion at the next summit.

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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

Auto-rotate proved more confusing than anything else

Yes, the image above is supposed to be confusing. It’s one of the lessons learned from collecting feedback and tracking events on the TAP iPod tour for Sacred Spain. Patrons didn’t quite realize that as they interacted with the tour, we were secretly shooting off messages to a server.  We tracked everything from incorrect codes to device rotations.  All in all we collected over a quarter million events.  Almost half of those events were rotations of the application layout.  We heard back from people that they were “catching up with the rotations”.  Based on this we have decided to flat remove any rotation from the next tour. Everything will be in portrait mode with the exception of video playback.

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Filed under: Technology

This blog post began like many of our new media projects at the IMA. I was meeting with my colleagues in the Nugget Factory, kicking around ideas for this blog post. Actually, we were also literally kicking a soccer ball around. We keep one in our area for creative brainstorming and because I love Soccer (did someone say 2010 World Cup – England vs. USA, what?).  All of a sudden, Dan Dark kicked the ball and hit my coffee mug, which of course exploded all over my sweater. True story. And a blog post was born. Spontaneity.

Dan Dark, Senior New Media Producer

It’s the first time I’ve been doused by coffee in a creative meeting, but I’ve also been pranked countless times by my colleagues.

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Filed under: New Media

I’m excited yet sad to say this will be my last IMA Blog post, for the foreseeable future. (If you haven’t noticed, most of us find it hard to stay away.) I’ll be transitioning into the world of motherhood and all things baby. Writing for this blog has been my outlet for creative energies and personal interests. But I didn’t get to share all of the intriguing, amusing, and strange ideas I’ve archived over the years. So I leave you with my blog bucket list (Please read with the voice of Morley Safer from 60 Minutes):

• Throngs of museum security guards donate hair to Locks of Love
• IMA race car art
• Indianapolis Zoo’s Naturally Inspired Paint Out: My favorite elephant
• Banana Republic’s 2008 ad campaign “The Art of Style: Captured Through Photography”
• Blogger Swap 2010 call out
• My senior thesis and why I believed new media was ruining the culture of Bhutan
• Current state of the art market with an insider’s look from Sotheby’s Institute of Art professors
• Corporate art in Indianapolis- What’s really hanging on the walls at Eli Lilly headquarters?
• The Plaster Belly Trend: 3 Dimensional replicas of pregnancy (only $24.99)
• How to get on the roof of the IMA, an in-depth investigation of the IMA Nuggets

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Filed under: Musings