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.

Stops and Assets:

Perhaps the biggest change in the spec as a result of the initial meeting is the addition of Assets along with Stops as the basic elements that hold content in TourML.  Originally, Stops of different types each held links to their own media assets.  An AudioStop contained a link to an audio file, and so on.  By separating Stops and Assets we achieve a number of important features in the spec that we weren’t able to before.

Each Stop may contain links to multiple Assets which may be of mixed type.  This lets us create new types of Stops that potentially mix different kinds of media together. (i.e. a slideshow with an audio narrative running)  Also, assets for a stop may be defined that relate primarily to the design and user experience of the tour and not just the content of that tour.  For example, header images, icons, backgrounds and sound effects can all be defined as Assets and attached to a particular stop.  In order to tell the difference between how each of these assets should be used, we’ve also added some additional attributes to those Assets that describe their use on the stop.  In addition we’ve added the ability to indicate that an asset should be automatically played when a stop is initiated (“autoplay”).  This would be a great way to start an audio file playing as soon as the visitor reaches the stop.  This removes the need for the old GOTO feature of the initial TourML specification, and is a much stronger way of moving forward.

No More StopGroups:

In the original spec, StopGroups were used as containers for stops and were the way we conceived of linking those stops together for the navigation of a tour.  It was pretty clear in the initial Museum Mobile Summit that this concept was confusing to many.  What we came up with instead, is the concept of a StopReference.  Similar to AssetReferences (described above), a Stop may define a number of StopReferences, or pointers to other stops that a user should be able to use for navigation from that Stop.  This allows the tour author to create a narrative path of stops through the tour, and to offer choices to the visitor about what they might want to do next.  Like the AssetReference, StopReferences have some hints included with them as well.  Using the “navhints” attribute on a StopReference allows the author to designate particular stops as the “first”, “last”, “next” and “previous” stops for navigation.  Therefore, if the tour author wanted a “book-like” experience on a tour where each “page” in the book is a Stop… they could use the navhints attribute of a StopReference to indicate what the next and previous pages are.

There is still some thinking to be done regarding the implementation of the “autoplay” and “navhints” attributes.  It would be great to get some feedback from the community on those ideas and what kinds of values we might want to include with those attributes.

Multi-lingual

An obvious area of interest in the first Mobile Summit was the ability to create multi-lingual tours without needing to completely segment and copy the tour for each different language.  To address this we’ve added a number of language specific elements to Assets and Stops which allow the author to create one or more versions of the content in a stop but using different languages.  We think this is a pretty clean and easily understood way of including multi-lingual content in your next mobile tour.  Take a look through the spec and let us know if we’ve missed any elements that should support multiple languages!

Object Collections

One thing that the original TourML specification never addressed was the ability to include links to objet collections in a tour.  I know this is an application that many people in the community are using right now, and it needs to be supported well in any successful specification.

After asking around a bit and doing some research on my own, it seems the that LIDO specification offers a pretty good solution for describing many different kinds of object collections.  Rather than invent something new ourselves that wouldn’t be nearly as good, or have nearly the amount of thought as LIDO, we think it would be a good idea to reference that specification in TourML, and use it as the default object specification for museum tours.

This is a point that we’ll really want to talk over at the next Mobile Summit, and I hope some folks who are interested in object description (and maybe LIDO) will join us and help us to integrate it correctly.

Rights

As we all know too well, securing the appropriate rights and permissions for media we use in the tours can be a bit of a process.  To make sure that none of that information gets lost, we’ve added some elements to the TourML specification that seek to describe rights information and how it is represented in the tour.  We’ve even added the ability to assign a watermark to different assets on the tour.  Like many new things in the spec, AssetRights can be defined once and reused across many different assets in the tour.

Positions

As more and more of us create tours which rely on the location of users to correctly experience the content, it’s becoming more and more critical to correctly indicate the place of a stop during the tour.  We’ve added a Position element to the spec which exists on every Stop.  This position element can be used to record the x, y, and z position of the stop which can then, in turn, be rendered to a map or some other user interface for the visitor.  So whether you want to locate the new gallery on the third floor of the museum, or the latitude and longitude of where that artifact came from, you can now encode that information in TourML.  We’re also experimenting with the GML specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium to see if that will provide a nice way to tie museum experiences into other location based experiences.

Next Steps

While we’ve taken some great strides towards a more usable specification, we’ve still got a long way to go.  We really need the input of museums and vendors who will look at the descriptions and let us know where it works and where it doesn’t for their particular application.  Again, we’re shooting for a very practical 80% rule at this point in the game (see the previous blog posting), and also to be flexible enough to make TourML work for describing your next tour. Want to help?  Here are some things you can do to help move the process along!

1. Read The Spec: It would be great to get a lot of eyes on this version of the specification as it incorporates a lot of the input from the first meeting.  For those that are not as comfortable looking at XML, we will soon update the text description of all the Elements and Fields on the Museum Mobile Wiki
2. Attend the Meeting: While it might not be possible for everyone who’s interested to attend the next meeting, we really hope that lots of you will join us.  The meeting is FREE and takes place during the pre-conference workshops at the MCN Conference in Austin.  Thanks to the Museum Computer Network Board and Program Committee for agreeing to host this meeting for us!
3. Give us Your Two Cents: Don’t be shy!  Speak up and ask your questions, give us your suggestions about how we can improve what we’re doing.  We completely re-wrote our first version based on the input for those who attended the London meeting.  If we need to, we’ll do it again, and again until we get it right.  We need input from museums, software vendors, academics and enthusiasts to attempt to synthesize something that represents the majority of what we need.  We’ll do our best to smooth out the wrinkles and we promise not to bite!
4. Give us Your Examples: I know that many of you (vendors in particular) have your own XMLSchemas that you’re already using to build your tours with.  We’d really like to see examples of those and how they’re constructed.  This might be a shortcut to figuring out hard problems, finding consistency, and ensuring that the features you need make it into the final spec.  Please post any sample files or schemas to the Museum Mobile Wiki, or mail them to me directly and I’ll put them up for you.

Thanks, and see you in Austin!  -Rob

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

1. First-Class Content Management

The task of creating mobile tours for museums is an art form in and of itself.  I’m not sure that we’ve  nailed it yet, and we’re certainly still learning a whole lot from our peers about what works and what doesn’t when engaging audiences on a mobile device.  One thing I know for certain is that creating these experiences is a lot of work, and the results are pieces of content that we would be well advised to preserve and reuse over a long period of time.  Along those lines, it is incredibly important that we treat the mobile content we create as a first-class citizen with respect to the other content our museums care for.  If we take this content seriously, we will necessarily store and manage it professionally and for the long term.  A proper content management system is critical in this effort.

The Homepage of the TAP CMS Showing Two Different Tours

TAP is based on an open-source content management system called Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) that the IMA (and many other museums) have used successfully over the years to drive all sorts of online experiences.  This means that any museum adopting TAP as their mobile platform will immediately benefit from the depth of experience in the Drupal community and from the possibilities for expandability and enhancement that come from an active open-source platform.

Because creating the tour content can be time consuming, we need to be sure that the tools we give content authors are as easy to use as possible.  TAP features a very simple user interface, and takes all of the guess-work out of creating a tour that is properly formatted for the web.

TAP's User Interface for Adding Tour Stops

For those of you who have authored these tours in other platforms, there is nothing worse than pushing content to your device platform only to realize that you missed some small little detail or that tour stops were mis-labeled, mis-linked or otherwise incorrect.  TAP’s CMS offers the ability to preview and view media and connections between tour-stops so that authors can be sure all the content is correct prior to publishing to a device.

TAP's Stop Preview Pop-Up for Video

2. Open-Source, Community Owned, Freely Available

If you’ve been paying attention to the mobile tour space over the past few years, you’ll already know that we are seeing an incredible growth in the number of options available to museums who want to create mobile tour content.  Many of these systems offer very nice interfaces for authors to create engaging content and offer very attractive pricing options and incentives for museums who want to publish tours on those platforms.

I can’t help but think we’ve seen this movie before…

In the past 5-10 years many museums adopted proprietary CMS tools to drive their websites too with varying levels of success.  To me, many of the available options for mobile tours today seem very similar to the kinds of options museums pursued to get collections and content on the web to begin with.

At the end of the day, I think we’ve seen now that only a few of those proprietary solutions have been successful over the long term.  Museums bear a responsibility for the preservation of collections and content as our primary and core business service to the public.  Certainly this is possible within a proprietary context, but I would argue that open-source platforms and solutions put museums in the driver’s seat with regard to their own success and content preservation issues.

We are releasing TAP so that others can take advantage of the work we’ve done in this area, and can extend and enhance it to meet their needs as well.  I think we’re all still learning all the features we want and need as a part of a mobile solution.  Our requirements will continue to evolve over the next several years as mobile computing cements itself into our audience’s expectations.  I’m hoping that those who use TAP will also contribute their changes back so that we can build a suite of tools and help each other succeed in this area.

Google Code Project Hosting for TAP

Source code and documentation for TAP can be downloaded from a Google Code Project (http://code.google.com/p/tap-tours).  Instructions for installing the CMS and configuring the iPod Client can be found there as well.  There’s also an email list that we will monitor to answer questions about using the tool.  While we’ve made the process of authoring tours very simple at this point, it will still take someone familiar with web and mobile development some time to correctly setup and configure the CMS and particularly the Apple Development environment.  We’re happy to help with this as we can and continue to document the process.

3. Open Standards (TourML)

As we think about ways that mobile tours are different than web pages, and more so, how we might encode these tours in a way that’s portable and future proof…  We eventually end up needing some standard description of a Tour, its content and its structure.

We’ve floated a proposed meta-data standard for mobile tours called TourML (pronounced Turmoil)  and have published this for comment on the Museum Mobile Wiki.  We’ve successfully used TourML on a few production tours now, and have shown how it can be used to drive many types of tours.  We’re certainly not saying that TourML is perfect, and would really love to receive input from the community on ways that it could be improved, but it serves as a useful (and functional) straw-man as we try to settle on a good standard.

4. Multi-Platform

5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

In addition to the back-end CMS and authoring infrastructure, we are also releasing an iPod-Touch application client that we’ve used at the IMA for public tours.  The keypad based tour is not the only type of tour museums will want to offer based on the TAP platform, but offers a multipurpose and easy-to-use interface that is a great starting point.

We’re working on several different kinds of clients for future versions of TAP including web-based and outdoor versions of TAP tours.

The future of TAP

For our part, we’re working on a new set of tools for an outdoor tour for our 100 Acres Art and Nature Park which will include an HTML5 web client that visitors will use on their own devices.  We’re also going to add some support for GPS and mapping features so that visitors can locate themselves on trails throughout the park.  As a teaser, here are some mockups of our ideas so far.

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.

Here’s a few more simple stats I pulled.

2,788 times TAP was launched during the Sacred Spain exhibition.

90,984 tour stops visited.

3,051 incorrect codes entered.

Interested in more?  Here’s a dump of the log file.

I invite you to experience the next TAP tour of our upcoming exhibition, Tara Donovan: Untitled.

Explore Tara Donovan: Untitled using the next TAP tour from the IMA

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/03/25/tap-analytics/feed/ 0 Auto-rotate overload Splash screen for TAP Tara Donovan: Untitled http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/01/07/whistle-while-you-work/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/01/07/whistle-while-you-work/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:12:14 +0000 Daniel Incandela http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=10400 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.

1) Phone in the ceiling, ringing incessantly. 2) My door closed and unable open because of a clever door stop. 3) 100′s of water glasses covering my desk. 4) The wheels from my desk chair missing and hidden. 5) Lowering my desk. 6) Co-workers writing down everything I say. 7) And at least ten more. I’ve never snapped.

I’m not trying to tarnish the good reputation of the IMA or new media. And I’m certainly not trying to give the impression that we never work.  We do work, a lot. In fact, it sometimes difficult to find the division between work and our personal lives.  But that’s because we make work a fun and open environment for ideas and expression. That attitude shows in what we produce, and ultimately, we hope our visitors experience the same feelings. It  reminds me of the Jack Torrance quote – “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Our approach to content creation is fueled by a creative environment from within our department and our collaborations with our museum-wide colleagues. We are fortunate to work with every IMA department, producing a variety of digital projects that support their voice. And we are lucky to have the freedom and support to simply be ourselves. Talk about lucky. (and did we really get to produce this video?)

I talk a lot about creating technology with a personality. This can only happen if there is a real personality behind the idea, the development, the implementation of our projects. In many ways, I’m often surprised that we are given the freedom to express ourselves creatively, which often involves a certain amount of humor or cheekiness. It shows tremendous trust by a large organization and I try to never take this leap of faith for granted. Fortunately, the projects usually turn out well.

And really, the reason our projects tend to do well, is because of the content, the voice of the experience – the personality of content.  I look back on all the time, weekend work and late hours, it takes to create some of our work – videos, ArtBabble, this blog, exhibition sites, TAP and so on – and the quality or success always comes down to the people involved. It’s the people we get to work with on a day to day basis (think about all that are represented in this blog), artists (think videos), exhibition teams (think curators, registrars, educators) and so many more talented colleagues in other institutions that provide a unique, honest point of view. This is translated directly into engaging, thought-provoking visitor experiences. Our role in this is to think of creative ways of presenting the stories – hence the soccer ball, coffee on my sweater and moments of spontaneity.

So, I thought I would start 2010, by sharing some of my favorite examples of projects we’ve produced featuring a variety of internal and external personalities. They are the stars.

- One of my favorite blog posts is by Richard McCoy, when he challenged our readers to write wikipedia articles. The result? The participants enjoyed lunch with Maxwell Anderson.  It’s a great example of someone speaking from their own area of expertise, point of view and voice, creatively.

- Still a favorite video of mine – Moving East Gate/West Gate by Helicopter. A massive project and we just showed up with cameras and watched colleagues from security, public affairs, exhibitions, photography, registration, conservation do all the work. It came off beautifully and is one of our most viewed videos on ArtBabble.

- Woody Woodpecker.  Sort of. A bird cam out in 100 Acres? You bet. We’ve been working with our grounds and horticulture team for over a year on this one. But I guess the real stars are the hungry critters.

- And one of the best examples, would be our Director’s Journal video series featuring Maxwell Anderson and interviews with staff from a variety of departments. It brings the world of a museum straight to your video player.  Check out one of my faves below.

So, just a few projects – I could keep going and going and going (ArtBabble is up to 21 partners now!).  But it’s a good indication of what’s around the corner in 2010 and a hint at the types of projects we’ll be producing. You’ve already read about a new IMA website launching in the near future and we have some amazing things planned for 100 Acres.  We’re also developing a brand, spanking new idea called IMA TV. More to follow on that.

In the meantime, keep a close eye on your coffee and feel free to share some of your favorite IMA blog posts, videos and how you get inspired at the office. Or wanna share some good pranks?

• 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

• The girl behind the Upland Brewing Co. Twitterfeed and the cool green key chains she gave away at Bloggers Anonymous
• Micro-donations on the Blog. NPR does it well.
• My life changing experience with Tara Donovan at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati
• Following up with Indianapolis City Ballet: What’s next?
• “Synchronous Object for One Flat Thing, reproduced” Web site: Visualizing choreographic information in new ways
• Why people don’t buy art: A recap of OnTheCusp.org’s summer 2009 survey results
• Wilber takes on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail
• The life of a content migrator and why I love/hate wiki
• The making of an IMA Magazine cover (link coming soon)
• IDADA: The Year Ahead
• Sacred Spain: TAP tour survey trends, How did you rate the TAP experience?
• moosh in indy. -The coolest mommy blogger I know

Thank you for reading!

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

http://www.beardrevue.com

Blog: beard revue

It’s all about the beards, people. This blog has a simple description: ‘Review, commentary & discussion for the beard enthusiast. Up the beard ratio!’

ArtBabble Video: Creation of a Tibetan Mural

IMA Work of Art:

Madre Jerónima de la Fuente from Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World

Tweet:

rjstein: TAP is selling out regularly… Waiting lists and iPods not getting enough charge. Great problem to have! Time to buy more iPods!

To give you an overview of what someone who works in museum marketing does , I thought that I’d outline my typical day. In order to do that, I recorded my activities throughout the past Monday. While some of you were relaxing (or partying) on your Columbus Day off, I was hard at work with my fellow colleagues at the IMA.

Image taken from ugotbling.com

COLUMBUS DAY, OCTOBER 12, 2009*

8:27 Arrive at office. Plug in laptop.

8:35 Sip coffee and respond to emails sent over the weekend.

8:50 Research the 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park for IMA  Magazine article.

9:15 Write interview questions for article to send to Ed Blake, the  landscape architect for 100 Acres.

9:32 Email interview to Ed Blake.

9:37 Discuss signage in Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion with Marketing Manager.

9:42 Register for Next Audiences Summit.

9:52 Review marketing budgets from last 2 years.

10:22 Read NYT’s article about the Louvre’s attempt to ‘Loosen Up.’

10:34 Get distracted by Jamie Oliver article in NYT’s Mag.

10:39 Review Web site content. Put together work plan to present in the afternoon’s Web team meeting.

11:22 Read Geoff Von Burg’s blog entry.

11:31 Email this week’s TV schedule for Sacred Spain commercials to Max, curator Ronda Kasl, and Nugget Factory.

11:38 Check attendance numbers from the weekend.

11:39 Organize opening weekend debrief meeting for Sacred Spain.

11:45 Polish up communication pieces for potential Winter Nights and Summer Nights media sponsorships.

12:18 LUNCH (Lean Cuisine and Fage Yogurt).

12:38 Watch Gentleman Broncos movie trailer.

12:41 Send movie trailer to Dan Dark.

12:44 Change Twitter name from @IndyArtGirl to @MegLiffick.

12:50 COFFEE.

1:00 Catch up on emails from the morning.

1:30 Web Team!

2:50 Review and edit Group Tours corporate mailer for Sacred Spain.

3:15 Respond to email from Contemporary Curator Lisa Freiman about the prestigious national award that her husband received. Congrats, Ed!!!

3:17 Create an initial inventory of marketing materials that can include media/corporate sponsor recognition during 2010.

4:02 Continue to draft 2010 marketing plan for Public Programs.

4:48 Brainstorm about communication ideas for TAP.

5:21 Respond to remaining emails.

5:42 Leave office. Head to gym.

6:13 Check email while running on treadmill at gym. DANGEROUS!

6:16 Attempt to respond to an email while on treadmill at gym. EVEN MORE DANGEROUS!

8:15 Read IBM’s social media guidelines while watching Will Ferrell on Man Vs. Wild.

8:30 Close laptop. No more work for the day.

*Please note that I have left out some details such as phone conversations, specific email correspondences, bathroom breaks, and Facebook and Twitter checks.

Next up (Oct. 28), I’ll tackle the ginormous topic of branding a museum. Stay tuned.

X-Ray of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Way back in September, Charlie initially wrote about TAP, giving our readers an early look at the software.  The application is designed to be extremely flexible, meaning that we will be reusing TAP for future exhibitions both inside the museum and conceivably outside.    Although the IMA attempted a multimedia guide back in 2005 for the American galleries (does anyone remember this?) – this will be the first time we’ve attempted this type of visitor-focused experience for an exhibition. And to think, the entire software development and authoring, content production and implementation was done entirely in-house (check out the video below for a closer look at TAP).

When it comes to new media production, a lot of footage and content goes unused in the final product.  In the case of TAP – we shot and recorded hours and hours of media for the tour.  Once it’s all edited and fine tuned, it boils down to about a 90 minute experience.  What happens to the hours of unused material? This brings me to Easter Eggs.  We wanted to provide some surprises in this tour and make use of content we ordinarily wouldn’t use.  In some ways, Easter Eggs are similar to a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.  They are little surprises or experiences that were created to augment the real or planned experience.  In the technology sense, they are intentional, additional pieces of content that are hidden, hard to find – but the in the end, result in a funny or unexpected discovery.  What will you find?

The hidden location!

You won’t find Alfred Hitchcock on TAP – especially since he once said “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible” - but you will be able to locate secret 3-digit codes that will lead to you new stories.  How do you find these Easter Eggs?  Well, you can surf around HERE or come to exhibition and investigate.  You might find something – are you up for the challenge?

I’m going to let the images do most the talking, but please note that none of the design or content is completely finalized below.

New Media will have a very busy summer, both inside and out.

Regarding the great outdoors, we plan on installing more of the bird cams in 100 Acres.  You may have seen this video, but our hope is to capture more activity of the critters that inhabit the park (hopefully a fox!), as well as the changes that will take place this summer with construction and the beginning of art installations.  We’ll be on hand to try and capture all the activity and of course snag as many artist interviews as possible for ArtBabble.  It’s not a bad time to wander out into nature with a video camera.

100 Acres, you should check it out sometime

Speaking of ArtBabble, we’re working very hard on growing the site and adding content.  From IMA’s perspective, that includes our own agressive approach to producing video content, which will focus on visiting artists, exhibition related pieces and a major documentary (more on that in a future post).  The broader strategy for ArtBabble is to grow engaging and innovative content from other AB partners.  This means more videos and more museums.  I speak for everyone at IMA when I say we’re excited about the new crop of organizations joining ArtBabble.

And if we weren’t busy enough, we’re also developing a handheld tour for the upcoming Sacred Spain exhibition.  This handheld experience will function on an iPod Touch and will be available at the IMA during the exhibition.  Charlie, Ed, Matt and Rob have all been busy developing the framework for the application itself.  For most of the summer, we will be working very closely with curatorial, education and design staff to develop and shape the visitor experience of this handheld tour.  We will focus heavily on building connections to the impressive works of art in the exhibition by using video, audio, high res imagery and a couple of other tricks up our sleeve.  The main goal is not the technology itself (although I think it’s cool), but the content or stories we tell to help our visitors discover connections to the artists or their works.  It’s a process much easier said than done.  But much more on this in another post.  In the meantime, enjoy a current mock-up of part of the interface.

Early interface design

So, what are your summer plans?