Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Art Babble is one of the most interesting, informative and stylish art websites I’ve ever seen and it’s no surprise that it won the MW2010 Best Overall Museum Web Site award at the Museums and the Web Conference in April.

ArtBabble is a project developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art to share and showcase their high-quality videos about art and artists. They have since been joined by an impressive list of museum partners that includes the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the New York Public Library (and several others.)

The videos are beautifully presented, with all the usual features of a video site — commenting, sharing, downloading and embedding. Each video is enhanced with notes providing images and information, synchronized to specific points in the video. These are shown to the right of the video, and it’s easy to explore or ignore these while watching the video.

There’s quite a variety of videos here both in terms of style and subject matter. Two of my favorites are an interview with Beverly-born artist Wil Barnet from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a lecture on Hello Kitty by New York Times business reporter Ken Belson, who wrote the book “”Hello Kitty; The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon.” I’ve embedded the Wil Barnet video below, but you’re really better off following the link and watching it on the Art Babble site to get the full effect.

This site is a great resources for students, teachers, and anyone with an interest in art.

Meet Wil Barnet

View on Art Babble

[This is a page of links for a 30 minute session on Data that I'm doing tomorrow.]

Data Trends: Structured, Visual, Interactive

• Wolfram Alpha — Precise, high-quality answers for structured data. “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”
• Baby Name Voyager — Visual, interactive exploration of a huge data set
• How Different Groups Spend Their Day — New York Times interactive, visual presentation of a more complex data set.
• Inaugural Words — New York Times mixes word clouds with a simple database of the Presidents
• Who Went Where [screenshot] — An example of Linked Data that lets you search for a college or university, and find recent New York Times articles about alumni [Who Went Where][Build Your Own NYT Linked Data Application]

Data and Tools

• Open : All the Code that’s Fit to Print — The New York Times provides open APIs to lots of data and shares code and other tools for working with data
• Guardian Open Platform — UK newspaper provides a large collection of curated data and tools to work with them
• Free book usage data from the University of Huddersfield — Dave Pattern’s announcement about making the library’s circulation data available under an Open Data Commons license. If more libraries did this, it could be an amazing resource for recommender systems and other analysis

Your Own Statistics

• Flickr Stats — If you have a Flickr Pro account and turn on statistics recording, you can explore your Flickr Stats in many ways.
• Boatwright Library at a Glance — Visual presentation of statistics
• Indianapolis Museum of Art — Visual data widgets provide access to a wide variety of counts and statistics, with the ability to drill down and get more detail, select by department, follow by feed and much more. This site is built on Drupal and has been released as the open source museum-dashboard
• Google Spreadsheet Gadgets — Google makes it easy to create data gadgets in different formats, and offers more powerful tools through Google Code

Sample Motion Chart from Google Spreadsheets

[This is a page of links and a few notes for a 30 minute session on Going Mobile that I'm doing in a few days.]

More People Doing More Things with More Devices

• Smartphones, feature phones
• Devices that aren’t phones (iPod Touch)
• What about netbooks, iPad, eBook readers, gaming devices?
• In 2009, data traffic surpassed than voice traffic

Texting

• “People today text 2.5 times more than make/receive calls.”
• Texting is the most used application across all types of cellphones
• Google SMS — Ready reference for simple, structured queries
• ChaCha — Free text reference service with paid guides

Smartphones

Prevalence
Smartphones to Overtake Feature Phones in U.S. by 2011 — Graph showing the rise in smartphone use

• Challenges: Small screen size, small keyboard (often virtual), not usually hooked up to peripherals
• Advantages: Available, camera, accelerometer, compass, sensors, Location (GPS, WiFi, cell towers)

Apps or Mobile Websites

Apps:

• Programs to install and run on device
• Platform specific and distributed by app marketplace (free or $$$)
• More costly to create and maintain
• Use all of the device’s hardware and configurations

Mobile Website:

• Use the browser
• Less expensive to create and maintain
• Interact less with the device

Connecting

• Google Search — Search by keyboard or voice
• Google Gesture Search — Search the phone by writing with your finger
• Google Goggles — Search by image for works of art, book covers, landmarks; scan, OCR and translate snippets of text
• QR Barcodes — Uses camera’s phone to scan 2D barcode to connect with mobile users. QR codes can carry formatted information for contacts and calendar listings, and can be read from paper or screen

Geo-Awareness and Augmented Reality

• Yelp Mobile — Find nearby restaurants, libraries, etc., and read reviews from other users
• WolfWalk — NCSU’s mobile campus tour (optionally) knows where you are, shows you nearby points of interest and provides information, historical photographs, etc.
• Layar Augmented Reality Browser — Look through the camera, see information superimposed on the view
• Museum of London’s StreetMuseum app — Beautiful augmented reality app…look through your phone’s camera, and see a historic photo from “then” superimposed over the reality of “now.”

Resources

• Nielsen Media: Online + Mobile — Good source of statistics and trend reports
• Pew Internet and American Life — Studies and reports on the way we use technology
• Mobile Web Designs Show Future Trends — A showcase of some beautiful mobile website designs
• Mobile Mammoth — Mobile News and Reviews

“When I was a student at MIT, we all shared a computer that took up half a building and cost tens of millions of dollars. The computer in my cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful.” (Ray Kurzweil)

This is a collection of the links related to the brief presentation on History Trends that I am doing at the Massachusetts Library Association Conference tomorrow.

Facial Recognition

Picasa and other image management systems have facial recognition that can help identify and tag people in photographs. Systems need to be taught who people are, but the software can be very useful with historic images as well.

• Screenshot — Picasa screenshot showing a gallery of faces waiting to be identified
• Update To Google Picasa 3.6 With Face Recognition — From the MakeUseOf website

Mass. Memories Road Show

Mass Memories Road Show — Official site where you can search and browse images “The Mass. Memories Road Show is an initiative of the Massachusetts Studies Project at UMass Boston, co-sponsored by Mass Humanities and the Joseph P. Healey Library.”

Mass. Memories Road Show Presentation — Great presentation by Heather Cole, Assistant Director of the Mass. Memories Road Show

“Wakefield Then and Now” Photo Contest

“Wakefield Then & Now” Photo Contest — Contest announcement

“Wakefield Then & Now” Photo Contest Winners — Announcement of the winning photographs

“Wakefield Then & Now” — Flickr set

Corner of Water Street and Wakefield Avenue — Record for a then & now set in the library catalog

Names

Eastman Building, 1888 — Photograph of the Eastman Building in Melrose, Massachusetts, on Flickr

Jenny Greenwood — Photograph of the grave of Jenny Greenwood, 1851-1862, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Reading, Massachusetts, on Flickr

World War I Monument — Transcription of names and dates from monument in Hamilton, Massachusetts

Places

Boulevard Diner — Worcester Lunch Car Company #730, 1936, on Flickr

Revolution of 1689 — Photograph of Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Marker on Flickr

The Historical Marker Database — Crowdsourced database of historical markers around the world with transcribed text, photographs, longitude and latitude, categories and more

Dr. P.H. Peach, Dentist — Screenshot of old advertisement from a book in the Internet Archive on Flickr

Worcester History Images from the Internet Archive — Blog post

$5K homes in Mt. Pleasant, 1905 — From a set of historic images of Washington, DC by rockcreek on Flickr

Solving Mysteries

Hugh Butterworth — Flickr member phototrack123 and his wife buy old portrait photographs, identify the subjects and research the family with a goal of sending the photograph to descendents

Harry Montague as Captain Molyneux in “The Shaugraun” 1875 — Read the comments to see a group working together to identify the subject of this photograph

Unclaimed Persons — Volunteer genealogists work together to identify possible relatives for cases where the identity of the deceased is known but the next of kin is unknown

Mobile

MobileGenealogy.com — “Dedicated to news, reviews and information about mobile devices and genealogy software”

QR codes in use at the Powerhouse Museum — Linking exhibits to more information

Encyclopedia Virginia — Using Layar with the Encyclopedia’s geolocated content out in the real world

Wikitude — Another augmented reality browser that overlays information and images on your view of the world

An easy way to connect with your mobile users is to add a QR barcode with your contact information to your library website. Users can scan the barcode right from the screen to add your library to their contacts. This is faster than adding the library information by keying it into the phone’s contacts program, and the information added by scanning the barcode is likely to be more accurate and more complete than what would have been keyed in by hand (or thumb?) on a tiny keyboard.
.
QR barcodes are two-dimensional, square barcodes that can hold much more information than the conventional barcodes our circulation systems use on books and library cards. These codes can be read by cameraphones that have built-in support for QR or using an barcode app. There are lots of different apps out for different makes and models of smartphone — the easiest way to find one is probably to just check your phone’s app marketplace or look in the official or unofficial online support forums for your phone.

But you don’t need to have a phone capable of reading QR barcodes in order to create your own. There are sites that can generate a QR barcode from a form. I used QR Code Generator from the ZXing Project to make the contact code in the sidebar of this blog.

The first step is to choose a Contents type — Contact, calendar event, SMS, e-mail, etc. The content type is part of the infomation in the barcode, and it tells the smartphone what to do with the information. If I scan something with the content type Contact, for example. my options are the add a new contact, to open the address in a map, call the phone number, or send a message to the e-mail address. You can try scanning the library QR barcode on the left to test this on your own phone.

If you don’t have a phone to use to test QR barcodes, the ZVing Decoder Online can show you the contents of a QR code. You just enter the URL to the barcode file or upload the file itself, and the decoder shows you what it says. Here’s the decoder’s report on the contact barcode in the sidebar of this blog: Contact: Elizabeth Thomsen

You can use QR barcodes for all sorts of things, on and off your website. The one to the right is in the calendar format, and scanning it makes it easy for a mobile user to add a library event directly to their phone’s calendar program. QR barcodes are especially useful when you want to direct users to a service that’s specifically aimed at mobile devices users, like a reference by texting service, or the mobile version of your library’s catalog or databases.

There are lots of other creative ways to use QR barcodes, but the easiest and possibly the most useful is the library contact information, which makes it easy for your library users to get your information into their phones so they will always be able to find you when they need you!

Links

• ZXing QR Code Generator — A handy form for creating several types of QR barcode
• ZXing Decoder Online — This tool reveals the contents of any QR barcode

The C-SPAN Video Library launched last week, opening up access to an amazing reference resource for students, journalists and anyone interested in history and government. This includes over 160,000 hours of political and public affairs events covered by the C‑SPAN Networks since 1987, free, well-organized, searchable, and easy to share. For example, embedded below is the first day of the Scalia Confirmation Hearing, in which Justice Scalia responded to questions about his views on federal-state relationships, the Constitution, death penalty, abortion, national security versus individual rights and more.

Read the rest of this entry »