Re-Making the Museum Blog, #MCN2013

On Saturday, November 23, Joan Troyano and I presented on ways that museums can re-make their blogs into new forms of digital publications using WordPress and the PressForward plugin.

We had a great panel on digital publications, chaired by Vicki Portway, Head of Web and New Media at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Interestingly, we presented with two groups representing museums/cultural institutions who are building tools for scholars. And we are scholars who help build tools for ourselves that are also relevant to the GLAM community. Susan Edwards and Will Lani of the J. Paul Getty Trust who presented on their efforts building a collaborative digital art history platform, Scholars’Workspace. Amy Parkolap, discussed challenges of creating new forms of exhibition catalogs that is transforming the Art Institute of Chicago through their OSCI program.

Common thread through the first two presentations: scholars are particular and need digital publications to count/be recognized as scholarship. Their scholars also don’t want process docs & forums to be included in those “publications”. Also, we learned that no one has quite figured out a completely digital editorial workflow that captures comments, changes, and versions all in one place. Editing and revising happens in word or Google docs, then is moved into the digital platform for publication. From what I observed, even as this work is digitally-enabled, the final products are still traditional. Learn more about the Scholars’ Workspace on the Getty blog, and the Getty-funded OSCI toolkit, created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art on the OSCI site.

Here are our slides. The session was webcast, so video will soon be available on the MCN site.