“May you live in interesting times” goes the saying, reported by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen to be a ‘Chinese curse’ he heard while serving as the British Ambassador to China 1936-37. Of course there never has been such a saying in China, but the double entendre, stemming from the last era in which fascism and xenophobia swept the globe, seems particularly apt to describe MuseWeb’s ambivalent relationship to MW20 Online and the circumstances that led to our producing our first online conference March 31-April 4, 2020. 

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus, as it was then known, in Wuhan caught our attention immediately. In 2016, MW ran a workshop on the beautiful historic campus of Wuhan University. We were concerned for our friends and colleagues in the city and throughout China, and watched with alarm as the virus swept into South Korea and throughout Asia, which has graciously hosted so many MW events. 

As the COVID-19 spread and conferences around the world were cancelled, MuseWeb monitored the advice of the CDC and WHO, and began considering a number of possible scenarios that could impact our planned meeting in Los Angeles. The health and safety of our community of course came first, but there were also many depending on us to run the conference, from the hotel and contractors who had invested time and resources in organizing the event with us, to the exhibitors and attendees who had booked flights, paid deposits, and made extensive plans around their time in LA. Could we accommodate both those who still wanted to meet in person, and those who could not?

To Be Online or Not To Be

So we tackled the question of how to provide remote access to the conference: not for the first time–it has probably come up every year since the conference started as “Museums and the Web” in 1997! Having so many talented technologists in our community, we are very aware of the challenges of providing inclusive online access to in-person meetings. As the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Technology Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center wrote in their tips on accommodating mixed local/remote participants in the same room: “The first rule is: don’t do this type of meeting if you can avoid it. It’s hard. Like–really hard.” 

When the pandemic was declared by the WHO on March 11 and Governor Newcom of California banned meetings of 250 people or more, it was clear that no in-person conference could happen in Los Angeles. In a sense, this made things easier because we were no longer trying to combine in-person and online audiences. We tapped our community’s incredible skills and generous advice, and by March 19, were able to announce that the MW20 Conference would happen entirely online. It was a scramble to figure out all the moving parts of going virtual by March 31, while also honoring the significant investment that everyone from presenters to exhibitors and sponsors had made in creating a quality conference experience. 

The technology hurdles were not the most daunting; rather, it was time zones! For clarity of communications–and to prevent our heads exploding–we had to pick just one to hold the conference in. We mapped out the time zones of all the registered participants and found that PDT was at the center, roughly equidistant between Europe and Australasia. This is not surprising, as our last conference in Los Angeles in 2016 had drawn our largest audience ever, being a sort of global epicenter. And there was a simplicity in sticking with the published program times to the greatest extent possible, though we did some rescheduling of sessions to accommodate presenters’ time zones, as well as the inevitable last-minute changes that were a result of the exploding pandemic and its impact on participants. Thanks to their flexibility and generosity of spirit, over two-thirds of the originally scheduled presentations went ahead in the online version of the MW20 Conference. 

If we had any doubts before, it became abundantly clear as we wrestled with how to make the program accessible online that the primary benefit of in-person conferences is that all the participants are in the same place at the same time. As a result, even if some are jetlagged, they can not only attend the same sessions but also run into each other and enjoy what our survey participants have said is the most important part of an MW conference, after the program: networking. 

Serendipity and Second Life

We knew that the serendipity of the hallway encounters and late night drinks that are the heart of our community’s networking would be impossible to replicate online. But the closing plenary speakers, Alice Krueger from Virtual Ability, Inc. and Draxtor, gave us the idea to use a virtual world as a digital meeting place for more casual mingling. The Virtual Ability group and Linden Lab, the team that runs Second Life, the oldest and most populous of the virtual worlds, built and donated to the conference MuseWeb Island a beautiful meeting venue featuring its own auditorium and seaside views for the duration of the conference. Virtual Ability even offered free orientation sessions in the run-up to and during the conference, as well as tours and support in creating Second Life accounts and avatars. (Draxtor and Strawberry Linden collaborated to make sure that MW co-chair, Nancy Proctor, was well-represented by her avatar as well, and in record time!) And opening plenary speaker, Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, installed an exhibition of her artwork in the MW20 Auditorium, literally overnight. The artist has continued to update the exhibition since the conference, and it remains freely available for a bit longer for anyone who wants to see it here.

Like the originally-planned closing plenary, the Second Life sessions–pre-conference tours, “Linden Lunches,” and “Birds of a Feather” breakfast on the final day–were experiments in accessibility in all senses of the term, so were offered at no charge to anyone who wanted to join those sessions. Again, our friends at Virtual Ability were invaluable in ensuring that there was support for people of differing needs and preferences for participating in the Second Life sessions: their mission is to enable people with a wide range of disabilities to thrive in online virtual worlds. It was illuminating to see what the affordances and the limits were on digital accessibility in a VR space, and also discover that like any place, Second Life has its own culture and aesthetic, which some found fascinating, and others very off-putting. 

As Lauren Jensen pointed out, we should have underscored to participants that these open sessions were analogous to the parts of the in-person conference that happen in the hotel’s public spaces: anyone can turn up, and everyone needed to know what to do about unwanted communications in the virtual world as they would in the physical one. For about 24% of those who responded to our post-conference evaluation survey, the virtual world technology alone was “a bridge too far.” Nonetheless, about 130 or more than a third of those registered to attend MW20 online visited MuseWeb Island in Second Life during the conference. 

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams was the primary platform for the conference, and the one used for all of the presentation sessions except the closing plenary. It allowed us to host up to 250 participants in each session with robust video-conferencing features, run multiple parallel sessions from the same account, and record and caption all of the session recordings. As “Zoom-bombing” and data breaches led the Guardian to publish an article calling Zoom “malware” the week of MW20, we were grateful to be using a platform that afforded good security and, to our knowledge, never came under attack during the week. Thanks to Catherine Devine, long-time MW Program Committee Member and Business Strategy Leader for Libraries & Museums at Microsoft, our Global Sponsor, and an amazing group of tech support volunteers, we were able to provide free training in Teams for participants in the week running up to the conference, and help in using Teams for anyone who asked for it during the conference. Of course, some found it hard to fit that training in before the conference, and many skipped it entirely. Interestingly, a similar percentage–24%–of those who responded to our survey had trouble using Teams, as reported trouble with Second Life, but the opinions on Second Life were much stronger among those who answered our survey, both for and against. 

The main issues with Teams were getting the software installed and launching correctly (some experienced conflicts with existing Microsoft licenses on their computers), and the chat panel disappeared for some users some of the time. We did notice a decrease in sharing of conference content and experiences through Twitter compared to previous years and think this may have been a result of people commenting in the Teams chat windows instead, or simply the inability to focus on multiple screens while attempting to actually learn something. 

Live captioning is a new Teams feature, not yet installed with all licenses and available only in the app, but it was a real boon to accessibility when available. Participants also appreciated that it was easier to hear and to control the volume of presentations watching online than in person, and one commented, “…oddly enough, I had more conversations and contacts with people that I admire so much than in the last face-to-face event.”

Inevitably, there were inexplicable glitches and user errors, including from the organizers’ side. Often this had to do with the network traffic in the administrator’s and/or the presenters’ locations, and was beyond our control as the internet got busier and busier throughout the week of the conference. We had up to three administrators running the Teams sessions behind the scenes simultaneously. We wished we had a fourth person and computer so there was always an “uber-admin” to take over in case one of the administrators had technical issues. (And we’re available to give more detail on set-up of multiple and parallel Teams conference sessions; just email us here.) Ciprian Melian and Loic Thirion-Lopez from Livdeo, pulled out their superhero capes to help out as admins when we needed extra hands, as well as provide tech support to attendees, alongside Richard Urban, Paige Dansinger, Kate Stevenson, Kate Wilcox, Colleen Thomas, and Dr Mark Osterman. As in our in-person conferences, we could not have run MW20 Online without a large team of talented and expert volunteers, and those who responded to the post-conference survey heaped thanks and praise on the work all the conference volunteers did. Read more about the conference volunteers here. 

Recordings

One of the best outcomes of MW20 Online is that we now have video recordings of most of the presentations, and MuseWeb members can access them at any time. We have recorded selected sessions in the past, but the cost and technical challenges of videoing and editing all the in-person presentations, not to mention live streaming them, has prohibited our providing comprehensive documentation of MW’s many strands and the full range of presentation types. Thanks to Microsoft Teams, we were not only able to record but also caption the videos of all the sessions as well. MuseWeb Members can log in to access the recordings of the MW20 Online conference here. 

MW21 Online?

80% of those who responded to our MW20 survey said they want to attend future conferences online, so we are working towards offering virtual as well as in-person ways to participate in our Washington, DC, meeting, April 5-9, 2021. In addition to the quick pivot to make the conference accessible online, MW20 participants said they appreciated that we were trying something new, and that the quality and depth of content was not lost in the online format. Many said they could not have attended the conference in LA regardless, so putting it online made it accessible to them. Participants also noted that MW20 Online brought our community together, at a time when the world had just gone into lock-down, and so many plans had been disrupted. Even without the hallway encounters and drinks to provide the ‘serendipitous sauce’ that makes our in-person gatherings so special, MW20 Online was “a lighthouse for boats on troubled waters,” according to one participant. Another commented, “it meant a lot, to many people, to be able to connect as peers, colleagues, and friends, and be able to concentrate our attention back towards the topics we care so much about.”

We received several good suggestions for how to improve the online experience in future: 

• Offer breakout rooms for small group and one-on-one chats with colleagues, and follow-up with presenters;
• Try the World Cafe or Open Space approach to the online format;
• Consider Mozilla Hubs and Altspace VR as platforms;
• Develop the Birds of a Feather format further;
• Offer more evening sessions so people can attend after their work days;
• Facilitate local and regional meetings, and/or offer presentations in different time zones.

It won’t come as a surprise to the MW community to learn that running a successful online conference takes no less work than running an in-person one. We are now tackling the question of how to scale up to offer both online and in-person ways of participating in future MW meetings. There is no such thing as “one size fits all” when it comes to accessibility, so adding platforms for our conferences is an important step in growing our community and serving it more inclusively, not to mention helping steward the environment more responsibly. It will not be simple to make MW conferences cross-platform, but with the acceleration of online activity today, we know the technology and methods are sure to develop by leaps and bounds, and we are fortunate to be able to learn from all the leading technologists and innovators in our community. We live in interesting times indeed! Stay tuned as we continue to work with our partners on our next MW Asia conference as well as MW21, and please let us know your recommendations, further comments and ideas as you see best practices for online and mixed-reality meetings emerge.

And thank you again: for all you do for the MW community, your organizations’ communities, and the field at large.

To read what others have written about MW20 Online, check out the links below (and please let us know if we are missing any!):

• Lauren Jensen: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/museum-industrys-first-virtual-conference-what-went-well-jensen/
• Rachel Thornton: https://rachelthorntonjournal.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/week-29-making-day-keynote-and-museums-and-the-web/
• Catherine Devine: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-ballroom-chat-room-my-first-virtual-conference-catherine-devine/
• Simon Adlam: https://www.thebigidea.nz/stories/making-the-most-of-a-crisis
• Robin Owen White: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-first-virtual-conference-mw2020-robin-white-owen/
• Nettrice Gaskins: https://medium.com/@nettricegaskins/making-art-in-vr-while-trying-to-survive-a-pandemic-2e72252a0734

MW20 was able to move from a physical event in Los Angeles to a fully online conference in record time thanks to the collaboration and support of literally hundreds of colleagues.

We are especially grateful to Catherine Devine and Microsoft for helping make this year possible technically, and for being our Global Sponsor as well as recruiting Gabriel Loshbaugh and Angelo Krakoff of SoftwareOne to provide Microsoft Teams orientations to the speakers and attendees.

We also thank the conference sponsors who stuck with us and even signed up to support the conference after we moved to the online format; they are critical not only to making the conference happen, but also to keeping the cost to non-profit participants to a minimum:

• MW20 Gold Sponsors Google Arts & Culture and Piction;
• Silver Sponsor: Brightcove, who also provided online video hosting and delivery for the recorded sessions of MW20; and,
• Bronze Sponsors: Axiell, Livdeo, Lucidea, Forum One, and CDW.

Individual anonymous donors have also contributed to MW20, enabling us to give scholarships to everyone who needed one to attend MW20 because they had lost their livelihoods due to the coronavirus crisis, helping our community remain whole in these distressed times.

We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work in online conferencing in a very short time: for one, the challenge of working across time zones! We are grateful to everyone who made a special effort to participate at what were often unfriendly hours for them at home.

Conference partners Virtual Ability and Linden Lab enabled the new online format to offer the kind of social experience, including networking and serendipitous encounters and conversations, that we would otherwise have missed because we could no longer run into each other in the hallways and over drinks and meals at the conference hotel. An enormous team of volunteers came together to build MuseWeb Island in Second Life, train our community in using it, and run virtual events there throughout the conference; we are delighted to count them as part of the MuseWeb family now too! In particular, we’d like to thank:

From Virtual Ability:

• Gentle Heron, President of Virtual Ability and our Second Life guru who made it all happen;
• Draxtor, who introduced us to Gentle and lit a fire under MW20’s virtual world concept;
• Eme Capalini, head builder and landscaper of MuseWeb Island;
• Etheria Parrott, mesh creator and collaborator on the GLAMi Award trophy;
• Sitearm Madonna, MuseWeb Project manager and photographer;
• Linn Darkwatch, head of greeter team that provided free orientation and training in Second Life to MuseWeb members;
• Suln Mahogany,
• Leandra Kohnke, also moderator of the closing Plenary Session;
• Vulcan Viper,
• Mook Wheeler,
• Orange Planer,
• Slatan Dryke,
• Ajay McDowwll,
• iSkye Silverweb, media set-up;
• Treasure Ballinger, art gallery hostess;
• Scottius Polke, art gallery host; and,
• CeleneHighwater, Radegast viewer trainer.

From Linden Lab:

• Ebbe Linden, CEO;
• Brett Linden,
• Patch Linden,
• Strawberry Linden,
• Grumpity Linden,
• Oz Linden,
• Kiera Linden, and
• Squeaky Mole, who did the initial build of the auditorium structure.

We are also grateful to our opening plenary speaker Nettrice Gaskins & Cory Doctorow, as well as our closing plenary speakers, Bernhard Drax, draxtor™, Alice Krueger, Virtual Ability, Inc., Anrick Bregman, Studio ANRK, Nonny de la Peña, Emblematic Group, and moderator, Natalie Gordon, from Virtual Ability.

The conference’s closing feedback session and launch of MW21 was led by Shanita Brackett, who will be our guest co-chair for next year’s conference in Washington, DC. We thank her for keeping us looking to the future, even as we were scrambling to pivot in the present, and also the invited panelists she convened: Andrea Monteil de Shuman, James Leventhal, Cheryl Fogle-Hatch, and Omar Eaton-Martinez from the Association of African American Museums.

More than 50 people formed the MW Program and GLAMi Awards Committees: we thank them all for giving so generously of their time and expertise to select the incredible MW20 program  – two thirds of which was able to be presented in the new online format by equally generous presenters. A special shout-out to the MW20 GLAMi chairs: Heather Hart, Douglas Hegley, and especially Ariel Schwartz who did an extraordinary job of creating our first online GLAMi awards ceremony in record time!

Similarly, Kellian Adams of Green Door Labs turned on a dime to create a series of compelling sessions in the MW20 program to feature some of the artists and ideas that she had curated for the MWX exhibition in Los Angeles. We are also grateful to her for having brought fresh energy and ideas to MuseWeb as our MW20 co-chair.

Another special part of the MW20 program was provided by our partners, Access Smithsonian and IHCD, with whom we have been collaborating on the Inclusive Digital Interactives book to be launched later this spring. Special thanks to Beth Ziebarth, Jan Majewski, Robin Marquis –MuseWeb’s accessibility coordinator and project manager for this book.

Heather Shelton, MuseWeb’s digital curator and online manager, once again provided invaluable oversight for all of MW20’s operations from start to finish, including recruiting and collaborating with our excellent team of social media volunteers: Marta Maria Peinador, Alison Heney, and James Leventhal.

We also thank our assistant editor for the MW20 book, Allison Wall, as well as designer Saul Miller, and all the authors who contributed an excellent array of papers for the selected proceedings this year.

More than 40 people volunteered to help run MW20 in LA, and over 100 people offered to help as we turned to the new online format. We couldn’t have done it without you! In particular, we thank our help desk volunteers:

• Ciprian Melian and Loic Thirion Lopez from Livdeo
• Richard Urban
• Paige Dansinger
• Kate Stevenson
• Kate Wilcox
• Colleen Thomas
• Dr Mark Osterman
• And a special shout-out to Paul Rowe of Vernon Systems.

There are countless more who stepped up in timely ways, despite all the demands on you professionally and personally at the moment: what may seem a tiny gesture or effort on your part has had an enormous butterfly effect on this meeting, and has provided an incredible morale boost to the MuseWeb partners and our families: Rich Cherry and Hiroko, Erika, and Noha Kusano, and Titus, “Taco”, Timon, and Lula Bicknell as well as QingQing Liu who provides critical behind-the-scenes support on the home and conference front as our China coordinator.

Winners of the 2018 GLAMi Awards Announced in Vancouver, B.C.

Download the Press Release (PDF)

More than 550 leaders from museums, libraries, archives and galleries around the world gathered at the MW18 Conference in Vancouver on Friday, April 20 to recognize the year’s best innovations in the sector at the annual GLAMi awards. Winners were selected by an international committee of judges, chaired by Steven Beasley, Director of Digital Media at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and Jane Alexander, Chief Information/Digital Officer at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Since the dawn of the Internet age, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (referred to as GLAMi institutions) have been pushing the envelope on what technology can do to preserve, display, and showcase cultural treasures. MW’s annual conferences have been a platform for showcasing and disseminating this important work since 1997. Formerly the “Best of the Web” Awards, the GLAMies were relaunched at MW’s 20th conference in LA last year to showcase the best work the cultural sector has done to engage, inform and excite people both on the Web and across myriad emerging and ever-changing platforms. Whether it’s social media, virtual reality, augmented reality, audio and video tours, apps, or anything in between, the GLAMi Awards honor the projects and people that allow us to visit far-away places, explore ancient artifacts, or connect with the natural world, using amazing, often cutting-edge technologies and practices.

MW’s 22nd conference wrapped up in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Saturday, April 21, with attendees from more than 25 countries and 300+ worldwide galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Judges were assigned to 1-2 categories and read all submissions in those categories. No judge was assigned to a category in which their museum entered a submission. The annual North American gathering of the best and the brightest in the cultural and tech sectors is an opportunity for museum professionals, product developers, researchers and students to talk innovation as it relates to the stewards of the world’s history and heritage. Next year’s conference and GLAMi awards will be hosted in Boston April 2-6, 2019.

This year’s GLAMi Award winners include the following. Complete descriptions of the winning projects are listed at https://mw18.mwconf.org/glami-finalists/

2018 GLAMi Co-chairs Jane Alexander and Steven Beasley congratulate John Stack of the Science Museum, London.

Education category: WikiWelcome, Stockholmskällan and Wikimedia Sverige

Exhibition and Collection Extension (Non-Traditional) category: Send Me SFMOMA, SFMOMA

Exhibition and Collection Extension (Traditional Website) category: Rethinking Guernica, Museo Reina Sofia

Exhibition Media or Experience (Linear Media) category: Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros videos, J. Paul Getty Museum

Exhibition Media or Experience (In-gallery Interactive) category: Gaze Tracker, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Groundbreaking category: TIE! ARTLENS Gallery, The Cleveland Museum of Art and Contactless Donations Experience, National Museums Scotland

Marketing and Promotion category: Science Museum Group Websites Relaunch, Science Museum, London; National Railway Museum, York, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford; Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester; Locomotion, Shildon

Museum-wide Guide or Program category: Headhunt! National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia

Rich and I are delighted to announce that David Alexander and Lucy Bell from the Royal BC Museum will be Guest Co-chairs of the 22^nd North American MW Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia 18-21 April, 2018. David is Head of Archives, Access and Digital at the Museum, and Lucy is Head of the Museum’s First Nations and Repatriation Department. Find out more about David and Lucy, and their contributions to the MW18 program! With their broad experience and multi-disciplinary expertise, David and Lucy are ideally positioned to help us ensure that participants at MW18 connect with peers in multiple areas to raise the standards and impact of cultural practice globally. Please join us in welcoming David, Lucy, and the entire Vancouver cultural community to MW18!

Procrastinator’s salvation! Join the MW18 proposal-writing workshop at 5pm EDT on Thursday, September 28 via Facebook Live or in person at the historic Peale Center to polish or – let’s face it – write your #MW18 proposal. Get help connecting to possible co-presenters and past research on similar topics. Think through how to make your paper and presentation accessible. Most importantly, get yourself to Vancouver April 18-21, 2018!

RSVP (tours of the Peale start at 4pm)

Can’t make it then? A video archive of the session will be available after the event. Also feel free to contact MW with questions about your proposal.

Join MW’s Nancy Proctor and guest co-chair Sina Bahram for a live Twitter chat on Wednesday, September 20 at 12:00 noon (EDT).

Nancy and Sina will help you formulate or refine your MW proposal, think about accessibility in your findings and presentation, point you to relevant past research, and connect you with others who may be working on similar topics.

Don’t have a topic in mind yet? No worries. Follow along @MuseWeb on Twitter and the #AskMW18 hashtag to be inspired or throw out a few questions about some of your ideas!

About MW18

The Call for Proposals for MW18 papers, workshops, professional forums, and how-to sessions is open on the MW18 website through September 30, 2017. Proposals for demonstrations and lightning talks will be accepted through December 31.

MW conferences do not have pre-determined themes; instead, the program is built from the ground up based on what the community proposes. You can propose a session on any topic relevant to the field. The program is selected by an international committee of cultural heritage professionals, and reflects the issues and ideas of greatest interest and urgency in each year.

Authors submitting proposals by September 30, 2017 are notified if their paper has been accepted by December 1, 2017 when the draft program is announced and registration opens. Authors proposing demonstrations and lightning talks are notified by February 1, 2018 if their proposal has been accepted. We endeavor to contact and give feedback to authors whose proposals have not been accepted as well, but due to the volume of proposals received, we cannot guarantee we’ll be able to do this in all cases.

You can find the entire archive of past MW papers since the conference’s founding in 1997 freely available online.

Learn more about the conference in Vancouver next April.

Save September 28, from 4pm EDT for a special MW18 Event on Facebook Live and
at The Peale Center in Baltimore, followed by #drinkingaboutmuseums at Ida B’s Table!

Stay tuned for details…

The Call for Proposals for MW18 papers, workshops, professional forums, and how-to sessions is open through September 30, 2017. You may propose demonstrations and lightning talks through December 31.

Join us in Vancouver for MW18, April 18-21, 2018! Learn about the most innovative and trend-setting projects of the year and meet international leaders in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector.

Do you have or know of an innovative project completed between April 2017 and April 2018? You can nominate it for a GLAMi award until March 11, 2018!

MW conferences do not have pre-determined themes; instead, the program is built from the ground up based on what the community proposes. You may propose a session on any topic relevant to the field. The program is selected by an international committee of cultural heritage professionals, and reflects the issues and ideas of greatest interest and urgency in each year.

Authors submitting proposals by September 30, 2017 are notified if their paper has been accepted and the draft program is announced by December 1, 2017 when registration opens. Authors proposing demonstrations and lightning talks are notified by February 1, 2018 if their proposal has been accepted. We endeavor to contact and give feedback to authors whose proposals have not been accepted as well, but due to the volume of proposals received, we cannot guarantee we’ll be able to do this in all cases.

Want to know what an MW program is made of? You can find the entire archive of past MW papers since the conference’s founding in 1997 freely available online.

Need help attending MW18? Apply for scholarships and volunteer positions by December 1, 2017.

Sign up to get the latest news and updates  for MW18 in Vancouver.

MW17 was an action-packed four days, with tours, workshops, and sessions about everything from inclusive design to big data to embracing failure. For a wrap-up of these activities and all the #MW17 Twitter takeaways, visit the conference Storify and see photos on Flickr. More content, including transcripts and videos of selected sessions, are being uploaded to the MW17 conference site.

Please take a few minutes to complete this anonymous post-conference survey. Your participation will help us improve the 2018 MW Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Do you already have a great idea for an MW18 session or speaker? Capture your thoughts now by starting your MW18 proposal. You’ll have until Sept 30, 2017 to complete and submit your proposal for review by our international program committee.

Click here to take the survey.

Many thanks,
Nancy Proctor, Rich Cherry, and Sina Bahram
Co-Chairs, MW 2017

The most innovative cultural projects of the year recognized at MW17 in Cleveland

More than 550 leaders from museums, libraries, archives and galleries around the world gathered at the MW17 Conference in Cleveland, Ohio on Friday, April 21 to recognize the year’s best innovations in the sector at the annual GLAMi awards. Winners were selected by an international committee of judges, chaired by Steven Beasley, Director of Digital Media at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and Jane Alexander, Chief Information Officer at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Since the dawn of the Internet age, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (referred to as GLAMi institutions) have been pushing the envelope on what technology can do to preserve, display, and showcase cultural treasures. MW’s annual conferences have been a platform for showcasing and disseminating this important work since 1997. Formerly the “Best of the Web” Awards, the GLAMies were relaunched at MW’s 20th conference in LA last year to showcase the best work the cultural sector has done to engage, inform and excite people both on the Web and across myriad emerging and ever-changing platforms. Whether it’s social media, virtual reality, augmented reality, audio and video tours, apps, or anything in between, the GLAMi Awards honor the projects and people that allow us to visit far-away places, explore ancient artifacts, or connect with the natural world, using amazing, often cutting-edge technologies and practices.

MW’s 21st conference hosted attendees from more than 33 countries and 300+ worldwide galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The annual North American gathering of the best and the brightest in the cultural and tech sectors is an opportunity for museum professionals, product developers, researchers and students to talk innovation as it relates to the stewards of the world’s history and heritage. Next year’s conference and GLAMi awards will be hosted in Vancouver April 18-21, 2018.

This year’s GLAMi Award winners include the following. Complete descriptions of the winning projects and nominees are listed on the MW17 site.

In the Education Category Winner: Museum At Your Fingertips: Telepresence Tours For Schools from the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, USA.  

The Museum at Your Fingertips project tested the ability of a telepresence robot, the BeamPro by Suitable Technologies, to provide meaningful and engaging remote tours to classrooms that lack the resources to visit museums in person. The two organizations worked together to design a tour program that took full advantage of the BeamPro’s capabilities to provide unique opportunities to students to access museum spaces and experiences.

In the Exhibition and Collection Extension Category Winner: Website from the National Museums of Scotland, UK

The beautiful Explore section of the National Museums of Scotland’s website provides visitors with an “online equivalent of a visit to one of our four museums” by bringing together the expanding catalogue of online content.

In the Exhibition Media or Experience Category Winner: The Natural History Museum of Utah’s Trait Tree, USA

The museum held a number of photo shoots around the Salt Lake City Community, inviting individuals to come and share a select set of visible physical traits through photos of themselves, then created a digital interface into which all of the photos could be searched and viewed according to like traits. The museum then created a custom piece of software to allow all of the visitors to the exhibition to participate in the project digitally. By the end of the 3-month exhibition, more than 1,600 had added their live photographs to our digital Trait Tree. This was among the most popular elements in the exhibition with more than 70% of visitors engaging deeply with—and chatting about—their place on the Trait Tree.

In the Exhibition Media or Experience Category Winner: VOLUME: Making Music in Aotearoa from Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand
Hands-on and ears-on, Volume is the first major exhibition of New Zealand popular music. What sets Volume apart is participation – the museum wanted visitors to put themselves in the exhibition and have a go at making music themselves. They developed four major digital interactive experiences to explore different aspects of the music industry, demonstrating the range of creative roles and skills in the sector – beyond being a rock star. Extensive prototyping and user-testing ensured they had well-crafted and accessible visitor experience.

In the Exhibition Media or Experience Category Honorable Mention: Weaving A Better Future Virtual Reality App from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), Canada
Through the use of virtual reality (VR), visitors were transported to Guatemala with an experience that was part of the Empowering Women exhibition! Visitors were immersed in the vivid sights and sounds of weavers’ workshops, a fair-trade textile store, ancient Maya ruins, a kitchen where women come together to prepare meals, a bustling outdoor market, and more.

In the Groundbreaking Category Winner: ArtLens Studio, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA
In 2016, the Cleveland Museum of Art opened the doors to the ArtLens Studio, a completely re-imagined expansion of the museum’s original Studio Play. Astonishing in its visionary breadth, the magic of ArtLens Studio is deceptive in its simplicity. While visitors are having fun, they are also looking closer, making connections and gaining comprehension that will enhance their appreciation of art throughout the museum. At the Reveal and Zoom Wall, visitors use their bodies to reveal artworks or zoom into an artwork in great detail. In the Create Studio, visitors create their own unique artworks at the four stations: Pottery Wheel, Collage Maker, Portrait Maker and Paint Play.

In the Marketing and Promotion Category Winner: #ElectionCollection Campaign from the National Archives, USA:
In 2016, the National Archives partnered with American Experience PBS to launch #ElectionCollection, a social media campaign that showcased the holdings of our thirteen Presidential Libraries during the 2016 election cycle. #ElectionCollection unified our various institutional parts–thirteen Presidential Libraries, regional archives, the flagship museum in Washington, DC–and raised the public profile of our institution.

In the Marketing and Promotion Category Winner: Digital Content Strategy by the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), UK
In the run-up to the RA’s 250th birthday in 2018, the museum wanted to overhaul their website and social media content. Through a tremendous amount of research, they determined they would reach new audiences by being genuinely valuable, not by telling audiences that they were valuable. In practice, it was a process of stopping everything that was published online and starting again – this time with their values, objectives and audiences at the core of everything they did.

In the Museum-Wide Guide or Program Category Winner: SFMOMA App, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA
The SFMOMA app is the first mobile experience in the cultural sector to combine cutting-edge location-aware technology with rich and diverse audio storytelling, in what we hope is a new standard for the field. The app features a new breed of guided narratives that take you through the museum’s seven floors of galleries and public spaces, as well as onto the surrounding streets of San Francisco. These 15–45 minute Immersive Walks feature a range of fascinating and unexpected hosts, including high-wire walker Philippe Petit, Avery Trufelman from the 99% Invisible podcast, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, and comedians Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani from HBO’s Silicon Valley. Production values are akin to those of This American Life or Radio Lab, with richly layered soundtracks accompanying personal narratives.

MW’s annual meetings are always opportunities for the community to come together and offer mutual support, but this year MW17 will serve a particularly urgent need to help our U.S. colleagues strategize and respond to the recent attacks on cultural organizations and creative practice that are represented by the budget proposed by the current U.S. administration, aimed at eliminating all Federal funding for the arts and humanities as well as deep cuts for scientific agencies. Beyond the obvious detriment to our anchor institutions and cultural heritage, these attacks are aligned with a similar de-emphasis on the representation of those in our society who have historically been excluded and unheard from in our shared discourse.

As a result, it’s now more important than ever to hear, amplify, and ally with the concerns of all citizens, be they persons with disabilities, those who do not subscribe to a heteronormative viewpoint of the world, people of color, and of all religions, ethnicities, and gender identifications. As has been reported by Hyperallergic and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) among others, representatives from both sides of the U.S. Congress have recently joined in publicly calling for support and funding for the IMLS and NEA. AAM’s website offers tips and links to add your voice and urge the House and the Senate to support these critical agencies and through them, the work of thousands of essential organizations and initiatives around the country. In a recent newsletter, The Baltimore National Heritage Area also offered a handy set of links that allow you to send a customizable message to your elected representatives in Congress through the National Humanities Alliance and/or the Americans for the Arts Action Fund and urge them to oppose any attempt to eliminate or cut funding to the National Heritage Area program, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Institute Of Museum and Library Services.

We also oppose the resolution passed by Congress and signed into law by the President that compromises the privacy of Internet users. This attack furthers the attack on Net Neutrality and has deep implications for creators and stewards of culture everywhere, since the Internet is now our common platform, culture, and heritage.

What other timely topics would you like to see addressed at the Conference in Cleveland? Where do you need help, on projects or larger issues? Propose them for the MW17 Clinic or Birds of a Feather Breakfast.

We look forward to talking with you about it all in Cleveland!

> You can still register for MW17
> More hotel rooms are available at the conference hotel! 
> Check out the workshops and program

You have until 11:59pm at the International Dateline on December 31, 2016 to submit your lightning talk and demonstration proposals for MW17! Check out the draft program and add your voice!

Registration for MW’s 21st conference is open with the early registration rate of $700 through 31st December, 2016.

The MW17 draft program is now online.

The call for proposals for lightning talks and demonstrations is still open and closes Dec 31, 2016 at 11:59pm at the International Date Line.
Register for the conference.

Book your room at the conference hotel with our discounted rate.

Rich and I are delighted to announce that Sina Bahram will be joining us as Guest Co-chair of MW’s 21^st conference in Cleveland, Ohio 19-22 April, 2017. Sina Bahram is an internationally recognized expert on inclusive design. His collaboration on the development of the MW17 program and community at our Cleveland meeting will advance the state-of-the-art of accessible technology in the cultural heritage field, and underscores the critical importance of expanding the audiences served by museums, galleries, libraries and archives worldwide.

We are excited by the new ideas, vision, and connections that Sina will bring to the MW17 conference and conversations. Check out the full press release. We look forward to working more closely with Sina and the entire community on making innovation accessible at MW17 and beyond!

Please join us in welcoming Sina Bahram to this new role in the MW community, and feel free to share your ideas and suggestions for MW17 with us all.

Storytelling at its best can change the world.

This weekend, the ancient Greek tale Antigone is at the heart of an important dialogue about activism and empowerment. The Onassis Cultural Center in New York hosts the Antigone Now festival from October 13 -16, inspired by Sophocles’ tragic story of a young woman’s fatal choice between her personal ethics and the rule of law. Premiering a new performance by Carrie Mae Weems, Antigone Now explores contemporary resonances with this classical figure through visual and performing arts, family programs, and digital media. Antigone’s struggle puts our own Civil Rights movement and today’s interrogation of the judicial system and the role of law enforcement in American society into a human context that is millennia old. Her story reminds us that our own stories are part of a deep tradition of making a world for ourselves in which we don’t just survive, but we thrive.

The Festival also brings the much-needed “light and the warmth of stories authentically told and shared,” as Seph Rodney has written, in the form of a digital activism initiative called #iSTANDfor. Drawing from Antigone’s famed courage in standing for what she believed, #iSTANDfor encourages people around the world to share stories of what matters to them via their social media channels and a dedicated web site (http://www.istandfor.net). #iSTANDfor celebrates people around the globe whose individual and collective acts of heroism and bravery are changing our world for the better.

For those of us at the MuseWeb Foundation, the new initiative from the international Museums and the Web Conference, not only does the festival affirm our belief in the power of storytelling, it also reminds us of the importance of visual and performing arts in expressing those stories. At MuseWeb, we stand for many things—for inclusion, innovation, and democratic access to culture; for creativity, participation, and free and open data; for libraries, galleries, archives, public monuments and community cultural centers. We stand for museums and the people their collections and cultural knowledge are here to serve both today and for the millennia to come. MuseWeb is joining the #iSTANDfor campaign by showing our support and our belief that museums, both big and small, matter.

Please help us tell the world you stand for museums. Use the #iSTANDfor #museumshashtags on social media and tell us why museums are so critical to you in today’s rapidly changing world. Get our attention @museweb on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And, if you’re in New York later this week, the Antigone Now is free and open to the public at the Onassis Cultural Center New York (645 5th Avenue, New York, NY). Visit the festival website at http://www.onassisfestivalny.org. Find out more about the MuseWeb Foundation at http://www.museweb.us/about.

Join us in Cleveland for the 21st annual MW conference: April 19-22, 2017 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown, 100 Lakeside Avenue East, Cleveland, Ohio, 44114, USA.

Call for Exhibitor Briefing, Demo, and Lighting Talk is open through December 31. Submit your proposals here.
Early registration opens on December 1, 2016
Find out about exhibiting and sponsorship opportunities at MW 2017.

Stay up to dates with all the key dates.

Join us for the 21st Museums and the Web Conference in Cleveland, 19-22 April 2017.
The call for proposals will open on 1 September 2016 and closes 30 September.

Hoping to win $1,000+ for your Be Here: Baltimore stories? MuseWeb is offering two free workshops to help you write successful proposals:

Get funded to tell your stories of Baltimore’s culture and heritage! 

Be Here: Baltimore is a mobile storytelling project about the culture and heritage of Baltimore. A $25,000 fund is being sponsored by izi.TRAVEL to help the MuseWeb Foundation support new and diverse voices in telling the stories of the city through open and location-based platforms. The Call for Proposals for Be Here: Baltimore funding is now open. Submit your proposals no later than July 10, 2016; win $1,000+ and launch your project by August 15!

We are also looking for participants who represent a diverse mix of backgrounds, organizations, and experience with cultural interpretation and mobile storytelling to review applications and help award the Be Here: Baltimore funds. If you want to review proposals or nominate someone else, please email us at info@museweb.us

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in MW’s landmark 20th anniversary conference in LA April 6-9! MWXX was our biggest gathering ever with almost 800 attendees from 32 countries, representing 467 institutions. It was great to see so many old friends as well as lots of new faces: about half of the participants were joining the MW community for the first time. It took more than 172 gallons of coffee and an undisclosed number of other adult beverages to see us through the 90+ sessions in the MWXX program, not to mention all the events, museum visits, crowd-curated bar talks and karaoke! It was impossible to squeeze all the best stuff into each day as the program committee had 334 proposals to choose from; the most competitive categories were Professional Forums with a 28% acceptance rate, followed by How To sessions at 30% and Lightning Talks, of which only 1/3 were accepted. Thank you to all the authors, presenters, and keynote speakers, as well as the indefatigable Program, GLAMi, and Local Committees: you provide the life-blood of the conference and the community’s conversations.

We are also grateful to the volunteers, sponsors, partners, exhibitors and LA hosts who made the event possible. Many participants have continued to contribute to the conversation by posting slides, Storifys, and reflections on #MWXX as well; we’ve gathered as many links below as we are aware of, but please add to the list.

If you are interested in serving on the Program Committee, as a GLAMi judge, or as a volunteer at MW17 in Cleveland, please let us know!

We’re also keen to have your input into our new non-profit initiative: MuseWeb. The MuseWeb Foundation will support transformative projects, capacity-building, and sustainable innovation for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). In addition to the annual MW conference and publications, MuseWeb’s expanded scope of work will include new ways of collaborating with the community of museum technology professionals, developing shared platforms, facilitating corporate partnerships, and providing grants for innovative GLAM projects.

Our core question is:

How might we best support the GLAM sector as a space for the inspiration, curation and creation of culture, by, with, and for people?

We welcome your ideas, questions and challenges as we continue to develop and refine the project. Feel free to send suggestions by email to future@museweb.us
Slides

Analytics Tune Up! Insights and methods to achieve a manageable approach to Google Analytics

Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Website and Social Media

Transform your museum with agile

Professional forum 4 – Capital Projects & Technology

How to session 6 – IIIF The International Image Interoperability Framework

How to session 4: Beyond the Play Button: Getting the Most Out of Video Content

Turning the Battleship: Small Digital Pilots at the Holocaust Museum

Changing gears: Fast-lane design for accelerated innovation in memory organisations

Co-designing the future of museum digital literacy

BIG and S l o w – Adventures in Digital Storytelling

Ready, Set Crowdfund! (or not)

Why Museum Campaigns go Viral – Angelica Aboulhosn

Online Scholarly Publishing: data and_insights_from_osci

Adapting Museum Studies Programs for a Digital Future

Periscopes

All the Periscopes recordings can be found here.

Blog posts and Storifys

SESSION: Do It Together: The effect of curators, designers and technologists collaborating (meSch)

Welcome and Opening Plenary: Cory Doctorow

Open source in museums – now what?

Auckland Museum at #MWXX

Museums and the Web 2016 – a talk by Jim Fishwick

Post conference notes by Vernon Systems

Museums and the Web: 20 years of debate on digital transformation

Know of more round-ups and responses to #MWXX? Please share links in the comments below!

MWXX Conference Survey
Dear colleagues,

thank you so much for joining us in Los Angeles. Please take a few minutes to complete this anonymous post conference survey.
Your participation will allow us to improve the next MW Meeting.

Click here to take the survey.

Thanks,
Nancy Proctor and Rich Cherry

Few places are as rich in history, culture and innovation as the world’s cities, yet we tend to serve the city up as a series of isolated experiences with no connection or continuity as visitors and citizens move from airport or station, hotel or home, to museum, park, library, performance, shop and restaurant.

How can we use the power of storytelling and mobile technologies to knit together a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? How can we create “network effects” that mean every urban experience is better because it is woven into the full diversity of voices that make up the fabric of the city? How might the very act of connecting its stories change the city itself?

izi.TRAVEL, the international mobile storytelling company, is leading a “Connected Cities” initiative to encourage the creation of high quality digital content that connects the stories and people that live in and visit US cities. They are offering $25,000 for collaborative teams in multiple US cities to create content that can be accessed through a range of platforms, including izi.TRAVEL’s mobile app. The Connected Cities initiative kicks off this month with the Baltimore Stories Prize.

Please join us at the Baltimore Museum of Art on March 22 for a free working lunch and charrette, followed by drinks at Gertrude’s, to help launch the Baltimore Stories Prize and participate in an afternoon of workshops and brainstorming about how we can make Baltimore a more connected city through its stories. At the end of the day, we aim to have formed our plans and a steering committee to manage and award the Baltimore Stories Prize by the end of summer 2016.

N.B. This event is free but in two parts; reserve one or both tickets. 

1. 12-1pm: Mobile storytelling workshop with lunch: create a mobile tour in 30 minutes and learn about the open technology that has inspired the Connected Cities initiative.
2. 1-6:30pm: Baltimore Stories Prize Charrette: help design and launch the first of the Connected Cities funds.

Agenda (Lunch and all sessions are free for registered attendees except drinks at Gertrude’s)

• 12-1:00: Working lunch: Workshop on using open platforms for creating mobile tours of cities and cultural sites with izi.TRAVEL experts
• 1:00-3:00: Presentations by leading Baltimore storytellers and creatives on how they connect stories in their work (Confirmed: Stoop Stories, Lab Bodies, Raphael Alvarez)
• 3-5:00: The Connected Cities Charrette & Baltimore Stories Prize planning
• 5:00: Adjourn to Gertrude’s for drinks and further conversation (cash bar)

WHEN Tuesday, March 22, 2016 from 12:00 PM to 6:30 PM (EDT)

WHERE Baltimore Museum of Art – 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218

Submit your projects for MWXX Crit Rooms

Bring your museum websites, mobile apps and videos to Museums and the Web 2016 to be reviewed by peers and experts in a Crit Room.

Submissions are due by March 31, 2016 and the Crits all take place on Friday 8 April.

To submit a project use the MW submission form and select the appropriate type of Crit room (Inclusive Design Crit, Mobile Crit, Video Crit, and Web Crit). A representative of the project (preferably the manager/designer/developer/videographer) must be registered for the conference and in attendance to have the project reviewed. In the session representatives explain their intentions and the expert panel reviews the project assessing how well those intentions have been realized and suggesting strategies that might have improved it.

Submit your project for a critique on a first-come, first served basis (approximately four projects can be assessed in each 1.5 hour crit session).

Crit Rooms Schedule:

Friday 8 April, 2016

Video Crit: 1.30pm – 3.00pm

Web Crit: 1.30pm – 2.50pm

Inclusive Design Crit: 3.00pm – 4.20pm

Mobile Crit: 3.00pm – 4.20pm

Museums and the Web 2016, April 6-9 2016, Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, CA

#MWXX

Storytelling: tall tales or the future of museums?

Museums and the Web Roundtable in Boston was held on January 27, 2016 at the Revere Hotel in Boston.

Museum leader Rob Stein challenged us to reconsider the way we think about the content we produce and its role in ensuring the relevance, sustainability, and impact of museums today and into the future. A panel of local experts on cultural storytelling, crowdsourcing, and digital content delivery, which included Sandy Goldberg, Halsey Burgund and Titus Bicknell, responded to Rob’s provocation.

Here are more resources that relates to the round table topics (digital storytelling, museum audio guides, Smart City concept and much more).

THIS EVENT WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF OUR SPONSOR, izi.TRAVEL.

Due to the great interest in the special meeting of Museums and the Web in Boston we have moved the event to a larger location, the Revere Hotel.

Register now for FREE to secure your place. To register please click here and complete the form.

If you are unable to join us in Boston, please tell us where you would like to attend a future MW Roundtable here.

Storytelling: tall tales or the future of museums will take place on 27 January from 8-10am 

Program:

8:00am Program begins with networking and continental breakfast

8:30am Keynote by Rob Stein with responses by Sandy Goldberg, Halsey Burgund and Titus Bicknell

9:30-10am: Discussion

Questions? Email us.

Follow the event and join the conversation on Twitter #MWBoston

THIS EVENT IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF OUR SPONSOR, izi.TRAVEL

Storytelling: tall tales or the future of museums?

Museums and the Web Roundtable in Boston: Wednesday, January 27, 2016 from 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM

Please reserve a space on your calendar to join us for a special meeting of Museums and the Web at the Revere Hotel in Boston on 27 January from 8-10am.

Museum leader Rob Stein will challenge us to reconsider the way we think about the content we produce and its role in ensuring the relevance, sustainability, and impact of museums today and into the future. Local experts on cultural storytelling, crowdsourcing, and digital content delivery will respond to Rob’s provocation, and we hope you’ll join the conversation as well!

Registration is FREE but seats will be limited and provided on a first-come first-served basis. To register please click here and complete the form.

If you are unable to join us in Boston, please tell us where you would like to attend a future MW Roundtable here.

8:00am Program begins with networking and continental breakfast
8:30am Keynote by Rob Stein with responses by Sandy Goldberg, Halsey Burgund and Titus Bicknell
9:30-10am: Discussion

Questions? Email us
Follow the event and join the conversation on Twitter #MWBoston

THIS EVENT IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF OUR SPONSOR, izi.TRAVEL