California SIG Events
The CAL SIG meets at least once a year, alternately in Northern and Southern California.
PAST EVENTS
2011 CAL SIG MEETING June 3, 2011 University of California, Berkeley
MCN’s California SIG and the Center for Digital Archeology at UC Berkeley (CoDA), present a meeting organized by Cinzia Perlingieri, Director of Research at CoDA, bringing together UC archeologists and MCN technologists in a way we have never done in the California SIG.
Places, Collections, and Digital Narratives: Towards a stronger collaboration between Museums and Cultural Heritage. For a full report on this event, please see: http://www.codifi.info/news/2011-mcn-coda-meeting-recap/
2010 CAL SIG MEETING
There was no meeting in 2010.
2009 CAL SIG MEETING
September 18, 2009 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Topic: The Getty Online Scholarly Catalog
Speakers included staff from LACMA, the Getty Foundation, and University of California, Los Angeles.
2008 CAL SIG MEETING
August 22, 2008
San Jose Museum of Art
Northern California MCN members gathered in San Jose for the August 2008 MCN Cal SIG meeting and enjoyed conversation, learning and networking. The day included a business meeting and presentations by staff from several local museums.
Chris Alexander, Manager of Interactive Technology, San Jose Museum of Art; host for the day
Chris Alexander presented the museum’s holistic approach to technology, which incorporates the museum’s web content into various Web 2.0 websites, and its revolutionary iPod Touch tour. Over the last couple of years the SJMA has been working to heighten the visitor experience at the museum and technology has played a big role in this endeavor. After the presentation attendees tried the iPod Touch tour for themselves in the exhibition Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon.
Melissa Johnson, Curator of Interactive Media, history | san josé
Sarah Puckett, Curator of Art and Photography, history | san josé
In 2001 History San José, a regional history museum with a collection of over 75,000 photographs, 500,000 objects, and 5,000 linear feet of archival materials, ventured in to the digital imaging world. Since 2005, HSJ has launched five online exhibits which share the history of the area and make a small percentage of the collection available to the public.
Staff from History San Jose used the opportunity of the Cal SIG meeting to mine their colleagues' considerable expertise for help with some of the problems they face. MCN members shared ideas regarding keeping up with the demand for digital images from the public, researchers, and co-workers. Problems included the very practical need to migrate image files periodically and keep them active on a network; as well as dealing with issues of perception by users and Board members.
The group challenged MCN to create workshops to help organizations write digital plans, which are so key to any grant proposal. Another area of discussion, where more help is always needed, is vendor relations--finding and working with vendors who are willing to donate services.
Perian Sully, Collection Information and New Media Coordinator, Judah L. Magnes Museum
Dr. Francesco Spagnolo, Head of Research, Judah L. Magnes Museum
We heard about one of the centerpieces of the Magnes Museum's digital initiative, a new collection management system, IDEA@ALM, which allows the museum to completely integrate archive, library, and museum materials. Perian and Francesco talked about how the Magnes Museum uses IDEA@ALM to reorganize its collections into discrete intellectual sets, while it defines how certain fields can be shared across these three collection types. Additionally they discussed the benefits of cataloging in their new system and the greater philosophical reasoning behind this methodology. They highlighted how shared cataloging enhances research, protects collections, increases access and interpretation, and protects professional standards.
Susan Grinols, Director Photo Services and Imaging, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Susan has worked for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in various capacities since 1991. She currently heads the Photo Services and Imaging Department and presented FAMSF’s approach to archiving--solutions they’ve found and the challenges of using a “homegrown” 4D database system as their CMS/DAMS. Cal SIG members learned about what is being produced, what is being archived, and what should be archived. Susan also discussed a new opportunity they have recently begun to face: what to do with digital files of images of the old museum, now being sent to them by the public.
Many thanks to presenters and audience alike for a productive and successful meeting.
2007 MCN CAL SIG MEETING
The Convergence of the Arts and Sciences
Thursday, June 7th, 2007
Discovery Science Center, Santa Ana & University of California, Irvine
presented in conjunction with
Museum Educators of Southern California (MESC)
"Teaching with New Technologies"
Friday, June 8th, 2007
California Science Center, Los Angeles
The California Special Interest Group (CAL SIG) of the Museum Computer Network held a summer meeting in which members explored the convergence of the arts and the sciences in both museums and educational contexts. A tour of Orange County'sDiscovery Science Center was combined with a tour by Eleanore Stewart of the Beall Center for Art + Technology and the Maya Lin Plaza at UC Irvine. Walt Scacchi from the University of California Irvine’s Institute for Software Research as well as UC Irvine’s Computer Game Culture and Technology Laboratory spoke on the development of theDino Quest interactive exhibition.
Walt Scacchi on Dino Quest
Ph.D., Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine
Associate Director for Research, Computer Game Culture and Technology Laboratory, UC Irvine
Research faculty, Institute for Software Research, UC Irvine
Eleanore Stewart on the Beall Center for Art and Technology
The Director of the Beall Center for Art and Technology discussed the Center's mission and then led the group on a tour of the exhibition ALAVs 2.0 (Autonomous Light Air Vessels).
Sponsored by UCI Visual Resources Collection
2006 CAL SIG MEETING
The 2006 CAL SIG Meeting was held Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at the de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The Fine Arts Museum Meeting Hosts for the day wereSue Grinols, Director, Photo Services and Imaging and Andrew Fox, Webmaster.
Presenters at the meeting, held in the Piazzoni Mural Room, included
Deborah Frieden, project director for the new de Young, speaking about technology implementation in the new Museum
Sheila Pressley, Director of Education, Fine Arts Museums, discussing technology use in the education center
Andrew Fox, Webmaster, Fine Arts Museums, talking about electronic signage and new textile housing
Jodi Burke, Antenna Audio, previewing current Antenna Audio technology projects
After lunch, the group reconvened to hold a short business meeting and to share current projects and discuss technology issues. The day concluded with a docent-led tour of the permanent collection.
2005 CAL SIG MEETINGS
August 26, 2005 Meeting at MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Gary Castro, Head of Information Technology, and MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles hosted the Southern California CAL SIG meeting on August 26, 2005.
The morning presentation by Murtha Baca, Head, Getty Vocabulary Program and Getty Research Institute Digital Resource Management; Karin Broughida, Getty Research Institute Senior Information Systems Architect; and Sally Hubbard, Digital Projects Manager, Getty Research Institute addressed the complexities of building and managing a digital library. The particular challenge at the Getty is to create integrated access to their diverse resources – library, archives and special collections, and museum.
After lunch, a MOCA Educator treated the group to an informative and insightful tour ofBasquiat, an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The tour of the exhibition was followed by a behind-the-scenes tour of MOCA's storage areas and state-of-the-art security system.
Gary Castro wrapped up the day by sharing information on his system for networking five separate sites – two sites at Bunker Hill, one at Little Tokyo (Geffen), one in West Hollywood, and the retail store in Santa Monica.
At the end of the day, there was time to share current projects and to solicit ideas from colleagues on technical issues.
February 25, 2005 Meeting at RLG and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California
MCN Board Members Marla Misunas and Dana Mitroff welcomed the group and presented a brief history of the California SIG. The new Cal SIG Co-Chairs were introduced: the Northern California Co-Chair is Margaret Kendrick, SFMOMA and the Southern California Co-Chair is Diana Folsom, LACMA. Marla and Dana then turned over the meeting to the RLG staff for their morning presentation.
Anne Van Camp, Member Programs Manager, outlined for us what RLG is all about. Founded in 1974, RLG (http://www.rlg.org/) is an international, not-profit membership organization with over 150 institutional members that include universities, libraries, archives, and museums. With a recently revised Mission Statement and a new strategic plan, RLG aims to increase the number of museum members. With 88 staff in Mountain View and two in New York City, RLG develops programs and services at collaborative points between cultural institutions. Much of the strength of RLG lies in their ability to provide an operational base with systems staff on board that includes data analysts, information architects, and system engineers. An exciting current project is the development of a system for certifying digital repositories with a draft certification report that was scheduled for presentation in March.
Guenter Waibel, Program Officer, followed by presenting an example of how RLG works at the intersection of museums, libraries, and archives--the newly published Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for RLG Cultural Materials. Submissions to RLG's Cultural Materials database were coming in from across four continents and from various institutional communities, making the data far too diverse to be converted by RLG staff alone. The development of guidelines was clearly a critical need. With input from the RLG Cultural Materials Alliance Description Advisory Group, Guenter led the charge to create the present guidelines. Chapter 1 starts with the basics, guidelines for a common terminology so museums, libraries, and archives can all begin to generate metadata in a way that may be easily shared. Following chapters discuss guidelines for data fields and structure, data contents and values, and data format. Chapter 5 describes the data fields in RLG Cultural Materials, and Chapter 6 presents a case study in data conversion. For more information and a PDF of the publication go to http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=214. The central importance of these guidelines lies in the fact that they are the only ones written by museums, libraries, and archives.
Ricky Erway, Digital Resources Manager, concluded the morning by introducing the RLG family of image-related services: RLG Cultural Materials, Trove.net, and AMICO. As described on their Web site, RLG Cultural Materials "is a dynamic, multimedia collection of digital versions of manuscripts, photos, art, historical documents and memorabilia, and much more, brought together from around the world." The interface gives an overview of available searches and provides an intuitive approach to creating multi-level queries. If your institution is an RLG subscriber, try a sample search, and see what you think. Go tohttp://www.rlg.org/ and select RLG Cultural Materials under Quick Links in the Databases category. Trove.net is a freely accessible image database on the Web. The images are a subset of RLG Cultural Materials that member institutions have chosen and their presentation via Trove.net provides a means of reaching a wider audience and exploring models for revenue. A percentage of the proceeds go the contributing institution. RLG expects that Trove.net shouldn't erode the revenue base for institutions since it is aimed at reaching a new audience. Trove.net is readily available through a general Google search and it's not necessary to know anything about RLG Cultural Materials. Lastly, Ricky discussed AMICO. As presented by RLG, AMICO has been converted to the same useful interface as Cultural Materials. With AMICO closing at the end of June 2005, RLG is working to develop agreements with the thirty-nine AMICO member institutions. As of our February meeting, three had dropped out, eight had signed agreements, and the rest were at some point in negotiation process. RLG plans to continue offering AMICO as a separate database to give subscribers the advantages of a more defined database focusing on the fine arts and at a lower subscription rate.
After yummy box lunches generously provided by RLG, we drove just a few minutes to the Computer History Museum, recently moved from rough-and-ready quarters at Moffett Field to a snazzy new building that formerly housed Silicon Graphics, Inc. Little did we know what a fascinating afternoon lay ahead!
Established in 1996, the Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org ) collects the artifacts and stories of the information age. It is the world's largest and most significant history museum for preserving and presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience. The collection totals over 20,000 items comprising artifacts of all sizes, photographs, moving images, archival material, ephemera, and software.
Paula Jabloner, recently-hired Archivist for the Museum, introduced us to some of their ongoing projects, such as scanning parts of the document collection for online access. Volunteer Docent Dick Guertin led the group on a wonderful and highly informative tour of the Museum's Visible Storage. Although not yet an exhibition, the area houses samples of the collection arranged in chronological order beginning with the abacus! Did you know that to return search results so quickly Google has huge banks of computers working simultaneously? At the end of the afternoon, Paula gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of their storage areas that included row upon row of shelves packed with full-to-the-brim document boxes; vast sections designated for CPUs, viewing devices, printers, pointing devices, and games; plus a room full of refrigerator-size computers from the early days. It was fascinating to encounter equipment such as an old Apple IIe with an external hard drive or the Imagewriter your kids used for their homework! Who knew we would feel such nostalgia and fondness for our old computers and computer games!
2004 CAL SIG MEETING
June 2004 Meeting at the California Academy of Sciences and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The 2004 meeting was co-hosted by Carrie Burroughs, Image Management Librarian at the Cal Academy, and Marla Misunas, SIG Chair and Collections Information Manager at SFMOMA. Speakers included Paula Jabloner, Project Director, who demonstrated Silicon Valley History Online; Dave Carness, the Planetarium Science Visualizer, demonstrating the full-dome video he's creating for the new planetarium; Stan Blum, discussing biodiversity informatics and building interoperability; and Carrie Burroughs, discussing the Public Access Database. We also toured the Naturalist Center with Diane Sands, the Center's Coordinator; and learned about the Bay Area ant collecting project.
During the afternoon at SFMOMA, Bob Futernick, Associate Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, brought us up to date on the new building project in Golden Gate Park, as well as their digital imaging projects; this was followed by Nora Nirk, Koret Education Center Manager, and Tim Svenonius, Production Manager for Interactive Educational Technologies at SFMOMA, discussing SFMOMA's new Koret Visitor Education Center and related digital initiatives.
It was a very full day and all were grateful to the many speakers, especially to Carrie and the folks from the California Academy, who put together a very interesting program on very short notice.
2003 CAL SIG MEETING
August 2003 Meeting at the Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum), Los Angeles
The 2003 meeting was hosted by Rebecca Lachter from the MAW. Speakers included Tim Hart and Vicki Porter from the J. Paul Getty Trust, who spoke on usability studies and the Web; Phil Bedel from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area; and Cheryl Miller and Rebecca Lachter from the MAW, who all spoke on database mergers and integration; followed by Steven Thomas from UC Riverside's California Museum of Photography and Guenter Waibel from RLG and speaking on the Online Archive of California and RLG's Cultural Materials initiative.
2002 CAL SIG MEETINGS
November 2002 Meeting at Stanford: CAL SIG, VRA, and ARLIS
On November 15, 2002, local MCN, VRA, and ARLIS members combined at the Stanford University campus for a day of meetings, presentations, and tours. In our CAL SIG business meeting, we discussed ideas for the upcoming MCN conference in Las Vegas in November 2003. Among the topics discussed for workshops were digitizing large format materials, grant writing, and rights management for digital materials. Panel presentation ideas included collaborations currently operating in California, such as the California Digital Library, and History San Jose's Santa Clara Valley area collaboration with six other institutions; as well as some more hands-on topics such as preserving data on and retrieving data from old computers. History San Jose has an immediate interest in that issue, with its 32 ocean containers full of an electronic materials collection.
Lorna Corbetta-Noyes, the incoming ARLIS chair, proposed a joint directory between our groups to further enhance our possibilities for collaboration with each other. Seems like a natural outgrowth of the meetings where hearing other groups' views is so helpful. We all liked the idea of keeping in touch with local resources for those tough technical questions.
The featured speaker for the day was David Rumsey, President of Cartography Associates (http://www.davidrumsey.com) who showed his award-winning digitized map collection, using Luna's Insight browser (http://www.luna-imaging.com), or the GIS browser. Even those of us who weren't sure how much fun maps could be found it fascinating, seeing the capabilities of the various browsers and presentation tools once they have some truly rich content to display. We saw historic overlays and morphing, such as the overlay of historic San Francisco maps with depth charts of the Bay, even 3-D modeling that allowed us to fly into the maps themselves. High level *gee whiz* factor!
We finished off the afternoon with a tour through the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, and Andy Goldsworthy's wonderful Stone River.
June 2002 SIG Meeting in Los Angeles
MCN's California SIG held a Southern California meeting on Friday, June 21, 2002, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 20 museum staff from local institutions gathered to learn about LACMA's digital asset management, the impressive Collections On-line project. Members of the group whose institutions received Getty grants compared notes and offered advice to others in the group who were thinking of applying, or who had recently received grant funding.
Renee Montgomery, Assistant Director, Collections Management, and Diana Folsom, Manager of Art and Education Systems, reported on LACMA's Getty-funded Collections On-line Project http://lacma.org/. Currently their database consists of 120,000 records from 12 curatorial departments and several archival collections. 40,000 records, 30,000 images, and 150,000 library records are online. 20,000 more images are copyright protected and are online only at LACMA. Among discussion topics were curatorial involvement in reviewing and keywording records, the online user survey and the interoperability between the collections database and library system.
Recommendations from LACMA's experience:
- Institutional support and internal public relations are very important from the beginning of the project.
- Meet with individual departments to ascertain their needs and publicize regular progress reports.
- Show staff how the project supports their work.
- Be conservative when estimating design time and the number of records that can be effectively completed within a given time frame.
- Create virtual exhibitions; promote visible "storage" (access to works not normally seen).
LACMA image management:
Peter Brenner, Manager of Photographic Services, and John Stalder, Digital Archives Manager presented digital capture and the LACMA Tracking System (LTS) for digital images. The Department of Photographic Services handles initial capture and initial color matching to the original object immediately following the capture. Images and workflow are tracked through Filemaker, Excel, and Portfolio before any images go into their collections management system. Once the Scanning Department gets the images for processing, they are uploaded and filed as appropriate. After filing, only the Scanning Department can add, move, or delete them. Images are presented on the web using Mweb (Stephen Toney, Systems Planning Inc). Mweb utilizes a viewer/light table component so users can view any group of images together on one screen.
Derivatives created and maintained:
Full image - corrected with color bar (TIFF) Cropped image - no color bar (TIFF) 2 JPEGs for the CMS - thumbnail and full image 2 JPEGs optimized for the Web for thumbnail and full image
Thanks to everyone at LACMA who participated in making this an informative, productive day, especially our organizers and presenters. And thanks to everyone in the area who was able to attend, making our discussions useful (and fun!), whether during the program, lunch, or afterwards. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our next meeting in Northern California.
2001 CAL SIG MEETING
September 2001, Northern California
Venues:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (temporary facility)
2000 CAL SIG MEETING
August 2000, Southern California
Venues:
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
University of Southern California, Interactive Art Museum at Fisher Gallery
Japanese American National Museum
Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Garden
1999 CAL SIG MEETING
December 1999, Northern California
Venues:
Exploratorium, Center for Media & Communications
Zeum, children's center for art and technology
SFMOMA, multi-media lab
