Panelists

Thursday, February 4, 2010

11:00 – 12:15

Connecting Online: Social Media

Chris Mathieson, Executive Director, Vancouver Police Museum

Allowed in the Crowd
Successful social media engagement requires a responsiveness that can be difficult for many institutions to handle without a fair bit of planning and thought. Smaller institutions have a real advantage in implementing quickly, if they have the technical ability and a strong commitment. As a small museum, the Vancouver Police Museum has been aggressively exploring the options and has learned some valuable lessons they hope to share on implementing a social media strategy in a small museum.

Sean Rodman, Strategic Partnerships Manager,
Royal British Columbia Museum

Online Communities and Museum Membership
This session presents research into the potential that social media and online communities hold for museums. Specifically, it examines how museum membership programs can benefit from an online presence – and the potential hurdles to successfully implement such a strategy. Synthesizing information from across North America, the session uses the Royal BC Museum as a case study.

Robert Labossière, Executive Director,
Canadian Art Museum Directors’ Association

Lessons from Facebook: Social networking, digital tools and emerging digital heritage
This presentation will argue that Canadian cultural communities are, by virtue of their inherent values and communications and networking methods, pre-disposed to social networking . Early adoption and exceptional adoption rates among Canadians generally, and the Canadian cultural community in particular, suggest two things: that cultural institutions are better positioned than other sectors to utilize social networking and that new kinds of cultural artifacts and new ways of communicating cultural values are being created which it will fall to cultural institutions to collect, preserve and exhibit.

The presentation will illustrate the exceptional way in which Canadians have taken to Facebook, trace several examples of effective uses of this new medium, and distill out from these some “lessons” intended to foster discussion about how cultural institutions can best approach social media.

13:45 – 15:00

Connecting in Education

Maryse Paquin, Ph.D., Professor,
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Canadian Virtual Museums and Francophone Teachers: Report on a Cross-Canada Survey
This presentation will show the results of a cross-Canada survey conducted on the use, by Francophone teachers in Canada, of learning objects (LO) provided by the country’s virtual museums. The virtual museum LOs are an indispensable tool for Francophone teachers in this country as a means of achieving the objectives and skill levels associated with academic programs. There are, however, some major challenges, such as that of integrating their use with teaching tasks. In this regard, the research was intended to provide better knowledge and understanding of the issues surrounding integration of Canadian virtual museum LOs with the various academic subjects, at the elementary and the secondary levels, among French-speaking teachers in Canada. A fuller knowledge and understanding of those issues is key to better responding to teachers’ needs. To that end, an online questionnaire was sent to 404 Francophone elementary and secondary teachers in 2008 and 2009. The results of the collected data will be presented. They deal with the value and importance given Canadian virtual museum LOs, with confidence in terms of language level and content, as regards course preparation, teaching/learning and personal use. Other results will be presented with regard to the ability to identify LOs, ways of making use of them, barriers and impediments experienced by teachers in their use, the potential they hold for knowledge acquisition by students, as well as the development of skills and attitudes, the change in teaching philosophy and the conception of their field of academics. In conclusion, recommendations will be formulated for increasing the use of Canadian virtual museum learning objects, given that the overall results show they represent great potential for the preservation of the language and identity of Francophones among the coming generation of minority-group students in Canada.

Jérôme Gédéon, Senior Heritage Information Analyst,
Canadian Heritage Information Network

Youth Curators of the Future
“Youth Curators of the Future” is an innovative project that uses social media and open source software to allow youth curators age 16-18 to conduct research, write texts, and create mini-exhibits about selected artworks or provide creative responses through their own artworks inspired by or in response to a work in the partners’ collections. The youth curators will experience behind-the-scenes visits to the partner museums and galleries and will meet with personnel to learn more about the museum profession.

The completed project will become part of the Experimental Lab of the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC – virtualmuseum.ca). The project will be featured at the Canadian Pavilion at the Shanghai International Exhibition in 2010.

Lisa McIntosh
Director of Learning, HR MacMillan Space Centre

Connecting into the classroom: Removing Barriers – Creating Opportunities
The opportunity for students to interact with museum educators who have a deep knowledge and passion for teaching and the unique resources of a museum is one that classroom-based teachers cannot replicate. Teachers, however, are faced with a growing number of issues, procedures and costs when considering a field trip to enhance their students’ learning. As these issues become increasingly complex, teachers and museum educators are contemplating new ways to create learning experiences.

Staff at the HR MacMillan Space Centre has been exploring the role of new technologies to provide our unique resources for students and their teachers. We have implemented a new program that brings students and our unique resources and expertise together using technologies that a busy teacher can access without any special expertise or equipment. All a teacher needs is a computer, internet connection, a microphone and a program such as Skype or iChat. This presentation will describe our virtual field trip program, demonstrate a component of the program and describe some of the issues we are navigating around as we re-think the traditional ‘field trip’. It will also present how we structure the learning experiences to take advantage of the technology, our unique resources, and the students’ needs, and how we are integrating social media and other resources to create powerful, accessible learning experiences.

Friday, February 5, 2010

9:45 – 11:00

Interactivity in Museums

Dr. Victoria Dickenson, Chief Knowledge Officer, Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Placing our Bets: Planning the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is in a unique position within the museum world. Not only is it the first national museum to be created by the Government of Canada through an Act of Parliament since 1967,(1) but it is also in all senses of the word, a ‘start-up’ organization. The Museum was created not around a collection, an historic site or event, or even an established body of knowledge, but around an idea. This idea, that each of us has rights by virtue of our shared humanity, has been one of the great transformational social ideas of the 20th century, now finding its expression globally in the 21st. The CMHR, then, is the physical embodiment of this dominant and inspirational idea since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The great advantage of a start-up, particularly in the rapidly evolving world of new media, interactive technology and innovative communications, is the absence of legacy systems and protocols. The disadvantage is the necessity to make rapid decisions on adoption and implementation, based on present-day analysis, for an opening almost three years away. This paper will present a resume of our best guesses and aspirations for the ways in which the CMHR will connect with all its publics both in the museum and beyond its walls through innovative technologies, a deep digital content database, on-line resources, and social media. We are basing our plans on research, exchanges with colleagues and our own experiences of best practices in Canada and internationally. This paper will also outline our thinking to date plus the issues and challenges we have identified in implementing our ideas on data architecture and user experiences on- and off-site. (1) In 2009, Pier 21 was also designated a national institution.

Ron Wakkary, Associate Professor,
Simon Fraser University

Kurio: An Interactive Museum Guide for Families
In interactive museum guide research, new approaches related to tangible computing aim to enhance social collaboration during a museum visit. In this paper we discuss, Kurio, a museum guide system prototype that supports families and small groups visiting museums. In designing Kurio, we explored three design strategies for improving the quality of social interaction and learning with interactive museum guides: 1) embodied interaction; 2) game-learning; 3) a hybrid technologies system. In interacting with Kurio, a family imagines themselves as time travelers who are lost in the present time and need to learn about the present in order to repair the time map that will return them to their time or our future. The results of our evaluation at the Surrey Museum in Surrey, B.C., show positive implications of implementing the design strategies: closing the social gap, naturalizing technology, and supporting exploration and discovery in learning.

11:15 – 12:30

Community Research

Graham Larkin, Curator of European & American Art, National Gallery of Canada

Patrimony Foul and Fair: Addressing the Challenges of Provenance Research in Canada
Thanks to the presence of a provenance expert and an intern supported by our Foundation, the National Gallery of Canada has recently been able to step up our commitment to the issue of Nazi-era provenance. Researchers in the department of European and American Art have painstakingly assembled full ownership histories for 148 paintings and sculptures in our collection that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945. This information comes in many guises, ranging from records of sale and ownership to old photographs or labels on the backs of paintings.

Our next challenge is to make these research findings easily accessible on the internet, and helping museums and archives throughout Canada do the same with art and artefacts in their collections. To that end, curators in my department will be working with colleagues at CHIN on developing Artefacts Canada into a system for posting and retrieving provenance information on a huge number and wide range of artefacts. Since this is a daunting and neglected task, the CHIN conference provides a timely opportunity to share this work in progress, and to benefit from the feedback of various interested parties.

Susan Rowley, Curator of Public Archaeology, and Assistant Professor,
University of British Columbia
Museum of Anthropology and Dept. of Archaeology

The Development of the Reciprocal Research Network
Over the past decade cultural institutions have increasingly utilized the web to make their data public, encourage user contributions and create networks between institutions, communities and individuals. There are many different challenges when building online collaborative networks, especially when trying to engage diverse knowledge communities. From conception, through technical development and practical implementation, the problems encountered can lead all project participants to find new ways to collaborate and share knowledge. The development of the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) can be seen as an example of such a process: it brought together three First Nations communities, a dozen international cultural institutions, and individual researchers and technical developers. Their collaboration succeeded in creating a new research tool that provides functions for instant access to information housed in diverse places, and effective engagement between researchers and developers.

The RRN creates an online research community, allowing geographically dispersed users to collaborate while studying cultural objects held in institutions around the world. Museums and other cultural institutions are contributing their data to the RRN in order to facilitate this research. The faceted interface provides an easy and innovative way to find a wide range of information about objects. The networking and research tools allow diverse user groups, including indigenous communities, to share their own perspectives and knowledge with the people and institutions that make up the RRN community.

The Reciprocal Research Network is scheduled to launch in March 2010. It is being co-developed in equal partnership by the Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lo Nation/Tribal Council, and the U’mista Cultural Society, and the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia. Museums from Canada, the United states and the United Kingdom also are participating in the development process: the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Burke Museum, the Laboratory of Archaeology at UBC, the Glenbow, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the McCord Museum, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Stephen Fai, Associate Professor, Carleton University

A Digital Archive for Materials and Methods of Construction
In this paper, we discuss the work of the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) to archive materials applications and building technologies brought to Canada, and more specifically to the province of Saskatchewan, by immigrant communities between 1850 and 1925. Cultural Diversity and Material Imagination in Saskatchewan’s Architecture (CDMISA) began with the hypothesis that the materials and methods of construction used by immigrant communities make visible the rich cultural diversities that characterize Canada and therefore constitute an invaluable heritage resource. Further, our preliminary research suggests that buildings constructed by the hands of community members and used specifically for religious practice are particularly relevant in this regard. Built by the community, for the community, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are often understood as places of resistance to cultural assimilation. As such, community-built religious structures present a unique opportunity for the study of ethno-cultural building technologies and the transformation/translation of those technologies in a new social context. For current and future generations, a nuanced documentation and dissemination of these traditional methods of construction (and local variations) are essential for a sustained, inclusive cultural memory. More practically, and equally pressing, a comprehensive understanding of these technologies is essential for the conservation of our built heritage.

14:45 – 16:00

Digital Art & Preservation

Alain Depocas, Director, Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D)
Daniel Langlois Foundation

Presentation of the Results of the work of the DOCAM Research Alliance: Documentation and Conservation of Media Arts Heritage
In this day and age, museums are faced with a variety of new challenges resulting from the recent proliferation of artistic practices based on such technological components as videography, digital art, robotic art and Web art.

Launched by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology (DLF) in 2005, the Docam Research Alliance: Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage was tasked with examining the factors that contribute to the vulnerability of technological art heritage and suggest solutions and tools that would enable museum professionals, collectors, artists and those who work with them to better document and conserve works created in the new media. Such works of art are fragile for a variety of reasons, which are beginning to be better understood, recognized and taken into account. Chief among them is the increasingly rapid obsolescence of the technology present in such works. Obsolescence requires us to rethink the criteria for authenticity and integrity in the new media works and to realize that they rest upon variable media. Thus we can see that their very essence is found more in their behaviour and in the effects they produce, rather than in their tangible components. In addition, such works often possess transitory characteristics that make them ephemeral phenomena, unstable and in constant mutation. Because of those characteristics, they are seen as variable in nature, in the sense that over their useful life, they are subjected to all manner of changes, transformations or mutations.

In this context, DOCAM has conducted several case studies on technology-based works of art within the museum collections associated with Alliance members, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The works were created by artists such as Janet Cardiff, Stan Douglas, Gary Hill, Nam June Paik, David Rokeby and Bill Viola. A multidisciplinary group, DOCAM brought together many Canadian and offshore partners from the academic world and from a community of interest that included, among others, museums, research organizations, and broadcast and documentation organizations connected with technological arts. DOCAM includes a variety of partners, such as the aforementioned museums, the DLF’s Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D), the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), as well as several university departments at Université de Montréal, Université du Québec in Montréal and McGill University. DOCAM includes conservators, information science specialists, IT specialists, art historians, curators and technologists. Practical work performed during the case studies resulted in five tools and guides that are now accessible to all on the DOCAM Web site:

• Guide to Good Practices in the Conservation of Media Art
• Guide to Cataloguing New Media Collections (also available on CHIN Web site)
• Documentary Model adapted to the specifics of media arts
• The Glossaurus, a bilingual terminological tool
• technology timeline showing both media works of art and technological components

There are also several learning activities such as the DOCAM seminars, and five international summits were organized and yielded great numbers of audiovisual documents also available of the DOCAM Web site.

Sara Diamond, President, Ontario College of Art and Design

www.horizonzero.ca: A Case Study
Funded by The Banff Centre’s Banff New Media Institute and Heritage Canada, www.horizonzero.ca was a multimedia Web magazine about digital art and culture in Canada - a bilingual virtual space devoted to creativity and critical ideas in the new media canon. We have revitalized Horizonzero.ca as part of Code and the Cultural Olympiad, with a special issue: Bridge! and the relaunching of the back issues. These constitute a history of Canadian and international new media in the early 21st century. Now out of production, the eighteen back-issues explore an extensive range of subjects in the territory where art, science, and technology meet. In this extensive case study I will provide a case history of this Canadian experiment in creating an online gallery and critical publication.

Liane Davison, Director, Surrey Art Gallery

Ready or Not – The trials and triumphs of supporting the presentation and production of digital art
Willing or otherwise, Museums have had to accommodate technology – both within administrative operations and in programming. For contemporary art museums, this has presented a particular challenge. Artists using technology, push capacities, experiment with software and hardware, and create works that are challenging to exhibit, protect, maintain, and even more challenging, to welcome within a permanent collection. Some museums occasionally show a digital artwork, and others, like the Surrey Art Gallery, have leapt into the unknown, making a commitment to digital art, whether they were ready or not.

Since 1999 the Surrey Art Gallery has supported an ongoing program of exhibitions and residencies in digital media in addition to its regular programming. This initiative arose not only in response to the increased use of digital media by contemporary artists, but also because of the context of Surrey – an extraordinarily young and diverse community. Surrey has 470,000 residents, and the province’s largest school district, and is growing at a rate of 1000 people a month. The Surrey Art Gallery is the City’s only art gallery and its digital art program has supported many forms practice, including immersive interactive video, telerobotics, interactive drawings, animation, database projects, GPS projects, chatrooms and avatars, surveillance projects, and more recently audio art, and exhibitions recognizing the relationship of technology to ceramics and textiles. Most projects have been challenging to finance, and maintain for many months, and have necessitated that the Gallery be innovative in how it works with digital art and artists. This presentation will provide an overview of some lessons learned.