The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is the largest art museum in Atlantic Canada; it is an agency of the Province of Nova Scotia and one of the premier arts institutions in Canada. The Gallery is a gateway for the visual arts in Atlantic Canada and is responsible for acquiring, preserving and exhibiting works of art, and for providing education in the visual arts. They manage their collections with Argus.

Rights management has significant implications for archival collections. If you have documents or images in your possession, you might believe you own the rights to them. However, even though you may physically have the items, the creator of the documents retains the legal copyright, sometimes for much longer than you would assume.

In his Adweek article, Millennials are Discovering Art by Ditching Museums for Instagram and Pinterest, Robert Klara asserts that “social media has nudged museums aside as the primary venue by which American consumers discover works of art.” Don’t let your museum be nudged aside!

Open source software (OSS) is the technology world’s response to consumers who are price sensitive, but as with many things, it’s important to do your homework before making a commitment. Read on for some thought provoking suggestions on how to evaluate the best ILS or KM software for your organization. Maybe it’s open source, maybe it isn’t.

Photo: David Ohmer

Many of our Argus clients are feeling inspired by the achievements of Thomas P. Campbell, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who among many things, is an advocate for digitizing museum content and publishing online exhibits.

Due to popular demand, we are reprising a webinar presented by museum evangelist and strategist Nina Simon, where she drew upon research for her book, The Art of Relevance, and offered substantive, creative, and inspiring advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to communities you hope to engage. Join us on February 2nd and see how Nina’s advice applies whether you work in a library, a museum, a theater, a park, an academic institution or a corporation.

We recently offered a webinar presented by museum evangelist and strategist Nina Simon, where she drew upon research for her book, The Art of Relevance, and offered substantive, creative, inspiring and practical advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to the communities you hope to engage. Interestingly, in Nina’s role as speaker, she offers advice that applies whether you work in a library, a museum, a theater, a park, an academic institution or a corporation. It’s all relevant.

Originally posted 1/15/2015

I left this year’s American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference with its theme, “Innovation Edge,” rumbling through my brain. My old Webster’s Dictionary defines innovation as:

1) the introduction of something new
2) a new idea, method, or device: novelty

My own definition is simpler: a new or better way of reaching a goal.

Does your organization’s mobile website lack the punch of your desktop version?

“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”
–Google Webmaster Central Blog, Mobile-first Indexing, November 4th, 2016

As part of its new mobile-first strategy, Google will give preferential search rankings to “mobile-friendly" sites (sites optimized for mobile devices). This change will have a significant impact on search results.

We will be offering a free webinar on November 15th that promises a substantive and thoughtful discussion full of creative, inspiring and practical advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to the communities you hope to engage.

This is the third in a series of posts on IT and the information Professional. When I chat with information professionals and IT managers about open source software, they often talk about two key concepts:

• It’s free
• Bug fixes and enhancements come from the community

While both of these statements are true, they fail to paint the whole picture and hide some pretty ugly truths.

I talk to lots of information professionals about IT. Some have great relationships with IT, others not so great. But if you’re leveraging technology to build and maintain your collection and information/knowledge systems—and who isn’t?—then just like death and taxes, it’s inevitable that you’ll be working with IT.

All our software is developed on a platform we call LucideaCore, with the key advantage that enhancements made for one Lucidea product can be easily leveraged with others, keeping costs down and speeding deployment. We recently launched a project to make our software more accessible to people with disabilities. By virtue of our platform-based approach to developing KM solutions, related new capabilities will soon be incorporated into all LucideaCore products.

(Originally Published December 18, 2015)

One of the biggest challenges for museums is getting control of huge cataloging backlogs. It’s a sad thing that wonderful and unique objects and artifacts are hidden from the public gaze because of resource constraints. Leveraging qualified digital citizens may provide a solution.

My old Webster’s Dictionary defines innovation as:
1)  the introduction of something new
2)  a new idea, method, or device: novelty

My own definition is simpler: a new or better way of reaching a goal.

When I think of innovation in a museum context, I think about the new and exciting ways that museums are reaching out to the community. Certainly the traditional still works: public programs continue to inspire repeat visits to the museum, and the work that museum educators do with schools continues to make new museum visitors out of children who, without these programs, may never be taken to a museum.

People who choose careers as archivists have an abiding commitment to identifying, collecting, preserving and making accessible information and records of enduring value. Paper, film and electronic records deemed to be of interest for an extended period should be shared with the world, not simply collected.

 

Mobile devices represent a significant opportunity for visitor engagement – before, after and during visits. In a major survey done in 2012-2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London discovered that almost two thirds of their visitors own a smartphone and bring it with them to the museum, and the majority of survey respondents said they use their phones to “enhance their cultural visits.”

Many museums rely on interns and volunteers for data entry, cataloguing and as docents. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming is no different. With a campus that houses five museums and a research library, managing the collection of western objects, papers and research materials, photographs and art is a tall order, and requires a team of well-trained people supported by excellent tools.