Hi Maureen, Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Blog posts have been very thin on the ground for a few months and may remain so for a while but this was an idea I really wanted to write up and I'll try to follow it up before too long with a digest of survey responses and blog comments.
The wifi question I can't respond to with any real depth of knowledge, but I do agree that if it enables what might be a fair sized slice of real-world visitors to gain quick, free and reliable mobile access to your web-based resources, it could be a liberating thing for both parties. The perennial debate over whether to tailor something to work beautifully on one platform or to get it to work adequately on lots will need to be had on a case by case basis, but for reasons of cost (hardware and software) and access I imagine that we'll see ever more decisions made in favour of building cross-platform web enabled apps that suit access by wireless mobile devices, as you suggest, as well as by at-their-desk computer users, instead of beautiful but constrained device- and context-specific gallery tours etc. These will always have their place too, though (see Koven Smith's review of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum iPod tour for a great discussion of this http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/311). And then if we are taking people onto the web whilst their strolling our galleries, there are still more use-cases for universal registration/login, and for a means to pool what you've done in one museum with what you did in another (which might be the motivation to do what you wouldn't bother doing if it was limited to one institution). So I rather like the wifi-to-fewer-silos rationale! On another topic, I don't know why I've not looked into Open Museum before but it's a really interesting project. Very cool. Still welcoming further responses to the survey (http://bit.ly/aGDcn7). All the best, Jeremy Jeremy Ottevanger Web Developer, Museum Systems Team Museum of London 46 Eagle Wharf Road London. N1 7ED Tel: 020 7410 2207 Fax: 020 7600 1058 Email: jottevanger at museumoflondon.org.uk www.museumoflondon.org.uk Spectacular new ?20 million Galleries of Modern London opening at Museum of London on 28 May 2010. Find out more at www.museumoflondon.org.uk Before printing, please think about the environment -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Maureen Doyle Sent: 09 February 2010 20:21 To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] On museum visitor login Jeremy, Thanks for the invitation to Doofercall. Enjoyed it very much, so added it to my RSS feed. Personally & professionally, I hope that more museums will go the route of some university museums I am working with by offering free wifi to their visitors. Besides being a nice perk (available in most cafes) and an essential learning tool (imagine a library without it!), wifi means museums can offer web-based services (such as visitor mobile tours) to enhance the visitor experience. Wifi means you can connect your online services to the in-gallery experience, integrating the range of real and alternatively real museum offerings and treating the visitor like a guest not intruder. I think it's a question of figuring out how to make wifi available not if. Maureen -- Maureen Doyle Heritance, Executive Director Open Museum, Team Member maureen at openmuseum.org www.openmuseum.org Connect with people, objects and museums at www.openmuseum.org _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/
