[MCN-L] California law concerning resale of artwork
I had not heard of this before: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-grotjahn-valentine-20111025,0,5885749.story Perhaps some who are more familiar with the details of this law and US Copyright in general can weigh in on it.? As described in the article, sale of certain classes of artwork in California require the seller to pay the artist 5% of the sale price based on a 1976 law signed by Gov. Gerry Brown in his original term. ? James D. Keeline
[MCN-L] Question about software to show online museum exhibits
See if this one would work.? It seems to be free and an iPhone app is available.? I don't know how easy it is to add descriptions to the each piece. http://tamron.myphotoexhibits.com/ ? James D. Keeline _ http://www.Keeline.com http://Stratemeyer.org > >From: Glen Barnes >To: mcn-l at mcn.edu >Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2011 12:29 AM >Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Question about software to show online museum exhibits > >You might want to take a look at Exhibbit in NZ - http://www.exhibbit.com/ > >I haven't used it myself but it does a take on the 3D gallery space. > >Thanks, >Glen >http://mytoursapp.com > >> >> We are exploring the possibility of putting our educational exhibits >> online in a more interesting way. We already have images that we put on >> our website as well as our descriptive text. However, I'm looking for >> something juicier. I've been on Second Life (SL) for several years and >> love the 3-D interactivity of that program (and I use it to lay out future >> exhibits) but SL has a significant learning curve and not everyone uses >> it/knows about it/wants to know about it. So I'd like to have something >> that gives the feeling of 3-D but doesn't require an avatar to navigate >> through the space. Is this ringing any bells for anyone? >> >> I look forward to your suggestions and thanks so much! >
[MCN-L] Digital recorder for teacher/classroom use
Last July my wife and I organized and hosted a successful convention to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Tom Swift series of books about a young inventor. The first five stories were published in 1910 and since that year there have been 105 books in five series. The first three of these series were produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, also responsible for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys among many others. As part of this convention we produced two live performances based on a book from each of the first two series. Tom Swift and His Airship was from 1910 and public domain. Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X was from 1961 and in the public domain because the owner failed to renew the copyright. The shows had voice actors from San Diego's WriteOutLoud (http://writeoutloudsd.com) and the script, direction, and sound effects were accomplished by the talented and resourceful Scott Paulson (http://ScottPaulson.info). Scott engages in performances like these to provide sound effects for stage performances like the recent It's a Wonderful Life at the Cygnet Theatre in Old Town San Diego for the Christmas season. In this version, the performance is a 1940s-era radio show with a live audience, voice actors who step up to the vintage-looking microphones, and Scott as sound effects artist on the side of the stage. He has also provided sound effects and movies for silent films through his Teeny Tiny Pit Orchestra. Recently these have been shown at New Village Arts in Carlsbad in the northern part of San Diego county. In these, as with many of his performances, he gets the audience involved by passing out noise makers and then gives direction to how and when to use them in the program. Some of these are cheap items which can be given away and others are vintage sound machines that he collects at the end of the performance. In our Tom Swift and His Airship show, bubble wrap was used for gunshots and cellophane for crackling fire. As usual, he also had machines that made ratchet sounds and other devices for use in the program. Here are a few clips to give an idea of how this worked: 2008 clip about Scott discussing sound effects devices http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szyht9jc8PE Tom Swift and His Airship performance at UCSD library http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88EuLHIfWg The performances of Airship and Visitor from Planet X were highlights of our convention. Looking at your project, it appears that you initially asked for an audio recorder to gather the sounds and build your performance. Of course, many phones, including the iPhone, come with voice recorder apps which are fairly effective and save files in .WAV format. This is useful because it is not compressed at this stage and easier to edit with free tools like Audacity. Another device I own which could work in this fashion is a voice recorder. Mine is an RCA model number RP5030A. It was purchased at Fry's Electronics some years ago so I don't know what the current offerings are. It also stores audio in .WAV format. For my purposes, one of the key features is that the USB plug that connects to the computer. It shows up as a USB mass storage device on my computer (Mac) so I can simply copy the files over and then use them in an editing program like iMovie or Audacity. Probably Garage Band could be used on the Mac as well if that is available. Some voice recorders have a limited frequency response so it may be well to look into this. Looking at the offerings of Frys today on Voice Recorders I see one in the $30 range that saves files as .MP3 (a compressed format which loses some data) but it does use USB so the key would be whether it shows up as a mass storage device or requires special software. In the community which is interested in sounds for model railroad layouts, they generally recommend using a video camera for audio recordings. The quality is often sufficiently good and the devices are more generally available than dedicated audio recorders. The additional advantage is that you get to see the source of the sound and this can help with identifying clips. It could also be a benefit to the participants and their families to see them actually performing the sound effects. For this reason, I have found the Sanyo Xacti line of cameras (~$200) to be good ones. I have the CG-9 model. This one records standard definition video but there are HiDef models. The video is stored on an SD-HC card and the card can be inserted into a card reader on the computer or the USB cord can be used for transfer. The .MP4 video files are compatible with iMovie (important for my workflow) as well as other programs out there. One of the special features of Wal-E talks about special effects and many old devices are shown in action. James Keeline 100th Anniversary Tom Swift Convention (July 16-18, San Diego) http://TomSwiftEnterprises.com http://www
[MCN-L] Basic rule of copyright term in the US
m of copyright one does not really own would be as severe as those for infringing on someone else's copyright. As it stands now, entities with enough attorneys on retainer or staff tend to win by intimidation. An ideal purpose of the rule of law is to level the playing field so that the rules are the same for all. We're far from that in copyright and other IP law areas. James Keeline San Diego, CA
[MCN-L] Apollo 11 mission recreated on WeChooseTheMoon.org
http://www.wechoosethemoon.org This site is celebrating the 40th anniversary by using Internet technology to recreate the timeline of the Apollo 11 flight. James D. Keeline Lead Programmer Balboa Park Online Collaborative
[MCN-L] K-12 Museum-related fiction
--- On Thu, 7/9/09, Montgomery, Renee wrote: > Attached is a personal project to which I'm hoping you all can > contribute in your infinite knowledge to all-things-museum > related.? As a personal project with the help of several others, > I'm trying to develop a bibliography of books about children in > museums - museums of all kinds, but fiction books only,? like > books stories children solving crimes, wandering around at night, > traveling through time, encountering dinosaurs, ghosts, etc, etc > with museums as the background. Can be picture books or K-12 novels. > > Renee Montgomery > Assistant Director > Collections Information and Risk Management > Los Angeles County Museum of Art No attachment came through so I don't see your list. In the likely case that this mailman list is not configured to allow attachments, perhaps you will want to have a version on a webserver and provide a link? One interesting possibility is to use a shared spreadsheet such as the one on Google Docs, or even better the one on http://www.Zoho.com I can think of several examples but they may be ones you know about. The Blue Balliett books which begin with Chasing Vermeer are obvious modern examples. However, there are so many more. It would be helpful to see the list as you intended. The OCLC fiction finder database might be a help. Of course it is limited to books that may be found in libraries. It seems like an early effort. A search for one of my personal interests, "time travel", yielded many false hits, including Prince and the Pauper and War of the Worlds, on the top page. The individual book pages show how many libraries but not a way on this interface to list them. For that I'd have to find the book on a related system, http://www.WorldCat.org A search for a particular author brought up hundreds of false hits. An attempt to report the problems showed a list of 5 issues but the link to report additional problems is broken. As with the time travel search, it all depends on what types of subjects libraries use today and have used in the past. Frequently topics like time travel fall under generic categories like "space and time fiction" which can encompass a wide range of stories. On other subject searches when I wanted to make a fairly thorough checklist I used large heavy reference volumes like the Cumulative Book Index and its predecessor, the U.S. Catalog. Each volume covers 1-4 years of "new" publications for that period so a title is not relisted until there's a publisher, artist, format, or other major change. Some of the USCat/CBI volumes have appeared on Archive.org. Files can be up to 600 MB and the PDFs are not always searchable. However, since they are alphabetically arranged, this is not a show stopper. The CBI volumes attempt to be more international in scope and include books from other English-speaking countries, including the obvious ones, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Checking the CBI for 1948-52, I do not see a fiction subhead under museums but that is just one brief span of time. You might want to look at the titles on my Time Travel Literature database ( http://www.TimeTravelLit.com ). My search of "museum" in the subject and plot fields yielded 28 entries and most seem to be kids' books. There might be something new there for you. James D. Keeline Lead Programmer Balboa Park Online Collaborative http://www.BalboaParkOnline.org San Diego, CA
[MCN-L] Drupal vs. WordPress MU as content management systems
When you visit http://drupal.org/project/Modules and search individual third-party modules that you might be using, you will see pledges by many developers to have their module(s) ready on the day that Drupal 7 is released. Smaller modules and internally-developed modules could be delayed, of course. Having worked with Drupal since late 2006 (4.7), I agree that some major version upgrades have seen a delay in the availability of key modules. However, I think the Drupal folks are working to remedy this for D7. I think the plan is to make the release after DrupalCon in SF. James Keeline San Diego, CA --- On Thu, 2/25/10, Andrew Fox wrote: > Drupal 7 is in alpha right now. I think they're planning on releasing > it some time in the second quarter of this year. Of course then you > have to wait for all the modules to catch up, too, so my guess is > that we're probably looking at the fall for a viable Drupal 7 > installation. > > AF > > Andrew Fox
