: General

We had a very successful day today. We met up with Nate and Brent from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It's good to meet with people similar to us - they have built most of their interactive installations and web projects in house. Many museums and galleries in the USA outsource much of their work, at least that's the impression I got from the Museums and the Web conference.

The Walker Arts team have gained a reputation for blogging, as they were one of the early adopters of the format. It was a learning curve for them - they intended to roll it out across departments, but before they could do that they needed to understand the software better. And what better way than to use it?

It turned out that their New Media Initiatives blog is the second most popular blog on the Walker Arts website. It seems that this is due to peers being extremely interested in what the team were developing. Which is how I found out about their work, and I ended up visiting the center. And I live about 3900 miles away.

We spoke at length about our respective organisations' websites. There were some things that both Chris and I liked about their system. We also got to look behind the scenes at some audio-visual installations, and I ended up taking photos of their racks! Chris or I might post more technical details of how we compared in time.

Nate has sorted a meeting out for us in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts tomorrow, and we'll hopefully visit the Science Museum of Minnesota if we have time.

At MW2007 staff from the Whitney Museum of American Art examined the development and integration of the Collect Art tool into the Learning@Whitney web-site design from a practical, pedagogical and technical perspective.

Chuck Barger from Interactive Knowledge, Inc (USA) who designed the site with the Whitney staff gave us a brief introduction to the technical and navigation side of the site. I was impressed with what I saw and took the time to explore the site myself. The site is divided into Teachers, Kids and Teens. You can pour through their catalogue of works, zooming in to very high resolution. We were told that there were some copyright issues with the site, as I suspected.

As well as quality images the site has content to match - there are guidelines for teachers to follow. Not only does each artwork provide teachers with plenty of curriculum links, but also ideas for projects and llinks to further resources. Of course not all teachers need this guidance, but it does provide the site with mass appeal.

Examples of what teachers put together showed diverse ways of using the website, from printouts and collages to electronic presentations. I'm looking forward to visiting the Whitney and picking their brains a little further.

The conference is over now, and we're into the next leg of the journey, which is to visit more museums over here and look a bit deeper into what they're doing.

Some of the interesting sessions I should mention (and I'll end up writing about a few more) include an accessibility workshop hosted by Stephen Browne from De Montfort University and Brian Kelly of UKOLN, and a usability lab from Paul Marty at Florida State University and Michael Twidale at the University of Illinois.

In the usability lab, volunteers were asked to navigate a set of museum sites with a purpose in mind - planning a wedding, looking up botanical information, etc - not having visited those sites before. There were little struggles with navigation, wording of links, placement of information and so on which the designers hadn't anticipated.

Our site wasn't one of the sites that was examined, but it does make me think about how we plan our new collections-based area. We're hoping to offer more interactivity and the navigation will be based on categories, time periods, activities and other criteria. It'll be different from the rigid hierarchy of the rest of the site, so there's a lot of new accessibility and usability issues for us to deal with.

Rydyn wedi bod mor brysyr gyda'r gynhadledd mae'n anodd ffeindio amser i ysgrifennu ein blog. Rydyn wedi cymryd llawer o'r gynhadledd, fallai un o'r gwersi gorau oedd i ysgrifennu ein mynediadau ystod diwedd y sesiynnau fel ein ffrind Nate o Walker Art Center.

Ges i'r wers hon tra yn sesiwn Accessibility 2.0 gan Brian Kelly (UKOLN) a Prof. Stephen Brown (Prifysgol De Montfort). Roedden yn edrych ar pa mor effeithiol mae canllawiau yr WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). Mae e werth edrych ar fel allen cael i addasu gan crewyd y canllawiau yma yn 1999. Ac er bod set newydd o ganllawiau yn cael eu creu, dyw llawer ddim yn credu bod rhain yn ateb rhai o'r problemau sy'n ein gwynebu.

Roedd e'n diddorol eistedd gyda rhai oedd yn gweithio i archifau a llyfrgelloedd Canada. Mae nhw'n gwynebu rhau o'r un problemau a ni gyda dwyieithrwydd. Hyd yn oed yn waeth - mae rhaid gwneud peth stwff yn Métis ac Inuit! Mae'r archifau a'r llyfrgelloedd yn Canada yn cael eu noddi gan y llywodraeth, felly mae ganddynt canllawiau strict iawn.

Mae'n bwysig i ni edrych ar ein safwe mewn ffordd sy'n ateb canllawiau hygyrchu, ond hefyd i weld os mae ein cynnwys yn galluogi pobl i ddysgu mewn ffyrdd gwahanol i'r cyfrifiadur - fel roedd Brian yn sôn am - blended learning. Er bod dal lle am yr WAI, mae'n bwysig edrych ar dynesiad mwy holistaidd.

It's always interesting at conferences like Museums & The Web how individuals seem to be independently moving the in the same direction. Dafydd mentioned the Brooklyn Museum's Graffiti Mural which is a really nice example of how gallery spaces and online spaces can be combined to provide an experience for everybody.

There's also a distinction developing between a museum's web-site and a museum's online presence. In the past, if you spread your wings outside your own site, it was to pay a tourism or web-links site to promote your museum, and I think it was mostly a fruitless venture. A lot of the teams here have actively participating on a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and the community of museum bloggers (the 'blog-o-sphere'). The audience for these sites tends to be a little different to the average web-site visitor looking for opening times or driving directions.

Actively participating in online communities - leaving comments, flagging up related links, and linking to others - can be one of the big drivers for people to come to your site. If you can get this community talking to the people standing in the exhibitions, you can build a much stronger community than museums have ever had before, and reach a wider variety of people too.