Found History

Yet more evidence big associations have lost the plot: watch nine sessions of AAM online for only … $300?!? — The American Association of Museums (AAM) has announced that it will host its first “virtual conference” during this year’s annual meeting in Los Angeles. I understand AAM’s motivation here. They’re surely hoping to recover some [...]

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Two Reviews of NARA Civil War Exhibit — Last week The Washington Post and The New York Times each reviewed the National Archives’ new Civil War Sesquicentennial exhibit, Discovering the Civil War. I haven’t seen the exhibit yet myself, but I’d characterize both reviews as “mixed.” Hat tip: Lee White of the National Coalition for [...]

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IMLS UpNext Wrapping Up with Discussions about the Workforce and What’s Next — The IMLS UpNext project has entered its final two weeks with open forums on two new topics. In the first, Joanne Marshall of UNC leads a discussion of the shape of 21st century library and museum workforce. In the second, Larry Johnson [...]

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On "Uninvited Guests" — As I tweeted when it was first posted, Bethany Nowviskie’s “uninvited guests: regarding twitter at invitation-only academic events” is “*the* must-read Twitter-at-conferences post.” But it’s more than that, of course. It’s also a nuanced unpacking of the ways in which new, technologically-driven modes of scholarly discourse are colliding with older, analog [...]

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Be Your Own Privacy Settings — Recent missteps at Facebook and Google Buzz have put privacy on the front burner of conversation among internet watchers and digital humanists of all stripes, including this one. To be sure, there is lots to criticize in the way big social media companies have handled their users’ supposedly private [...]

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An Asset Bubble in Higher Ed? — Michael Feldstein (currently of Oracle and formerly of SUNY) argues that we may be seeing an asset bubble in higher education of the kind that recently burst in the housing market. Taking Anya Kamenetz’s observations about the problematic economics of higher education one step further, Feldstein argues (with [...]

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edUi Call for Proposals — edUi has posted the CFP for its November 2010 conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. edUi provides a forum for user interaction and experience designers to talk about designing for institutions of learning including higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, and museums. Full disclosure, I’m on the speaker selection committee. But that doesn’t [...]

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Teachinghistory.org’s New Look — If you haven’t visited recently, take another look at CHNM’s National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC) at teachinghistory.org. The NHEC team has spent several months completely redesigning CHNM’s one-stop history education portal. The result is easily one of the best websites we’ve ever built. Congratulations to all! CHNM to Build Transcription Crowdsourcing [...]

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Yikes! Another Facebook Privacy SNAFU — Another reason to be happy I left Facebook: it seems a bug in Facebook’s code allowed its 400 million members’ email addresses to be exposed publicly for 30 minutes yesterday. As Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove correctly noted in her report of the incident, while we may be inclined [...]

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Old Sturbridge Village Shaping Up — I have spent more time at Old Sturbridge Village, which is two towns over from where I grew up, than at any other museum I haven’t worked at. So I’m very happy to see that its attendance and finances appear to be improving after a very rough decade for [...]

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