Found History

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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Personalized URL Shorteners (Suggestions for CHNM?) — @sebchan explains how the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney started rolling its own tiny URLs using Yourls. Powerhouse employees can now shorten links to Powerhouse blog posts, exhibits, and collection items for easy Tweeting or inclusion on gallery labels. Any ideas for a good tiny domain for CHNM?

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Omeka-Powered Digital Amherst Recognized by ALA — The American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Program on America’s Libraries for the 21st Century has recognized Digital Amherst with one of three awards for best use of cutting-edge technology. A project of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, Digital Amherst is a collaborative Omeka-powered website celebrating the town’s 250th [...]

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Facebook, Google, Apple: Patents Gone Wild — The last ten days or so have seen a flurry of suspect behavior by large technology companies, their intellectual property lawyers, and the United States Patent Office. First, Facebook secured a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed,” which has likely caused some consternation among the folks at [...]

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YouTube dropping IE6 support — At more than a week old, I suppose this doesn’t qualify as breaking news, but it’s still big news. According to Ars Technica, YouTube will cease to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 beginning March 13, 2010—that’s right, less than two weeks from today. To the delight of CHNM’s web developers, [...]

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How on earth did I miss this? IMLS Discussion Guide to the Future of Museums and Libraries — It’s hard to believe I missed this, considering it features Omeka as a case study, but the The Future of Museums and Libraries: A Discussion Guide [.pdf] seems to have escaped my notice when it was originally [...]

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There’s an app for that: It’s called "The Web" — In a run-down of coverage of Mozilla’s new Fennec mobile browser, Bryan Alexander at Liberal Education Tomorrow quotes Mozilla’s vice president of mobile, Jay Sullivan, arguing that while the iPhone apps model of mobile content delivery will remain dominant in the near-term, nevertheless “over time, the web [...]

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