Today, I’ll be speaking at the Connecticut Forum on Digital Initiatives at the Connecticut State Library under the catch-all title, “The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media: New initiatives, oldies but goodies, and partnership opportunities with ‘CHNM North’.” The long and short of it is that the institutional realities of being a grant-funded organization and the imperatives of the Web have meant that CHNM has from the beginning been a dynamic and entrepreneurial organization that’s always, always looking for new opportunities, new partners, new collaborations.

Among the projects I’ll point to are:

• History Matters
• The Object of History
• The National History Education Clearinghouse
• The September 11 Digital Archive
• The Bracero History Archive
• Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives
• Zotero
• Omeka
• Digital Campus
• THATCamp
• Hacking the Academy
• Press Forward

Partners wanted.

As an open source, not-for-profit, warm-and-fuzzy, community service oriented project, we don’t normally like to talk about market rivals or competitive products when we talk about Omeka. Nevertheless, we are often asked to compare Omeka with other products. "Who’s Omeka’s competition?" is a fairly frequent question. Like many FAQs, there is an easy answer and a more complicated one.

The easy answer is there is no competition. Omeka’s mix of ease of use, focus on presentation and narrative exhibition, adherence to standards, accommodation for library, museum, and academic users, open source license, open code flexibility, and low ($0) price tag really make it one of a kind. If you are a librarian, archivist, museum professional, or scholar who wants a free, open, relatively simple platform for building a compelling online exhibition, there really isn’t any alternative.

[Figure 1. Digital Amherst, an award-winning Omeka powered project of the Jones Library in Amherst, MA.]

The more complicated answer is that there are lots of products on the market that do one or some of the things Omeka does. The emergence of the web has brought scholars and librarians, archivists, and museum professionals into increasingly closer contact and conversation as humanists are required to think differently and more deeply about the nature of information and librarians are required to play an ever more public role online. Yet these groups’ respective tool sets have remained largely separate. Library and archives professionals operate in a world of institutional repositories (Fedora, DSpace), integrated library systems (Evergreen, Ex Libris), and digital collections systems (CONTENTdm, Greenstone). Museum professionals operate in a world of collections management systems (TMS, KE Emu, PastPerfect) and online exhibition packages (Pachyderm, eMuseum). The humanist or interpretive professional’s online tool set is usually based around an off-the-rack web content management system such as WordPress (for blogs), MediaWiki (for wikis), or Drupal (for community sites). Alas, even today too much of this front facing work is still being done in Microsoft Publisher.

The collections professional’s tools are excellent for preserving digital collections, maintaining standardized metadata, and providing discovery services. They are less effective when it comes to exhibiting collections or providing the rich visual and interpretive context today’s web users expect. They are also often difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain. The blogs, wikis, and off-the-rack content management systems of the humanist (and, indeed, of the public programs staff within collecting institutions, especially museums) are the opposite: bad at handling collections and standardized metadata, good at building engaging experiences, and relatively simple and inexpensive to deploy and maintain.

Omeka aims to fill this gap by providing a collections-focused web publishing platform that offers both rigorous adherence to standards and interoperability with the collections professional’s toolkit and the design flexibility, interpretive opportunities, and ease of use of popular web authoring tools.

[Figure 2. Omeka Technology Ecosystem]

By combining these functions, Omeka helps advance collaboration of many sorts: between collections professionals and interpretive professionals, between collecting institutions and scholars, between a "back of the house" and "front of the house" staff, and so on.

[Figure 3. Omeka User Ecosystem]

In doing so, Omeka also helps advance the convergence and communication between librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and scholars that the digital age has sparked, allowing LAM professionals to participate more fully in the scholarship of the humanities and humanists to bring sophisticated information management techniques to their scholarship.

Which brings us back to the short answer. There really is no competition.

[This week and next I'll be facilitating the discussion of "Learning & Information" at the IMLS UpNext: Future of Museums and Libraries wiki. The following is adapted from the first open thread. Please leave any comments at UpNext to join in the wider discussion!]

In addition to the questions posted on the main page for this theme—I will be starting threads for each of those over the course of the next two weeks—something that has been on my mind lately is the question, “What is access?”

Over the past ten or fifteen years, libraries and museums have made great strides in putting collections online. That is an achievement in itself. But beyond a good search and usable interfaces, what responsibilities do museums and libraries have to their online visitors to contextualize those materials, to interpret them, to scaffold them appropriately for scholarly, classroom, and general use?

My personal feeling is that our definition of what constitutes “access” has been too narrow, that real access has to mean more than the broad availability of digitized collections. Rather, in my vision, true access to library and museum resources must include access to the expertise and expert knowledge that undergirds and defines our collections. This is not to say that museum and library websites don’t provide that broader kind of access; they often do. It’s just to say that the two functions are usually performed separately: first comes database access to collections material, then comes (sometimes yes, sometimes no, often depending on available funding) contextual and interpretive access.

What I’d like to see in the future—funders take note!—is a more inclusive definition of access that incorporates both things (what I’m calling database access and contextual access) from the beginning. So, in my brave new world, as a matter of course, every “access” project funded by agencies like IMLS would include support both for mounting collections online and for interpretive exhibits and other contextual and teaching resources. In this future, funding access equals funding interpretation and education.

Is this already happening? If so, how are museums and libraries treating access more broadly? If not, what problems do you see with my vision?

[Please leave comments at UpNext.]

In an article about Kuali adoption, the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Campus Computing Project director, Kenneth C. Green as saying,

With due respect to the elites that are at the core of Sakai and also Kuali, the real issue is not the deployment of Kuali or Sakai at MIT, at Michigan, at Indiana, or at Stanford. It’s really what happens at other institutions, the non-elites.

Indeed, all government- and charity (read, “foundation”)-funded open source projects should measure their success by adoption at the “low end.” That goes for library and museum technology as well; we could easily replace MIT, Michigan, Indiana, and Stanford in Mr. Green’s quote with Beinecke, Huntington, MoMA, and Getty, Though we still have a long way to go—the launch of Omeka.net will help a lot—Omeka aims at just that target.

This one made the rounds of Twitter earlier today thanks to Jo Guldi. This month Wired Magazine tells a cautionary tale for those following the progress of Google Books. Entitled “Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles,” the article reminds readers of Google’s 2001 acquisition of a Usenet archive of more than 700 million articles from more than 35,000 newsgroups. Incorporated today into Google Groups, the Wired article contends the archival Usenet material is poorly indexed and hardly searchable, rendering much of it practically inaccessible. The article concludes, “In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.” Something to remember when considering the Google Books settlement and its implications.

Originally published in the journal Archival Science, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries has just released under open access terms a report of the Institution’s experience with Flickr Commons. Written by Martin Kalfatovic, Effie Kapsalis, Katherine Spiess, Anne Van Camp, and Mike Edson, the report recounts what the authors deem a mostly successful experiment with Web 2.0, one that provided insights into the opportunities and challenges of both social media and library, archives, and museum collaborations. Stressing the importance of “going where the visitors are,” the report also recognizes that engaging visitors in external commercial venues like Flickr cannot be a replacement for local digital preservation and outreach programs and strategies:

Our Flickr pilot project is part of an emerging strategy to ‘‘go where they are’’ in the Web 2.0 environment. The Smithsonian seeks to ‘‘go there’’ to increase access for educational and research purposes, and fully realize that in doing so we are going to a virtual location that is commercial and not a trusted website in many educational environments. Therefore, our strategy is to use this type of site in context and in parallel with development of access to these collections through Smithsonian web sites.

Via Mashable, yet another timeline service: Timetoast.

Many readers will have seen this already, but Robert Darton’s February piece in The New York Review of Books is the most readable discussion I have seen of the Google Books settlement.

Fresh + New(er), the Powerhouse Museum’s always interesting blog, describes that museum’s recent open house for local Wikipedians and the common ground they found between expert curators and amateur encyclopedists.

GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters has some advice on bridging the gap between institutional and open source cultures. Useful reading for digital humanities centers and cultural heritage institutions looking to participate in open source software development.

Amanda French has posted a much-needed open calendar of upcoming events in Digital Humanities, Archives, Libraries, and Museums.

The Guardian newspaper unveils an open API to more than 1,000,000 articles written since 1999.

20 years ago today: Tim Berners-Lee produced his first written description of the Web.

This year CHNM and the American Historical Association will be pleased to award the first Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History in memory of our late friend and inspiration, Roy Rosenzweig.

The American Association for State and Local History has launched a traveling exhibition directory for museums and other organizations looking to find and publicize traveling exhibitions.

Smithsonian Director of Web and New Media Strategy, Mike Edson, has posted his spot-on treatment of lingering concerns over social media and web technology among collections professionals and administrators. The presentation originally appeared at the recent WebWise conference in Washington, DC.

Scholars may not like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the 21st century’s fragmented media environment, marketing and branding are key to disseminating the knowledge and tools we produce. This is especially true in the field of digital humanities, where we are competing for attention not only with other humanists and other cultural institutions, but also with titans of the blogosphere and big-time technology firms. Indeed, CHNM spends quite a bit of energy on branding—logo design, search engine optimization, cool SWAG, blogs like this one—something we view as central to our success and our mission: to get history into as many hands possible. (CHNM’s actual mission statement reads, “Since 1994 under the founding direction of Roy Rosenzweig, CHNM has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”)

In my experience, branding is mostly a game learned by trial and error, which is the only way to really understand what works for your target audience. But business school types also have some worthwhile advice. One good place to start is a two part series on “personal branding” from Mashable, which provides some easy advice for building a brand for your self or your projects. Another very valuable resource, which was just posted yesterday, is the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide. In it the team that managed to carve out a 20% market share from Microsoft for the open source web browser Firefox provides invaluable guidance not only on branding, but also on giving public presentations, using social networking, finding sponsorships, and dealing with the media that is widely transferable to marketing digital humanities and cultural heritage projects.

It may not be pretty, but in an internet of more than one trillion pages, helping your work stand out is no sin.

(Note: I’ll be leading a lunchtime discussion of these and other issues relating to electronic marketing and outreach for cultural heritage projects later today at the IMLS WebWise conference in Washington, D.C. I’ll be using #webwise on Twitter if you’d like to follow my updates from the conference.)