mid-March Update 2009

Association of Nova Scotia Museums

The ANSM conference and annual general meeting is fast-approaching. If you have not renewed your membership we strongly encourage you to do so. While the membership year was extended, just because you were a member last year does not mean you are still a member. This is your provincial association, and the AGM is where you can make sure that your voice is heard. Given recent events and current circumstances, it is imperative that the board of directors receives a clear message about your wishes for both Passage and the ANSM. Without you, there is no association.

Call the office at 1-800-355-6873 or 423-4677, or visit the website for more information.

You have to be a member by April 14^th in order to be eligible to vote!

Passage Renewal

Thank you to everyone who has paid their Passage renewal fee and sent in their signed contract. The deadline for renewal is April 15^th, and all renewal fees and contracts must be received by the Wolfville Historical Society by this date.

CMA Conference

Karin will be in Toronto next week for the annual Canadian Museum Association Conference (March 24-28). The conference program is filled with a wide range of workshops and information sessions that promise to be very beneficial to the Passage Steering Committee and partner sites. As with the CHIN meetings, a full report will be written and sent out to Passage partners on her return. Please contact Lynn for assistance while Karin is away.

SDI Interim Report

Our interim progress report to the Strategic Development Initiative is due at the end of the month.

The following funding deliverables will be reported on:

· 100,000 records uploaded to Artefacts Canada

· Data Cleansing for 15 sites

· 50 site visits

· 500 enriched records

· Regular contact & communication with member institutions

· Increased communication & co-operation

· Improved management practices

As you can see, the biggest deliverable is having at least 100,000 records uploaded to Artefacts Canada. To date we have uploaded over 60,000 records, making the completion of the "funding deliverables" seem far less formidable, and with all partners’ active and full cooperation we can certainly achieve them. We cannot, of course, fail without the prospect of consequences, but we do not want or need to dwell on that. Lynn has been hired and we are looking at the ways and means of extending her employment until mid-July at which time we hope for a CHIN grant to keep her on after that. So, with both Karin and Lynn focusing on that level of uploading production for the remainder of the year, we are making available considerable resources to assist you all to do that. We believe that by reaching a total of 125,000 records uploaded, the Heritage Division will be well satisfied with the project results.

Uploading to Artefacts Canada

For those of you who still have reservations about uploading information, please enjoy as we did, this video created by Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution. It is slightly interactive and we encourage you to share it with others in your Society. The nature of public ownership of collections and access to property cared for by institutions is rapidly changing (in fact has changed) with the universal uptake of the internet and this is increasingly where our stakeholders, whose numbers have suddenly multiplied overnight, look for and expect to find information. The video playfully rebuts the traditional view of museum stewardship. As statistics indicate (counter intuitively to some) that far from diminishing museum visitation, sharing information of all kinds actually increases it.

If you can't access the video through the hyperlink, paste the following into your web browser:

http://usingdata.typepad.com/files/webTechGuy.html

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