February 2010 Update

Renewal Contracts

Renewal contracts were due on January 31^st.  If you haven’t sent yours in yet, it is absolutely imperative that you do so immediately.  Without a valid contract, services and support will not be delivered.

ITCMAC Meeting

The ITCMAC’s first meeting was held on Friday in Truro.  Thanks to Aidan Norton and the Colchester Historical Museum for hosting.  Topics of discussion included remote assistance & web conferencing, posting information in a Resources section of ANSM’s new website, and Anita & Karin’s upcoming trip to Ottawa to meet with CHIN and the other provincial associations.  It was requested that the issue of “old loans” and “orphan works” be raised at the PMA meetings as an advocacy issue. 

The next meeting will be held in Port Hawkesbury on April 22^nd (preceding the ANSM conference) and will be open to all participating museums.  This will be a dinner meeting, so please RSVP to Karin if you are interested in attending.

ANSM Website – Resources Section

As ANSM’s website continues to take shape, I have been working on developing resources to post for members.  The collections management documentation package will be available online, as will tip sheets on a variety of subjects.  And I’m taking requests.  Please let me know what resources you would like to see online.  This is something that will continue to develop as time and resources allow, so having a member’s wish list of items to get online would be a great help.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium

If you haven’t checked them out yet, Karin has posted her Symposium notes on the blog in four sections.  Find out how museums of all shapes and sizes are using technology to enhance their activities and expand their audiences.

Artefacts Canada Tally

With such a short month and the CHIN enrichment project being finished, most people took a break from uploading this month.  But one region uploaded another 862 records this month.  That means we now have a grand total of 153,993 records on Artefacts Canada.

Here are the new regional stats:

Southwest: 68,589

Central: 39,093

Northeast: 24,909

Cape Breton: 21,402

Congratulations to the Southwest Region for being the only group to upload this month.

Blog Polls

Thanks to everyone who voted in the recent poll about loans management.  The results were discussed at our ITCMAC meeting on February 19^th, and we will be looking for ways to assist participating museums with this issue.  Here is the summary of results:

Question: How do you manage loans in your collection?

• We have a loan policy – 81%
• We track our loans with our database/paper documents – 51%
• We regularly renew loan agreements/return items to lenders – 29%
• We don’t know where/how to start – 11%
• We just hope that no one comes to ask for objects back – 3%

Our next polling question is about how you are currently marketing the museum online.  As you know, we will be writing a report on online marketing this year, complete with realistic recommendations on how to increase your profile and expand your audience.  These results will be discussed at the April meeting, so please let us know what you’re doing.  This is a quick and easy way to provide excellent feedback to the ITCMAC which helps us better meet your needs.  Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the poll, and remember that you can select multiple answers.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium - Part 4

Connecting in the Museum

Paul Loke – Senior Assistant Director of Computing & Information Systems, National Heritage Board of Singapore

The NHB is working to increase visitor numbers by enhancing the museum experience through the following means:

1. Wireless internet – available free throughout all NHB museums (except in the bathrooms), with free public terminals.  This encouraged people to visit and stay longer, and also for teachers to research and conduct lessons in the museums.
2. Interactive panels – an increase in interactive exhibits provides extra layers of content, encouraging children to experiment and learn.
3. Gaming – designs tied to exhibit themes and used to increase the interest and hold attention of younger audiences.
4. Audio-visual guides – optional guides that can be downloaded to cell phones or other PDAs
5. 3D tours – an archive of exhibits are online for people who missed visiting them in person
6. SGCool – NHBs online repository of artifacts and art, allowing people to view Singapore’s cultural treasures from anywhere in the world

Connecting in the Communities through Research

Graham Larkin – National Gallery of Canada

The gallery has been working on reconciling artworks in their collection that contain a gap in provenance, particularly when the gap falls in Europe during World War II.  Of all of the research that has been conducted, only one artwork has had to be returned to the rightful owner.  They hope that three things come out of this work:

1. database of Nazi-era restitution art for provenance research
2. information on how to care for and address artworks with a gap in provenance
3. in-depth stories of the history of individual works will be shared

Digital Archive for Materials and Methods of Construction

Stephen Fai – Carleton University

Carleton has started a project to document ethno-cultural building practices in Canada, with the end goal being a culturally nuanced database that can be used in research work.  To pilot the project they focused on religious buildings as these would be the last to be culturally assimilated.  As these buildings are all aging and undergoing repairs and renovations, documentation of techniques and materials must be done before this information is lost.  Along with digital photographic images, the database will incorporate hand drawings, sketches and autocad drawings.  More information can be found at www.cims.carleton.ca.

Reciprocal Research Network

Susan Rowley – Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver

The RRN is a partnership project between the Museum of Anthropology, the Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council, and the U’mista Cultural Society.  Operating as an online portal to BC First Nations material culture, the website allows communities to build projects, collaborate, record stories, upload files, hold discussions, research museum objects and create social networks.  One of the driving forces of this project is the wide dispersal of Northwest Coast native material culture, especially those items that were removed in the 1800s and early 1900s and are now housed in museums around the world.  The RRN allows for the reconnection of these with the original communities, providing a circular sharing of knowledge and information.  Research projects can be completely customized, being open to the public or kept private between one or two individuals.  For more information, visit www.rrnpilot.org.

Panel: Connecting in Communities – Digital Art

Ready or Not – Trials and Triumphs of Supporting the Production and Presentation of Digital Art

Liane Davison – Manager, Surrey Art Gallery

The Gallery has been establishing itself as an innovation institution in terms of digital art.  They host family days, artist talks, and have a technology lab with an artist-in-resident.  In creating the artist-in-residence program they worked with artists to build a space that was tech-friendly and allowed for collaboration on development and installation of exhibits. 

Technology lab:

This space is dedicated to continually presenting digital art, and consists of acoustic walls, soundproof unbreakable glass, linoleum flooring, high ceilings with accessible trusses, two networks with multiple ports, three lighting systems and natural light, a lockable door controlled only by the artist-in-residence.  It serves as an adjunct to the exhibit hall which also has a youth media gallery, recognizing kids` desire for creating digital art.

DOCAM – Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage

Alain Depocas – Daniel Langlois Foundation

This project is a highly multi-disciplinary project that uses a multi-focus approach which includes documentation, conservation, cataloguing, terminology, technology and pedagogy.  Case studies will also be included.  It will look at the specific characteristics of new media works as they are often variable, unstable, location sensitive, performed, interactive, generative, non-linear, multimedia, open, hybrid, interconnected, networked, processual, collaborative, coded, and dynamic.

The question for museums becomes, ``what to preserve?``  Traditionally the need has only been to keep the object, but these new digital artworks require the keeping of the object, its functions and relations.  New documentation must be done in order to capture a functional description, user/visitor interaction, links and relations between components, and the pacing or rhythm of the piece.  This inevitably raises questions about authenticity and integrity.  A criteria must be set as these notions will never be perceived in the same way by artists, conservators, curators, etc.

Results of this project are that 5 tools have been created, outlining the functional requirements for bibliographic records.

1. Work – recognized as a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
2. Expression – the intellectual or artistic realization of the work
3. Manifestation – the physical embodiment of expression
4. Item – the single exemplar of manifestation

A cataloguing guide is currently being developed and will be available on CHIN`s website in the professional exchange.

Horizonzero.ca

Sara Diamond – President, Ontario College of Art and Design

Horizon0 was a collaboration between the Banff New Media Institute and Canadian Heritage, providing editorial commentary on the trickle down effects of Canadian new media art and invention to larger cultural industries.  It contains a deep and growing bank of current and recent knowledge about Canadian new media art, culture and invention and the institutions that made it possible.

The website is attempting to position itself as the vehicle to popularize Canadian scholarship on new media culture and technology.  It is a bilingual, national web portal that takes a unique approach and issue.  Navigation is guided by aesthetics and coherence, and it is accessible in flash and text versions. 

Originally it was anticipated that the big budget and high quality portal would be hosted by or linked to the Canadian online portal.  This fell through when a sustainability strategy could not be determined.  Horizon0 has recently returned with CodeLive as a relaunch and new issue.

Panel Question & Answer:

What should we preserve?

We need many different types of collections, mandates, and curators so in the future we will have a broad range of information.  This must include the documentation of the process of cultural networks, not just the art works themselves.  We need collective strategies and more dialogue.

How can museums serve a generation without memories based in objects and physicality?

We need to give up the authority of the museum.  We`ll always be looking for innovative solutions to issues of relevancy.  This is part of our heritage as museums and there is no real answer.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium - Part 3

Keynote: Interactivity in Museums

Agnès Alfandari – Head of Multimedia Department, Musée du Louvre

In 2005 the Louvre’s website went interactive.  The goal was for it to be an element of the Louvre in its own right, an arena of exchange, sharing and creation.  Visitors have been encouraged to highlight their Louvre experience before, during or after a physical visit, or just use the website on its own if they can’t make it to Paris.  The website was organized to be intuitive to the visitor instead of being based on how the museum thought things should be organized.  On-site multimedia would also be pushed, with changes being made in temporary and permanent exhibit rooms.  Mobile tools such as self-guided tours and other downloadable interpretation enhancing materials were also made available.

The museum asked itself how new technologies could help serve the missions of the Museum in key areas – curation & display of collections, reception & audience development; education, transfer, and dissemination of knowledge, and scientific research.  It was determined that communication and knowledge dissemination could be much improved, promotion could be very cost-effective using new multimedia, and visitors and professionals could explore the collections in new and exciting ways.  Concerns were also raised over the Louvre’s audience demographics, being well-off people who feel privileged and exclusive to be able to enjoy the museum.  They wanted to actively reach out and change that image and be viewed as a museum where all are welcome.

Museum Lab:

In determining how new technologies can contribute to a better understanding and grasp of art, individual pieces and groups of artworks were selected to have their interpretation enhanced by various forms of multimedia.  Considerations during the research process included managing visitor traffic, the need for multilingualism, and intellectual and physical accessibility.  Corporations or other groups wishing to partner with the museum can pay to have a mini-Louvre lab in a designated space using virtual displays of selected Louvre collection holdings.

Presentation methods:

1. Handling, experimentation and appropriation – allow visitors to gain a better view & understanding of the artworks through various hands-on approaches.
2. Immersion, whole body involvement – sensorial spaces for an intuitive, immediate approach to artworks or an artistic context.
3. Contextualization, reconstruction & exploration – art history and archaeological displays provide historical and geographic markers, such as the use of animated maps to show invasions, political powers, etc.
4. Observation – displays designed to guide or train the eye to view artworks or particular aspects of artwork.
5. Gaining new perspective on one’s gaze – displays encourage viewers to question their perception or impression of an artwork.
6. Guidance, instructions on how to use multimedia – intuitive as possible, with simple step-by-step instructions.

Question & Answer:

How exactly do these partnerships work?  How much control does each party have?

The partner pays the Louvre to do this work, so aside from control over which museum holdings are included, most decisions are made by the paying partner.  This is how and why the Louvre has a museum lab in Tokyo.  There were concerns when this project launched that there wouldn’t be enough interest for the work to continue after the initial testing, but the opposite has happened.  The work is being viewed as so innovative and exciting that there is currently a waiting list of potential partners.

Kurio – Museum Guide for Families

Ron Wakkary – Professor of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University

Museums are social places while technology is often not.  In order to figure how to improve a family visit to the museum, three areas must be examined:

1. adaptivity – identify characteristics and categories of group
2. interactivity – focus on game interaction to engage group
3. tangibility – develop playful, intuitive system interactions

How Kurio works:

The concept behind Kurio is that the family arrives at the museum as a group of lost time travelers.  In order to return to the current day they must reconstruct a time map by answering questions and solving exhibit-related puzzles around the museum.  In designing it, a tabletop was used to explain how the game works, and each family gets a PDA to coordinate their game efforts.  Individual mission assignments are given to each family member so that everyone has their own puzzle to solve.

User studies:

18 families representing 58 participants at the Surrey Museum were interviewed about their experience with Kurio.  Responses included comments about this provides something for everyone to enjoy and allows the family to bond since it forces them to work together.  It is also a way to naturalize technology and provide a physicality of interaction in the museum.  In the words of one child, “we actually got to do things, not just look or watch, we had to find stuff”.  This shift to exploration and discovery forces visitors to absorb information instead of just skimming through the exhibits and leaving.

Limitations:

The coordinating role can be overwhelming, especially for families of 4 or more since teaming up may be required on the various mission tasks.  The games also require a structure that can limit the experience in the museum.  And as with any technical venture, technological failures, no matter how minute, can be very disruptive in the game.

Placing our Bets – Planning the Canadian Human Rights Museum

Victoria Dickenson

Premises:

1. National museum with a global mandate
2. Museum of ideas, not objects
3. Subject is human rights
4. Approach is engagement
5. Goal is transformation
6. Medium is digital, the bet is ubiquity

Making the bet:

The museum’s planning committees are hoping for universal access, with tactile interaction for everyone despite their disabilities.  Displays will be multilingual, ensuring that the museum represents and provides access to Canadian indigenous languages.  In terms of collecting, the museum will follow principles of oral cultural, collecting oral histories and memories.  They have already begun this process by visiting 21 cities and talking with 2000 people, capturing hours of video memories and audio recordings, transcripts and roundtable reports.  This will be presented using “digital magic”, multi-touch tables, gestural interfaces, image recognition, etc.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium - Part 2

Panel – Connecting in Education

Connecting Into the Classroom: Removing Barriers – Creating Opportunities

Lisa McIntosh – Director of Learning, HR MacMillan Space Centre, Vancouver BC

It’s the same story that all museums have heard.  Schools don’t have the means to get the students out to the museum.  In order to analyze this issue, the Centre asked themselves three questions:

1. What do we have to offer?
2. What does our audience want and/or need?
3. What are the perceived and real barriers to participation?

It was determined that teachers wanted their students to experience the educational offerings of the science centre, but find it increasingly difficult to justify and/or organize class trips.  Curriculum supplements are wanted and needed, but must be advertised specifically to teachers instead of broadly through school boards. 

The Solution:

Video conferencing through Skype.  This means that the Centre can perform science experiments that may be viewed as dangerous or an insurance liability in seclusion while kids eagerly watch from the safety of their classroom.  They also discovered that their charging a fee for each session did not prevent teachers from bringing their classes to the Centre at a later date.  In fact, the online sessions boosted in-person visits and in some cases became viewed as the preliminary contact with the Centre.  This allowed their visit to be more focused and educationally specific instead of just providing a broad understanding of the issues.

Lessons learned:

Since you’re not in the same room, it is very important to remind the students that they aren’t just watching TV.  Encourage them to interact, and work hard to involve them throughout the session.  Remember that a time lag exists when using Skype and other similar systems, so slow down a little bit and take breaks & pauses to allow for this.  While you are still testing Skype in-house, take turns delivering information & being in the audience to gain a better understanding of the process.

Virtual Museum of Canada and Francophone Teachers: Cross-Cultural Survey

Maryse Paquin – Professor, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

CHIN has been working with member museums to build the Teacher’s Centre of the Virtual Museum of Canada.  Teachers can access curriculum enhancing information that includes images, audio and visual files from museums across the country.  At the end of each learning object are assignments and questions for students to complete.  These are easy to use and re-use, and are available for different grade levels.

Use of the VMC learning objects requires the integration of technology in the classroom so they can access the website.  Currently a minority of teachers use the learning objects, most of these being in rural areas where field trips and access to other information may be more difficult to obtain.  Teachers were/are initially hesitant to use the site, but love it once they have tried it.  They view it as an improvement to curriculum that saves money.

Research Questions:

1. What are the issues with the integration of the learning objects?
2. What is the value of learning objects?
3. Are you confident in the level of language of the learning objects?
4. How pertinent are the subjects & content of the learning objects?

Demographics:

Current VMC learning objects users are 25% male and 75% female, with the groups being 50% elementary, 45% middle/high school, and 5% home school.

Results & Recommendations:

Francophone teachers were asked to rank by order of importance, stating that ease of preparatory work, frequency of use, and value of French-language VMC projects were average while the content was very important.  All of the results were viewed as being reflective of the baby boomers and the emergency of a new generation of teachers who want to use online curriculum enhancers.  This would mean that over the coming years there will be a continued increase in the use of the VMC learning objects.

CHIN should advertise more so that teachers can easily find the VMC & learning objects.  Links to the VMC should be on teacher portals and promoted through school boards and at conferences and professional development events.  Suggestions should be taken from teachers on how to make improvements, and CHIN should broaden its scope to include learning objects for preschoolers. 

Youth Curators of the Future Project

Jérôme Gédéon – Project Coordinator, CHIN

Goals:

To entice youth aged 16-18 to consider a career in Museums by providing them with a behind-the-scenes look at participating institutions, thus gaining experience in curatorial practices.  Social media was used to share and discuss their creative work with participating students from across the country.  This would provide member museums with experience in using social media and open source software.

Other goals included partnering with CHIN members in innovative use of digital technologies, bringing youth into museums & galleries, and creating dynamic content for the VMC experimental lab.  They also wanted to test social media platforms to engage youth in culture and promote dialogue about art among youth from across Canada.  The project’s findings would be used to promote best practices.

Partners:

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Musée d’art de Joliette, Museum London, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and Kamloops Art Gallery were partnered with local high schools.

Process:

Eight teachers and 90 students visited their partner museum, saw the storage facilities, conducted research in the archives and interacted with staff.  In groups or individually the students selected an art work, conducted research and wrote a curatorial record for the object.  Museum staff provided guidance and a high-resolution image with copyright permission.  A multimedia company created a wordpress platform for the students to work in.  Facebook was also used since all of the students already had accounts.

Panel Question & Answer:

What did the students like most?

They loved getting the “real” picture of museum work, and also working with like-minded peers from across the country.

Is online stuff taking away from physical visitors?

It depends on how you view “visitors”.  The Space Centre records Skype sessions and participating students, including this in their visitor count.  They also put a dollar value to this work, charging for sessions.  That said, some teachers also follow-up with a real visit or follow-up a real visit with a Skype session.

Are there any plans to provide sessions for students and/or teachers to learn how to use the VMC?

Not at present, we must first convince teachers

Facebook vs. Wordpress…what did you find?

Facebook already has a massive user-base, so the students were very comfortable using it.  Wordpress does have some extra or usier features though, such a tagging and sharing

Panel Wrap-up

George Siemens – Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, Athabasca University

Museums must achieve a fine balance of maintaing their mandate but responding to societal needs.  This means they must be constantly experimenting, doing small projects whose failure won’t impact the institution.  In using Facebook, we must remember that there is a total lack of privacy – go in with your eyes open.  In terms of relevancy, we must meet people where they are, meet teachers at the space where they live.  It all comes down to asking the questions, “is it accessible and do people use it”.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium - Part 1

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium

Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver BC

February 4-5, 2010

Keynote: National Museums Online Learning Project

Speaker: Davis Anderson – Director of Learning & Interpretation, V&A Museum, UK

The V&A Museum started a project called Going Graphic in the late 1990s.  Visitors were given digital camers and asked to capture images of the exhibits & museum, manipulating the images into posters.  Not only did this provide visitors with a unique souvenir of their visit, but the ‘best’ posters were added to the Museum’s website.  A second initiative was developed that saw people uploading audio/video to the V&A’s website explaining why/what/how the Museum means and matters to them.  This saw an increase in one million visits to the website in the first year alone.

The National Museum Online Learning Project was born out of these successes.  In an effort to make their museum websites more useful for schools and kids, 9 museums joined forces in order to provide a much broader community appeal than just one museum doing something innovative.  The group wanted to demonstrate a productive, innovative, effective partnership model.  Other goals were to create sustainable and scaleable content and a technological model with potential for future re-use and growth across the heritage sector and to build a critical mass of high-quality digital learning.

WebQuests

Challenges are similar to CHIN’s Agora learning objects found in the teacher’s centre, where students are given tasks to accomplish while working through a virtual exhibit of items from the Museum’s collection.  Challenges include designing a variety of objects from furniture to clothing accessories, and learning about historical personages and architecture.

Creative Spaces is a social networking application that allows artists of all kinds to draw inspiration from participating museums’ collections.  Users make connections and form mini-communities of in interest around specific tools with museums and galleries as a continuing space of creativity & inspiration.  The website features 28 videos from users showing how different people are inspired by collections.

Issues:

$50,000 in legal fees to draft contract arrangements, and one partner’s micromanagement caused some tension and caused one partner to drop out of the initiative.  Initially it was very difficult to convince people to participate and coordinate efforts, although all say it has been worth the effort.  Some hesitation was due to opening up of the interpretation of the collections by the general public and other museums. 

Lessons Learned:

1.      When embarking on group efforts, it is absolutely imperative to draft an agreement on the common purpose, both philosophically and practically, in order to prevent conflict and slow decision-making in the future.

2.      Developing services with time-limited project funding is high risk and makes sustainability more difficult to achieve.

3.      Collective action through partnerships for the public good is only feasible when there are clear benefits (financial, technical, political, etc.) for the individual museums that participate.

4.      Museums must effectively argue for the value of their public resource.

Next Steps:

A group of 8 museums are meeting with the BBC to discuss sharing access to their digital archives.  The idea is that for a small subscription or access fee, the Museums as well as other publicly funded cultural institutions in the UK will be able to easily access information that will assist in the interpretation of their own collections.

Britain’s Government Strategy

Known as “Digital Britain”, proposed legislation will “enable commercial schemes for dealing with orphan works to be set up on regulated basis”.  For people unfamiliar with the term, orphan works are items in your collection that fall under the copyright act, but for whatever reason the rights holder cannot be found.  This limits how the object can be used by the Museum.  The proposed legislation would also state that “powers to grant rights over certain works could be exercised collective licensing arrangement and to assume a mandate to collect fees on behalf of rights holders who have not specifically signed up to that society.”

Keynote: Preservation vs. Perpetration – How to Keep Art Performing

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Electronic Artist

The traditional opinion of artists has been that artworks go to museum to die, but the opposite can now be said, especially for digital works that would need to be moved to new platforms in order to be preserved.  From the artist`s perspective, it is absolutely imperative that their intention for preservation be sought before any such preservation work occurs.  Some artists prefer to allow the art to have an ``honourable death`` instead of being migrated to new platforms.  While opinions are changing, they have viewed museums as traditionally being paternal and condescending in regards with artists` intentions for their works.

January 2010 Update

Renewal Contracts

Renewal contracts were due on January 31^st. If you haven’t yet sent yours in, please do so immediately.

ITCMAC Meeting

The first official meeting of the newly named IT & Collections Management Advisory Committee (fondly referred to as the “itchy committee”) will take place on February 19^th at the Colchester Historical Museum. Aside from the old Passage Steering Committee members that you all know and love (Derek, Gail, Dayle, Linda, and Jim) we will be welcoming Valerie Lenethan from the Nova Scotia Museum to the group. The agenda will include an ITCM (Passage) membership policy, evaluation survey and financial review.

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium

CHIN will be hosting a Digital Heritage Symposium at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver on Feb. 4-5^th. Karin will be participating in the Symposium online and will post a review of the event on the blog.

CHIN Enrichment Project

January 31^st also marked the end of our CHIN enrichment project. Thank you to everyone who participated and helped us meet the project deliverables. This year 27 museums took part, 8 of which had never before uploaded to Artefacts Canada. A total of 465 art works and other objects were photographed, researched, and uploaded. Here's our fun little statue (inspired by the Islands Museum) that helped us keep track of how many records were completed.  We added the bird (inspired by Colchester Historical Museum) when we reached the top of our little man's hat.  Check our the uploaded records to see if you can find our inspirations.

While Jen has finished this aspect of her work, she will be staying on staff until mid-March in order to tie up loose ends and assist with other ANSM activities.

Equipment Purchase

The external hard drives have arrived, and the order for microphones & webcams will be placed this week. In order to document delivery, sites will be required to sign a receipt. We will do our best to deliver these as quickly, taking advantage of regional meetings & events whenever possible.

Museums in the News

Several Passage sites have made the news recently. First is the Antigonish Heritage Museum, which became the focal point for a fundraiser for Haiti last week. The museum was featured prominently on the CTV evening news for playing its part in the fundraiser.

Also on the list is former PSC Chairman Ryan Scranton of the Annapolis Heritage Society. Ryan’s blog Annapolis Royal Heritage has been nominated for 3 different awards – 100 Best Museum & Curatorial Blogs of the World, and two from the 2010 Canadian Weblog Awards under the categories of arts & culture and placeblog. If you’ve never checked out his blog it’s well worth the visit, and you’ll understand why it’s getting so much attention.

Artefacts Canada Tally

As our CHIN enrichment project came to a close, we saw a little flurry of uploading. 8,027 new records were uploaded in January, giving Passage sites a grand total of 153,131 records on Artefacts Canada.

Here are the new regional stats:

Southwest: 67,727

Central: 39,093

Northeast: 24,909

Cape Breton: 21,402

Congratulations to the Central Region for uploading the most records this month!

Blog Polls

If you haven’t already, please make sure you vote in the blog poll about loans management at the bottom of the page. Results will be shared & discussed at the February 19^th ITCMAC meeting, which means that we need everyone to answer by the 18^th.

That's all for this month. If you're ever in Halifax feel free to stop by the office.  And don't forget to check out Anita's blog about her museums adventures in Nova Scotia.  Until next time...