This just in from NOAA…
“The National Marine Sanctuaries Media Library is an online vault where a comprehensive collection of select video clips and high-resolution still images from America’s underwater treasures are securely stored and available for searchable access and download.”
As part of our mission to share ethical underwater archaeological research
with the general public we have created a group page on Facebook. We hope
to reach a new audience through this medium by reaching out to groups who
perhaps know little about what we do. Why are we telling you since you’re
already visiting the MUA?
Our Facebook group allows visitors to upload their own videos, photos,
links, discuss topics, and ask questions. So if you’d like to let people
know about you and your work without doing a formal web post this could be a
great option for you. An additional benefit is that through issuing
invitations to your Facebook “friends” you can help spread the word about
preserving submerged cultural resources.
To join our Facebook group you will need your own Facebook account. It’s
free and easy to join. Once you’ve done that just search groups for “Museum
of Underwater Archaeology (MUA)” and click join.
You’ll be surprised by just how many folks you know who have already joined.
Last week we announced that the Museum of Underwater Archaeology’s “Holding History in Your Hand” (HHYH) classroom learning kits were ready for shipping world wide. The response has been incredible with inquiries coming in literally from around the world. If you’re not familiar with the kit you can view the brochure here. The MUA staff has been conducting the HHYH exercise for several years now. But since we can’t be everywhere at once we worked with members of the East Carolina University’s Maritime Studies Association to create a lesson plan and artifact analysis guide so that school teachers and other organizations could conduct the exercise themselves.
But one of the most exciting things for us was the decision to augment the lesson plan with additional exercises that let teachers use the MUA website as a teaching tool. We’ve built up a great collection of projects written by underwater archaeologists from around the world but after you’ve read say a field journal written in 2006 what more can be done with it? Is it then time to send it off to the archive to wither away? We don’t think so.
One of the primary goals for the Museum of Underwater Archaeology is to encourage Underwater Archaeologists to use the Internet to share their research with the world. We also want to highlight what Internet tools are available for those folks who want to dive into the cyber ocean themselves. To that end we have featured links and articles about Internet tools on our blog. Today, however, we have incorporated a freely available Internet tool from Google Maps. Last spring our audience let us know through our online survey (another freely available tool) that they wanted to see more maps to show where different projects were taking place. Today we have posted a new way to navigate our site. You can now view a world map and select what project you’d like to see based on its geographic location. It’s an especially great way for younger students to see what work is taking place around the world.
In addition we have reorganized our home page to make it easier to see all of our content in one place (another great user suggestion). In the future we hope to create ways to let the viewer organize the page based on their own interests.
We will continue to explore the many freely available software tools for databases, museum exhibits, photo slideshows, bibliographies, time lines, and more. Stay tuned and check out our new look and organization.
Look for the map under our “New to the MUA” section found here:
Best regards,
Kurt
This morning I received word that Dr. Roy Rosenzweig passed away yesterday. Roy was the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University where I am enrolled as a PhD student. There are many others there that knew him far better than I did and I’m sure could and will tell better stories about him. My time in the program had not occasioned many opportunities to work with Roy. I spoke to him at length only a few times but it occured to me today just how much this man has influenced my own life. I can only imagine how his passing will impact those that worked more closely with him.
CNN posted a video story that has some important implications for organizations considering using Flickr to help them create slide shows for their websites. While API’s offer promise for helping websites add technical content that website owners might not have time to develop on their own, if they are simultaneously giving up ownership of their images then they may find the price of this “free” assistance to be too high. View the story here: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/09/24/intv.virgin.flickr.lawsuit.cnn
Ben Ford, author of the Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape Project Journal on the MUA recently wrapped up his summer work on the lake and was interviewed on Blog Talk Radio. You can listen to the interview here: (http://blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=42233)
I would love to hear from readers if they have other blog talk radio stations they visit online.
Ben’s sixth post will be online soon. You can see his current entries here: (http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/project_journals/bf/bf_intro.shtml)
Dave Shirlaw recently posted the following article on the MARHST-L list. It’s an interesting comment about the impact of the Internet on museums. Our comments follow.
Kurt
NEW YORK, Aug. 9 /PRNewswire/ — That’s not simply a rhetorical
question. With diminished government funding, dwindling audiences and a
tenuous connection to the next generation of patrons, museums are facing
a challenging 21st Century. To attract new audiences, museums have
mounted blockbuster exhibitions, enlisted starchitects to build
expensive additions/expansions and introduced hip evening events with
DJs and cocktails.
But the real problem may well be the museum experience itself. And for
many younger targets — particularly the under-30s who grew up with the
instant gratification of the Web — it remains as didactic and passive
as it has been since the 19th century. Read the rest of this entry ?
The MUA website has grown over the last year and despite the recent addition of some talented volunteers we have had to look for ways to work more efficiently while striving for professional standards. Our recent move to WordPress is hopefully a step in the right direction.
In the months ahead we’ll be experimenting with open source software and other online tools such as Zotero (from George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media) to help us in our mission of assisting underwater archaeologists in presenting their research to the general public. We encourage others to explore the many ways in which they can enhance their public outreach AND we ask that you share your knowledge with us.
One of the reasons we started this blog was to offer suggestions and help with some of the more technical aspects of presenting research online. Tools like WordPress make it far easier to do so than was possible even just a few years ago. To help spread the word about the current trends in humanities computing we now feature links to a few other blogs and websites that while not really related to maritime history or underwater archaeology they are incredibly useful and informative about ideas that could be adapted to our field. Dr. William Turkel’s site on “Place Based Computing” is one example. Dr. Mills Kelly’s Edwired Blog discusses using new media in teaching. By engaging in public outreach we all become teachers in a way and these folks have a great deal to offer. I hope you’ll check them out.
-Kurt
What’s web accessibility? Do I need to make my new website accessible? What if I’m just getting started building web pages? All of these questions went through my mind over the last year as we continued to try and improve the MUA site. It seemed like a huge job. I had already built so much material that the prospect of going back and redoing it was not attractive. But as our goal was to reach as many people as possible and not dismiss a large segment of the population, we had to investigate what exactly that might involve. A review of several articles and a closer look at software I was already using demonstrated that this was not an insurmountable task. I’ll be the first to admit, however, this is an ongoing project for us and the site, in its current state, needs a lot of work but we believe it is well worth the effort and is important to discuss. Read the rest of this entry ?
