Balboa Park Online Collaborative Blog

Balboa Park Commons Launches with More Than 20,000 Digitized Materials from Seven San Diego Museums

posted on: 05/07/2013 - 7:22am by mdougherty

Rare collections from San Diego museums are now free to access online through this new collaborative resource

Contact: Maren Dougherty, Balboa Park Online Collaborative 

Email: mdougherty@bpoc.org | Phone: (619) 819-9200

San Diego, CA (May 7, 2013) — More than 20,000 rare and significant materials from Balboa Park museum collections are now freely available to the public to access anytime, anywhere via the Balboa Park Commons, a new online resource that launched this morning at www.balboaparkcommons.org.

Developed by the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), the Commons offers unprecedented access to digitized photos and artifacts from Mingei International Museum, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego Air & Space Museum, San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego Natural History Museum, The San Diego Museum of Art, and Timken Museum of Art.

“This is the first time you can look at the collections across the museums and make relationships that have never been made before,” said Christina DePaolo, BPOC’s Director of Digital Media. “The interdisciplinary aspect is what’s really exciting. Commons visitors can get images related to art, history, and science at once, which opens up new ways of learning about topics.”

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More than 100 years of California Garden magazine now online

posted on: 04/12/2013 - 8:26am by mdougherty

CA Garden We have just completed a two-year project to digitize and upload over 100 years' worth of the San Diego Floral Association's gardening magazine, California Garden. The first issue, published in July 1909, predates Balboa Park's landmark exposition (for which the vast majority of the Park's iconic buildings were constructed), and subsequent issues discuss not only gardening, but the development of the Park.

The San Diego Floral Association was founded in 1907 as a volunteer organization, and their early work was to help prepare the city of San Diego for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. They gave residents cuttings, seeds, and instructions about how and what to plant for the San Diego climate. Soon, they realized that they would need to begin providing written instruction, and California Garden was born. Many of the articles are written by famed horticulturalists Kate Sessions and E. Bernard, and cover such topics as rose varieties and cultivation, citrus trees, Balboa Park, "Victory" gardens, and almost anything else a gardener might be interested in.

The Floral Association believes that California Garden is the longest continuously-published gardening magazine in the United States. During World War II, when...

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BPOC Produces Video for Partnerships with Industry

posted on: 04/03/2013 - 5:01pm by mdougherty

Partnerships With Industry is a San Diego-based nonprofit that partners with over 200 local businesses to help adults with developmental and other disabilities to find work opportunities while providing fulfillment solutions to businesses. They recently received an award to produce a video specifically about their support of adults with autism in the workforce from Advancing Futures for Adults with Autism (AFAA) Applauds earlier this year.

BPOC only recently started providing services outside of Balboa Park and we were excited that Partnerships With Industry selected us to produce this video. Video Production Assistant Drew Mandinach and I gathered interviews to paint a portrait of the great work Partnerships With Industry does with clients on the Autism Spectrum. We travelled to Barc headquarters in La Jolla and Vitality Web headquarters in Poway, where Partnerships With Industry clients support various technology needs of these businesses. We interviewed clients, their job coaches, bosses, and colleagues to understand their work and relationships.

During a month of intensive filming and editing, we learned about the abilities of the clients to provide extraordinary support to local businesses, as well as the lives and careers the clients are building with Partnerships With...

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Timken Museum of Art is First in the Nation to Feature Innovative Place Sticker Mobile App

posted on: 04/01/2013 - 12:15pm by mdougherty

Contact: Maren Dougherty, Balboa Park Online Collaborative 
Email: mdougherty@bpoc.org | Phone: (619) 819-9200

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 1, 2013) –The Timken Museum of Art has launched a prototype of a mobile application that serves information about works of art based on a visitor’s location in the museum’s galleries.

In collaboration with Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) in San Diego, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, and the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experience (PRIME) program at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the Timken is the first museum in the United States to feature an Android-based mobile gallery guide using this experimental technology.

“The new app makes it possible for visitors to access much more detailed information than we’re able to include on the walls of our galleries,” said John Wilson, Ph.D., the Timken’s Director. “The world in general and museum visitors in particular are using mobile devices as part of their daily life. The Timken is committed to delivering information in the way contemporary audiences require."

Visitors start by downloading an app to their mobile device that features select works from the Timken’s collection. When the visitor is close to a work of art included in the app, supplementary information (text, audio, or video) is displayed on their device...

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Balboa Park Partners with Historypin to Offer a Then-and-Now Historical View of the Park

posted on: 03/14/2013 - 4:14pm by mdougherty

Digitization project to continue through the 2015 Centennial Celebration of the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park

Contact:
Maren Dougherty, Balboa Park Online Collaborative
Email: mdougherty@bpoc.org | Phone: (619) 819-9200

SAN DIEGO, CA (March 14, 2013) – In fewer than two years, Balboa Park will celebrate the centennial of the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition, a landmark San Diego event that sparked the construction of many of the Park’s most iconic structures.

To provide people with an engaging look at Balboa Park’s history in advance of this anniversary celebration, a group of Park organizations have teamed up to digitize and present historical images online using the interactive Historypin tool. Through Historypin, photographic images, videos, and audio clips are “pinned” directly onto a modern-day Google Map to provide visitors with a juxtaposed then-and-now viewing experience.

The interactive map launched to the public today.

The site is seeded with more than 100 historical images from The Committee of One Hundred, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego Air & Space Museum, and San Diego Museum of Man.

Staff and volunteers from the participating museums, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, and The Committee of One Hundred are helping to digitize,...

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