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February 2012

Where We’ll Be: BPOC Presentations at National Conferences

Our staff will present at four upcoming national conferences: WebWise, Museums and the Web, American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, and Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. We are grateful to the Institute for Museum and Library Services for supporting our participation in WebWise and AAM, and a portion of our costs for attending Museums and the Web. We will present on collaborative, IMLS-supported initiatives at all of these conferences.

IMLS WebWise 2012
February 29 – March 2, 2012, in Baltimore, MD

As a cooperator for WebWise, BPOC has been working on the conference program and publicity since early fall 2011. At the conference, Perian Sully, Project Manager: Digital Asset Management and Online Access, will be one of the organizers for "WiseCamp," the daylong unconference on Wednesday, Feb. 29. Christina DePaolo, Director of New Media, will be a panelist for "Better Together: Multi-Institutional Solutions to Digital Challenges," where she'll talk about her experience managing the development of the Balboa Park Commons. Maren Dougherty, Senior Editor, will assist with photography, video, and social media for the conference, and Rich Cherry, Director, will be providing support for the overall conference program and opening reception.

If you'll be there for the pre-conference workshops, be sure to attend the morning session "Playing the Past: Gaming, History, and Technology," where BPOC's contracted game designer Ken Eklund will discuss the development of the award-winning Balboa Park cellphone adventure GISKIN ANOMALY.

A collaborative project of BPOC and the Museum of Photographic Arts will be a featured demonstration on Thursday afternoon. MOPA’s Joaquin Ortiz will demonstrate “Your Photo Here,” a project to develop and test an open source online contest solution.

Museums and the Web 2012
April 11-14, 2012, in San Diego, CA

With MW in San Diego this year, you'll find BPOC staff and our Balboa Park colleagues participating in many sessions, workshops, and demonstrations. They include:

AAM Annual Meeting 2012
April 29 - May 2, 2012, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN

Later in April, you'll find BPOC staff presenting at the AAM Annual Meeting, themed Creative Community. BPOC staff will participate in sessions with colleagues from institutions such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Henry Ford, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sessions and roundtable discussions including BPOC staff include:

Society of American Archivists (SAA) Annual Meeting
August 9-11, 2012, San Diego, CA

For the first time, BPOC will participate in the SAA Annual Meeting when it comes to San Diego.

  • "Linking Data Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums," a presentation led by Su Kim Chung, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Corey Harper, New York University; Patricia Harpring, Getty Research Institute; Anila Angele, Bibliothèque nationale de France; and Perian Sully, BPOC.

There is a waiting list for WebWise but space is still available for Museums and the Web and the AAM Annual Meeting. Registration is available online.

For interested people who cannot make the conferences in-person, we’ll be Tweeting links to our papers and slides from @bpoc_sd.

BPOC recognized for internship program

This week, we received a letter and Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from Representative Duncan Hunter for our Wounded Warrior Technology Internship Program. We have been operating this program for the past year with funding from the Gary and Mary West Foundation and the Ruby Family Foundation. 

In his letter, Congressman Hunter wrote:

"You are to be commended for your work in assisting these great American heroes. As a Marine combat veteran, I am very much aware of the sacrifices that our Wounded Warriors have made on behalf of us.

In order to recognize your fine work, I would like to award you a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition to highlight your efforts."

We have had more than a dozen young service members participate in this program. They have provided great support to our staff and to our member institutions in Balboa Park. We thank Congressman Hunter for recognizing this program and the valuable contributions that our participants have made to our country: first in national defense and now, in arts and culture.

Certificate

To learn more about this program, read a recent San Diego Magazine article about one intern's journey.

 

 

BPOC Becomes Content Partner for Project Audience

Earlier this month, Project Audience announced a Southern California pilot project to develop an online resource to collect, manage, and publish arts and cultural information in Southern California. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project team will test the resource’s scalability and adoption potential for other regions, and examine the possibility of a national aggregation service.

BPOC, along with Arts Orange County, Artsopolis, and KCET (public television), has agreed to participate in the pilot project as a content partner. In coordination with ExperienceLA, a consortium of Los Angeles-area organizations, we will build upon and extend the functionality of the existing ExperienceLA.com resource.

Last week, a few BPOC staff members participated in a kick-off meeting in LA to establish requirements and specifications for the online resource. Microsite testing will begin this summer. A public beta testing site will then be established to mirror the tools developed for the Southern California resource, and provide other interested communities a testing environment to experience and evaluate the toolkit.

The goal of Project Audience is to provide communities with access to easy-to-use, low-cost, web-based tools and technologies that will increase arts and culture attendance and enhance the visitor experience. Learn more at projectaudience.ning.com

BPOC Launches Video Production Services

With the hiring of Video Project Manager, Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli, and the addition of two video production interns, Chris Radomski and Corey Pike, BPOC has started offering video production services to Balboa Park cultural institutions on a fee-for-service basis.

Anna has an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego where she also taught video production, performance art and film history. A video installation artist with a background in small-gauge film and photography, she closely follows the rapidly changing landscape of video technology for both production and display, specifically in context of the gallery and museum. She has worked as a technician for the Guggenheim Museum and developed video content for The San Diego Museum of Art, as well as with numerous individual artists providing consultation for projects and overseeing production of live events and finished video works. 

Together with Chris and Corey, Anna will work on a variety of video projects for members, including in-gallery video displays; educational videos for websites, podcasts, and kiosks; and videos highlighting special events and exhibitions. Just this past weekend the new video team with the help of a volunteer film crew produced content for a series of videos to advertise the Balboa Park Commons (due to launch this spring). Anna has also launched BPOC's first podcast on behalf of The San Diego Museum of Art, and with the help of her talented interns, will soon be completing a video series for SDMA to expand visitor experience of series of works in the Museum's collection.

She will also spend this year working on ConservationReel, a project funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to create an online portal for videos related to conservation and collection care for museum professionals inside and outside of the conservation field. Anna has already started pre-production planning with the Balboa Art Conservation Center for a series of videos to be shared through the ConservationReel website.

With this new field of production BPOC will continue creating innovative approaches to technology for museums: in this case, with video.

Or, in Anna's words: "We will use video and display technology to improve the visitor experience and educative potential of media material in context of programming found at the many institutions of the park. I am interested in how we can expand our concept of video in context of the institution, particularly for creating video that is conceptually fluid with the mission and mode of each institution."


Anna BPOC