This is the fifth of the daily updates of the Cultures Connected:  Automating
Museums in the Americas and Beyond conferences, being held in Washington, D. C.
this week.
 
  Thursday (Sep 1) saw the MCN conference get off to a big start.  Following
brief meetings of the MIS, Small Museums, and Vocabulary and Cataloging Special
Interest Groups, everyone assembled in the auditorium for the opening plenary.
  After some announcements, CIDOC's chair, Andrew Roberts spoke to everyone
about synergy -- saying in particular that he sensed, and was pleased by, a
great deal of synergy between CIDOC and MCN at this, their first joint
conference.  Following that, the out-going president of MCN, Diane M. Zorich,
gave a brief introduction to just who and what the Museum Computer Network is,
and also explained briefly what CIMI is all about.
  Then Rachel Allen -- this year's MCN conference chair -- introduced the
keynote speaker, Robert C. Heterick, Jr., president and CEO of EDUCOM.  Dr.
Heterick's speach was immensely entertaining, as well as informative.  Between
jokes and Russian folktales, he spoke to the attendees on the implications of
the information revolution going on right now.  Before closing, he urged
everyone to ask themselves two questions:  What does all this change mean for
the way we do business? and Are we in the right business at all?
  After the opening plenary, the conference-goers attended a variety of panel
discussions that ran throughout the day.  Among the first round of sessions was
"Homegrown Applications -- Adaptive Uses for Off-the-shelf Packages", moderated
by management consultant, Abby McLean.  Although the three speakers' experiences
with "making do" with "home-grown" solutions were each very different from one
another's, there were a number of similarities.
  They all agreed that it meant a lot more work for the museum staff, especially
during setup.  They also agreed, though, that the budgetary savings were well
worth the hassle.  Finally, they each demonstrated that, when developing a
networked database, the first thing one should look at is what the actual users
will be most comfortable with.
  One of the afternoon sessions, "Virtual Museums:  VR, Ubiquitous Computing,
and Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction", gave attendees a glimpse of the
future of the marriage of museums and computers.  The first speaker, Thornton
Staples of the University of Virginia, described the ongoing development of the
online Rosetti "collection" set up at jefferson.village.virginia.edu.
Unfortunately, he was unable to establish a connection to the site, and thus
could not fully demonstrate this unusual hypertextual arrangement of poetry,
prose and images developed as a WWW site.
  Next came a demonstration of Apple Computer's soon-to-be-released QuickTimeVR.
With this, applications can be developed that allow the user to pan, zoom, move
and interact with photo-realistic 3-D worlds.  The system, amazingly enough,
doesn't require much in the way of processor speed, and the average QuickTimeVR
file, at near-best resolution, averages around 800k of storage.  This means one
can create, with no fancy extra hardware, a fair-sized museum that will fit on a
CD-ROM.
  The final demonstration was of a virtual museum put together by the Michael C.
Carlos Museum, in conjunction with the Multimedia Technology Laboratory at the
Georgia Institute of Technology.  Interestingly, the developers decided to use
rendered (rather than scanned) images of their museum, which allowed the virtual
version to be more easily customized by only displaying those objects -- whether
on display in the "real" museum or not -- that fit their particular "lesson
plan".  This was in accordance with the museum's policy of, when dealing with
tours or school groups, focusing in-depth on a small collection of related
objects, rather than overwhelming the visitors with the contents of an entire
gallery or more.
  Another interesting session held that afternoon was "National Information
Infrastructure: A Legislative Update", led by Michael Roark, recently of the
American Association of Museums.  (Michael's replacement is Christine Walker.)
Speaking on the panel were Thomas Hardy of NTIA and James Wilson, advisor to the
House of Representatives Subcommittee on Science.  Much of interest was said
during this session.  For those that don't know, The NTIA is the overseer of the
recently created TIIAP award program which grants money to educational and other
entities to help forward the creation of the National Information
Infrastructure, by helping them to get set up and on line.
  For the first award, TIIAP had only twenty-six million dollars to award, and
they received proposals and requests for around one-billion dollars in grants.
Of the 1,070 applications sent in, however, only 27 were from museums.  Because
getting museums on board is a significant goal for the administrators of TIIAP,
Mr. Hardy wanted to make absolutely certain that the community of museums were
fully aware of the program, whose funds will be increasing over the next couple
of years.  That being said, here is how you can get in contact with the people
who can answer all your questions regarding the award program:
 
     email: [log in to unmask]
     voice: 202-482-2048
       FAX: 202-501-5136
       ftp: iitf.doc.gov (look for the public grant information directory)
     modem: 202-482-1199 (2400 or 9600 bps, 8/N/1)
 
  The most likely schedule for the 1995 awards is as follows:
 
Officially solicit proposals and applications:  October or November '94;
All proposals and applications due:  January or February '95;
Announce final decisions on awards:  September '95.
 
  There were, of course, other sessions held on Thursday.  In fact, there were
eleven of them, not including the walking tour of Washington, the TMS Users
Group meeting, and a Shopping Session organized by Mary Case.  In addition, the
Exhibition Hall was open all day long for those who missed it the previous day,
as well as for those who wanted to check it out some more.
  Finally, the day's events concluded with a pleasant, mule-drawn boat trip
along the C&O Canal in Georgetown, during which the conference-goers snacked and
socialized before returning to their lodgings.  All in all, it was a promising
start to the MCN segment of the joint conference.
 
Although the conference is scheduled to continue until Saturday, this may be the
last Update that gets posted to CIDOC-L and Museum-L.  My company, from which I
have been taking a vacation, has apparrently worked itself into some sort of
crisis that demands my attention, so I'll be leaving D. C. sometime Friday.
Depending upon what time I end up leaving, I may be able to put together one
more update, but I can't guarantee that.  Sorry.  Bill's work at the National
Zoo has kept him pretty busy, so I don't know if he'll be able to pick up the
slack when I'm gone.  Whatever the case, it's been fun.  I personally suggest to
all those who can manage it to try and get to the next meeting of either CIDOC
or the MCN -- you'll be glad you did.
 
-Glenn