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