I’ve got things I need to write about, and can’t quite find the time. In the meantime, here are some interesting reads from elsewhere:

7 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand Without Releasing a Sex Tape
Nicely sensationalist headline notwithstanding, I think most of us – techies or otherwise – could use some work on our own personal brands. Here are some tips to get you started.

Teaching with Omeka
Technology, digital history (or humanities – take your pick), and education. There’s plenty to glean from this Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Wave – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Just what it says. Useful for identifying problems at a glance.

Accessibility Wizard
Another useful accessibility tool. Select your role in web content creation, and get targeted tips on improving accessibility.

Cultural Heritage Collaborators: A Manual for Community Documentation — a new book, making me think it’s time to up my book buying budget. I’ve been trying to make do with just the library, but I doubt this will make it into their collection anytime soon.

Public Humanities Clinic at Brown University
I’m loving this idea. Within much of a budget for things like this in my state museum association, I’m trying to think of ways we could do something similar.

ArtSocialMedia
A host of social media resources from Beth Kanter.

Tate Handheld Conference Reading List
My “to-read” list is already too long. This just makes it worse. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to find some of these resources. I just wish I could find more time to read. (Or magically have them converted to audio, so I can listen to them on the way to work.)

I never really thought it would happen, but it has! Pachyderm 2.1 has been released!

We’ve talked about Pachyderm before, along with other options. If the iPad (and its abhorrence of flash) take over completely, Pachyderm may quickly become an irrelevant option. On the other hand, I wonder if there’s any possibility it may one day work its magic in HTML5, instead of flash?

I haven’t had a chance to tinker with it yet (how can summer be so busy?), but hope to soon.

Download:

I’ve been sending out some emails on behalf of our state museum association, and just received the following auto-response (names have been removed to protect the unknowingly guilty):

If you have gotten this message you have  emailed  *******.

(Or your virus affected computer may have… if so get a good service tech)
(Also if your mail server has problems and is infected YOU need to fix that I do not want to be involved!)

You Have  Contacted ****** –  THE MUSEUM!

If you have something  you wish to sell us for our Archive and displays here
at **** Please follow up  your Email with a phone call as we  get a
high volume of message into the in box and may not respond right away (***-***-****)

If  we are busy and ask you to call back please do so. Chances are we are running though the halls here
on the cordless and are not sitting at a desk to take a message  down on a pad!

Note We are a museum,  we do not have human resources files for  ***** and such things people
through google  request from us.

If any of your relatives were involved in any of the activities we document  here DO NOT
throw any thing away before you check with us.

Thanks for joining in the crusade to save history.

Thanks,

*****, Archivist for ******

See the Museum’s Web Site at ****

We are always looking for items to add to the museum’s display and ref. library – please advise if you have anything we can use.

(***ADDRRESS)

CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio e gli eventuali allegati sono confidenziali
e riservati. Se vi è stato recapitato per errore e non siete fra i
destinatari elencati, siete pregati di darne immediatamente avviso al
mittente. Le informazioni contenute non devono essere mostrate ad altri, né
utilizzate, memorizzate o copiate in qualsiasi forma.

CONFIDENTIAL: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may
contain reserved information. If you are not one of the named recipients,
please notify the sender immediately. Moreover, you should not disclose the
contents to any other persons, nor should the information contained be used
for any purpose or stored or copied in any form.

(The weird text formatting is original.)

This is such a perfect example of what not to do that I couldn’t resist.

And why the “Confidential” warnings? The email address is simply for the archivist at this organization. They’re not a doctor or a lawyer.  And why in heaven’s name is one of the warnings in Italian? Spanish in this area I could see, but Italian?

How many possible donors or friends get this auto-response, and not knowing much about computers, suddenly fear they have a virus?

Ouch.

In more general terms, this highlights the importance of checking all of your communications with someone who will give you honest feedback, but isn’t too close to the organization to see the problems. Can you try out a new auto-response reply on a neighbor, friend, business associate, or member before releasing it into the wild? When you make changes to your website, can you assign this same person to execute a specific task, while you watch them to see if there are any problems?

If you’re getting a lot of spam, or lots of messages seemingly sent from virus-infected computers, what can you do resolve that? There are several options — add a contact form with captcha to your website (to prevent (future) Bots from scraping your email address), change your email address (beware of this one, but sometimes extreme measures are necessary), heighten your spam protection (such as by routing your email through Google Apps/Gmail or something like Spam Assassin), etc.

or Why It’s Better to Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers.

Click over to The Oatmeal for the full series.

<Trying to decide if my boss would think it funny if I forwarded it to her.>

Awhile back, I posted about ways to create online exhibits.  There are some new entries, and I have some additional comments, so it’s time for an update.

One new option is Open Museum. Right now, curating exhibits there is free, although that should change when they reach their beta phase.  (See the business faq.)  In the meantime, this seems like a nice option, particularly for small museums without the confidence to try some of the options with more technical requirements, or for those who like the idea of having a more social aspect to online collections.  While if it became a commonly-known portal for online museum exhibits, I think that might make it more valuable.  I’m not sure what Open Museum provides right now though that is not built into Flickr.

There may be some other options available, depending on where you are.  In Arizona, for instance, there is the Arizona Memory Project, which brings some similar online exhibits options, although with some of the same drawbacks of Flickr or Open Museum (i.e., few options for configuring into a more creative exhibit).

Before I talked about Pacyderm. The new release of Pacyderm (via Pachyforge) is “slated for release in Fall 2009.”  Granted, Fall 2009 hasn’t passed yet, but there seems to be very little going on.  That could be because they’re working hard on the new release, or because not much is going on.

Both Open Exhibits and Collection Space are still pending.  Open Exhibits has released some interesting survey results.  The numbers themselves are interesting, as are some of the responses to the open-ended questions.

Larry Cebula at Northwest History has recently posted about different Collections Management software options.  There are some good contenders, and some overlap with the ability to create online exhibits (for instance, CollectiveAccess seems like it does a great job of putting collections online, although perhaps not so much as “exhbits”).

Right now, I think CollectiveAccess and Omeka are my picks for the win – assuming a museum has someone who can install (and maintain) them.  I haven’t yet tried installing CollectiveAccess, but I have installed and configured Omeka, and, at least on Dreamhost, it was super fast and easy.

Are there online exhibits options I’ve missed?