Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut”

The CIDOC 08 conference theme: “The Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage” inspired the paper presented in Athens, Greece. Titled, “Designing for mere mortals: a methodology for developing accessible, educational multimedia” discusses the importance of planning for the development of accessible, rich-media content and developments on a workflow for creating mobile educational content as well as recent trends in Flash development for delivering access for all.

The paper is accessible here: http://cidoc.mediahost.org/content/archive/cidoc2008/EN/site/Home/t_docpage1680.html?doc=/Documents/conference/papers_79

On June 7, the long awaited graduation day at Harvard, my thesis research project was honored as the winner of the Dean’s Prize for outstanding thesis in Museum Studies! Thanks again to Jim Devine, my thesis director and Kathy Burton Jones, research advisor, for their support and guidance. Additionally, a book project is in the works to get the research published.

The complete text of my thesis research entitled, Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut” has been posted to this site. The analysis of the museum and developer surveys are included in Chapter III; case studies featuring interactive projects developed by The Library of Congress and Terra Incognita (Chapter IV), The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Second Story Interactive Studios (Chapter V), and The Tate Modern (Chapter VI) provide exemplary models for creating accessible rich-media online. Chapter VII offers a summary and conclusion of the research findings, along with recent developments in accessible multimedia, particulary for Flash developers.

Jim Devine, my thesis director and Head of Multimedia at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, has organized a demonstration session at Museums and the Web 2007. Myself, Jason Springer and Kurt Stuchell will be presenting our thesis research projects on the theme of “All Access” for museums. The demonstration will take place on Saturday, April 14 from 9:30 - 11 am at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A description of the demonstration can be found on the Museums and the Web conference web site or download a pdf of the presentation.