I shared a ride to the airport with some colleagues who had very different takeaways from the conference than I did, so it’s clear there wasn’t a universal message. Everyone picks and chooses the ideas that might apply to what they’re working on.  Here’s what stood out to me:

Cast wider nets: organize, filter, present.

Just as we’re getting good at putting our content online and connected internally, we’re starting to realize that’s not good enough. We need to connect more dots for our visitors: show related content not just from our institution, and not just from other institutions in the sector, but the entire web. We’re still a trusted source dealing with authoritative information, but we’re now expected to use that authority to interpret and present more than just our own content.

Part of this includes opening up our content in return so that we can be part of someone else’s related content. This includes OpenGraph markup (FaceBook, etc), simple machine readable versions, and above all: sort out our licensing and make it easy to understand what can be shared and how!

Standardize access, not content.

There was some of the usual hand-wringing over metadata formats and authorities, but also some new ideas on skirting that hurdle rather than jumping it. While everyone agrees we need to continue to work towards clean, linked, open data using shared authorities, there are a number of steps we can take right now that can potentially have a great impact.

Namely, what if we standardize the access to the data, rather than the data itself? Rather than building another API (although we’re still going to), we can provide similar and simpler functionality right now. (In an afternoon, if my impassioned rant is to be believed!  🙂  Details to follow.)

Stop inventing. Iterate.

A great demo (early beta here: http://trope.com/miami/) was given in the unfortunate timeslot of 8am on Saturday morning. The Art in Public Places project by Miami-Dade County is, to quote @minxmertzmomo: “a great example of doing the obvious thing excellently”. There is a tendency to try to solve our shared problems in a unique way with a special and clever twist (guilty!), when instead we should be choosing best-practices from working solutions and applying them in an un-complicated way. To reach higher we need to stand on others’ shoulders instead of building our own stepladders.

Don’t finish building the wrong site.

James Davis from the Tate presented a great paper describing the process they’ve taken to launch the new (also beta) version of their Collections site: http://beta.tate.org.uk/art/explorer. The paper is a lovely narrative exploring the issues we face when development takes years and we must constantly remind ourselves to not finish building what we started building, but instead what it’s become along the way.

Summary

For me the conference provided a great summary of the latest innovations and thinking of museums online, and affirmed for me many of the choices and directions we’re taking in our current relaunch project. It was fantastic to see old friends and make new ones, and hopefully set the stage for future collaborations. I’ve also got a growing list of stuff to steal (er, shoulders to stand on.. :). Fantastic stuff all around!