As we mentioned in posts earlier this year, we’ve written and have now submitted a proposal with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) to fund an open source initiative to develop software for computer-based interactive exhibits.  Our preliminary Website for the Open Exhibits project is now available at openexhibits.org.  The new site contains a screencast introducing the project along with a description of this planned project.

Also on the Open Exhibits site, you’ll  find results from the survey we conducted in April and May of this year. We had a total of 125 responses from 110 museums.  The survey results can be filtered by small and large museums, as well as informal science institutions.  You’ll also find  links to our Facebook group, YouTube page, and Flickr presence.   Please join us on these sites and we’ll keep you up-to-date as we  (hopefully) start this new initiative.

This weekend, I headed up to Chaco Culture National Historic Park on the summer solstice to see traditional dancers. The Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice since 2000, and I’ve been lucky enough to be at four out of the last five (you can see photos from 2004, 2006, 2007, and there are lots more photos of Chaco Culture at the Traditions of the Sun Website.)

The dancers perform in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. For those of you who’ve never been to Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito is largest of all the great houses found in the park, with nearly six hundred rooms, and it was three stories in some parts. Pueblo Bonito was built around 1000 AD and was continually built on for a few hundred years afterward, until the Chacoans left the area in 13th Century. Pueblo Bonito is a truly dramatic setting and it is a very emotional experience for those who dance; Chaco is the home of their ancestors after all.

This year the group of dancers were from Acoma Pueblo (which is the oldest, continually inhabited community in the U.S.). Below are some photos from their two morning dances. There are a few more photographs, including high-resolution versions on the Ideum Flickr site.

Dancing in the Plaza.

Marking the start of summer.

The two youngest dancers hold beautiful Acoma pottery.

Back in May of 2006, we launched Museum Blogs (www.museumblogs.org) as an experimental site and to “help increase the community’s awareness and authority.” By authority we meant search rankings and Technorati ranking in particular. By aggregating all of the collective feeds the site has created additional links to all the museum blogs in the directory.

When the site launched there were only around 50 museum blogs and now two years later there are nearly 300 in listed in the directory.  In just a few hours, we will exceed 100,000 blog posts, a pretty remarkable development for the museum blogosphere which, by all estimates, was pretty far behind in using blogging technology.  Two years later blogging is common-place among many museums and is seen as just another way to communicate with the public.

A new and improved version of  KQED’s QUEST Website, which we helped to develop, is now live. QUEST is an ambitious project utilizing all of KQED’s platforms to not only broadcast science and nature programming, but to also build a community supporting further exploration in the area. Ideum worked with KQED to design a website promoting community participation via an interactive mashup-driven website.

The most recent version of QUEST includes a number of improvements intended to simplify the navigation of the site’s ever-expanding content. With nearly 100 television broadcasts and around 65 online radio broadcasts, the initial sort features (time based) became difficult to use. The radio/television tab can now be filtered by topic and type and the main map features the latest five items instead of search features.

You’ll also notice that blog posts are now displayed as items on the main site’s map - a feature we were able to implement using data from the geopress plugin for WordPress. This feature means that all of KQED’s great content can now be available within the Google Map Mashup. Since the purpose of KQED QUEST is to explore “the stories behind Bay Area science, nature and environmental issues,” this addition makes perfect sense. Take a look at the KQED site or check out  KQED Quest in our portfolio to learn more.

Last night a number of us from Ideum went to the opening of Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico at the New Mexico Museum of  Natural History and Science.  We helped develop two computer-based interactive exhibits for this exhibition.

The Fossil Viewer touch screen allows visitors to pan and zoom an image of large fossil block discovered at Ghost Ranch here in New Mexico.  There’s more about this interactive in the Ideum portfolio (see Triassic Fossil Viewer).

The other interactive exhibit is a small database collection of information about Coelophysis, the official State Fossil of New Mexico. We haven’t added this to our portfolio yet, but you can see the Web version of this kiosk at nmstatefossil.org. The floor version is a bit different in design and functionality. This Web-based exhibit was developed using Ruby on Rails.

The Coelophysis database exhibit uses the iCab browser, which has an excellent kiosk-mode. Both of the interactives we developed with the Natural History Museum run using Mac mini computers. Along with their low cost and small footprint, we found them powerful enough to run a 24″ monitor at a 1920 x 1200 resolution (for the Fossil Viewer).

Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico opens tomorrow, May 17th and will be a permanent part of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.