A brief Wolfsonian-FIU chapter, reconstructed through surviving video work, showing early experiments in participatory storytelling, curator-led interpretation, installation documentation, and the institutional conditions that shaped what came next.
Tag Archives: DigitalHeritage
Canon umbrella tag for digital practice in cultural heritage: access, interpretation, collections, participation, platforms, preservation, and institutional strategy.
Preservation Technology Podcast: Interviewing the Field as It Changed
What remains is the belief that relationships beyond the walls matter, that cross-disciplinary curiosity matters, and that experimentation matters. Technology can extend the imagination and connect people in ways that allow a shared vision to advance further than any one person or institution could take it alone.
Digital Heritage Pros Share Top Tips for Developing Strategy
Digital strategy starts less with choosing technology than with getting clear about purpose, audiences, evidence, and actual institutional needs. Drawing on advice from practitioners across the cultural sector, this piece considers visual storytelling, CRM, testing, platforms, content, and the difference between what organizations want and what their audiences need. Together, the contributions make a larger argument: strategy is the discipline of connecting technology decisions to meaningful outcomes rather than accumulating disconnected digital projects.
My Heritage Twitter Lists, Developed Over a Decade
After more than a decade of using Twitter, Jeff Guin explains how curated lists became more useful to him than the general feed. Organized around fields such as archaeology, archives, built heritage, conservation, and digital humanities, the lists function as a lightweight professional listening system. The post is less about Twitter itself than about deliberate information architecture: creating focused channels that help practitioners find useful people, conversations, and ideas amid the noise of social media.
Information Technology: The less-fun, crucially important foundation of digital heritage evolution
Taking responsibility for IT initially felt like a detour from digital strategy and audience engagement. Instead, rebuilding the institution’s infrastructure revealed how deeply creative digital work depends on networks, servers, wireless access, policies, cybersecurity, and systems an organization can actually control. The experience reframed IT from a back-office necessity into strategic capacity: the less-visible foundation that determines whether ambitious digital interpretation can scale, adapt, and survive real institutional conditions.
Pinterest, Flickr, and the Road to GLAM-Wiki: Getting Collections Out of the Catalog
Two Othmer collection experiments—ballooning postcards on Pinterest and ceramic Christmas cards on Flickr—show an early shift from catalog-bound collections toward platform-native interpretation, GLAM-Wiki, and public knowledge infrastructure.
Promote the Heritage of Your Community with Interactive Google Maps Tours
This guide shows how simple online maps can become tools for place-based interpretation, heritage tourism, volunteer coordination, and community storytelling. Using Louisiana’s Cane River region as an example, it walks through setting goals, selecting sites, adding context, and building a useful interactive tour. The central lesson is still sound: mapping works best when it does more than mark locations, helping people understand relationships among place, history, access, and story.
Interpretive Animations Can Activate Audience Connections to History
A partnership with University of the Arts explored whether animation could restore some of the human context that museum objects often lose behind glass and barriers. Students translated paintings, scientific history, and collection stories into short-form interpretive videos, improving the process through repeated experimentation. The project revealed both the promise and difficulty of collaborative digital interpretation: creative technology works best when artists first understand the meaning, audience, and historical context they are being asked to animate.
The Strategic Linchpin: Transforming Digital Tools into an Interpretive Platform
A strategic linchpin is a technology or approach that solves several institutional problems at once and becomes a platform for further work. Drawing on examples including the Preservation Technology Podcast and later digital initiatives, this piece argues for experimentation followed by concentration: test broadly, learn what creates value, then invest more deeply in the approaches that connect audiences, staff, content, and organizational goals. Strategy emerges when isolated tools begin functioning as parts of a larger system.
Social Media Lessons from User Studies for Digital Library Development
Lessons from contributing to User Studies for Digital Library Development and why audience research should shape digital collections, services and platforms before technology choices are made.