On Monday, at the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion entitled, “Can and Should Small Museums Be Technological Leaders?” We’ll primarily be talking about Web-based technology and I will be drawing on some of the results of a survey we’re conducting for Open Exhibits, a proposal for the National Science Foundation. In filtering the responses we’ve received thus far, there are some interesting findings with respect to computer-based exhibits at small vs. large museums.

I filtered 90 responses by operating budget. Those with an annual operating budget of less than one million US dollars I’m considering small (29 responses), while large are those with a budget of more than a million (61 responses).

There are some interesting preliminary findings with respect to the number of computer-based interactive exhibits produced at these museums and their overall capacity to develop them.There is a dramatic difference in the number of computer-based interactive exhibits that small and large museums produce. More than half of small museums (56%) produce no electronic exhibits at all, while only 14% of respondents from large museums reported that their institutions produced no electronic exhibits. Interestingly, 20% of small museums produce computer-based exhibits in-house, a slightly larger percentage than large museums (18%). Most large museums (56%) use a combination of in-house and outside resources to develop computer-based exhibits, but only 18% of small museums use that combination of resources.

There were also some significant differences in small and large museums’ capacities to develop computer-based interactive exhibits. Most small museums rated their ability to produce computer-based interactive exhibits at either “no ability” (30%) or just one notch up the scale (30%). No representatives from small museums responded with a 6 or 7 (”very capable”). Those representing large museums, however, had more varied responses which were spread across our seven-point likert scale from “no ability” to “very capable.”

If you haven’t yet done so, please take the survey. We’re going to keep it open through May. It is open to museums, science centers, and other informal education venues of any size. We’ll share the complete results with you once the survey closes at the end of next month. If you’re headed to AAM, perhaps I will see you in Denver. You may also want to check out the complete AAM 2008 Media and Technology Committee Sponsored Program Schedule.

Two projects we helped design and develop have won awards at this year’s Museums and the Web Conference held in Montreal.

ExhibitFiles won the Best of the Web award in the museum professionals category. Congratulations to our partners the Association of Science-Technology Centers and Indepedent Exhibits, and to our advisors and the many members of the ExhibitFiles.

The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. won the Best of the Web award in the exhibition category which included over 40 nominees. Congratulations to everyone at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. The judges had great things to say about the project, you can view their comments on the conference forum.

You can learn more about the ExhibitFiles and The American Image in the Ideum portfolio.

In just over two weeks, we’ve received more than 40 responses to our survey about computer-based exhibits in museums. The survey is open to museums of art, history, and science. We’re also hoping to hear from aquariums, children’s museums, planetariums, visitor centers, and zoos.

As Emily mentioned in our last post, we are conducting this survey to support a grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to research, develop, test, and disseminate open source exhibit software to museums.

As promised, we will share all of the survey results with those of you who have participated as soon as the survey is complete. We wanted to share a few preliminary findings that we thought were particularly interesting in the meantime.

So far, the results indicate that almost two thirds of electronic exhibits stay on the museum floor for more than 4 years. 40% of respondents selected “More than 5 years” when answering the question, “On average, how long does an electronic exhibit stay on the floor at your institution?” 8% selected “5 years” and another 16% selected “4 years.” The remaining responses were divided up between less than one year and up to three years.

55.9% of those who responded to the question, “Does your institution currently have Internet access in the public exhibit areas?” answered Yes. 26.5% answered No, and the remaining 17.6 % said Partial. These answers serve as a reminder that many museums are still struggling with basic Internet infrastructure issues. This feedback will likely inform our approach electronic exhibit development.

Obviously, these findings will become more valuable as we receive more responses. We really appreciate those of you who helped spread the word. Many thanks to following blogs for writing about Open Exhibits: Ancient World bloggers, Musematic, ExhibiTricks, Open Objects, and Museum 2.0.

Update: April 7, 2008 - We now have 73 responses to the survey.  Thanks to A Look at Art & Design for the survey mention.

We are in the process of writing our first National Science Foundation grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate three open source software templates that will allow museum professionals’ to assemble electronic exhibits for the museum floor. The Open Exhibits templates, as well as the source code, training opportunities, and prototype exhibits, will be made freely available to museums. The exhibits will be built using ActionScript 3 and Flex.We are seeking feedback from museum professionals so we can tailor our project to meet the needs of the field. We have put together a survey to help us assess those needs: to gain insight into the state of electronic exhibits at a variety of museums, to gauge interest in the Open Exhibits software templates, and to better understand museums’ technical expertise and constraints.If you are a museum professional, please take a few minutes to complete the survey — and please help us spread the word about it. It will take about 20 minutes and we will share the results with everyone who participates. We will also keep you updated about the status of Open Exhibits.

After toying with the idea of a public alpha, we’ve decided to keep RSS Mixer private for now. We’re still working through issues concerning performance and scalability — even with a modest number of feeds (we currently have 11,169), we’ve handled as many as 3 million posts.

Just last week, we moved the alpha server over to a new host. We’re now using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This will help us serve many visitors (if they come), but we are still sorting out some of the database issues that come with a system that contains millions of records. If you’d like an invite to the private alpha, please send us an email: rssmixer [at] ideum.com. We just ask that you are willing to share some feedback about the site. We’ll be posting a launch update in March.