ReadWriteWeb

Museum aan de stroom - a brand-new city museum covering the art, shipping and folklore of Antwerp, Belgium - is offering web visitors real, real-time guides. Through June 7, visitors to the museum's website can interact with, and direct, flesh-and-blood guides through their Discover the MAS Live program and website.

Using your computer, you "capture" a live guide and, your arrow keys, direct him or her to explore the museum for you in real time.

Today is International Museum Day. Celebrated annually on May 18 since its inception in 1977, the day seeks "to raise awareness on how important museums are in the development of society."

Well, ReadWriteWeb is lousy with museum-goers, and we have paid attention to some of the technological advancements and experiments that museums have seen over the last year. We thought we would celebrate by bringing some of those to the fore.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is asking the public to help them identify a bunch of gear in their digital collection that their experts cannot figure out. As io9 put it, the NIST "doesn't just produce technical specifications for everything from wifi to voting machines - they also have a digital archive devoted to the study of early technology."

The mystery machines, which come from the NIST's collection of scientific instruments in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

April 2011 will mark the 150th anniversary of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War, and museums, municipalities, and historic sites are making their preparations for the events and exhibits to commemorate it. And while, no doubt, times are tough for funding cultural heritage projects, there's a lot of excitement and momentum building around the sesquicentennial, making it a great opportunity for those exploring how technology can make history more interactive.

"A more valuable field trip" - that's the argument that Pennsylvania high school social studies teacher Jeff Mummert makes, pointing to the increasing accessibility of both mobile and augmented reality technologies as ways to "offer deeply interactive projects for students and the general public."

To that end, Mummert has created the Civil War Augmented Reality Project (which recently evolved to become HistoriQuest). Aimed at giving both students and the general public a richer experience, the Civil War Augmented Reality Project wants to build apps that will use augmented reality to connect primary documents and photographs to local historic points of interest.

There was an interesting article recently in The Wall Street Journal by Isacc Arnsdorf that discussed how art gallery and museum patrons are studied as they move through art exhibits. The objective is simple: measure how people navigate through and engage with the art. When I read the article, I immediately thought of some of the things that we're doing at MindTouch, but really there's a broader lesson to be learned here.

During a ceremony in Iraq's National Museum in Bagdad today, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company will digitize the museum's collections. By early next year, all of these images will be available online for free. The museum lost a large part of its collection to looting in 2003. Except for a number of photo ops and press conferences, the museum has remained closed to the public since the beginning of the war in 2003. Most of the museum's collection remains in storage.

The Powerhouse Museum of Science and Design in Sydney, Australia has begun to utilize the Reuters Open Calais API (our coverage) to tag their collection. The museum's online collection database houses some 66,303 objects, so tagging them all by hand would be quite a task. By using the Open Calais web service, the museum is able to automate much of the process.