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.

The service is available during museum hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. As the museum said in its announcement:

"You can direct your 'private guide' to walk through the museum. You instructions are translated into directions the guide receives on his PDA and he'll obey every command you give him. The guide carries a camera so you can see the exposed masterpieces and works of art as if you were at the exhibit yourself."

After hours, the website is still available and its video channel offers canned tours on topics ranging from Antwerp's classical heritage to masterpieces from the museum's collection to a tour of the city with its former poet laureat, Tom Lanoye.

To interact, instantly, across great distances is one of the thrills the Internet affords. To add people more functionally to the equation makes it even more so. Now take machine-interactions, add people and contextualize that interaction in what promises to be a very interesting new museum in one of Europe's capitols and it's super happy family fun time. I am very interested to see if this cyborging turns into a real trend.

Has anyone seen a machine-human pairing along these lines? If so, let us know in the comments.

Museum facade photo by Arend

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 Museums of Scotland became the first major museum organization in the world to fully implement HTML5. Museum digital media tech manager Simon Madine explained that the implementation across its five allied sites was married to an overall redesign. That redesign saw the site gain color and shoulder-room and emphasize more visuals. But the implementation of HTML5 is more revolutionary. It allows a greater level of search engine accessibility, easier rendering across browsers and overall makes it easier to elegantly add and change site content.

Google Partners with Yad Vashem to Digitize the Shoah

Yad Vashem and Google began an ambitious project to digitize the Holocaust museum's extensive collection of materials.User can directly access over 130,000 full-resolution photographs from Yad Vashem's photo collection via the Google search page. Google has implemented experimental optical character recognition technology for the project. OCR, it is hoped, will make photographs and other documents lacking in metadata easier to find by search in different

Yale Collections Now Free Online

Yale Digital Commons debuted with just under 260,000 images. The idea is to encompass the whole of the university's collections in time. Among the institutions the project draws from are the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and the University Library, not to mention the Yale University on iTunes. According to the university, "no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use."

Omeka Launches a Hosted Platform to Move Museum Collections to the Cloud

Open-source publishing platform Omeka announced the launch of a hosted Web service, Omeka.net. While similar in some ways to the content management system provided by WordPress, Omeka is geared towards the online exhibition of library, museum and archive collections. By using Omeka.net, scholars and archivists will be able to easily build digital exhibits and publish digital scholarship, while also taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools that foster collaboration and communication.

Is There Art on YouTube? Guggenheim Wants to Find Out

The Guggenheim Museum teamed up with YouTube and HP to discover the art of YouTube videos. Tasked with uncovering the "most creative video in the world," the companies launched an international search by way of YouTube Play, a specially branded YouTube channel that will feature the entries in this new competition.

9-11 Oral Histories Saved and Shared via Smart Phone

Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 50 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online. Through Broadcastr, the public can use their phones to record oral histories of their own. Interviewers can then geolocate the interview on the service.

The Dawn of Sensors & Social Media in the World of Fine Art

Wall placards, museum docents and audio tours have all become essential technologies for many peoples' engagement with our collective culture as represented in the world's fine art. Imagine what could happen if your enjoyment of art was augmented further by the kinds of social technologies that you already use on the internet. Thousands of visitors to the STRP art festival in Eindhoven, Holland last Fall got to experience exactly that. The festival's creative integration of its existing art exhibits with Twitter, Facebook, a recommendation engine, a print-on-demand service, tag clouds and RFID chips might represent the kind of experience that art lovers everywhere may be able to enjoy elsewhere soon.

This is only a sample of our museum coverage, so if you are interested, poke around. The smart visitor will not try to see everything in a single day.

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.

Currently, 137 artifacts are on the site, and hundreds more will be added in the coming months.

The unidentified objects come with some really stylish names. To wit:

Instrument with Eight Dials Set in Wooden Frame

Black Cylindrical Instrument with Small Round Window Set on Tripod

Metal Instrument in Wood Case

Photos from NIST Digital Archive | additional sources: PopSci

"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.

The Civil War's sesquicentennial provides both challenges and opportunities for many local historic sites. It's estimated, for example, that Gettysburg, Pennsylvania will receive some 3 to 4 million visitors in 2013, the 150th anniversary of the battle and of Lincoln's famous address. How can mobile technology and AR provide better, smarter, more active experiences - inside and outside the museum walls? How can building localized apps encourage the public to do more than just walk through a battlefield or a visitors' center?

Mummert walked me through one app under development: a body of an identified Union soldier was found in the town of Gettysburg on one of the first days of the invasion in 1863. At the spo where the body was found, the mobile app triggers a CSI investigation, of sorts, where Gettysburg visitors can follow clues (a photograph of a wife and child found on the body) through various points of interest in the town: to the churches that served as hospitals during the battle, to the David Wills House - now a museum, and the site where President Lincoln stayed the night before he gave the Gettysburg Address - to battlefield site and the Gettysburg National Cemetery, and eventually to the soldier's grave-site.

The Sesquicentennial: The Opportunities for Mobile, AR, Linked Data

Mummert's Civil War Augmented Reality Project is one of many efforts underway to commemorate the 150th anniversary through technology. The Civil War Data 150 Project is one example - a partnership that aims to support and connect linked data across local, state, and federal institutions so that information can be found and utilized, no matter the collection, the archives, or the library in which it's housed. The Civil War Data 150 Project will help pull together the open data upon which developers can build the sorts of apps that Mummert and others envision.

Although a fundraising effort on Kickstarter last summer was unsuccessful, Mummert is moving forward with his plans for the Civil War Augmented Reality Project. He believes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will be an important moment for historians, educators, archivists, and technologists. It's a nice round number to build a celebration upon, of course. But just as importantly, Mummert argues, we're at a key moment in the adoption of mobile and augmented reality technologies, a new way to help invite and engage the public and students in a more engaging and interactive experience with Civil War history.

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.

A well-curated art show is not just a bunch of paintings in a room. Items are grouped together to evoke certain ideas. The placards next to artworks that give context details about the author, the era, the method of composition educate the viewer and in doing so make the exhibit more enjoyable. The online documentation offered by a company to its users works the same way in relation to the company's products or services.

If a museum is lucky enough to have a Picasso on display, the name alone probably makes it a destination piece. Users of all art-appreciation levels will want to pay it a visit. Picasso in that sense is a great common denominator across audiences. And like a Picasso, there is probably a set of documentation that product users flock to first, such as tutorials, FAQs, and feature pages. As the WSJ article shows, to get the full value of having a Picasso on exhibit, you must learn the best ways for your audience to find and view your content.

Just as curators want to help audiences appreciate and understand artwork other than their Picasso, documentation creators want their audiences to understand where and how to find information beyond those first, most popular pages.

Are You Learning From Your Users?

Observing your patrons is only half the exercise. Both museum and content curators must take the information their given and turn that into action. An excerpt from the article explains this well:

Based on what they see, the museums may rearrange art or rewrite the exhibit notes. Their efforts reflect the broader change in the mission of museums: it's no longer enough to hang artfully curated works. Museum exhibits are expected to be interactive and engaging.

This is exactly what good documentation is about learning from your users, taking their feedback and making decisions on what areas of documentation need to be updated, improved or perhaps removed altogether. This curation results in a more interactive, useful, and engaging documentation resource. This process goes beyond simply counting page views.

Do you know what your users are searching for? And when they search, do you know what they find, or more importantly, don't find? If your patrons are continually asking for a Monet and not finding one, they're going to go to another museum.

The same is true for what users are searching for online. Repeatedly seeing Monet in the list of performed searches - with no resulting content - is an indicator of an unmet customer need.

A Virtual Suggestion Box at Each Painting

Back to those exhibit notes. Data from the museum observation showed an interesting trend even for works by famous painters: only 1/4 of the exhibit notes were read. What did they learn from that?

A big problem that the Detroit museum hopes it has solved: getting visitors to read the written descriptions and analysis next to the art. In its pre-renovation studies, it found that the most-read text, between a Matisse and a Picasso, was read by just 26% of visitors. Four panels were read by just 2% of visitors.

So the museum cut the write-up's lengths to 150 words maximum from 250 to make them appear less intimidating. Curators also broke up blocks of text with bullet points, subheadings, color and graphics.

This is a great example of learning from your users. In this instance it was gleaned from visually tracking visitors. This is not unlike community scoring that you see online for product reviews, or ranking articles on a blog or news site. This capability effectively provides a mini suggestion box at each page users can rate it thumbs up or thumbs down, along with giving suggestions for improvement.

It's interesting to me that this approach has been replicated offline, in a seemingly unlikely place. Whether you're curating a museum or designing a new technology, your customers will never do exactly what you predict which is why monitoring their behavior can teach you so much about your product.

In this case the offline world is in many ways learning a lesson from the techniques of the online world. But it's worth noting that this is a business issue that applies to startups and businesses of all types. Listening to your customers, and doing so in smart, sophisticated ways gives you a competitive advantage, and there's no way around that whether you're the newest Twitter client or a local bed and breakfast.

Photo by srboisvert

A Government-Sponsored Infomercial for Google?

While this sounds like a great idea, the New York Times also reports that there are also some interesting politics at play here. Parts of the museum's collections, for example, have already been digitized by Italy's National Research Center. This collection is already available online.

Today's event was sponsored by the US Embassy in Iraq, where, according to the New York Times, US Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the digitization project as "part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq." Some of the invited journalists, however, argued that the event was nothing else but a "government-sponsored infomercial" for Google.

However, there are so many objects, that even though users can help to tag them, many of them haven't yet been tagged. Sebastian Chan, who is the Manager of Web Services at the museum, told us that Open Calais is being used to compliment the people-powered tagging they've had running for two years. "What Open Calais lets us do now is connect people, places and companies across our collection and has already revealed many new pathways through our dataset (navigating by designer or inventor is now much easier for example)," he said.

The automatically generated tags at right were created by the API for some swim wear designed by Speedo for the 1991 Australian swimming team that competed at the World Swimming Championships in Perth. Open Calais was correctly able to identify some important locations in the document -- Perth where the competition took place, and Sydney where Speedo is based -- as well as an important corporation (Speedo). It also picked up the name of the designer, and the name of the person who owned the suits before the museum.

However, as you can see, the API made some mistakes too -- it classified "World Championships" as a company, and mistook the general text "international swimming organisation" as an actual organized body. It missed the actual organization (FINA) and probably should have picked up the MacRae Knitting Mills company, which was a predecessor to Speedo. Further, because Open Calais is built around people, places, and companies, general information about items may be lost on it. Tags that would be obvious to humans, such as swimming, swim wear, Olympics, or the year 1991, are beyond the scope of Open Calais.

"These errors and other like them reveal Open Calais' history as Clearforest in the business world," said Chan. "The rules it applies when parsing text as well as the entities that it is 'aware' of are rooted in the language of enterprise, finance and commerce." On the other hand, according to Chan, the technology has already revealed "many new connections between objects," even though it has so far been deployed only very sparingly across the collection.

Powerhouse's use of Open Calais may be the first large scale deployment of the technology across a large public data set. It will be interesting to see the results as they evolve. "It is important to remember that there is no way that this structured data could be generated manually - the volume of legacy data is too great and the burden on curatorial and cataloguing staff would be too great," reminded Chan.