folksonomy
what’s a theodolite?
The transit theodolite is a surveying instrument which measures latitute, longitute, and altitude. There’s an old wooden one (~1840) in the collection of the mighty Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia. The theodite has been around in one form or another since the 1500s, and is still used today. Shown at left, a blinging bronze theodite courtesy the Antique Sextant.
We mention it not simply because it’s a neat word we’d never heard before (and has the prefix theo- without having anything to do with god), but as an example of the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection, which comes correct with user-generated and automated tags, similar objects and subjects (not to mention subjective and objective descriptions and tagging systems), and good use of the zoomify zooming software (a free and easy web imaging kit we’ve worked with before).
this is my collection, damnit
Incredibly awesome presentation/video about stuffy old museum staff vs. information-spreading, coffee-drinking, museum-web-tech-ing LIEb’ruls.
Watch it or your museum or library will die!
spectacular craptacular vernacular
The Museum of Vernacular Photography is a geocitiesesque online collection of old photos, or, as the scrolling teal banner on the top of the page tells you, “great images by as-yet unappreciated & undervalued artists.” Let’s disregard the double…
curate my rack
Boring and historically de-contextualized wall labels be no more! Museum 2.0 is here, synergistically harvesting public insight in a folksonomical moblog of tag clouds for museum objects and artificacts. It’s steve.museum, “the first experiment in social tagging for museum…
