Yeah, good afternoon everyone. I hope you can hear me well in the back. Everybody hear me. All right, great So I'm I'm usually very high energy, but I've spent the last three days Really enjoying this conference a lot, and I am exhausted. I'm sure many of you are too So you'll forgive me if this is not my usual high energy presentation I've been thinking for two days about what I'm going to talk about During this keynote. I left it purposefully vague Because I like to try to assimilate some of the ideas that come from the conference as I experience it and try to put it together Into a bit of a narrative. This is going to be a bit more of a philosophical talk about the future of crypto currencies And what I've learned here at this event. So first of all, thank you all for coming I think this has been a spectacular event. I have a lot of fun If you come to this event, it's called the Bitcoin Expo 2014 It might have been called the Bitcoin and Ethereum Expo 2014 I don't if you notice the theorem had a pretty big presence here and an interesting question comes up, which is I actually quite a few people asked me that does Ethereum threaten the future of Bitcoin? Does it steal some of its thunder? And that's a question that I've heard several times and I've heard people refer to that issue in trying to understand altcoins and Wondering whether the altcoins Essentially threaten the dominance of Bitcoin or if they make Bitcoin weaker or if they distribute the value of the network too broadly I've been thinking about this question for quite a while and I think fundamentally it's a question that evokes the old paradigm of currencies We've all grown up in a world where currencies are Forced upon us in a monopolistic fashion where currencies are defined strictly by the geographies in which they occur and Where the choice of currency is not yours? It is an accident of birth just like many other things in our lives as an accident of birth I was born into an upper middle-class family in Greece Fully loaded with the lottery of privilege in my life and I also Acquired the drama. I didn't choose the drama. It happened to me Any more than I choose to be a white male Any more than I choose to be born into a family of educated people those things simply happen to me Currency as we understand it is an artifact of the nation-state and it imposes upon us certain constraints We don't choose our currency. It chooses us and We are forced to use that currency in all of our interactions. We don't have a choice Until 2008 that is and So now we live in a slightly different world But a lot of the old paradigm still persists in our thinking In a world where your currency is a monopolistic nation-state artifact that is constrained by geography It's a zero-sum game The currency is the flag is the nation-state it is the expression of the economic value of your state and It defines your interactions in a world of geopolitics in a global struggle for domination among nations It's not up to Individual choice it has nothing to do with the individual except for that one individual whose face is on the currency, you know up to recently here in Canada some old white lady called Elizabeth and That's the only person who really has control over the currency and Now we live in a new world a world in which currency is a choice and Not just a choice in terms of use It's not just a matter of being able to choose which currency we use as individuals, but it's also a means of expression This is one of the things that crystallized in my mind a few months ago as I thought about the evolution of alt currencies as they're called If you haven't seen it, there's a website called coin gen dot IO And it allows you to use a web form to create a currency Up to that point I was thinking how many currencies will there be how many alt coins will there be and how will all coins Compete in a world of crypto currencies as we move into the future Will there be hundreds of alt coins and if there are hundreds of alt coins? What does that mean for the value of each of the alt coins? How do they compete and? That was the wrong way of thinking about it Because I saw currency as a zero-sum game Just like it had been imposed in my worldview from the nation-states that created currency and Then I started thinking of currency as an application and then I started thinking of currency as a means of expression You see money at the very root of it is a language It's a language. We use to express value to each other when I give you a dollar bill I am saying that I want to hand you the equivalent value I'm communicating my desire to exchange value with you because I appreciate something you can do or something you can give to me So I'm using this as a token of language and this thing happens in human societies whether you have currency or not and If you don't have a currency with a stamped face on it you invent it and you can see this one of the things that really captivated me was understanding that if you have a primary school environment and you watch children in their natural habitat a Very unnatural habitat in most schools, but in any case they don't have currency Young children don't have currency. They don't understand currency. So what they do is they invent currency They start trading Rubber bands Pokemon cards Tamagotchi tokens of affection tokens of popularity Humans create currency as a means of expressing their desires of expressing their individuality So I thought what happens when a five-year-old in a primary school can use a website to create Joey coin To compete against Maria coin in a game of popularity within their school and Then it dawned on me To ask the question how many currencies will exist is equivalent to ask the question How many bloggers will there be on the internet and the answer is simple all of us? Currency is now means of expression But if everyone can create a currency, how does it derive value and what does it mean? What is the difference between currency as an expression of popularity as an expression of desire as a mean a fad a brand? Down there right now Canadian teen idol is running one of those contestants armor Has a big fan group Maybe he wants to create armor coin So that his fans can express Their desire to watch more of his dancing. Why not? People have talked about me doing Andrea's coin. I think it's a bit silly, but why not? I Think at some point we're going to see things like that happen So we're not gonna have hundreds of altcoins. We're not gonna have thousands of altcoins We're gonna have hundreds of thousands and then millions of altcoins And then there'll be thousands of altcoins being created every day to organize local communities to express bans to Create popularity contests for short term for fads to codify the latest internet meme to create the latest fad How the hell do you tell which ones have value and which ones don't have value? that's a very different world from the one we live in today and I'm looking for parallels to understand what this means And I often go back to looking at the emergence of the first decentralized system in my lifetime the internet and what it did for understanding information information scarcity Opinion and authority of opinion and what it did to us as a society as the internet emerged into our global scene So there used to be a time that if you wanted to read authoritative opinion You bought a piece of paper From an organization that had a printing press that was three stories high and four football fields long and had a Really great name like the New York Times and that organization could buy ink bath the barrel and Through that ownership of this enormous manufacturing facility. They had the weight of authority and So we imbued authority into these institutions and we use that authority to decide which opinions mattered and which Opinions didn't we use them as gatekeepers of authority to give us guidance in understanding opinion and then the internet destroyed all of that Because suddenly anyone could print and anyone could publish and I remember in the early days People talked about well, how the hell will we know which opinions matter if anyone can have an opinion? The world will come to an end surely a funny thing happened We shifted from a world in which authority of opinion came from the issuer from the authority of the publisher By proxy into a world where we had to look at opinion on its own merits on the content of that opinion and we arrived at a world Where Judith Miller of the New York Times prints bullshit that sends an entire nation into war and An Egyptian blogger on the front lines of our evolution prints the truth that nobody wants to hear and Suddenly the world is upside down Authority is no longer the person who owns the printing press But it is now the person who has the content that matters And we just did this to currency Because now the authority is not derived from the sovereignty of the issuer From the printing press of a nation state that can declare through monopoly and use of force that this is the currency You will use now we can choose currency and a five-year-old can create currency And maybe the currency that the five-year-old created has monetary value Maybe it doesn't most likely it doesn't some will And so we need to get used to a world where we have to judge currency not by who issued it But by who uses it or rather how many people use it and what they use it for So let's imagine a world in which currency is being used in a widespread fashion And no one remembers who created the currency or why they only know that within their local community It has purchasing power as a little fanciful thought Imagine a decade from now in a rural village far detached from our developed nation civilization Villagers exchanging two currencies One that has a sheba inu a Japanese breed of dog on the front and is pronounced doggy coin or doge coin or dog coin And I'm not quite sure but it doesn't really matter But you can buy half a dozen eggs with it And other villages are trading another currency that has an old white lady called Elizabeth on it And they have no idea who Elizabeth is and they don't know why she got her picture on the coin Maybe she wrote a nice song. Maybe she won Canadian teen idol. Nobody remembers anymore, but you can buy six eggs with it And to those people it doesn't matter who issued the currency what matters is whether it has purchasing power or not The currency is now evaluated purely on its monetary basis because of adoption because of use and There is one fundamental difference between those two currencies One has a predictable stable Algorithmic monetary supply and the other has an old white lady called Elizabeth on it so in fact one of them has some real intrinsic value because It's removed some of the uncertainty of the monetary system from it. The other one doesn't really We need to get ready to live in a world where multiple currencies will coexist So currency as a means of expression currency as a tool of language is no longer up to the issuer It is up to us as individuals making a choice to use that currency and we give it value through our use We give it value through adoption and we will be surprised by some of the currencies that will emerge from a fad That will emerge from a joke perhaps even a sick joke and Will explode into viral consciousness on the internet and then become real monetary powers in use across a broad population Surprising all of us How the hell do we operate in that kind of world and what does it mean to have competition between currencies if there are millions if Digital scarcity really applies, but only on a local basis and only within the context of each one of these currencies If scarcity is not derived from the issuer But is derived in terms of adoption and in terms of the token itself We're gonna have currencies for different uses already You have Bitcoin that provides a very specific monetary policy You have Ethereum that can provide a contract platform There's name coin for distributed naming conventions And there's many others and there will be many others who will solve other problems protein folding search for extra terrestrial life Maybe we'll have currencies that are better for micro transactions and micro payments with very fast resolution Maybe we will have currencies that are better for larger transactions like real estate. Who knows? If you think this currency is an application, then you realize that it doesn't really matter on the internet email was the granddaddy of them all or the grandma of them all an Email like Bitcoin was the killer app that allowed us all to see the power of decentralized Communications and adopt this new platform and it was enough to create utility to spread this network all around the world But it was only the first app and then instant messaging and forums and bulletin boards and Facebook and Twitter Do you worry that Twitter will destroy email?  Do you worry that the value of email is eroded somehow by the existence of Twitter? We don't worry about these things because we understand that each one serves a different purpose Some allow us to express a modality of instantaneous real-time communications Some allow us to have Asymmetric communications where using Twitter I can address an audience of thousands and receive real-time feedback Without having to have a bi-directional synchronous communication Some like email allow us to have more long-term asynchronous communication between people and what we do is we build Interfaces we build abstractions We build unifying tools that allow us to use all of these modalities from a single interface and Fluidly move from one to the other so that we can start Transmitting a short text message to someone get into a conversation Convert that to an audio conversation Decide that we want to show them our dog turn on the video camera Convert it into a video conference and when we're finished with a conversation Follow up with an email to summarize what we agreed on and now we've gone through five different modalities of communication in a single unified interface I think that's what's going to happen with currency We're going to start treating currency as an application and in order to do that We're going to need interfaces that allow us a unified currency experience That allow us to have a single wallet with perhaps a hundred and fifty different currencies in it and Because of inventions like side chains and decentralized exchanges and fluid and liquid systems and the complete absence of monopoly of lock-in of Hostage situations around the currency we will be able to Instantaneously and at very low cost convert from Bitcoin to namecoin to dogecoin to Ethereum and If we can do that then it doesn't matter because we won't do that our Unified wallet interface will do that by trying to see what we're trying to achieve with our currency If I'm buying a house it might express my Transactional will in the modality of Bitcoin because that's the most suitable currency when I try to name The domain for that house it will convert some to namecoin the contract itself will be paid for in ether And when I tip the bartender for the cup of coffee they gave me when I got up that morning I'll tip them in doge My interface won't hide all of these differences I can see a world in which we can smoothly move between currencies in a multimodal way There's one other thing that comes out of this Which is the very real possibility that we will abstract value an exchange rate from the actual currency If we have a multimodal communication system We no longer need to look at the individual values and exchange rates of all of these commodities or assets or currencies Or call them whatever you want There's a very real possibility. We're going to have an index currency a currency that is not in itself tradable That has no intrinsic use as a transactional commodity But instead is only used to express the purchasing power vis-a-vis the various coins in our wallet. I may have a thousand Unified currency units You can buy unified currency units you can buy Bitcoin and you can tell me how many unified currency units that is And I price everything in unified currency units And then I pay in doge or name coin or Bitcoin or ether depending on how I want to use it We already do this in financial markets In fact, you can trade S&P 500. You're not buying a single company what you're buying into is the aggregation of all of the different things that are in the stock market as an expression of the total value of the market and You can then use that meta Instrument in order to price transactions for example the London interbank overnight rate is used as a meta interest rate To contractually tie things to a global set of interest rates And so you don't need to say I will buy this at whatever the Bundesbank says You say I'll buy this at Libor plus 2 and then you have a stable point of reference with which you can do transactions I expect we're going to see much of the same with currency We're probably going to see meta currencies whose only purpose is to aggregate the value in all of our wallets from all of our Currencies and allow us to understand value as an abstraction that exists independently of the currencies in which it's expressed So that's a slightly philosophical perspective and that's why I think it doesn't matter and ether is not competing with Bitcoin Bitcoin is not competing with Litecoin They are all means to express the transactional modality we want to use at any point in time to achieve the goals we want With this comes a very other very important and powerful tool in the choices We make with these currencies. We are also choosing to align ourselves with the community Adoption is not simply the act of using the currency. It's also Attaching oneself to a community that has also choose to adopt that currency When I choose to adopt Bitcoin I am a believer in monetary policy of 21 million total coins as a stable source of value If I choose to adopt fry coin I am a believer in an inflationary basis Demarrage coin that has a negative interest rate that enforces consumption and discourages hoarding I am choosing my politics through my currency and through that choice I am associating myself with a global community that has made the same choice as me and that is expressing that choice through currency Just like when I choose an application on the internet to communicate with I'm also aligning myself with the corresponding Community, I don't use Twitter just because it's the convenience communication mechanism I use Twitter because I also agree with many of the concepts and philosophies of the community of other people who choose to use Twitter But with currency that choice is a much more powerful political choice We have entered the realm of meta politics of politics by algorithm of the ability for global Communities to form around a common consensus of politics through the choice of currency You want inflation use an inflationary currency.  We're going to start seeing Communities politics and currencies converge and allow us to make these choices Just like I can support Joey coin in order to say that Joey is in fact the coolest kid among the five-year-olds I Can support green coin because I care about global warming or not Right I can support meat coin If I really really like red meat Whatever worldwide wrestling coin no problem. They'll be one of those two absolutely, so Really all of these things are forms of expression and that comes back to the original point that currency in the end is Really a form of language. It's a language by which we communicate our expectations and desires of value And now that we can do it on such a massive scale now that everyone can create currency our choices will really matter We're past the zero-sum game. This isn't about nation-states anymore This isn't about who adopts Bitcoin first or who adopts crypto currencies first because the internet is adopting Cryptocurrencies and the internet is the world's largest economy most populous economy and it is the first Transnational economy and it needs a transnational currency To summarize what we've really done is we've inverted the very basic and most fundamental equation of currency Which is that from millennia until the year? 2008 sovereignty Defined currency Sovereignty was the basis upon which currency could be created and that currency Allowed that sovereignty to be expressed the monopolistic control of currency is the basis of sovereignty And now the internet has a currency and the internet is going to use that currency to create sovereignty after 2008 currency creates sovereignty and The internet has its own currency which means the internet has purchasing power Which means the internet has economic freedom? Which means the internet can exert that economic freedom in a post nationalist way in a way that ignores Borders and makes the nation-state not obsolete, but simply less relevant Because when an Egyptian blogger can not only blog about the revolution, but also fund that revolution in Bitcoin And they can connect with people from all around the world who share their ideals for self-determination and freedom They are expressing their own sovereignty as an individual and they are expressing the sovereignty of their community through the use of that currency So this is the world we now live in a world in which currencies can coexist and where currency and its user adoption Creates sovereignty. That's basically what I wanted to talk about today. Thank you


Hello friends, welcome to the session. I am Malka. Let's discuss the given question. It will be the ratio in which the line 2x plus y minus 4 equal to 0 divides the line segment joining the points A with coordinates 2 minus 2 and B with coordinates 3, 7. Now let's start with the solution. In the question we are given a line segment AB with coordinates of A, 2 minus 2 and coordinates of B as 3, 7 and it is given that the line segment AB is divided by another line that is 2x plus y minus 4 equal to 0. We suppose that the line 2x plus y minus 4 equal to 0 divides the line segment AB at the point P and the point P divides the line segment AB in the ratio of K is to 1. Now we all know that to find the coordinate of the point P we use a section formula therefore by section formula which is given by m1x2 plus m2x1 upon m1 plus m2 and m1y2 plus m2y1 upon m1 plus m2. These are the coordinates of the point P. Now since we have assumed that the point P divides the line segment AB in the ratio of K is to 1 therefore AP is to PB is equal to K is to 1. Now by applying section formula we will find the coordinates of the point P that will be here m1 and m2 are K and 1, m1 is K and m2 is 1. Now m1 is K so it will be K into x2 that is 3 plus m2 is 1 into x1 is 2 upon K plus 1. This is the x coordinate now we will find the y coordinate so it is given by m1 that is K into y2 that is 7 plus m2 that is 1 into y1 that is minus 2 upon K plus 1. So these are the coordinates of the point P. This can also be written as 3 K plus 2 upon K plus 1 and 7 K minus 2 upon K plus 1. These are the coordinates of point P. Now since we know that this point P lies on the given line that is 2x point P lies on the line 2x plus y minus 4 equal to 0 then these points the coordinates of the point P must satisfy the given line that is 2 into x.  Now taking LCM and simplifying we get 6 K plus 4 plus 7 K minus 2 minus 4 K minus 4 equal to 0 or 13 K minus 4 K equal to 2 or this can also be written as 9 K equal to 2. This implies K equal to 2 by 9 therefore we can say that ratio is 2 is to 9. Therefore we can say that the ratio in which the line divides the given line segment AB is 2 is to 9. So hope you understood the solution and enjoy the session. Goodbye and take care.


I think that it's pretty clear that there won't be enough vaccine for everybody initially. It just takes a long time to get 300 million doses of vaccine made. And if we're looking at November and as a potential date for a new vaccine, then people start thinking about, well, what are we going to do when there's not enough? And that's where this proposal and others might fit in. There's four phases to their distribution suggestions. First, they would suggest giving high-risk workers in health care facilities and first responders access. And then people of all ages who have multiple comorbid conditions at higher risk for illness as well as older adult who live in crowded settings like nursing homes. The next thing they suggest is helping critical care workers, that is workers who are in jobs that are both really important for society and at high risk of exposure, teachers and school staff, people of all ages who have these conditions that put them at higher risk as well as older adults who didn't already get the vaccine. And people in homeless shelters and prisons and other detention centers. And then in phase three, they would give the vaccine to young adults and children as well as people who are at industries essential to society that haven't already received it. And finally, everyone in the U.S. would get a chance to have the vaccine if they haven't already gotten it. Then within each group, they will deploy a social deprivation index, which comes from the Center for Disease Control and looks at a variety of different kinds of deprivation and says, if you have a higher deprivation index or higher vulnerability index, then within that group we'll get it first. If we're talking about distributing a vaccine in the U.S., I do have concerns about the National Academy's proposal. They say that their first priority is to maximize social benefit by reducing death and disability and transmission rates. So at first they'll help try to prevent death and disability and then focus on constraining transmission. But they don't explain exactly what it means to reduce death and disability. You kind of have to explain how to measure that. And instead of really trying to do that, they shift to talking about different risk groups. So they define people in different categories like children and adults by different kinds of risks. So they'll talk about the risk of acquiring infection, the risk of getting really sick if you get it or dying, the risk of negative social impact if individuals have a high priority job, the risk of transmitting disease to others. And then they kind of rank everybody on these different categories and tell us who should get the vaccine first. They do provide some kind of value judgments about their decision, but they don't kind of explain how those connect to the risk evaluation they do in a way that would kind of justify what they're doing. I think what matters more than rationing, though, is changing pharmaceutical incentives and rules for innovation. So about 80% of the manufacturing is done on generics, which means there's a huge manufacturing capacity in the generic side of things, whereas only 20% is on patented medicines. If we let companies keep patents on those products, then they can charge what they want for those medicines, or maybe they have advanced purchase agreements with the government. But we can't use a lot of that manufacturing capacity, and so there'll be a lot less supply of the vaccine. I think we can tie incentives to what I call global health impact. That is the encourage companies to focus on the biggest problems that cause the most death and disability well beyond the pandemic. Using things like prize funds, so rewarding companies for innovations based on the health impact of those innovations, or tying things like the orphan drug tax credit to health impact. Companies will say that profit is such great profit. They're like the richest Fortune 500 companies, right? Such great profits are necessary for getting research and development done, but they don't make their costs transparent. Critics say they're overinflated and that they include a lot of unethical marketing costs in the data that they provide. And a minimum country, companies should substantiate the claim that their profits are justified for a software, then the kind of patent protections that contribute to inequitable access. I guess if I had to decide how to distribute a vaccine, I would try to save the most lives and not the most life years, which I think might be driving the National Academy's proposal, because they don't prioritize the elderly. They kind of give them less priority and give children more priority. I think that the arguments are focusing on life years aren't that great, that for each person, the fact that their life matters so much to them, however long they might have left to live, is sufficient reason to treat that person equally, at least unless there's a better argument against that than I've seen. I think a lot of things matter besides saving lives, so economic consequences of the pandemic, for instance, are really important. And we'd have to know how to trade off lives against economic consequences to try to deal with that within a vaccine allocation system. I guess I'm not sure that's the right place to deal with it. I think there may be a tension between helping people go back to work, protecting the elderly, getting kids to school. But we can also use economic policies to address some of the economic problems. So I think a truly ethical proposal would treat every person equally and help countries get vaccines to people when they don't have the capacity to do that on their own.


Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's session. We apologize for the delay. That was an issue with the phone bridge. We were trying to connect from. And we are now underway. Without further delay, I'm going to pass the audio off to your host, Jenny, your heritage preservation. Jenny, please go ahead. All right, thank you so much, Mike. Again, apologies for the delay in this webinar. But we're ready to get started now. So as you know, I'm Jenny Arena from Heritage Preservation. And we are so happy to have so many of you logged in, even though you had to wait. Let's see, we've got 131 participants logged in right now, which is great. I'm going to give just a quick introduction to the community and these webinars in case we have any new folks joining us. And then we will move on to our topic. So the Connecting to Collections online community was originally created in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It's moderated by Heritage Preservation and Learning Times produces both the website and webinars. The goal of the online community has always been to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. To help you do that, we've compiled an extensive list of online resources that are broken up by my topic on the online community. You can see that under the menu topic of the page. We also host these drop-in webinars, like the one we're doing today. They don't drop the phone. Our members will find useful. A recording of all of our webinars can be found under the webinar archives on the top of the page as well. And a recording of this webinar will be added there soon. So today, I am so pleased to welcome our speaker, Amanda Shep. Earlier this year, Amanda gave a presentation at the Small Museum Association Conference focused on digitization. And I'm really pleased. She agreed to give it another go for us. So if you weren't able to make it out to Ocean City, Maryland, you now have a chance to take a look at this presentation, which is just fantastic. So without further delay, I'm going to move my slides off. And Amanda, I am going to hand things over to you. Excellent. Well, thank you. I am Amanda Shep. I am the digital director of the skepticism. It is a small, entirely digital museum. We have a physical repository of about 1,000 artifacts. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of storage space to display them or display space left. We have plenty of storage space. It is being maximized all the time. So today I'm going to talk about digital collections and projects and how they can be helpful for small museums and institutions because it's kind of the way of the future. It's the thing that really needs to be focused on more. And it's a really interesting thing. There is a poll over on the other side of the screen for anybody that has digitized. And if you are a staff member, and I would like to see results from those to see what I am dealing with. Oh, a lot of you have digitized before. Excellent. And primarily staff. Cool. All right, then. So the skepticism started as a passion project for our curator, essentially. He is really into a lot of the paranormal stuff he's been on. Is it real? The ancient aliens shows like that. He does the big talking head thing about debunking mysteries and things like that. So we essentially wanted to figure out how to digitize all of these artifacts that he's gained from all of his travels and missions that he's gone on, things like that. So he originally started a picture style gallery site, which is nice and tidy, but there's no search features. There's no real typification or classification of anything. So we wanted to reexamine this really interesting collection and modernize it. So digital collections can impact the smaller institutions through the institution, itself, the staff, and the audience. Digitizing this collection opens a lot of doors. It's possible to collaborate with larger entities and institutions. It's a way to modernize, and it's a way to get good publicity for yourself. The skepticism has been featured on the travel channel show Mysteries at the Museum twice. And it's been really interesting to that. Also, two of our collections are featured on New York Heritage's Foundation at the Digital Humanities repository or collections in New York State. You can digitize your collection. So this little cart that's featured in the picture here is one of my digitization loads for one day of work. That's basically the same as how it looks when you see it in the actual museum itself. It is a lot of very compacted stuff crammed into display cases. And it's a really lovely collection. It's a lot of really interesting stuff. But sadly, we don't have the space to access visitors. So we decided to go online and make ourselves a digital museum. And that increases our publicity and accessibility. It doesn't matter if people can't get to where we are. It gave us a chance to partner with larger institutions. And as far as staff and volunteers, we just got in some younger volunteers that are working on digitization projects and smaller things. They help me around the social media, like the Twitter stream, and update our Facebook. And it's not necessary to be an expert in these things. It's really nice. Social media is also really important and stuff like this, to keep people posted on what you're working on, to keep updates frequent, and keep interest at a constant role. Is your collection particularly interesting? You don't need to digitize anything and everything. Digital collections should be interesting. They should offer a point of local history or something about your institution. They should be unique. If you have at least one of these qualities, then that's great. If you have more, it's definitely better. So before you embark on a digital project, you should really think about your haves versus your needs. You should think about your staff, your equipment, how you want to display things, who your target audience is, and do you want to collaborate eventually? Do you want something simple? Do you want something that's made mostly for your local population? Or are you trying to get more scholarly patrons in your facilities? So let's talk about these in depth. As far as skills, how detailed do you want your digital collection to be? Is your main audience for in-house things, or are you just digitizing that for your own records? Do you just need your own spreadsheets and metadata on your own purposes? Or are you going to put this up on the internet? Do you want everyone to see it? Do you want to partner with a larger consortium so you know that everyone will see it and that it will be scholarly? How public and professional do you want this to look? Or how public or how professional? Do you want a flashy digital collection, or do you just want a simple page that you can make on Foursquare? These are definitely things to focus on. When you focus on these things, it helps shape the parameters and the size and scope of your digital collection, your budget, and your needs, and how long it'll take you to complete it. So these are all things that you need to really think about. As far as your metadata requirements go, how involved and intricate is your collection? Do you need a librarian or a digital collection professional to complete all of this metadata? Or do you have a volunteer on staff that's familiar enough with your collection in order to get things going on? Is it capable? Sorry. Is it possible for you to do everything you want with as simple a thing as possible? Oh, I'm sorry. Metadata, essentially to back up, is data about data? It's the say you have a thing, say you have a vase. It's not enough to say it's a vase and what's on it. You need to do things like where it came from, the provenance of it, the date of it, who created it, were there any contributors to it being a part of your collection. So there's a lot of things involved. This is also where you get in your copyright statement and your notes and restrictions for use of your images. There's a lot of information that's very critical that's tacked into your metadata. So it's important that you have it as complete as possible, especially if you're posting it live on the internet. You also need to know in your metadata what's complete versus what's incomplete. This is something we've run into a lot with the skepticism. We have a lot of really great artifacts, but as far as how old they are or a date on them, a lot of that has been gained through independent research. And then as far as your metadata itself, you want to know if you are going with a Dublin core or an RDA format.  When we worked with the 3R's New York Heritage Consortium, they had their own metadata template that was very detailed. And it made things really, really complete. And it brought a really good picture of what was in each collection. Is there any training or education that needs to be had to complete the digital collection? And how will your metadata be displayed?  Or do you want little bits of it to be picked and chosen for highlights? As far as your copyright restrictions on your digital collections, this is another skill. Do you own these rights to these items? Are your digital collection items in public domain? Do you have the rights to them? Can you get permission for the rights to digitize them? Do you want to offer your images to the public? We do, because the skepticism tries to be a little more educational and things like that. We basically want people to use our images freely. We've had a lot of really interesting partnerships and people to do this stuff with. We've gotten, we have a collection of alternative medicine bottles, like old patent medicine bottles. And recently, there was a journalist from Germany that wanted to highlight some of our bottles in an article that was featured in a scholarly magazine. And that was really cool. And without us being able to do that, we wouldn't have had the opportunity to partner with something international like that. You never really know who will be interested in your presentation. How can you restrict use of your images? You can, there are options for a simple contact form or if someone contacts you for use of your permission, you can send them a file and have an agreement with them about what is going to happen. You can watermark it. We found in the past that watermarking it tends to be more restrictive than anything, because if people want to use your images, then you have to go and find the one that's not watermarked and then go through all of this thing again anyway. So it's an on the fence thing. It's good for some people, but it didn't really work out for us the way we wanted to, but it is a thing. Also, you need to know if you have staff that can write copyright statements. Do you have someone that is capable of declaring the restrictions for use of your images and what you want done with them and what your intentions are for putting these images in the public? Do you have someone that's capable of doing that? Do you have someone that understands copyright law enough to suggest what should be done? As far as the equipment goes, you want to think about the focus of your collection and the size of your collection. Do you have a lot of two-dimensional things? Do you have a lot of three-dimensional objects? The skepticism features a lot of paintings and etchings and works of art. There's also a lot of physical 3D items. Some are large, like three-foot-tall spirit trumpets and some are very tiny, like a two-inch ancient Egyptian Wastabi figure. So sometimes you need to have a broad access for things as far as capturing the digital image. As far if you're going to do photographs, do you have access to a photographer or someone that's decent enough with digital photography to take a high-quality master-tiff image? If you are looking for volunteers for this, a good place to start is, do you have an art school nearby or an arts program or a digital amateur photography class in a high school? Go talk to them. See if someone is interested in an internship. We'll get to cost in a minute, but thank you for that question. So that will be addressed momentarily. Also, as far as your equipment, you need to figure out, do you have a place to take these pictures? That was one of our problems originally, was we had nowhere to physically take these pictures where you had decent lighting and decent shadows and you weren't forced to be locked into a small office. But later on, we built a small archival photo booth in the basement. I will show you what we have in ours in a future slide, so thank Tide if you're interested on that. Do you have access to enough equipment? Do you have a decent scanner? Do you have a good enough camera? My first digital project that I did for school years ago, the girl that was to supply our camera, did not have a camera that would take tips. So we had to do some crafty work on that. And things ended up fine, but these are things that you need to definitely think of when you are undergoing this task in the first place, is do I have what I need? If not, how can I get it? You can get it through grants. If you have someone that's willing to work on it personally, that's pretty great. Do you have people that know how to do these things? It doesn't matter if you have the best and brightest camera, if no one on your staff knows how to operate it. So you have to really think about what you have in these aspects. Now, let's talk about software. Oh, as far as metadata is concerned. This is an example of a metadata sheet from Content DM Collection. It is very broad. As you can see, there are a lot of very small categories and facets that you need to know what is expected of you to describe this item. Let's talk about software and systems. Yeah. Now that you've figured out your level of audience and ownership of these items and necessary equipment and how much your staff can do with this, how are you going to display it? Do you want a webpage, a gallery-style thing? Do you want a rich exhibit? Again, the question of intranet versus internet, your audience kind of determines your display expectations. Why would you create this glorious multimedia-rich display for just your staff to check their funding or their inventory? But don't let this discourage you. There's a lot of free and very low-cost options as far as digitization software. As far as open-source software, which is sort of basic, generally free, some of its low cost, but for the most part, these are free programs. They're the best for small museum usage. They're very user-friendly. I haven't had an issue with any of these programs thus far, anything that I can tackle. You can modify them with plugins. They start out with a variety of templates, like if any of you have ever used Blogger or anything like that or built your own website on Squarespace. It's a lot like that for some of these. It's just a very basic template that you can just plug in your information and go from there. It's really nice and really easy. A lot of these are self-educational, like you learn how to use this yourself. It's not really a book or a manual that you can go to. However, there are a lot of help. There is a lot of help that is available in forums and tech support and developers. We used Omica for the skepticism, and they don't really have a very freely available startup manual for it, but their forums are very active with developers and other users of Omica, and generally you get your questions answered really quickly, and it's very nice. But with these sites, it's really easy to create and manage your content. You can have a lot of robust narratives and layouts. They're very good for beginners. You can make more complex sites with plugins and add-ons. Your expertise in this isn't really necessary. It's not something that you have to be a check person for in order to do these. But there are a lot of collaboration potential. If you have a lot of ideas and you have a person that's more tech savvy than you are, you can usually create something that's really special. So, back to Omica. Their focus is on websites and online exhibits. They are free and open source for starter packages. If you want to get more complex or have way more complicated stuff, there are tiers that you can pay on. They do have multiple plugins like Google Maps and Library of Congress subject cuttings. You can use this cool thing called MeetLine where you outline your exhibit digitally, and they kind of walk through your digital museum and check out your spaces as you've laid them out, which is really neat. They do rich exhibits with a lot of customizable plugins. They do optimized search engine support, which is really cool. As far as multiple cataloging possibilities, they do that. You can do double and core. You can customize it with your own metadata template. You can do Library of Congress classification. It's really, really up to you, which is very nice. Also, Collective Access is free and open source. Their focus is on cataloging and web apps and display. I have a friend that uses it, and it's really, really neat and tidy, very clean site. I really like the layout of it. I definitely recommend checking it out if it's something that you're interested in. Open Exhibits is another open source software. Their focus is on multi-touch interactive exhibits. You can use a smartphone or touchscreen style, like a tablet app with your exhibit. It's for use with existing digital objects. Essentially what it does is it renders it in a 3D format where you can in it and look at it from all sides virtually, which is a really nice resource if you have something that's particularly fragile or difficult to display. There's also AdLib Museum, which is free for the light version, which is less than 5,000 objects. Their focus is on data management. It looks like a graphic interface with module add-ons. They also do mobile collection management with apps for museum staff. You use RFID and barcodes to take a digital inventory, and then you can relate that to your staff so you guys have a more condensed and concise way to keep track of what you're doing with your collection. AdLib Museum is also used by over 1,600 museums in 25 countries. Their smallest client is a one-man operation, and their largest one is the National Museum of Ireland. Lastly, let's talk about Pachyderm from the New Media Consortium. It's focused on beginners and people with little tech expertise. It's also free and open-source. They use pre-designed templates in form, like a WordPress blogger type of thing. It's very flash-based, very interactive. You do multi-media exhibits. If your collections are heavy in images or audio or video, this is good for people that do oral history collections if you want to digitize them, things like that. As far as the question about the State Museum archives and the software and systems, it does vary for each one. It really varies quite a bit depending on what the collections are. The collection itself is mostly what you base your decision for software and systems off of. If you want to catalog more, then you might want to go with certain things. If you want to display more, you might want to go with something flashier like Omica. However, if you are a little more comfortable or experienced, there are more complicated systems, not necessarily in a bad way. These are more thorough for metadata and cataloging. It's suitable for a more complex collection or with larger audience needs, or if you're working with a larger consortium. This is usually something that they suggest. I'm talking about Content DM. Their focus is on cataloging and exhibits. There are proprietary applications run by OCLC. They are mostly focused around uploading, description, management, and access as far as your collection goes. It's not really about display. Their display is kind of basic, and it's not very customizable, but it's very, very, very information dense. If you have a lot to say about an object, I would definitely go with that because they're wonderful. I've worked with them before. It's really simple. You can change all kinds of fields at one time. They have a lot of very unique features as far as metadata control. It's really nice. Is there any reason that you can state you use this? Again, it's really up to your collection. If you're trying to work with a museum that's on a larger level and they use this and you want to show that you can also use that, I guess I would suggest doing that if you're trying to show that you're like-minded as far as your collections go. I think that might get a good idea, but it's not really my area to suggest. Anyway, with Content DM, the only problem with it is that for smaller museums and smaller institutions, it can be a little cost prohibitive if you're working on your own, which is why usually Content DM is found in partnerships or collaboration attempts. Also, there are services like Canto from Cumulus and Lyrisis. They do things like...  I haven't really used a service, so I don't really have much of an opinion on them. That is an option. If that's something that makes you more comfortable. Ultimately, your software insistence is about what is going to display your collection best in the way that you want it to be displayed and what software suits your needs and your skill level, your collection's needs and your staff skill level and your equipment capacity. This is an example from Omica. This is what it looks like when you are adding a file. You can see the Dropbox files. This is the image you pair with it. Over here, there's the double and core and the item type metadata. These are all just plug-in fields. You can kind of see what it's like, but there's your nav bar on the side where you can get to your plug-ins, like simple pages and else you collect or else you suggest, and you can see all of your items and everything. It's a really distinct, very tidy system. I really like it. So, now that you have a better idea of what goes into a digital project, how do you figure out the balance of these elements? Essentially, in my experience, I have learned that it's the balance of equipment, staff, and budget leading to the size and scope of your digital project and what you are going to do in the end. As far as your equipment goes, it's pretty straightforward. You either have it or you don't. Availability to use it is a factor. The budget, if you need new or updated equipment, that's also a big factor. And who do you have that can use it? As far as staff goes, that depends on the needs of your digital project. Do you have, well, first of all, are staff available or volunteers? Are they knowledgeable in your collection or in the process of digitization? Or do you have volunteers that are interested in starting this as a resume option or a hobby or if that's something you're interested in going to school for? It's definitely something that can be done. So, the skill level kind of hinges on the intricacy of the digital project. It's your items and your description of your items. So, do you need a subject expert? Do you have someone that knows enough about your collection? Do you have someone that knows enough about your equipment and everything like that? So, basically, do you have someone that can do this for you and has the technological capacity as due to it for you? As far as your budget goes, that kind of depends on your staff and equipment and availability. What sort of funds are available for your digital project? How much of your collection are you going to digitize? If you have, like we did, over a thousand items, I would be here four or five years digitizing and finding all of them. So, you need to select your most prominent items or the things that most encapsulate your museum statements, your missions, things like that. How does this collection represent who you are as an institution? How much of this collection do you want to show? And how much, then, how do you want to display it? Do you want a simple website? Do you want an open source thing? Do you want an elaborate digital collection? So, this all leads to the size and scope of your digital project. So, your software, your time, your level of cataloging, and your funding. These are all very important things that you should keep that are before you throw together a proposal and rush down to your director's office. So, I have some tips for you. Don't get too overwhelmed. There's definitely things that you should keep in mind that could help you out when things are looking tough. So, tip one, think outside of the box. Our curator basically doesn't really embrace technology like some people do. So, when we were planning this out, we essentially had to take his old display website and print it out page by page in a three-ring binder to present to him what it would be like to plan it. From these, I had to physically show him layout models. This photo is one of those. Each of those little post-its is an item, and the larger things are categories. And making sure that branches and ideas are connected.  But there is no wrong way to outline a digital collection. It's fine if you think outside the box on this stuff. Not everyone thinks the same.  Are you trying to tell a story with your collection? Is it a deeper meaning than just here are these things that represent the period in history?  So, this is my photo boost that I mentioned earlier. It's not very fancy. It's not very spectacular. But it gets the job done. The photos that come out of it look great. As soon as you get the lighting under control, it's wonderful. It's in a very shut-off, dark, archived room where no one bothers me. It's lovely. So if you don't have a ton of space, you don't have a ton of professionals, you don't have a ton of available materials to make these things, it's not really a problem. Do-it-yourself solutions can sometimes help you out a lot more than you think. So if you know a photography student or an amateur photographer that wants to help or gains some opportunities in their portfolio, ask them if they want to help you digitize. Don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to be creative. So, don't panic over obstacles. This is my cat.  This is my obstacle every day. It's easy to become overwhelmed with new projects and technologies, but take a step back and pick apart what exactly it is that you are having a problem with. And don't be afraid of a challenge. You can learn new software or programming language. Once you get into it, it's awesome. It's empowering. You have a new job skill. You have a new thing that you can brag about that you know how to do. It's good for your institution. It's good for you. It's helpful for everyone to develop and get new skills and work with new things. It's really lovely. So I have a question. This is run to the museum director. As far as that, we have only had a problem with visitors. Our skepticism is located inside of a not-for-profit center that is primarily a private facility. After our first episode that we were featured on Mysteries at the Museum, we got a ton of visitors the next day who had no idea that this museum was near them. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to explain that it's a museum that's not really open to the public. So it's easier to guide them and steer them toward your digital collection. And also, digital collections give people more opportunities to experience it. It'll give them, if it's something that they really are fascinated looking at and learning about online, chances are if they're a reasonable distance away from your museum, they will come in and visit your artifact and see it and learn more about your institution. It's possible that those people will bring their friends to see this or bring their children or their families. It's a new way to get exposure for this and for your collection. Say you're in a very rural area and you're not near a highway. How else are people going to know what you have unless you have some really great marketing or really great PR people? It's a matter of how much do you want to be seen and are you going to be upset if people are seeing you in person or on the Internet? Does it really matter? As long as you are reaching someone and educating them, isn't that the point of the museum? So that's in the condensed version. That's my answer to that before I get all crazy and philosophical. So if you're still interested and you're not scared yet, let's talk about funding. Once you've figured out the scale and size of your digital project and what your needs are to complete it, you may need to think about additional funding options, particularly if you want a fancier program to display it on or you need some nicer equipment. Many options for funding are available on small and large scales. Let's talk about federal funding. There are a lot of federal grants available, especially to smaller institutions. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has the IMLS Museums for America grants. This is a grant that has the goals of strengthening museums for lifelong learning and community importance. It covers things like conservation training, collection conservation preservation, increasing your public access, and technology. So if there are things that you want to do more with, it's a larger grant, but it's definitely worth applying for. Also, the National Announcement for the Humanities offers a NEH Conservation Assistance Grant for smaller institutions. These basically match... they offer an index to match the grant with the program. So if you know that you are a smaller institution and you want help with your digital humanities collection or digitizing something that's particularly interesting towards the smaller humanities, it would be good to apply to them. They do have a service on their website where, depending on your collection, your geographical location, they will match you for your ideal grant to apply for, so you weren't just flooding the market with grant applications. They also offer... Oh, also, the goal of the preservation assistance grant is preservation, planning, activities, and smaller institutions. It's not really for digitizing itself, like for the software and the end-user part of the project, but it will help training and digitization and preservation training. So... and those are due May 1st. That is correct. Thanks, Jenny. Also, digital humanities start up grants. The goal of these is to benefit digital humanities initiatives. They're meant for the initial and planning stages of your project, and they were focused on innovative technological uses and public programming education for your digital collection. Applications for these are due September 11. Also, the National Historic Public and Publications and Records Commission, their focus is on historical documents and records. They offer a couple really nice grants, digitizing historical records grants. The goal of this is to digitize and make online copies of important, significant historical records and collections. So if this is something that your institution hosts, you may want to consider it. Their deadline is in June, and also they offer a Decoding Democracy Access to Historical Records Project grant. The goal of this is to facilitate and enhance accessibility to primary source materials. So they want establishing archival programs, digitizing online placement of archival finding aids, processing archival collections. These are... it's a lot of... if you have a big, giant collection of historical documents, you should really, really, really apply to these people. Also, National Historic Preservation Offices are a good place to go for start-up funding or ideas for collaboration. They do have smaller grants. They do help you gain access to larger grants they can recommend you for things or point you in a better direction. But they also do possible collaboration and additional funding if it's something that's significant to one of their existing pieces. National and private funding. The Knight Foundation is a technologically-driven arts foundation. It focuses on technology and engagement with technology. Their focus is on bringing small communities together with open information. They do a lot of really interesting Web 2.0-type things. If you're interested in a last year or a more interesting display site and you have a very art-tight collection, I would really talk to them. As far as I know, they're not limited to the United States applicants. So the people that were asking about Canadian funding, I would definitely look into it. As far as the Sloan Foundation goes, they're focused on science and technology. They do grants for publications of science and technology to advance the understanding of that. They have a digital IT grant and they work with the Digital Public Libraries of America, the goal of which is for universal access and knowledge to digitized resources. So if you're interested in adding to that or contributing to the Digital Public Library of America, I would try it. They're really open and they're very, very communicative with their applicants and participants. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation focuses on scholarly communications and IT programs. They have grants that support preservation and access, increasing public access, and humanities information dissemination. So they're basically digital humanities, digital humanities all the way, go for it. Also, the American Alliance of Museums offers a variety of grants and programs for digital projects and emerging technology. So there is a lot to do with multiple levels of project planning and project foundation and project completion. There's a lot of places for you to go if you need additional funding or additional help with possible collaboration opportunities. There's a ton. Also, if you are a smaller institution, archives.com offers $1,000 grants for local history efforts. So if you have a particular, like, a family's collection or something like that, definitely go for them, because they are really, really nice and they publicize all your stuff on archives.com. And if you're feeling froggy, there is Kickstarter. Museum 2.0, which is a blog by Nina Simon, did a really excellent analysis of people that have used Kickstarter for museum projects versus small passion projects. There was a guy that made a board game with stocks versus a digitization Kickstarter where a small museum was trying to raise up enough money to digitize their whole collection. And so Kickstarter is very receptive. It talks about crowdsourcing 2.0, creative funding. You appeal to a wider audience with the... Because there's a change in donors now you have, like, a younger generation that doesn't have as much disposable income necessarily, but they're still interested in these endeavors. So this is how you appeal to those people. You might not be whining and dining people at a gala to get $1,000 donations, but if you get 200 people to give you $20, that's pretty nice. And you can give... You encourage your long-term relationships and foster new museum memberships with tiered rewards. You can gift memberships, like, you give us $15, and others will give you a membership, and that'll keep them coming back for all year. It'll get them to bring people. It'll engage them. So there's... Kickstarter is definitely worth looking into, especially if you have unique incentives and unique things that you can do. Nina Simon on her blog talked about one of the funding incentives for the museum project was to, if you gave a certain amount, there would be a traditional gala-style reception for you. And people really went for it. So it's definitely nothing to see that. So this has been a whole lot of information. However, don't fret, there is a checklist. So for your digital project, do you have significant material? Do they conform to the mission of your institution? Are these rare or valuable or fragile items? Does anybody possibly have a duplicate of one of these items? You want... If it's something that's difficult for you to display, you're going to want to digitize it because that will reduce wear and tear on that item. It'll reduce the damage that should be done to its firm displaying and UV, things like that. So if you have a lot of items that are fragile or not in the best condition, digitizing them is a really good option to make sure that those items in your collection still be viewed and appreciated by the public. Second thing, do you have permission? Again, I will drill this. Do you own these objects? Do you own their rights? Do you have copyright clearance or copyright ownership? Or are they in the public domain? You need to make sure that that is wear and tear before you ever start a digital project. As far as your metadata goes, are your items cataloged and described to your project needs? If not, how long will it take you to get them that way? Are they described for your end-user needs? Whoever is going to be looking at your digital collection, is all of your metadata going to make sense to them? I hope so. Essentially, your end-user wants the enhancement of their intellectual access and authenticity.  Like if someone wants a picture to put in a term paper or their own project for school, that's fair. If someone wants one of your pictures to put on a t-shirt, you might want to think about that. But these are all things that should be laid out in your metadata. And if anyone has questions, they can contact you. There should be a contact in your metadata also. As far as research value of these items, is this digital object going to be frequently used? Is this something people want to look at? Will it increase the value of this object because it's been digitized? Is it going to be more in the thoughts of people and in the public because it's available for someone to see at any time that they want to see it? Does it have a collaborative value? Is it something that's interesting only to your museum or is this something that could provide historical value for your state's institution or for a national institution? These are things that you should definitely think about. The lifespan of your digital object, how are you going to keep it current? Are you going to update this often? Are you going to re-photograph it? Are you going to keep the metadata updated? Are you going to have your digital object accessible through multiple platforms and formats? Is it going to be interoperable? Can people access it from only Apple computers? Or can people access it from anywhere that they want to? You've got to think about things like this. Finally, your resources. Again, a question of have versus need, funding versus time. And you also need to have your estimated cost per image into your final list of things to consider before your digital project gets started. Generally, that's calculated by thinking about staff versus equipment versus time versus funding and kind of working out a rough digital cost per image estimate. It doesn't have to be hard to estimate. So digital projects can definitely offer a lot to your small museum. They can open the door to many new patrons, many new donors, many new collaboration opportunities. The metadata might change to answer that question really quick before I go on a diatribe. The metadata might change in case there is something that happened to your object, like if it broke or if it was damaged somehow. Does someone need to update it or did you replace it? Has someone done something to it? Has it been cleaned? Have you had restorative people come in and work on it to fix it? Things like that. Or if it's done, say you have a photo. You think you have the provenance for it. Someone comes in and says, wait, no, that's not your photo. That's my photo. Things like that. So in case there's new ownership or new information about it, you should reflect that in your metadata. It's not just a one and done thing. It's the constant evolving thing. So to conclude this, there are a lot of new possibilities. Mobile phone apps, augmented reality exhibits where you can handle digitized objects through a touchscreen app. Special exhibits that break down physical disability barriers. Digital collections are really great for small museums that don't have a lot of like handicap access. If someone can't physically get into your museum, how can they see your objects? So if you have it online for someone that they... or for their own purposes and they can see it in a format that they need, that's perfect.  So if you're interested in stuff like this, definitely check out Museum 2.0 from Nina Simon. She's wonderful. Check out the new media consortium. It's a community of universities and colleges and museums that keep stats and updates on digital collections. And they also have news and they offer seminars if you want to learn about it. Really great. The Center for the Future of Museums is run by the American Alliance of Museums. And they monitor museum trends and connect museums to prepare for coming changes and challenges in the future of museums and institutions. So definitely check those things out. They're really worth your while. And that's it. If there are any questions, I will happily take them. Oh, thank you so much, Amanda. We've got just a few more minutes left. I'm just going to point out really quickly. I think what would be fun for this webinar, as soon as the recording is available for this webinar, we'll go ahead and post the recording. It looks like some people added some fantastic resources. We'll get those up as well. We'll open the comments on this post. And I think the question that would be great for all of you to kind of chime in is, you know, making the case for digitization. It sounds like that's one of the harder things to do is convincing leadership that this is a worthy thing to take on. So I'm going to pose that question. And folks, if you're interested, can leave comments in that so that we'll kind of stay with this webinar. So we do have one question, Amanda, from Kathy Gao. She's curious, how about a few examples of online museums? As far as online museums, there are a lot of digital collections that are offered through colleges that are really spectacular. My museum, the Skeptisium, which is, again, only digital, if you want to check that out. As far as off the top of my head, there is a really wonderful digital museum of fortune-telling that's based out of Northern California, and they do a really good job at displaying their artifacts. Off the top of my head is kind of all I can show off with it. No worries. We also did a while back, you guys might remember, a webinar WebWise Reprise, and we went through using Omeka for that, so another great resource. But we can add some more to this post as well. Oh, yeah. If anybody has any interesting digital museums to pose, oh, yeah. Digital collections from a historical society museum. Check out the New York Heritage Collection. They do digital collections from historical societies, as well as libraries, museums, and other independent foundations. I would really recommend checking them out. It looks like, we'll see if a few people chime in and have questions, but if they don't, let me just quickly get through my closing spiel. So if everyone wouldn't mind clicking on this webinar evaluation link, your feedback is really helpful for us in planning for future webinars and figuring out what to do next. And I will say up next, our next hour-long drop-in webinar will be Thursday, April 17th, at 1 p.m. We'll be reviewing the Incident Command System for Cultural Institutions with David Carmichael just in time for Mayday. So we'll post that on the online community shortly. So it looks like we're good to go. Thank you all so much for joining us. Again, a recording will be available shortly at the link above, and we'll open up the comments on that so we can continue this conversation. If you have other questions, you're also welcome to go to the discussion board. Amanda, thank you so much for giving us a taste of the Small Museum Association. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I had a great time, and I hope everybody learns things. Great. Let's see. Are you... Quickly, we can get to this question. Are you aware of any past-perfect issues? I don't have that much experience with past-perfects when I presented at the conference in February. There was a representative that attended my presentation, so he kind of fielded past-perfect questions. I've heard good things and bad things about them, so I'm not really certain. I don't have a very definitive standpoint, but... Sure. And I think one of our participants mentioned earlier that, you know, they've used past-perfects, the website add-on, but it doesn't allow you to zoom into photos as well as other software platforms. So there is one comment from our folks. And then let's see. One last question. I know I totally... You were off the hook, and now I have more questions for you. It's quite all right. I am fine with this. As far as cross-pollination with Pinterest, I have not really experienced any cross-pollinations with Pinterest. I think it could be interesting if you started a Pinterest for your museum or for your digital collection. That would be a really amazing way to use social media to get your items out there and get your message out there, and that would be really, really innovative, innovative actually. So thanks for bringing that up. And we can look for some as well and include on this webpage. Well, thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you, Amanda, and thank you Learning Times. We'll see you again in April. Have a great afternoon. Thank you, everyone.


In this video I am sharing the four secrets to a lasting long-term love and these secrets are so secret that I don't even technically know what the answer is. And by that I mean I'm not sure what the best four agreements are for your particular relationship.  All of this is going to happen right after we show some love to the sponsor of this video, you guessed it, Squarespace. Well, 2024 has arrived and yeah, it's time for a complete restructure. This year, Shan and I are embracing a new direction, focusing on artistically stunning and engaging content starting with Shan's website makeover. There's no better partner for this transformation than Squarespace, the proud sponsor of this video. Squarespace isn't just a sponsor for us, it's ideal for us in tailoring our brand and fit our unique needs and our desires. It stands as the ultimate platform for entrepreneurs looking to stand out and succeed online. With Squarespace, creating a captivating website is a breeze, allowing you to connect with your audience and know your audience with in-depth analytics plus you can sell everything from products and content to time. Now, while I can go on and on about Squarespace's impressive capabilities, I'll save that for later in the video. But if you're eager to explore Squarespace right now, for yourself, visit squarespace.com slash shan booty for a free trial, no credit card needed. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash shan booty to enjoy 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Enjoy the video. We'll talk soon. So I posted this video to Instagram. What's the honest secret to elastic marriage? Before we get to that. The other day, someone asked about the secret to elastic marriage and I said, constant mutual choreography. Five, six, seven, eight. And that's a beautiful analogy, right? Two people doing tons of incredibly difficult things with planning and rhythm. And the more I visualized that answer, the more I realized how f*** phony it was because the truth is, doing life with someone looks a whole lot less like this and more like this. And that's when it hit me. A good marriage is like playing the childhood game keep up while you also handle bills, individual goals, outside relationships, maybe kids, maybe pets, et cetera, et cetera. And don't get me wrong, often the game has a fun flow to it. But sometimes it's a dumpster fire where the only fun part is knowing you're not in it alone. And once in a while, one of you drops the ball and has to repent. And in extenuating circumstances, one person has to keep it all up alone so the other can heal. Learning to play together is a challenge. And that is why your first year can also be the messiest year of marriage. And then my brother-in-law who was helping us film this piece of content asked me, so what's the significance of this ball?  And so I thought, let me just make a video and make it crystal clear what I was trying to say. So in essence, when you were in a long-term relationship with someone, your relationship probably extends into various parts of your life, you know, the bills, the hobbies, the kids, the house, the all the other things you probably have going on. And sometimes what can happen is that people start to blur the lines and think that, oh, us being parents is our relationship. Us managing a house is our romantic relationship. Us having a business, a dog, again, all the list ensues. But it's not. The relationship is the balloon. And the balloon represents the agreements and priorities that you have between you as you do all these various tasks. And despite what tasks you are doing, that balloon of those agreements is still something that you have to be mindful of keeping up together, keeping on top of together. Now, the reason why it is four agreements and not 40 agreements, one, it's a homage to the book, the four agreements, which is an incredible book. And two, most people can only hold three to five bits of information in their brain at a time. So we want to ensure that what really matters to us is top of mind for us. And again, life is busy with multiple things being thrown in the air. So you want to keep it simple and clear when we do life together, when we do love together, these are the things that matter the most. So to satisfy the click baby YouTube title, the secret to a long lasting relationship is to identify your four agreements with someone else and then to remember those agreements and keep them top of mind in all that you do as long as you are committing to doing life with somebody else. So coming up with your four is both challenging because there are so many options out there and it is also unearthing because you have to go beneath what your initial reactions are going to be, right? You're going to want to say love, respect, trust, kindness, but underneath those, what do you actually mean and what genuinely matters and how do these things show up in a value system and values aren't just things that we believe, but they're also things that we act on. So the way that my husband and I came up with what is inside of our balloon, what are our four agreements is that we reverse engineered it and said, what would be grounds for getting divorced? Now it might be helpful for you to say what keeps us together or you might need the little nudge like us to go for the negative side. And interestingly, we actually very quickly came to a census on what our four agreements were. Now we had a little bit of a tricky time with a fifth and sixth additional piece that we were really thinking could fit in the four, but decided that we're going to keep them as reserve and then talk about it later because maybe in three years that thing that's five or six might make its way back to the list and end up being number two or three more on that later. Here's my list. Currently, the most important thing in our relationship is shared foresight, which means a mutual vision for our future together. This doesn't mean that we want the exact same things at the same time, but instead that we value what each of us desires and is moving towards and we will presently do whatever we can to make that foresight come to fruition. Our second agreement is a prioritization of individuality. It's important to know that some people come from a collectivist culture and some people come from an individualistic culture. Jared and I both come from an individualistic culture in which we believe that we are accountable for our own behaviors, that we are responsible for our own advocacy, and also it is our life's purpose to actualize our destiny and to reach our higher purpose. People can definitely help you, but by and large, this life is an individual pursuit with some team members. So in our relationship, we ask ourselves the question, is the best me possible in partnership with you? So far, the answer has been a resounding enthusiastic yes, but if for a prolonged period of time the answer was no, that would be grounds to reexamine the relationship and the point of the partnership. Third on our list is fondness, constant cultivated fondness. We actually went back and forth as to whether fondness or sexual connection should be number three. We ended up putting sexual connection at number five and kept fondness at three. And the reason why is best introduced by this clip from Jared's new podcast. How long does it take while you're in a relationship before you start looking at your wife's features or your girl's features to be like, what's that like? When everything starts bothering you about the person. Yeah, you start looking at her from the profile. The scientific answer to Mike's question is six months to a year. You start to notice them. And by year four, you've seen it all, baby. All the oogles, you smelt all the smellies you have experienced and witnessed all of the bottom feeding, vile, completely detestable humaneness of the other person. And that is because your honeymoon phase has ended that chemical cocktail that keeps you on that disillusioned high has now been turned down. And your love goes from being passionate to companion it. And that is not me casting a spell on you. That's just the nature of love running its course. And there's tons of positive benefits to love moving into the stage. But one of the negatives is that you no longer see that person without effort through rose colored glasses. And that is why fondness is important. You have to put the work in. There became a time in our relationship as we now come up to 10 years of knowing each other that I had to make a manual switch to trying to see my partner as if I was seeing him for the first time. And moreover, when you are seeing that person in not so first impression worthy moments, which spoiler alert is like 95% of relating with somebody, there is such an art to finding the awe in any egg, to seeing that person as full and fully lovable and adorable, despite being disgusting as all of us are. So yeah, fondness is definitely a skill that we work our asses off at.  And the fourth agreement that sits in our balloon, our pink balloon that we play keep up with all day long and our various tasks and roles and responsibilities is respect. And this is a heavy big word for me. And that is because it's associated with a past trigger in another relationship. The word respect was brought up so frequently and demanded in so many varied situations that I lost any attempt to understand what it could possibly mean or how I could give that to somebody. And I'm really grateful that in this relationship, respect is tied with a very clear action item that we both prioritize and agree on. And for us, respect means put a filter on that, please. Emotional regulation. I know that we do life together. We spend lots of time together. As a result, we could be subject to each other's changing moods or feelings or hidden triggers. And it's just nice to be around somebody who is mindful of not immediately making you the burden or the recipient of their first gut reaction. Put a filter on that, really assess before you move forward and you bring that energy to me. That's something as very simple as us driving together and not over-directing the others. Obviously, I'm speaking about myself in the passenger seat who really contend to be one of those annoying passenger drivers. And I've had to really just put a filter on that. Respect the driver, respect the leader in that moment, and knowing when silence is absolutely key. It also comes with not bringing jealousy or tainting relationships that exist outside of us, even if I feel away. It's again thinking of our other big priorities of foresight, that shared goal of individuality, of fondness, of respecting my partner and being fond of their choices. And then deciding if after consideration of all that, it's worth it for me to try to manage their behaviors or sway them to do something different than they naturally want to do. So respect is something very beautiful, something very bold. But it also is number four on our list for a reason because we acknowledge this is kind of the hardest thing to do. When you're around somebody as frequently as we're around each other, you can make a lot of slip-ups on this. And this is probably the agreement that I end up apologizing for the most.   And so sexual compatibility and connection is really at the heart of our relationship. But we also acknowledge that because our role as new parents and new business owners is so all-encompassing and dear to us at this time, I don't think that it would be a reason that we would consider ending the marriage. I think that once other roles maybe are not as important or de-prioritized, it'll make its way back onto the list. But as of right now, it's number five with an honorable mention. So as you can tell, this is so specific because of course on someone else's list, there is going to be a shared love for God or shared values when it comes to religion and a higher power. Of course on somebody else's list, fidelity is going to be on there. Monogamy exclusivity is going to be on there. Of course on somebody else's list, it's going to be so important that you have similar values because that person is out in the community every single day doing advocacy work and they want somebody else who's on the same wavelength. So that's to say to Hallmark and highlight and underscore the point that there is no catch-all, one-size-fits-all secret to a healthy marriage. And when people try to come up with something like saying something like communication, it actually ends up doing more harm than good because everybody has their own specific connotation for what communication means and an action item associated with that. And so we're both saying the same things, but we mean two totally different things, but we don't know that we have to have these additional dialogues on top of it. We end up feeling like there's no hope because we can't even get past things that we have in common. So that's to be said, this is why I was so curious to talk with other couples to find out what their agreements were. And I'm happy to share that with you. Okay, little pause here, but let's just dive into why Squarespace is so impressive to me. First, their appointments feature has been a game changer for us, with our schedules being quite hectic. This feature streamlines our day-to-day management beautiful. And speaking of beauty, you've got to check out their fluid engine. It makes creativity so easy, and it's accessible from your browser or even your phone. And are you thinking of selling products? Squarespace has you covered here too. They assist with everything from product design to production to inventory and shipping, plus their mailing list management and analytics tools are top-notch. And the ease of designing and customizing your website is simply amazing. If any of this sparks your interest, visit squarespace.com slash shambudy to start your free trial, no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, go back to squarespace.com slash shambudy to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Remember, that's squarespace.com slash shambudy for your free trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Now enjoy the rest of this video. Yeah. Six is our probably top priority. And then he said parenting, which we've been parents for 15 months, which I was very like, I was like, Oh, parenting, like that, that should be my number one, right? That wasn't even where he's like, if you just check out and don't want to be a parent, we're done. And I'm like, Oh, I can't believe that wasn't all my thought that was his. I was like, that is so attractive. And they're like, I was so excited that he said that. Oh, no, effort, which that is not very, that's like a big thing, right? So like, if he's not putting in the effort, or if I'm not putting in the effort, then that's a don't break her for us. Like what does parenting mean? I think a lot of it kind of rolls into effort making sure your kid doesn't die and hopefully turns out to be a well informed, productive member of society. When we ask our partner to be a parent, what requirements or skills come with that? I can go first. Yeah, I love it. I love you talking. For me, I don't think it's really, it's definitely not just supervising them and making sure that they don't die before they're 18. I think you're just, man, it's like influencing them to be to reach the full potential of who they are and not trying to fit them inside a idealized box that I might have or some preconceived notion of what qualities I wanted to have. I just wanted to be the best version of whatever their flavor is. Yeah, I think for parenting, for me, is consistency. I want my child to know consistency of us just being there and guiding and helping and being constant with them. Daisie, do you want to go next? Sure. I talked a little bit about these with my husband. I know he wasn't able to make it, but let's see. So I'm kind of scared mine aren't like specific enough, but I have kind of not putting each other on a pedestal of that. Like, because I guess that kind of seems brown. I was a big thing, like we had to work with, because I grew up kind of like the golden kid, like just always the good girl, just everything like everyone expected so much. And then it's just like, I guess I am divorced.  So a big thing for us is like kind of just being there and seeing each other as like normal people like flawed humans that we are. Really, you're not going to be perfect. I had to finally like really come to grips with that myself. And I think that what she said was, what did your friend say? She wanted to not be put on a pedestal by her husband. And I, that's brilliant. Greatest thing I've heard all year. It's only February, but so far it's great. It's just brilliant, because you won't get it right. And then another one would be like taking our mental health seriously, like doing the work and like accountability. Just always taking accountability when we, you know, do something all for a wrong. And just always being a safe space for each other when, you know, we have to have those tough conversations and everything. Just being able to not, I guess, yeah, just be a safe space for the other person not being like judgmental or like getting pissed or anything like that. Just telling some more. So like as a person, yeah. So those are my three. Cool. I like that. The pedestal thing that that feels like a really safe space to be in. And like both of them, both are allowed to make mistakes and that's okay. I am hoping my husband will join. So we'll let's see. But it's funny. Okay. So I, I get a bit of an unfair advantage in this conversation because I am a couples therapist and a therapist. So, so thank you for asking this question because it got us to really go deep into a pretty big part of our relationship.  And what that is for him is an alignment with me. And what he said was this sort of lack of harmony or avoidance of things that are really important to him and people that are really important to him. So that means kind of like if I'm like just not efforting or I'm, I'm avoiding or I'm causing some fights or I'm not moving through my resentments of certain things that he loves, the people that he loves, his family and such. And that makes complete sense because that's mine too. We both have come together and each other's families have been a big part of our life. We've gone through a lot together. Our families outside of us have gone through a lot together and we've been taking that on as a couple does because now it's your family too. So I agree with that myself and it was really important for me to find somebody that wasn't an avoidant, like somebody that was not an avoidant of intimacy. That they were, I mean we can all be to some degree, you know, I'm having a moment, I don't want to get intimate, sure, but in all, like just somebody that just not letting that fear or the traumas of love or the lack of get in the way. So that has been a huge one for me. And thankfully we're always, it's like we're, that's never a doubt, you know, if we want to, we'll always be available for intimacy. And that doesn't always, and I think when I say intimacy, it's more so depth and vulnerability when it comes to psychologically rather than like physically. Although that's been like a bit of a tricky place for me to live in with him. And I, you know, I think I use your content to support me with that, Jen. And I guess another one that I would want to say is this notion of not growing together and or growing. And it's, it's really just this, I couldn't imagine myself, I'm a therapist and Toper, my husband does a lot of personal work too. And I just don't think we can be in a relationship if we're not willing to grow and grow, meaning we're not sticking in the unstuckness, like the stuckness, or sorry, not sticking around in the stuckness. Like, okay, if you got resentments, like, I don't care, like, we have to move through that, like we have to do something about that. You know, having just the ability to process, move through what isn't working, what's challenging thing with parenting, I've been really resentful and moving, but having to move through those things. And now I'm arrived in a place where like, we have different roles. And there's just some things that I'm might be better at, and he's going to be better at, and we're maybe in a phase where I'm better at, son, turn those things just it's great to be able to talk about relationships. It's like such a center of our quality of life. And yeah, so thank you for that opportunity. God only knows, I gotta feel those kinds of things, tell me what I done, huh? Tell me like it's magic, who's the heavy-reaching client acting?


Thank you for this question and shout out to one of my lovely friends for my cohort for asking it. So I chose to pursue public policy in grad school, mainly because I studied political science and undergrad and I really loved it, but upon graduation from undergrad, I ended up in a completely different field doing different work. And I stayed there for a while, but while the role I was in was mostly administrative, I knew I didn't wanna get deeper into that field, it just wasn't really the place for me. So fortunately, I was able to leave, but I knew that I wasn't going to be able to just leave without getting more relevant experience. I wanted to build myself up in terms of my skills and practical application. So I was able to come here where I knew I'd get a lot of that experience and I'm very happy to be doing what I'm doing now.