We are now just 51 weeks from the The 16th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon.  To the more than 1,000 participants who joined us in New Bedford for the 15th, and the hundreds more who  joined us through our  live stream programing, thank-you for making this year’s Marathon a resounding success.

For an insightful account of the 25 hour long journey go to the blog Killing the Buddha to read “The Lingering Loveliness of Long Things” by Meera Subramanian .  It begins…

Last Friday night, a man late in his years and a recent recipient of news about his body that no man wants to hear, leaned in close to me and asked me a question. The air was heavy with mortality, and its twin emotion, love. What his question was is irrelevant, but the answer, I realize as I sit down to write about a marathon public reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick last weekend, is not. My answer was about how I cherish the quiet spaces in life. Time without interruption. Time for deep conversations or a sensuous focus on a single subject. Time to get into the grit of life, and let it unfold. I am decidedly of the mind that that’s where all the good stuff happens. I also feel like these moments, in our hyper-communicative lives, are becoming extremely rare. We share more, with more people, but we stay on the surface of an unfathomable ocean.

Reading together aboard the Lagoda (photo by S. Russell/ Medium Studio)

Approximate Time and Chapter in book for each Watch

Tweet the Marathon with #mdm15

The Museum’s Department of Digital Initiatives strives to keep up with electronic publishing and digitization trends.  While doing so we plan, as part of our ongoing website rebuild project,  to increase online access to the museum’s holdings, an idea which, if we follow Darnton’s thinking, puts us in the company of  Founding Fathers who wrote about  access to knowledge as an essential condition for a flourishing republic. It’s great to have a big idea to get behind.

“Discovering Whales, Petroglyphs, and Moby-Dick on the Olympic Peninsula in June 2008”

New Bedford Whaling Museum Theater, Friday, July 30, 5 – 6 p. m.

Admission Free

By Robert K. Wallace

This illustrated talk will highlight some of the discoveries Robert Wallace made on the Makah Indian Reservation of the Olympic Peninsula during a two-week trip with landscape painter Kevin Muente. Wallace will emphasize his encounters with gray whales, a humpback whale, and ancient Ozette petroglyphs in a sequence of events that brought Melville’s Moby-Dick to life before his very eyes.

Robert K. Wallace is a founder of the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He is author of Melville and Turner, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick, and Douglass and Melville. He has taught Literature and the Arts at Northern Kentucky University since 1972 and is a past president of the Melville Society.

Freshen up your walls with custom archival print reproductions of artwork that you fell in love with while at the museum. We invite you to visit the museum store or to browse through the expansive gallery online at 1000Museums.

It’s a familiar story – you visit a museum and you’re so taken with one of the many works of art on display that you want a reproduction to hang in your home.  You search in the museum store and on the Internet, but all you can find (if you are lucky) is a reproduction that is either printed as a poster or in a size that just won’t work for the “the spot” selected in your home or office. Until now.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum has chosen 1000Museums as a partner to supply custom archival print reproductions of the museum’s permanent collection of artworks and historic photographs. The new program offers several options to art and history lovers that weren’t available in the past.

Beginning with a modest 21 images, 1000Museums has established a page on their website that not only displays pertinent information about the museum but also a gallery of the images available for print. From there, the art lover can select an archival print of his or her favorite artwork or photograph. The prints are offered in 4 standard sizes: unframed or framed, starting as low as $19.  Custom Archival Print means that the artwork is produced by an 11-color digital inkjet machine on 100% cotton rag paper that work in concert to produce color that is stunning. Further adding to the uniqueness of the print, no print is offered until a proof has been approved by the museum’s curatorial staff. Once it has been approved, the final product is watermarked in the lower white space with the museum’s logo as a reminder of the artwork’s home collection.

As this program matures, the plan is to grow the initial offering of 21 images into a much larger virtual print gallery containing a significant percentage of the permanent collection.  The prints are offered on an “on-demand” basis, meaning that the print is only produced when an order is placed. This ensures that the customer gets a fresh print with every order.

The Adaline H. Perkins Rand Photography Archives is now the Adaline H. Perkins Rand  Photography and Digital Archives; an expanded name for an expanded mission. This name change represents the merger of the existing Photography Department with the new Department of Digital Initiatives. But what is a New Bedford Whaling Museum digital initiative, and why would it need a department of its own? Further, why is the digital archive linked to the photography archive; what is the connection?

Today’s Digital Era, characterized in part by an explosion of media types and applications, leads us to recognize the need for an institutional archive dedicated to electronic files. Linking of the Digital and Photographic Archives began as a result of a shared dependance on and connection to technology.

Within the Photography Archives, the history of photography can be viewed as a series of technological advancements. Arguably, over the last 170 plus years, there has been no greater shift in how photographs are made, or distributed, than what we have experienced recently. Silver based film has given way to electronic capture and digital media, and through the growth of the internet, the computer monitor now challenges for primacy in how people encounter museum collections. Currently there are more online visitors than visitors through our front doors, and this gap will only continue to grow as our web-based content increases along with our ability to create and manage it. The Department of Digital Initiatives recognizes that we must continue to create and sustain compelling content for this growing audience.

A broad definition of a digital initiative would be any project, process, or enterprise that is computer borne, or has migrated to the computer, and that improves access to museum collections, information, programs, or products. Much as Gutenberg’s printing press altered civilization forever, now the computer, through the web, changes how information and knowledge are created and shared. The web, like the printing press before it, substantially increases the distribution of all kinds of information, including access to primary source materials as well as related scholarship.

The Museum got its first computer in the early 1990s.  Within the decade to follow, while there were a few more machines, they were still mostly isolated from one another except through sharing via external media. This disconnection was recognized and addressed by the Museum in 2001, and with the help of an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences grant the Museum’s curatorial and library staff began the process of populating our just installed collections management database. The creation of the Museum’s collections database became the basis for what could be considered our groundbreaking digital initiative: offering an online version of this database. Initially we posted around 25,000 records, a majority with associated image surrogates. Today, we have well over 40,000 discrete records representing a substantial piece of our overall collections. This was a major turning point, and continues to be a growing asset.

Digital content of all varieties is growing exponentially. As we generate more and more, it becomes apparent that special care is required. One could argue that digitized materials, and content that is “born digital,” are in some ways more ‘fragile’ than some historic material. With digital content there is both a blessing and a burden that result from having a machine between us and it. The machine supercharges the distribution of the content, and the ability to organize and share it, but then inevitably machines break, associated software or media become obsolete. The digital age brings to the fore critical issues related to data preservation, integrity, and migration. It is fair to say that for many, paper is still the medium of last resort, a safer haven. When lightning strikes, when electricity fails, paper still works, it is tactile, it is concrete, we can hold it in our hands. It still makes a very nice complement to anything digital.

Digital initiatives tend to be collaborative among staff, volunteers, community members, and consultants. This new department is designed to encourage entrepreneurial thinking, developing a space for ideas to germinate and to encourage interaction. Projects tend to be both structural, in the sense of foundation building, and content driven.

Here are some of our current digital initiatives to be completed in 2010.

Website redesign (www.whalingmuseum.org): the goal is to transition from a static to a dynamic website.

Museum blog (http://whalingmuseumblog.org ): rich with behind the scenes information, timely updates, and articles.

Exhibit audio tours: available from the Frontdesk or our website. The production of these tours has been supported by the National Park Service and by the Melville Society Cultural Project.

Oral History Project: migrating existing recordings to digital formats and creating new ones.

Crewlist Project: creating a public access database for with the names of men who sailed from New Bedford on whaling vessels. This project is in cooperation with the New Bedford Port Society.

Most readers of The Bulletin from Johnny Cake Hill will no doubt find this issue in standard printed form, mailed as a benefit of Museum membership. A small but growing number of readers might have clicked onto it care of Google or Yahoo, or navigated to our website ‘News’ section to find it. Content digitally delivered, like whalers and whaleships that sailed the seven seas, can serve as a link between New Bedford and the world. Wherever you are, sail with us.

A  fascinating  discussion about the relationship between emerging technologies, primary source research, and libraries. (Run time, 1:54 minutes, takes a while to get to the meat of the topic). Posted online via MIT World™, a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT.

“Perhaps because he is a historian rather than librarian by training, Robert Darnton regards the vast ocean of digital information that civilization has begun accumulating with relish rather than anxiety. Darnton delves into European archives to find raw material, boxes of cast-off “ephemera,” for his stories of how people lived hundreds of years ago. No wonder he believes “it’s important to preserve as much as you can because you don’t know what will turn out to be significant.”

In conversation with David Thorburn and audience members, Darnton lays out why he finds more promise than peril in rapidly expanding digital collections.”

Here’s an example of an Emoji sentence from Moby Dick:

Read more about Fred’s Emoji Dick Project at Kickstarter.

Another pre-view of the upcoming photo exhibit from the wall of the Photo Archive

It is not too late to influence what ends in the exhibit. Which images are your favorites? Join our flickr discussion or comment directly on individual flickr photo pages. One needs to have an account (standard accounts are free) to place comments within flickr. If you’d prefer simply view the photos within flickr and tell us what you think via e-mail to photoresearch@whalingmuseum.org.

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