john blue - museums have curators

Museums Have Curators

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Many museums never display all their collections, mainly because of space limitations. But museums also don’t want to overwhelm their visitors with so many pieces. Museum curators work to organize and rotate their collected works into presentations to help entertain, educate, and inform their visitors.

3Monday, September 8, 14If you are a reader of any sort then you have found something of interest you want to keep for later. In the pre-easier-to-use-computer days (before 2000) most people would have jotted down the article or book in their note book. Some may have ripped out the page from a magazine or clipped the column from the newspaper. For the really serious, there were clipping services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_monitoring_service ) you could employ that would send you clipped summaries based on a set of key terms or search words.

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If you are doing any kind of research, "clipping" and storing information is part of the process. Many times, on a hunch, you find something that seems to make sense for some future need but you're just not sure. So you capture it and store it for later.

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In today's media environment you are most likely researching and reading online. As you see articles or blog posts, you may bookmark the website. Or you may copy / paste text or images into a document for later use.

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But collecting is part of the process. Before collecting you have to discover things. And after collecting you have to organize things. And flowing through all this there is an element of analysis. All the steps (discovery, collect, organize, analysis, publish) are activities that people go through when focusing on some end goal of "doing something" with all the collected material. Examples include writing a book or article, preparing for an event (wedding or a conference), or keeping up with issues as they move through time (GMOs, terrorism, mental health).

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Discovery, collection, organizing, analysis, and publish each have some tedious aspects. Discovery at first can be fun and exciting but after several weeks of always trying to "discover" information, you wish for a source that would just give you what you want. Similarly for collecting, organizing, and analysis, there are parts that at first you are willing to do but after dealing with some steps for weeks on end you start looking for ways to make your life easier. Save you time, make the process easier, or advancing the thinking are some actions many people wise for.

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The following are some approaches that can help you as you look to research for some end goal. They may provide you some examples from which you can extract some value or they possibly will point you in a direction that helps your efforts.

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This is a broad view of an approach to discover, collect, organize, analyze, and publish information as a process (aka curating). This is one approach, there are others you may prefer.

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Before starting a project it helps to write down some key words, terms, or phrases to help put some structure around information. It may also help to write down questions you are trying to answer.

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Using the terms, phrases, and/or questions, use services like Google Alerts or TalkWalker to set up automated article searches . These services provide RSS feeds (real simple syndication) that can be utilized in services like Feedly.

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Using the same terms, phrases, and/or questions, use searches on Twitter or Facebook to find experts. You may want to organize people you find on Twitter or Facebook into lists for later reviews.

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Once the terms are setup (flowing as RSS feed entries into Feedly), then Feedly is the main view I use to discover news & information (during collecting & organizing).

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These three steps; discovery, collecting & organizing, can occur at the same time. For example, when I find information from a site I want to remember for later, I will tag it in the browser using Delicious (there is a Chrome plugin).

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If the article is something I want to keep whole (all the text) I will send it to Evernote (also with a Chrome plugin). This approach allows me to capture the full article instead of just the link.

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Also, if I want to capture this and share it immediately, I would Tweet this out via Bitly (again, with a Chrome plugin).

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Feedly example: On the left are my Feedly folders. This example shows is the AgToday channel with news roughly organized by commodity type plus activism. On the right are some articles found in the Swine terms.

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Feedly offers the ability to tag articles for later use. In this example, I tagged an article for swine, picsymposium, and tmu. Those tags refer to projects I am working on: finding articles SwineCast.com site, the PIC Symposium audience, and / or the Truffle Media Update (email update). This is one aspect of curation.

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Another way to curate a page is if I was browsing and I saw an article I wanted to keep. In this case I used the Chrome Evernote button (1) to capture the page. The Evernote plugin (2) shows options I can add to the captured page (tags, which notebook the info gets stored, etc). This approach allows the full text to be captured for later.

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This approach also shows me organizing as I go along by tagging the article with terms I will use later for creating a newsletter or email update.

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This example uses an approach to tagging a link via Delicious. Since I have been using Delicious for a long time there are some articles I prefer to tag with Delicious to be consistent with past activity. Using the Chrome Delicious plugin button (1) I tag and label the page (2). This only captures basic info and the link.

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In each of these approaches I have “curated” the info via Delicious, Evernote or Feedly.

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Once something is in Evernote (full article plus organization tags), Feedly (as a tagged article), or Delicious (also tagged). I can start to look over the material and decide next steps. For articles, it may be just fine to use the captured link in an email update. For longer term projects, I may need the full text as part of a presentation being developed.

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This is an example Evernote notebook with articles and info captured and organized.

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This is an example Delicious page focused on articles tagged as app and agriculture (I am collecting info on ag mobile apps ).

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In this an example, Feedly has, on the left (below folders) the tagged articles. This screen shows the articles I have tagged “tmu” (for the Truffle Media Update email).

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Once I have narrowed down material through discover, collection, and organizations, I start to build up my work for publishing. Longer articles or presentations may have many articles saved to help support the information. For a short series of tweets I may just rely on the save links in Delicious.

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Evernote is best for organizing long form articles, writing drafts, and sharing notebooks of info privately or publicly with others. Evernote is on all platforms, making it easy to find material on the go. If you are working on a presentation or writing a book, Evernote is a key tool to supporting those early research & organizational processes.

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Feedly is a great way to scan, skim, or jump across many articles. Feedly has done a great job of offering sharing features (Feedly to Evernote, Feedly to Twitter, Feedly to email, Feedly to LinkedIn, etc). Feedly also offers good tagging and organizational tools on the desktop. Tagging is not available on the mobile version.

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Delicious is really only useful in a limited set of activities. If you have web page links you want to keep long term then use Evernote. The only reason I use Delicious is because of some long history I have in using it.

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