I have a presentation that I've done a couple of times that exams low-cost technology that can be used for museum applications. At the moment I'm spending some time looking at some new apps to add to the list.
On the list are two video editing programs and two photo editing programs.
What I'm most excited about is a simple little app called Readability. It's a bookmarklet that let's you decide how you want to view a webpage in order to read it (and print it if you like). When I demoed the Firefox plugin Nuke Anything, there was much rejoicing. User could delete annoying flashing ads and happily print their content without the ads wasting toner. But you had to do it one ad at a time.
Now some of you might be thinking who worries about wasting toner. But when you are in the non-profit world, especially during a recession, you are always looking for a way to eke out every penny's worth.
Well Readability is ten times better. It gets rid of everything at once and you get to decide the final format of the content you are trying to read. You get to pick the font, margin, and style. It's still in the experimental stage but the makers have made it so it works with most major browsers. They say it isn't 100% effective all of the time so they are looking for issue reports and comments, but it has worked every time for me. I'm in Heaven because reading on the Internet has just become so much easier.
My current projects are many and varied. For the museum I'm currently cataloging and organizing a very large manuscript collection of papers from the International Order of Odd Fellows. I'm also trying to catch-up on editing some podcast episodes and planning an exhibit that will open in 2010. I'm in the process of writing an article for the Historic House Museum Affinity Group newsletter and I'm putting together a workshop on social media for the Arkansas Museum Association. On the personal front I'm currently working on creating a portfolio.