Joe Baskerville (Cogapp's Head of New Technology) and I went to Washington recently for the annual conference of the Museum Computer Network, where we were each presenting in a session.  MCN is always one of my favourite conferences to attend, not least because it is quite small, non-commercial, and most of the attendees are hands-on doing things with computers for museums.  So it's very friendly; and technical without being ludicrously geeky or divorced from practical uses for the technology.  As witness, my favourite slide of the conference (from an excellent and very well attended session on the Semantic Web from the Met's Koven Smith and Don Undeen):

I was also grateful to Ari Davidow  for introducing me to a metaphor for how RAID 3+ storage survives drive failure, something I've never managed to conceptualise convincingly.  He compared it to a Sudoko puzzle: even though many of the boxes are empty you can reconstruct the whole grid from the information that remains.

Inevitably there was one timeslot where I was annoyed at my continuing inability to be in three places at once, but generally I thought the pace was good.  The programme chair was the fabulous Holly Witchey, who also appeared on a number of panels - often providing a healthy curatorial sanity check to technological over-enthusiasm.

The other treat for me was dinner with Günter Waibel and partipants in the OCLC Museum Data Exchange project.  We've been assisting this group to develop a tool to export data on their collection as CDWA Lite records and this was an opportunity to meet in person some of the people we'd been collaborating with remotely.  On Saturday there was a chance to catch up with the thinking of the working group developing the next iteration of this standard.

Our own contribution came in the form of two case studies in the showcase sessions.  On Thursday Allegra Burnette and Joe presented MoMA.guide, the much-more-than-a-kiosk developed by Cogapp and MoMA over a period of several years; and on Friday Allegra and I presented two of the spin-off projects (the MoMA Label Tool and Public Text Editor) developed while we working on MoMA.guide and moma.org's online collection.  It was a shock to realise that we'd never really talked about this work, which started a couple of years ago though both tools have been updated since; and gratifying to see how much interest there was.  We'll now write it up, either as a case study on the Cogapp web site or as a blog post here.