Resources - Geek Speak - Internet2

Welcome to Geek Speak, a column designed to keep cultural institutions in the know on the latest technologies. The tech world moves at a dizzying pace and we hope to make it a little clearer for those in the museum world. We will review hardware and software, make the business and technology of web pages a little clearer and hopefully make the internet a more interesting place for you to roam. If you have suggestions for future topics, please email them to zeroone@zeroonedesign.com

Dare to Dream: The Evolution of the Internet

This issue, Geek Speak is looking into the future. There is this fabulous tool called the Internet. It has great potential for research and communication, collaboration and you can buy stuff with it. However, since it’s promising inception in 1969, it’s gotten a little clogged. Have you tried doing a Google search lately for, say, Canadian museums? Not bad, 2,550,000 entries and the commercial sites don’t start to kick in until page three.

There is little doubt that the Internet offers great promise for the world of culture. It is a cost-effective marketing tool to attract visitors, it offers an opportunity to present collections in creative and unique ways, it is a wealth of information on all aspects of the museum and gallery world and it is a place to create community among those in the business. However, the Internet is also becoming so congested with commercial activity as to diminish that value.

The Internet as a tool has some serious drawbacks. It is no longer the domain of education and knowledge -- as was the intent -- but instead has become a money-making venue for commercial activity which makes up 83% of the Internet’s content, leaving a scant 6% devoted to scientific, educational or cultural content. It is growing at an astounding 5% each month and most commercial search engines cannot keep up with the growth. Indeed, no commercial search engine is able to index the entire Internet; Google, the largest of the search engines is only able to index 33% of the Internet. Sounds like it’s time for an upgrade and Internet2 is that upgrade.

The Internet2 arose as a result of the issues attributed to its cluttered and commercialized parent, Internet1. In 1996, a group of 34 universities formed the Internet2 consortium; their initial aim was to improve the amount of bandwidth the network could handle and thus improve speed. That consortium has now grown to 202 universities and has added schools, libraries and museums and is estimated to have 3 million active users. Culture members of Internet2 include: the Smithsonian, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Manhattan School of Music. The Cleveland Museum of Art was one of the first institutions to get on board and has had an active distance-learning program using Internet2 since 1999 and is considered a leader in this field. In 2003, it used video teleconferencing to deliver more than 700 distance learning lessons to more than 18,000 students in America.

The backbone for Internet2, the Abilene fibre-optic network, is up to 15,000 times faster than the standard Internet and has tremendous potential for research and knowledge sharing. Abilene, named after a Kansas railway depot that became a centre for travel and commerce in the 1800s for American pioneers is limited to the world of learning. In a bid to restrict the clogging of Internet2, commercial dot-com’s have been banned and research and educational information is the only data that should be flowing through the network. The huge amount of bandwidth that Abilene allows means that massive amounts of data, whether it be text, images, video, audio or any streaming dataflow, can be quickly and reliably transferred.

The Internet2’s giant pipes improve the Internet as a research tool in a number of significant ways. Videoconferencing on the Abilene network is no longer limited to a tiny, choppy video player such as Internet users are familiar with but via full-screen, broadcast-quality video. This allows for students or researchers to discuss and share knowledge across vast distances. The Jason Project started by archaeologist Robert Ballard was one of the first research projects to use the Internet2. Ballard and his team explored the wreck of the Titanic in a submarine and broadcast their findings to schools and universities across the world. Internet2 allowed students or researchers to ask the team questions in real-time, whether the team was on the Black Sea or in the Amazon Rainforest. Other institutions have also found research uses for Internet2 video-casting; the New World Symphony holds hundreds of virtual master classes over Internet2 networks, the Kansas State University at Manhattan offer courses in plant pathology that brings together three experts in universities across the United States using Internet2 videoconferencing and the American Museum of Natural History in New York streams educational programs directly to schools and universities using the Abilene backbone.

What does this mean for museums and galleries in BC? Currently, to set up hardware to access Internet2’s giant pipes is prohibitively expensive, but when the price comes down to a reasonable level, the possibilities are exciting. Real-time video collaborations with experts and colleagues in Canada and the world; educational programs aimed not just at local students, but those across the province; and the opportunity to present collections in breathtaking detail with video and audio interpretation are just a few of the possibilities. With some of the big players in American museums and galleries involved in its development, Internet2 is an exciting potential tool for the world of culture.

Links:
Internet2: http://www.internet2.edu
The Cleveland Museum of Art: http://www.clemusart.com
The Jason Project: http://www.jasonproject.org
The New World Symphony: http://www.nws.org

David Alexander (david@zeroonedesign.com) is a geek and he speaks. He can be found waiting patiently for Internet2 at www.zeroonedesign.com.