Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

We had a very successful day today. We met up with Nate and Brent from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It's good to meet with people similar to us - they have built most of their interactive installations and web projects in house. Many museums and galleries in the USA outsource much of their work, at least that's the impression I got from the Museums and the Web conference.

The Walker Arts team have gained a reputation for blogging, as they were one of the early adopters of the format. It was a learning curve for them - they intended to roll it out across departments, but before they could do that they needed to understand the software better. And what better way than to use it?

It turned out that their New Media Initiatives blog is the second most popular blog on the Walker Arts website. It seems that this is due to peers being extremely interested in what the team were developing. Which is how I found out about their work, and I ended up visiting the center. And I live about 3900 miles away.

We spoke at length about our respective organisations' websites. There were some things that both Chris and I liked about their system. We also got to look behind the scenes at some audio-visual installations, and I ended up taking photos of their racks! Chris or I might post more technical details of how we compared in time.

Nate has sorted a meeting out for us in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts tomorrow, and we'll hopefully visit the Science Museum of Minnesota if we have time.