I’m sorry, but the discussion about the Getty’s Cultural Objects Name Authority originally scheduled for Friday at 3:30 has to be canceled because one of the key participants is unavailable due to a family emergency. We’re sorry not to be able to have this conversation at MCN, but we will plan to do it some time in the near future, possibly at MW in Philadelphia next spring.

For those of you looking for an interesting THATCamp session to attend instead, please think about coming to the “Museum Visualization” session on Friday at 1:30 led by Richard Urban and Piotr Adamczyk. They’ll be picking up the way-too-short discussion started in our infoviz conference session today, and taking the discussion in lots of new directions, including the review of easily available tools. We’ll also have a chance to hear in detail from Richard, who was unable to present his own materials in today’s session because a cyclone kept him in Atlanta overnight, delaying his arrival at the conference.

Join us for a very informal discussion of the Getty’s forthcoming vocabulary, CONA–the Cultural Objects Name Authority. The Getty team is still at work at developing the vocabulary’s standards and planning its implementation; we hope that they’ll agree to formally present the project to our community at next year’s conference in Atlanta. Meanwhile, we thought that it might be useful for museum professionals to gather to consider the implications of a resource that will create authority records for unique works held in museum collections. We’ll consider the potential uses of the resource in museum practice, think through the concerns that the contributor community might have about the practical aspects making records available, and try to capture questions for the CONA team that represent the museum community’s thoughts. Some of you may have attended the introductory webinar this spring (sponsored by AAM, Gallery Systems, and the Getty Trust). The Q&As for that webinar are available (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/cona_webinarQA_may2010.pdf) along with a general introduction to the project (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/cona_intro.pdf). The CONA team has also recently released the vocabulary’s preliminary editorial manuals (www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/editorial_guidelines.html#cona). All of these are useful–but by no means compulsory–background reading for what we hope will be an interesting unconference discussion.

Susan Chun and Cathryn Goodwin