The Smithsonian Institution’s new museum dedicated to black history and culture launched Sept. 26 with an interactive web site–long before its building opens for visitors on the National Mall.

Social-networking technology donated by IBM Corp. will allow visitors to help produce content for future exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Almost anything is fair game–long essays, short vignettes of memories, or recorded oral histories. The museum plans to add video capabilities in the future.

“The culture of the African American experience … is too important to wait five or 10 years until the building is open,” said Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director. “I wanted people to know that from the day I was hired, this museum exists.”

Museum staff will monitor the site for historical accuracy, and technical filters will block racist or inappropriate comments, said Bunch, adding that the site is really a “virtual museum” and a new source of research for curators, scholars, and students.

Museum officials began thinking about launching the web site during an explosion in the popularity of social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. That’s when Bunch and IBM Chairman Samuel Palmisano, who sits on the museum’s advisory board, got to talking. IBM eventually agreed to donate $1 million worth of hardware, software, and services to build the site.

“The museum thought, ‘Let’s harness this. Let’s build a social network that brings together people interested in the African American experience … all those people that are your visitors but who have great stories to tell,” said John Tolva, IBM’s senior manager for cultural programs.

One of the first contributions came from Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and a member of the museum’s board. Lomax recalls when, at age 13, his mother moved him and his five brothers and sisters from Los Angeles to Tuskegee, Ala., to cover the civil-rights movement for Nation magazine. He submitted a story his mother wrote for the magazine, called “Journey to the Beginning,” which recounted his family’s encounter with the South in 1961.

“We traveled at first by automobile, and then our car broke down and we had to … travel by Greyhound bus from Arizona to Alabama. We thought of it as our family freedom ride,” Lomax told The Associated Press. “My mother was a writer accustomed to the privileges of the journalist. We found ourselves in a position where we no longer had privilege. We were being segregated, and we tried to stand up to it and were almost arrested.”

Lomax said everyone thought his mother was crazy to take her children to Alabama as a single mother during segregation. He said it was “horrifying and exhilarating at the same time” and an experience that changed his life.

Organizers said they hope people of all ages and backgrounds will post messages on the site.

“You’ve got the sort of historical materials on major people and major moments linked directly to the kind of bottom-up recollections of common folk,” Tolva said. “You can link, visually depict, how your memory relates to the other kind of grand narratives of African American history–the narratives of civil rights, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. DuBois.”

The museum announced a similar partnership in February with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with hopes of recording about 2,000 oral histories from black families over the next year, to be placed in the museum’s archives. The StoryCorps Griot project has been traveling across the country to collect recordings.

By opening the museum online, potential donors see that the museum is alive long before its estimated 2015 opening on the National Mall, said Bunch, who is working to raise half the museum’s $500 million cost, with Congress providing the other half.

The museum is opening its first physical exhibit, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19 at the National Portrait Gallery. It traces 150 years of history through 100 photographs of well-known abolitionists, scholars, artists, and athletes who challenged negative attitudes about race and class.

Links:

National Museum of African American History and Culture

StoryCorps Griot project

IBM Community Relations

National Portrait Gallery’s upcoming exhibits

If any doubt still lingers that popular computing is experiencing yet another fundamental realignment, the skepticism is likely to be erased by the latest salvos in the “battle for the desktop.”

In fairly rapid succession, high-profile companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo have been rolling out products for personal and business computing that aggressively seek to take greater advantage of the internet to transform how applications are delivered.

The products vary, from online word processors and communication packages to database management, document sharing, and other forms of over-the-web collaboration. But a common goal is to get a leg up on competitors by offering impressive electronic capabilities in the form of web-based software and services, rather than through individual applications like those that most users have long been accustomed to purchasing, installing, and running from the desktop.

While the new focus on internet applications has already has made great inroads in the business world, so far it has received much less attention in education. If history is any guide, however, where businesses go, schools often follow–at least for the potential financial benefits.

The basic idea is to provide more and better computer action for less money, and it’s all taking hold nearly 25 years after John Gage, Sun’s chief researcher, coined the prophetic expression, “The network is the computer.” Today, however, advances in technology are proving to be more catalytic than ever before, and the internet in particular is facilitating change at a stunning pace.

Often called “software as a service,” or SaaS, the new emphasis on internet-based options is expected to become increasingly popular over the next several years. Already, according to the technology research company Gartner Inc., worldwide revenue for SaaS software will top $5.1 billion this year, for a one-year gain of 21 percent.

Robert DeSisto, a Gartner vice president, predicts that SaaS will grow “seven times faster than on-premise software deployments during the next three years.” By 2011, Gartner projects, one-fourth of all new business software will be delivered as a web-based service, with more than half of all software vendors offering it in some form.

As is generally the case with the adoption of new technology, businesses are well ahead of educational institutions in switching to SaaS, DeSisto notes, although the approach has been gradually gaining ground in colleges and universities, where some operations tend to parallel those of the business world.

How quickly elementary and secondary schools may join the web-services bandwagon is hard to tell. But DeSisto says one of the trend’s key advantages is that money for SaaS software can be taken from operating budgets, rather than from capital funds–a factor that could become increasingly persuasive in financially strapped school districts.

But a deeply embedded attachment to desktop applications in both schools and colleges is likely to impede education’s early transition to software as a service, says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project.

In higher education, “it’s going to be slow because it’s a cultural shift,” Green explains. He maintains that SaaS can work well “if you really control the box,” but that with a high degree of student and faculty mobility, many educational institutions may not be inclined or able to cede such control by switching to a web-based approach–except, perhaps, for eMail services.

Green adds that the widespread practice of site-license discounting for software in education will work against rapid SaaS adoption.

In many schools, moreover, the option of replacing familiar desktop applications that have a long history–in terms of usage and expenditures–may seem impractical. School officials’ reluctance to change technologies midstream has been underscored lately by a widespread failure to switch operating systems from Microsoft’s Windows XP to the newer Vista system.

All the same, as software producers jockey for strategic advantage in the expanding battle for desktop influence, some of the key developments are occurring at the largest tech companies. Long-time rivals Microsoft and Apple, for example, are widely expected to introduce operating systems in the next couple of years that take much greater account of the internet.

Microsoft is already offering a free software suite dubbed “Windows Live,” which the company describes as “a new set of services that brings your online world together.”
Components include desktop and web searching, blog creation, voice communication, photo sharing, and computer security.

At the search-engine giant Google, meanwhile, developers have extended the reach of the company’s relatively new online office suite to include a business presentation tool that is clearly intended to compete with Microsoft’s long-popular PowerPoint. Google also has been pitching a “Google Apps” education edition, which includes free tools for communication, collaboration, and publishing, along with eMail accounts “on your school’s domain.”

Google’s online suite for corporate customers got a boost recently from an endorsement by Capgemini, a Paris-based technology consulting firm with worldwide influence on companies’ software choices. Capgemini also will continue to support business software made by Microsoft, IBM, and other vendors.

Meanwhile, Google also has begun offering Sun’s open-source StarOffice package as part of its Google Pack software bundle. Among other reports from the desktop battlefield: