I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but there were some interesting things to see in the exhibit hall. I saw the Magic Planet globes. They are really impressive. I would not mind having one at home. Imagine a glass globe, bigger than a basketball, with a display mechanism inside that lights up the globe with projected images. There's a video here, but seeing it live is much better.

ESRI had a booth, I met Angie Lee and her booth partner (whose name I now can't remember). They deserve a special mention for helping me get into the show in the first place.

The folks from Hubble Source had a display. They originally set up shop to provide access to Hubble data, but then the a NASA remote sensing group asked them to do some "downward" looking displays as well. Now they provide packaged content for viewing both space and Earth science data.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a booth. There was not much traffic there, the booth was a little sparse. It turns out that NASA lends exhibits to Museums. The person in the booth was not sure if there was a single place on the NASA web site listing all the available exhibits. She said to go to the web site of each NASA site and there would be information. I just tried that and was not able to find very much. I guess it's a well-kept secret.

One of the neatest things I saw was the Solid Terrain Modeling booth. They have a really neat process that uses a computerized milling machine to carve 3D models from polyurethane foam to a 1mm accuracy, then they run a special inkjet printer nozzle around over it to "paint" on an image. Apparently they are installing a 1:100,000 model of all of British Columbia somewhere in Victoria this month. So if you're going to be at GeoWeb in Vancouver in July it could be worth a trip to see it.

For those of you who are into folksonomies, there's a group working on social tagging for art museums. They have developed open source software to help tag art collections. They held a tagging workshop to show how they introduce the topic of social tagging to museum management in a way that demonstrates how tagging adds value to the existing curatorial descriptions of the material.

A colleague and I also had a special meeting with Jason Flick and Paul Bennett from Flick Software at the Canadian Consulate. They are developing mobile solutions for handheld devices.

I got to a couple of sessions. There seems to be quite a bit of experimentation going on at museums around the world related to handheld devices.

All in all, it was a good experience. I'm still not sure why they decided to use this picture of the redcoats on the coffee mugs they gave to attendees. Maybe because Malcolm Rogers, Director of the Boston MFA and Chair of the AAM Annual meeting is British...