As part of our effort to engage with the community, track trends, and encourage best practices we will be holding a panel discussion with industry experts to discuss where online collections are headed in the short term future. Panel participants include:

Heather Hart, Director of IT, The Broad

Heather Hart is Director of IT at The Broad, a new contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, where she works on a wide range of technology projects, from cross-departmentally designing and developing onsite and online visitor experience to planning and building the underlying digital ecosystem and supporting network infrastructure. Currently Heather is leading a DAMS project. Prior to the joining The Broad, she was the Director of IT and Project Manager at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, where she also wore many hats.

Julia Falkowski, Web & Interactive Media Producer, Balboa Park Online Collaborative

Julia Falkowski is the Web & Interactive Media Producer at Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC). She has managed website redesigns, in-gallery interactive projects, and experimental educational initiatives. Julia maintained the website for Balboa Park's centennial celebration year and maintains content on bpoc.org. Julia began at BPOC in June of 2015, after finishing an M.A. in Museum Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. While her focus was in Management and Administration, she developed an interest in museum technology through course work and membership in the Museum Studies Computer Club. Julia has a B.A. in American Studies and English from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

David Newbury, Enterprise Software Architect, J. Paul Getty Trust

David Newbury is the Enterprise Software & Data Architect at the J. Paul Getty Trust, where he works with museum professionals, researchers, scientists and technologists to find common solutions to technical and scholarly problems. He has also worked on other collaborative museum technology projects such as Art Tracks, a provenance project at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the American Art Collaborative, working with 14 museums on standardizing models and software around Linked Data. He has previously worked with Carnegie Mellon, the University of British Columbia, University of Illinois, and PBS. David is also an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, interactive developer, and animator whose work has received national coverage in Wired, Vice, Cosmo, and other publications.

The panel discussion will be chaired by Rich Cherry, Principal, Modern Operations. 

Rich Cherry offers consulting services that leverage his 20 years in non-profits along with 30 years of technology and operations experience. He has served as an executive director, COO, deputy director, CTO and CIO at several world class organizations.

Most recently Rich was the deputy director of The Broad, a new award winning contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles. The Museum opened to rave reviews in 2015 and immediately joined the top 100 most attended art museum in the world. He oversaw all aspects of the museum’s operations, including visitor services, collection management, information technology, finance, retail, security, human resources, marketing and communications, parking operations and facilities.

Prior to the museum’s opening, Rich managed the planning, design and construction of The Broad, its parking structure and adjacent outdoor plaza and streetscape updates. In working with the museum team to design The Broad as an innovative visitor experience, Rich also initiated and implemented the museum’s mobile ticketing, mobile retail, and a mobile audio app with contextually aware content. He also designed and implemented an award-winning visitor service floor staff program that utilized a custom-designed online learning management system to train a diverse team of associates in security, customer service, art and architecture.

Previously, Cherry was the founding director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), a consortium of 27 cultural organizations working together to facilitate and execute the use of online technology in the museums, cultural arts, and science institutions in Balboa Park, San Diego. His experience also includes serving as the director of operations at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where he oversaw information technology, operations, admissions, facilities, security, capital projects and more than $90 million in ongoing construction, and as the chief information officer, director of facilities and head of library and archives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He previously was the chief information officer of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and he has also taught New Media theory, web design and animation in the Media Studies department at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Rich is Co-Chair of the largest museum technology conference, Museums and the Web, and as co-editor of its proceedings gives him unique access to colleagues working at the forefront of innovation in the cultural sector. Museums and the Web explores the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of museums in a digital world. He also serves as president of the MuseWeb Foundation, which he co-founded to accelerate innovation in both cultural practice and business models. He is currently vice chair of the Culver City Cultural Affairs Commission, a board member of the Culver City Cultural Affairs Foundation and a project advisor on the National Science Foundation funded Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance STEM Program.

Before his museum career, Rich worked in technology in the fields of banking, manufacturing, and also worked as a field service engineer. He was also a commercial diver in the Gulf of Mexico and served for six years in the United States Marine Corps.

*Bios courtesy of the Museums and the Web Website