Let’s say you wanted to find a model museum using Web 2.0 A place that does all this in the context of a fairly traditional collections-based museum. It’s the Brooklyn Museum . Today, an interview with Shelley Bernstein , the Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum, and the engine behind that museum’s fabulous forays into Web 2.0. to support programs and exhibits. A place that blogs, that engages in social networking sites, that tries experiments, and reports about all of it honestly.

Last week, I spoke with Jim Richardson, managing director of SUMO Design , about their very cool new project with the North East Regional Museums Hub : I like... museums . museums is a website on which visitors can search for museums in the North East region of England. Funded by the UK MLA and launched on July 9, i like... But it's not a typical directory.

I have a lot of conversations with people that go like this: Other person: "So, you think that museums should let visitors control the museum experience?" Other person: "But doesn't that erode museums' authority?" One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control. Me: "Sort of." Me: "No."

Dear Museums on Twitter, Thanks for experimenting in a new and largely uncharted online environment. So here is a list of suggestions that hopefully will improve the way your museum thinks about using Twitter. Or it's rainy so you suggest I visit the museum? Note: this is a geeky post that assumes familiarity with Twitter . If you are new to Twitter, please check out this post for more context.

The presumed answer is "yes" your museum needs a blog, a pony, or a set of comfy couches. Does your museum need a custom online social network? Most social networking sites give each user a unique user profile, along with a personal "home base" where you can always find your content, your contacts, and your interests. Usually, when I start posts with a question in the title, it's a cheat. In this case, it's debatable.

And while the Brain exhibition has some qualities that were significantly improved over other RFID-enabled exhibitions (better scanning of the tags, more content-rich personalized welcome screens, effective timeouts if you walked away, a semi-useful group option to accommodate families), it offered an output mechanism that is dated and downright frustrating: the personal webpage. Many institutions that are pursuing online/onsite experience connections have lighted on the personal webpage as THE way to deliver post-visit experiences. Yesterday, I visited the Experimentarium , a science center just north of Copenhagen in Denmark.

I've written before about three types of museum users: contributors, lurkers, and judges. The social media user types, like learning styles or gaming styles, are more like personality traits than exclusive groupings. It would be strange to imagine talking the same way about learning styles--trying to push people out of their own modalities into preferred "higher-level" engagement types.* *Digression: Some people have commented that my hierarchy of social participation People who create content for the public try to appeal to a wide range of people, both in terms of demographics and usage styles.

As part of the article I’m working on for the journal Museums and Social Issues on using web 2.0 to promote civic discourse in museums, I’m developing an argument about the “hierarchy of social participation.” I believe that, as with basic human needs, experience design in museums (and for other content platforms) can occur on many levels, and that it is hard to achieve the highest level without satisfying, or at least understanding, those that come before it. One of the impediments to discourse in museums is that fact that designers want to jump straight from individuals interacting

Last week, I received an inquiry from Mary Maher, editor of Hand to Hand, a magazine put out by the Association of Children's Museums , about Museum 2.0. Why, Mary asked, were there no posts about children's museums on this site? I did a quick mental scan, and she's right; with the exception of a few mentions of the Exploratorium and the City Museum (both of which are much more than children's museums), has focused on "interactive" and "collecting" museums, with much attention paid to the ways adults engage therein. So today, we start righting the

Nik inquired as to how I feel about museum blogs. what's your take on museums that keep blogs? In general, yes, I think that museums maintaining blogs is an effective, cheap way to get changing content out to the public frequently. Do I have a personal preference among these approaches? That's not the point. The point is that you have to decide WHY your institution is starting a blog (and no, "all my He asked: Hey Ms. 2.0,