Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

I''ve mostly seen museums employ one of two methods for formal community advisors: Create special "spots" on the board of trustees for certain kinds of community representatives. CON: can feel disconnected from the primary governance of the museum or can feel like a second-class board overall. I struggle with both these options.

Community 39

Community Story Museum Map 39

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Every once in a while I come across a project I wish I could have included in The Participatory Museum. For one year, a group of twelve schoolchildren age 9-11 were invited to work with staff at the Wallace Collection to develop a family-focused exhibition using the museum's artifacts. it's a Secret! , What made Shh. it's a Secret!

Children 46

Children Museum Create Project 46

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" I'm incredibly proud of all the staff, trustees, volunteers, collaborators, visitors, and members who have made this happen.

Audience 47

Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 15, 2012

Last week, I sat down on a toilet in our museum and found myself looking at an interactive station intended to test a “Legends of the Stall” sign concept for the restrooms. Legends of the Stall was started by a visitor services staff member, Katie Chrivia, who collaborated with interns and volunteers to develop the content and the design.

Culture 53

Culture Build Museum Articulate 53

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 20, 2010

This post summarizes the content I shared in my presentation and offers some reflection on the conversational keynote. I started my talk with a story about why I liked Twitter: It allows me to connect with people in my professional field and have a great conversations or ad hoc collaborations that improve practice.

Social Media 115

Social Media Media Social San Jose 115

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

I was fascinated by our discussion, and Bob came to mind last month, when I was asked to write an article for the Association of Children's Museums quarterly journal, Hand to Hand , about children's museums and Web 2.0. To understand more, I turned to Elaine Gurian's article The Molting of Children's Museums? Why the uniformity?

Classroom 22

Classroom Children Museum Model 22

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2012

We're looking for an Exhibitions Manager to join our team here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This is a highly collaborative role, and we are looking for the perfect blend of strong design skills with a generous enthusiasm for amateur and professional co-creation. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp is filling up.

Participatory 32

Participatory Museum Blended History 32

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. But next month, Britain Loves Wikipedia will commence--the third instance of a strange and fascinating collaborative project between museums and the Wikipedia community (Wikimedians). Some of these challenges were about mission fit.

Wikipedia 40

Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2007

Gaming in Museums And a few of my favorites you might have missed are: Better by the Dozen? My guess is that reflects the difference between some of the gamer/tech users of this blog, who are probably using a high volume of blogs regularly, and the museum folks, who are most passionate about things that affect their own lives and work.

Museum 20

Museum Wiki Tech Flickr 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2008

Thanks to Bryan Kennedy from the Science Museum of Minnesota for providing this overview/reflection on the Museums and the Web conference that recently concluded in Montreal. Museums and the Web 2008 guest blogger Bryan Kennedy here. Who's sharing authority and how? Their task is both especially important and challenging.

Museum 20

Museum Web Teen Flickr 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

Question 49

Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

Participatory 44

Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2008

It's been awhile since I've shared the progress of The Tech Virtual , the web and Second Life-based virtual exhibit workshop that The Tech Museum of Innovation opened in December of 2007. Some of these people are professional artists or exhibit designers, but most are just talented folks with an interest in museums.

Museum 20

Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2008

This week marks one month of live activity for the Tech Virtual Museum Workshop , a collaborative, online platform for exhibit development. But museum folks, no matter how much we want to collaborate, don't move quickly. I went into this project skeptical about the use of Second Life as a collaborative design platform.

Museum 20

Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

This post shares my reflections on the projects and five things I learned from their work. As one participant said, "the museum feels friendly in a way it usually doesn't." People make the museum friendly, not activities. You can explore the projects in full on the class wiki. All the photos in this post are on Flickr here.

Participatory 51

Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Forum One

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

This Black History Month, we reflect on the strategy work that our team does through our partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture —much of which centers around expanding access. The outcome was an immensely successful event that attracted audiences from all corners of the country.

History 73

History Accessibility Museum Award 73

Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2015

This is the first in a two-part series about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s new theory of change. This week, Ian David Moss and I are each writing blog posts about our collaborative process to develop a theory of change at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We had tripled our attendance. Doubled our staff.

Process 20

Process Change Develop Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 20, 2008

Most museum conferences are focused on professional learning and networking. The Science Center World Congress looked standard in makeup--keynotes, plenaries, parallel panels--and yet the content was made distinctly different by the people involved. How are we addressing this woman? Who's leading that charge?

Reflection 20

Reflection South Africa Guinea Museum 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2009

Jane McGonigal and the folks from IFTF have released a new future-casting game/collaborative experience called Signtific Lab. The thing that excites me about this is not the opportunity to use all the weird-colored cardstock hanging around the supply cabinets of most museums. In other words, it's way better.

Game 24

Game Experiment Participatory Museum 24

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

I'm not talking about guiding content; I'm talking about guiding form. If your goal is to encourage visitors to perceive themselves as partners in the content co-creation experience, make room for their thoughts sooner rather than later. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, you can only respond with 140 characters.

Design 31

Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2009

Like many people who've worked in science centers and interactive experience museums, I've always been perplexed by the fact that hands-on workshop audiences top out around age 14. They are more than just workshop spaces--they are member institutions, like museums. Isn't this one of our dreams for museums?

Museum 24

Museum North Carolina San Francisco Structure 24

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 23, 2007

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting post up about the ascension of short-format content—the YouTube clip over the 2 hour movie, the blog post over the journal article. One of the comments listed other, non-web-based collaborative uses of short-format content, including potluck dinners. Potlucks are a great model for “good sharing.”

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Model Wikipedia Myspace Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 26, 2007

What does your museum have to say about it? What do visitors expect of museums, and what do museums expect of themselves, when it comes to timeliness? This is partially driven by museums, which want to be seen as "forums" for discourse, but also by the expectations of a media-saturated public. Pluto just got demoted.

Museum 20

Museum Boston Authoring Chapter 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Today, the Luce Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is launching what they claim is the first ever alternate reality game (ARG) in a museum. Why would an art museum create an ARG? And the "stuff" of the game is real stuff, artifacts created by players and sent to the museum. To expand their audiences.

Game 20

Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 20, 2007

This is the final installment of Museum 2.0’s s book club on Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions , a collection of essays edited by Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean. Ultimately, the arguments against including visitor voices come down to a lack of respect for visitors as meaning-makers in museums.

Voice 20

Voice Case Study Museum Analysis 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 8, 2006

Elisa’s focus is interactive arts, media design, and cultural management, and she has been involved in many pertinent projects, such as MUVI (the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lombardia). Environmentalists, the Museum of Natural History at CU, they all responded very enthusiastically to this. There are two strategies.

Interview 20

Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2009

It is an exhibit of user-generated content? In almost all cases, museums assure me that they want to be in conversation, that they want to be responsive, that they want to “really hear” what people think. Sadly, it was the second story that was about a museum. This afternoon, they issued a lengthy collaborative statement.

Conversation 21

Conversation Museum Artist Minneapolis 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 5, 2009

I've been designing game-like experiences with museums for a long time. What stuck out about this experience was putting the focus on the interpersonal gameplay and interactions rather than the content experience. We rarely talk about this when we design museum exhibits. What does it mean to play well in your museum?

Game 21

Game Design Museum Interaction 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 6, 2008

On June 4, we opened The Tech Virtual Test Zone , a new 2000 sq ft gallery at The Tech Museum of Innovation featuring exhibits on the theme of art, film, and music that were originally developed in Second Life by a community of creative amateurs. Some museum pros have been puzzled by this. We inspired a community and got real results.

Virtual 21

Virtual Tech Lesson Develop 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 3, 2009

I just returned from the Creativity and Collaboration retreat (C2) , a NAME/AAM program that I've been helping develop for about a year and a half. When we first started planning C2, we were concerned that no one would come or that people would perceive it as frivolous in a time of extreme stress in the economy and museum industry.

Conference 21

Conference Professional PowerPoint Evaluation 21

Museum 2.0

MAY 7, 2007

The whole process of developing an exhibition tends to get stuck behind a museum's doors. In the past two decades, science centers have been in the lead in the exhibits arena, and we think we have a lot to share--and learn--with other museums. I challenge you to model the kind of content you'd like to see.

NSF 20

NSF Interview Case Study Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

Helene Moglen, professor of literature, UCSC After a year of tinkering, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is now showing an exhibition, All You Need is Love , that embodies our new direction as an institution. This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements.

Participatory 51

Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 14, 2009

I've become convinced that successful paths to participation in museums start with self-identification. The easiest way to do that is to acknowledge their uniqueness and validate their ability to connect with the museum on their own terms. Who is the "me" in the museum experience? Not so at museums.

Museum 20

Museum Personal Experiment Profile 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 9, 2007

My interest in gaming in museums was ignited by working on Operation Spy, an immersive, narrative, live-action game experience at the International Spy Museum, and fueled by the CSI:NY virtual experience. The Open Source Museum project at The Tech is a grant-funded grand experiment. This is happening very, very quickly.

Open Source 22

Open Source Museum Game Open 22

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 24, 2016

For the leadership development, there were four guiding questions that we explored throughout our journey – and now as I’m back I will continue to reflect and take action based on these: What does it mean to be a leader in the face of complex challenges. What social disparities do you most want to remedy?

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Leadership Develop Exercise 50

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 10, 2009

This can be an incredibly technical topic, as it focuses on the ways that platforms (online, exhibits, museums) can harness the individual activities of many visitors and create meaningful experiential outputs that connect people to each other. But designing an entire museum that functions this way probably isn't your goal. exhibition.

Social Network 22

Social Network Tech Network Museum 22

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 28, 2009

The runner up winner was Maureen Dowd from Open Museum What I propose to do with the library you are offering is read it, try it, share it, and let you know how it works for me, my colleagues and the people we influence. It takes content, strategy and elbow grease. A Few Whuffie Winners!

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Library Social Media Louisville Media 94