Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

The conventional wisdom on museum memberships is that they are "one size fits many" programs whose primary benefits are free entrance to the museum and insider access to exhibition openings. But what about all the other people who love your museum? Want to know how the Brooklyn Museum is answering this question?

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Museum Audience Program Artist 24

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2009

Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. I enjoyed listening to it (virtually, not at the museum).

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Museum Alternative Portland Artist 22

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

The whole idea got started a year ago when James Leventhal who is Deputy Director for the Contemporary Jewish Museum asked me if I would design some trainings for the local arts community. Contemporary Jewish Museum. The Joe Goode Dance Company spoke about the challenges of getting an artistic director to Tweet.

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Social Media Media San Jose Social 100

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

For years, I've been fascinated and a bit perplexed by the Elsewhere Collaborative , a thrift store turned artists' studio/living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Over the past seven years, this exploration has been undertaken by a staff of artists and more than 35 creators each year participating in our residency program.

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Collaboration North Carolina Museum Artist 36

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

When you find a bar with your favorite song on the jukebox, or a museum room that feels like your grandmother's living room, you suddenly feel a strong affinity and are able to see yourself reflected in the space. It may be great for a natural refuge to remain hidden, but that sounds like a disaster for a restaurant or museum.

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Museum Los Angeles San Francisco Model 34

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

Between high-altitude hijinks, run-ins with wildlife, and very long days of hiking, I finished John Falk's new book, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. In other words, if you are a curious person, you will go to museums to learn new things. And the facilitator wants his friends and family to have a good time.

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Museum Maslow Facilitation Personal 28

Museum 2.0

JUNE 8, 2010

This guest post was written by Rebecca Lawrence, Museum Educator, Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 The Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center (SLHC) is a small museum located in Pennsburg, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

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Place Museum Discussion Pennsylvania 27

Museum 2.0

JULY 26, 2010

I've been spending time recently interviewing people who run unusual cultural and learning venues. From a museum perspective, I think there's a lot to learn from these venues' business models, approach to collecting and exhibiting work, and connection with their audiences. One of my favorite places for a long time now.

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Culture Alternative St. Louis Los Angeles 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2007

I don't usually fist-pump while reading the New York Times. But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. Half the time, I’m the one who doesn’t know what I’m missing. MOMA has standard art museum labels.

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Museum Arts Artist Audio 30

Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

I'd love to see a museum offer temporary tattoos instead of stickers at entry. I spent about 5 hours in a busy tattoo studio (interesting how they are rebranding away from "parlor"), both times on Sundays, and my highly uninformed impression is that most of the people who walked in the door are not museum-goers.

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Museum Arts Artist Culture 23

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

This guest post, written by Philippa Tinsley, Collections Manager for the Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum (UK), describes the innovative Top 40 exhibition they mounted in the summer of 2009. In my experience, museum professionals aren’t big reality TV viewers.

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Museum Chart Picture Arts 23

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2010

at the Brooklyn Museum, where you could track how people of various levels of art expertise rated crowd-contributed photographs. I've been thinking about this as I prep some interactive prototypes for the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, a Seattle-based museum of pop culture. There was Click!

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Audience Music Artist Museum 38

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2007

The ASTC (the Association of Science and Technology Centers) annual meeting is coming up in LA (home of my childhood), and Museum 2.0 In a world of increasingly sterile museum environments, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is a beacon of emotion, strangeness, and wonder. And if you want a more traditional Museum 2.0

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Museum Tech Childhood Artist 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2007

I read recently about an awesome project at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001, Collecting Our Thoughts, in which visitors were invited to write the labels for an art exhibition (more another time). But it's a lot of fun, and it could be a great way to construct a personalized takeaway from a museum experience. Then a number.

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Museum Game San Jose Artist 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 14, 2007

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. A place that does all this in the context of a fairly traditional collections-based museum. It’s the Brooklyn Museum. And it was so clear at the time.

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Museum Interview Flickr YouTube 27

Museum 2.0

JULY 12, 2010

When I first started exploring the site, I assumed it was mostly a place for charismatic hipsters and a few star artists with enough social media savvy and clever video production capabilities to produce enticing pitches. game and the Neversink Valley Museum's capital campaign launch materials. The museum's page is much simpler.

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Fund Museum Pledge Game 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 9, 2009

I once asked Eric Siegel, the Director of the New York Hall of Science, why museums are rarely innovative shining stars on the cutting edge of culture. He commented that as non-profits, museums are built to survive, not to succeed. Unlike startups and rock stars, museums aren't structured to shoot for the moon and burn up trying.

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Model Business Los Angeles Museum 55

Museum 2.0

JUNE 22, 2007

Over three days, 60 programmers/artists/composers/pranksters worked all hours to create finished computer-based games from scratch. No more half-architected, partially-coded snippets of games that you've rewritten 4 times. Whatever it is, museum program and exhibit designers, take note: I want a museum jam.

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Museum Game Artist Product 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 29, 2009

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. Haarlem Oost is a branch library in the Netherlands that wanted to encourage visitors to add tags (descriptive keywords) to the books they read. Or, so I thought. Of course I asked her why.

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Participatory Project Library Museum 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2008

Dear Museum 2.0-ers, ers, Next week, I'll be going to DC for a meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Museum and Library Services on "Museums and Libraries in the 21st Century." Over the last 50 years, public-facing museums and libraries in the U.S. From the Web 2.0

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Museum Library Participatory Wikipedia 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 4, 2010

He is Deputy Director for the Contemporary Jewish Museum , and an expert in using social media in a museum setting. We were lucky enough to have a fabulous space for the workshop in the Contemporary Jewish Museum. ArtsLab SF View more presentations from Beth Kanter. I said yes.

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Social Media Reflection Learning Social 95

Connection Cafe

AUGUST 3, 2015

T hinkery21 happens every six weeks, and has a different theme every time. How can you explore doing something similar at your museum? Austin is full of brilliant artists, scientists, musicians, performers, educators and organizations doing incredible work. Develop strong relationships with community partners.

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Audience Austin Test Portland 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 29, 2007

Thanks to Kyle Evans, who forwarded me the fascinating, lengthy master’s dissertation.art: Situating Internet Art in the Modern Museum by Karen Verschooren at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. In it, Karen provides a survey of the evolving relationship of Internet art to art museums. Citizen science programs. On the website?

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Museum Web Arts Internet 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. For me, it means spending a lot more time facilitating idea generation and communicating with others than being an independent creative agent. A month ago, I invited you to join this project.

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Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 7, 2010

As Peter wrote: If someone enjoys Arts Event A because it’s social, informal, energetic, fun, and hip, why should we expect her to also enjoy Arts Event B if B is individual, formal, quiet, serious, and traditional (at least in its presentation, if not artistically)? I employ the parallel strategy all the time in my work.

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

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.

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Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Audience segmentation and research has become a hot topic in museums, especially when it comes to crafting appealing offerings that are customized to different kinds of visitors. I sat down with Kristen Denner, Director of Membership and Annual Fund, to learn more about the program's development and the museum's goals for its future.

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Interview Director Museum Arts 46

Museum 2.0

JUNE 17, 2010

This morning, I gave the keynote address for the Washington Museums Association annual conference. It features lots of museum-based examples. But in this post, I wanted to highlight a goofy little (non-museum) project that inspires me in its simplicity and openness to mass collaboration. People spend too much time being digital.

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Collaboration Museum Minneapolis Oakland 34

Museum 2.0

APRIL 16, 2008

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. Click is an exhibition process in three parts: The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

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Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2009

In this guest post, Bruce Wyman, Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, shares his process for developing interactive technologies to extend familiar experiences in art museums. You may remember the Denver Art Museum from this post about their newest (highly interactive) exhibit space, Side Trip.

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Experiment Technology Denver Artist 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. As researcher Danah Boyd has pointed out, teens spend time on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks because that's where their friends are.

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Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process." Staff play a major role in setting expectations about what visitors can and can not do-especially in art museums. DO message clearly. DO train your floor staff.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

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?

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Museum North Carolina San Francisco Structure 24

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

To construct the video, artist Chris Milk assembled images and footage of Johnny Cash in a sequence along with the song. It's not a waste to have multiple participants contribute versions of the same original frame: at any time, any version could be more popular, or more appealing to a specific subset of viewers, than the others.

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Participatory Music Project Video 48

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2009

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. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now.

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Conversation Museum Artist Minneapolis 21

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 7, 2008

I met one of these data artists last year while visiting a friend/journalist at the New York Times. His name is Mark Hansen, a UCLA statistician, and he was working on the finishing touches of the installation of Moveable Type in the lobby of the new Times building (shown above).

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Design Data Artist New York 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 19, 2010

How, he asked, could a large museum that serves hundreds of thousands of people per year foster the same sense of personal connection and community that a small one can achieve? I think small museums are generally better than large ones at fostering local communities of visitors and members.

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Community Museum Participatory Relationship 21