Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Impersonal guards.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

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

NOVEMBER 18, 2009

I often think museums are like church--passionately loved by staff and devout audiences, irrelevant or off-putting to lapsed or uninterested adults, alien and overwhelming to newcomers. Two years ago, my dad and I embarked on a podcast project called Museum Hater. Help people understand why you do what you do. What do you think?

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Museum Culture Technique Badge 25

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

Exhibit labels in science centers ask more questions than any other kinds of museums, and yet the questions are often awful--teacherly, overly rhetorical, and totally meaningless. asked by a cop or mother, garners the full attention of asker and askee alike, museum questions like "what is nanotechnology?,"

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Reflection Research Question Museum 20

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. Participants had to answer these questions: -What were the objectives, audience, and how did integrate with your marketing or audience development plan?

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Social Media Media San Jose Social 99

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. Marnie also introduced me to social booking and tagging way back in 2004 as the originator of the NpTech Tag. I don’t like giving a keynote where I talk at the audience for 45 minutes.

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Social Media Media Social San Jose 115

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

I've long believed that museums have a special opportunity to support the community spirit of Web 2.0 This month brings three examples of museums hosting meetups for online communities: On 8.6.08, the Computer History Museum (Silicon Valley, CA) hosted a Yelp! Me: Have you ever been to this museum? meetup for Elite Yelp!

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22

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

JANUARY 28, 2009

What role does “promoting human happiness” play in the mission statements and actions of museums? That’s the question I’m pondering thanks to Jane McGonigal and the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM). Earlier today, the CFM offered a free webcast of Jane McGonigal’s talk on gaming, happiness, and museums.

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Museum Game Structure South America 21

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?

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Classroom Children Museum Model 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 15, 2010

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St.

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Support Museum St. Louis NSF 41

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. The back-channel was an especially active and important part of the conference this year.

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Museum Web Teen Flickr 20

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.

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

They edit the conversations into radio shows, which are then made available as a podcast (you can listen to episode featuring me, #89: Museum Secrets, here ). Mercedes and Zach aren't just interrogators; they also shared their own reflections and stories throughout our conversation. Tags: web2.0

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

How do you find your way around a multi-faceted museum? I spent some time playing with this question last week at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a large general museum that is moving toward redesign of the permanent galleries. Tags: design participatory museum usercontent. Do you interrogate the map? What would you do?

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Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2007

One of my most exciting moments of ASTC this year was picking up a copy of the newly released Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions , a collection of essays ten years in the making, edited by Kathy McLean and Wendy Pollock. The book opens with a list of reasons why museums might use "visitor-response elements in exhibitions."

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Museum Voice Case Study Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 26, 2008

In museums, attention to the visitor--her desires, his preferences--has grown over the last few decades. Ze Frank recently posed this question to several designers, filmmakers, and artists here , asking: When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process?

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Audience Artist Design Language 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 15, 2008

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? Many museums have been experimenting in these spaces by creating institutional profiles, museum affinity groups, and connecting with visitors and other museum professionals individually.

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Museum Social Network Case Study Discussion 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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

One of the best projects that illustrates the basic idea of Web2.0 - listening and conversation and stakeholders creating their own experience with your organization - comes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. o is Transparency - and the best example of that is what the Indianapolis Art Museum has done with its pubic metrics on its web site.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 19, 2009

With unemployment and cutback, for many a trip to the art museum can appear to be a luxury. Tags: Art Sector. The article includes a link to a google map where you can look at the economic impact in each state. Maybe arts organizations need to be doing "Social Capital Impact" studies along with other forms of advocacy?

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Arts Model Organization Org 59

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. They're having fun, playing, acting like visitors, working as and with the audience.

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Museum Virtual Tech Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This is the second part of a two-part interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard on their book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. I love this idea, but I often find that museum staff are really nervous about making any changes that might alienate current members/donors.

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Interview Museum Phase Reflection 32

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

APRIL 10, 2008

On Monday, David Klevan (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and I spoke at the MAAM Creating Exhibitions conference about Web 2.0 and museums. framework, and David shared lessons learned from the huge range of projects the Holocaust Museum has initiated. I provided the Web 2.0 Absolutely. and sniff around.

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Web Time Museum Audio 44

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

Today, Museum 2.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 and watched the Museum 2.0

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Museum Voice Minnesota Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

When you want visitors to spend a long time reflecting and sharing their thoughts, you need to design spaces for response that are comfortable and minimize distractions. Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors."

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2008

In the museum world, we often talk about lowering barriers to entry, helping people get through the door. And so today we look at an educational facility (not a museum) that swabs the deck with these barriers. Because it brings in new audiences and funders. It makes them walk the plank. 826 Valencia is a tutoring center.

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Education Museum Audience Design 21

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? To expand their audiences. Reaching Non-Gamer Audiences ARGs can be confusing. To tap into maker culture. Coincidence?

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2010

Three examples: In the late 1980s, the Brooklyn Children's Museum created an exhibit called Send a Letter to Snoopy. As Kathy McLean noted in Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions , while staff were afraid that typing on the typewriter would be too hard for some young children, "kids lined up to carefully and slowly type their letters."

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Museum Library Images Children 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 24, 2007

This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum , "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors.

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People Museum San Jose Chapter 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 23, 2007

standpoint: you create and share an item that reflects you you enjoy the items shared by others all items are subconsciously evaluated by all users (and those evaluations thus reflect on all users) These three steps could easily define a web 2.0 Tags: web2.0 And the implied: bring something good. Think about potlucks from the 2.0

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Model Wikipedia Myspace Museum 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.

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Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2007

The audience for games is gigantic, and sports fans are some of the most obsessed, energized, and involved lurkers on the planet. In museums, we always assume that everyone wants to get their hands dirty and “do it.” But are there ways to create games in museums that are as exciting to watch as they are to play?

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Game Museum Contest Interaction 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2007

Last week, Elaine Gurian and I talked about radical change in museums. Former museum start-up queen, Jen is taking a small organization whose goal is to promote girls’ involvement in math and science through research and programming to new, innovative, exciting places. But my background is in museum startups.

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Interview Museum Teen Myspace 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 28, 2010

Let's say you work at an organization that mostly caters to a middle and upper-class, white audience. Let's say you have a sincere interest in reaching and working with more ethnically, racially, and economically diverse audiences. Most large American museums are reflections of white culture.

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St. Louis Audience Teen Museum 53

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 25, 2009

I presume that this branding will help them appeal to a potentially large audience of those seeking exciting experiences in nature, but to me, this veiled the truly exciting work at the physical site. Tags: storytelling marketing design Unusual Projects and Influences inclusion. But let's get back to the good stuff.

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