Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum , is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation. didn't mince words. Here are my three top takeaways.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

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. Here are some reflections on the instructional design: 1. I said yes.

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Social Media Reflection Learning Social 94

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 11, 2009

Photo by American Art Museum Note from Beth: This week I'm trying to understand crowdsourcing and nonprofits, hopefully with a crowd of other folks. Some questions I don't know the answers to: What are the best examples of nonprofits using social media to crowdsource advice, program evaluation, ideas, or other uses?

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Museum Campaign Flickr Arts 92

Museum 2.0

APRIL 11, 2012

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. While not wholly explored, that question reverberates throughout a new book, Blueprint , that shares the plans for the Dutch Museum of National History. I chose this book for our next Museum 2.0 What happened? It's about Europe.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 17, 2015

Last week, I sat on the jury for the first Cultural Innovation International Prize given by the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona , and this week, I'm offering a workshop for museum professionals across Poland participating together in a "Museum Lab" in Warsaw. The second post , in which Museum 2.0

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Difference Poland Museum Minnesota 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian's excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title. I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! The Museum 2.0

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

Designing Questions Kathy Gustafon-Hilton coordinated a massive Pecha Kucha session, featuring 19 design professionals sharing 20 slides, 20 seconds apiece. I spoke about the importance of designing intentional frameworks for asking visitors questions, based on this blog post. While questions like: "Where were you last night?,"

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Reflection Research Question Museum 20

Bloomerang

APRIL 12, 2022

When my sister first started working with a nonprofit museum, she had a lot to learn about the fundraising process for the organization. The museum had notes saved in their donor management software about the seating preferences for their major donors and that particular donor preferred their regular seat toward the front.

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Software Management Donor Guide 98

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. I found this idea really powerful.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 23, 2008

Lynda Kelley I'm here in Sydney, Australia and just finished an informal workshop and discussion with Powerhouse Museum staff and other museums. Will post reflections shortly) I met Dr. Lynda Kelly, a blogger and the Head of Audience Research for the Australia Museum. The site is called Museum 3.0.

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Museum Interview Ning Australia 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2012

Imagine you've just been tasked with developing an innovative, future-thinking national museum for your country's history. Blueprint is the story of a group of people who tried to create a Dutch Museum of National History (INNL). The Museum directors released Blueprint as a showcase for these plans. Where would you start?

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Museum History Netherlands Create 36

Forum One

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Here we’ll summarize those questions and answers. For nearly a decade, Google has been developing and maintaining two different analytics solutions: Firebase, mostly used by developers to focus on app development and analytics, and UA, mostly used by marketers for website metrics. What are the differences between UA and GA4?

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FAQ Organization Analytics Google 58

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

If someone asked you that question, how would you answer? Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. We have different conversations on the phone than we do in person or in internet chat rooms. "Where were you last night?"

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Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2017

This is the tenth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History ( MAH )'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. When we started working on the food side of the Abbott Square project, it raised some basic questions about community inclusion. All those people eat.

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Arts San Jose Museum History 24

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

Each prompt was tied to a different artwork in the exhibition. In front of each of those paintings, you could stamp your pastport, reflect on the artwork and the question, and share your story. We created a simple wheel with open-ended questions about identity and place, setting it in a lounge area.

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Participatory Museum History Arts 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 2, 2014

Places where we encounter people who are truly different from us? What if we used art to activate space in a different way? These are the questions on my mind as I start working more intently on an outdoor plaza project. Not that bonding with people we already know is bad, nor that we don''t want to support it at the museum.

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Design Community Museum Hype 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. I've purchase a two copies, one for me and one to give away.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 4, 2011

In early January, the American Museum of Natural History announced that it would hold a Brain Tweetup for 75 of its Twitter followers. The event promised an after-hours look at their special exhibition Brain: The Inside Story , a chat with its curators, a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, and an opportunity to meet other fans of AMNH.

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Brain Museum Culture Interaction 94

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. Visitors have gone to town, writing both basic questions (“who made them?” “who how did they ride the plank?” "how

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext , a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

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

DECEMBER 7, 2017

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. The place surpassed them.

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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39

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

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

I''ve been curious about this question for a long time. 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. Also, can form factions of different community boards representing different groups (i.e.

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Community Story Museum Map 39

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

That's the question we've been grappling with as we start the OF/BY/FOR ALL initiative. Last year, we tested out different formats. We selected a First Wave that reflects diversity of geography, size, and sector, so we can see who this works best for and why. How do you build a movement for institutional change? Consulting.

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Los Angeles Network Oakland Change 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 6, 2014

I did a scan of the several hundred organizations registered for the webinar, many from Jewish education organizations, looking at their social media engagement practices as well as a literature scan of alumni network engagement with social mediaHere’s some reflections: Alumni Networks: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategy.

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Social Media Network Media Free 108

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

A man walks into a museum. Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff. He shares a story.

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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. Some of my happiest moments as a director come when I encounter awesome things in our museum that I had absolutely nothing to do with. Sorry for the delay.

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Culture Build Museum Articulate 53

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 12, 2010

There were so many fabulous recommendations for the next Museum 2.0 This book, suggested by Susan Wageman, looks like a fabulous, off-beat, and highly pertinent read for librarians, museum folk, and cultural professionals of all sorts. It's time to figure out some answers to these questions so we can keep moving forward.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Sixteen arts administrators, journalists, and researchers weighed in on the question over a series of posts. Several decried the oversimplification of the question, arguing that it's not an issue of "lead vs. follow" but a spectrum of forms of participant engagement. Turns out we're a lot more alike than I thought at the time.

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other people submit questions they'd like to have answered by strangers. Mercedes and Zachary pick people randomly out of the database, call them, and ask a contributed question. 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 ).

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 30, 2019

Me at the Norman Rockwell Museum Before we get to today’s topic, I want to start with a thank you. This month, I started with looking at some broad reflection on our field and visitors before looking at some of the great ways that we do participation in our spaces. Your responses are so cheering, and I’m thrilled to get them.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

This week''s guest post is written by Julie Bowen, VP of Experience and Engagement at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Years ago, I was running a workshop at a conference introducing a creativity technique to museum professionals. But it would never work in my museum because my boss would never go for it.”

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Place Museum Environment Problem 52

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

Thomas Alva Edison held 1,093 patents for different inventions. In his question to create the storage battery, he conducted 10,000 experiments before arriving at a method that worked. 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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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 10, 2008

In the final installment of Museum 2.0’s s four part series on comfort in museums, we get down to the basics: creature comfort. So for this last piece, we look at going the other way: making museums more physically comfortable. And on the walls, my friend explained, was art from the museum itself. There was funky music.

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