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

JULY 3, 2007

This week, we look at Chapter 5 of Elaine Gurian's book Civilizing Museums , Choosing Among the Options: An opinion about museum definitions in two parts. First published in Curator magazine in 2002, this essay presents five different museum "types" and their distinct opportunities and challenges.

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Museum Taxonomy Arts National 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

They provide detailed case studies of projects in each area, including project descriptions, informal science education goals, participant training techniques, and evaluation outcomes. I've added a fourth model to this citizen science typology, one may be more appropriate to facilities like museums than to scientific organizations: co-option.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2007

Inventory isn't a museum activity that inspires curiosity in many visitors. This summer, the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art ( Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde) is trying to change that. People often talk about non-collecting museums as the museums of the future.

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Museum Conservancy Registration Project 20

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. On the web, anyone can evaluate the photographs in terms of aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

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

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. But a few people seemed nervous that we were trying to trick or evaluate them. Get deliciously lost?

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Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

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

JUNE 22, 2009

My goals are two-fold: to develop a dynamic, creative, social platform for my community and to distribute its successful elements to other civic learning institutions (museums, libraries, community centers). And then at the end, when she asked how many of us could do this in our own museums, no hands went up. We loved it.

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Action Ideas St. Louis Museum 31

Museum 2.0

JUNE 9, 2009

Yesterday, I enjoyed three hours of graduate students' presentations of social media plans for museums in the Pacific Northwest. What is the evaluation plan? Jill Hardy worked with a museum that is trying to attract a younger, more diverse adult audience. Tags: web2.0 For example. Go forth and do awesome things.

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Social Media Develop Media Museum 43

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2009

Two weeks ago, I conducted a participatory exhibit design workshop with staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Between the giant squid brainstorming and experimentation, I gave a talk to the larger Smithsonian Institution about multi-platform museum experiences. The slides are also available for download.

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Slides Process Video Open 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. There are several good resources on evaluating participation. It’s nice to have both.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

APRIL 3, 2009

We tried this at the Denver Art Museum last week, and it is incredibly challenging—you can’t just put out a box of chocolates and expect people to talk. Virtual-to-real design workshop at Museums and the Web—Friday, April 17 in Indianapolis. Tags: Quick Hits professional development.

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Experiment Seattle Indianapolis Denver 20

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

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

AUGUST 3, 2009

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses ) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission.

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Community Museum San Diego San Francisco 22

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2007

But it’s a term that seems to be exciting a lot of folks in the museum field, and for good reason. Radical trust is appealing because it represents loosening of museum authority and openness to visitor input. Do you trust them enough to publish these tags on a sign in the front of the museum or in a tagcloud on your homepage?

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Museum Rate Wiki Tag 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Evaluating Next-Gen Volunteer Opportunity Platforms: Forget about the high school community service club : The next generation of volunteering platforms is here -- from Google's All for Good to the President's Serve.gov. Museum APIs: What Are They Good For? In Museums, context can be hard to come by. Tags: sxsw.

Social Media 79

Social Media Cancer Jordan Kiva 79

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2008

A few weeks ago, I participated in a Reach Advisors "museum conversation" with Web 2.0 I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a big picture for how to evaluate and plan a social media policy for their institution. Shouldn't we make it this easy to evangelize museum products? marketing.

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Museum Chapter Case Study Aggregator 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 5, 2009

I just returned from the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia. I led two sessions, one on visitor co-created museum experiences, and the other on design inspirations from outside museums. what is the value of the exhibition experience to non-participants, that is, regular museum visitors?

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Slides Participatory Museum Children 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2019

I tell the story of the one-man band because I think many museum professionals feel like him. But, most importantly, few museum professionals have a free hand or moment. Museums rarely have the funding to replicate positions. As a field, we spend a whole lot of time evaluating patron’s experiences (hopefully).

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Museum Accessibility Articulate Teen 29

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 17, 2009

Evaluating Next-Gen Volunteer Opportunity Platforms: Forget about the high school community service club : The next generation of volunteering platforms is here -- from Google's All for Good to the President's Serve.gov. Museum APIs: What Are They Good For? In Museums, context can be hard to come by. Tags: sxsw.

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Comment Social Media Jordan Cancer 95

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 27, 2007

Heck, sign me up for a ticket to the zombie museum. But when I took off my “entertainment” glasses and put on my museum eyes, my reaction wasn’t amusement. I imagined museum folks reading the article and snapping the paper closed with smug smiles on their faces: "See. It was distaste. This is why we have to avoid Disneyfication."

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Model Museum Blended New York 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 Think about potlucks from the 2.0 Social connectiveness? On Wikipedia?

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Model Wikipedia Myspace Museum 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2007

Pop quiz: How much does it cost to go a museum? Museums can range from free to about $30 for admission. But even more than this confusion, I believe museums suffer from a lack of consistent expectations when it comes to price and purchase options. So why can’t museums do it? How much for a family? How much for a student?

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Movie Museum Culture Free 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 7, 2008

For many museums, visitor research--how people use the museum, navigate exhibits, and understand content--may be an equally important arena in which to adopt groundswell listening techniques. I spent an hour this morning "brand listening" to what the online world says about one of my favorite museums, the Exploratorium.

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Museum Teen Second Life Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

There are some obvious ties to the role of "community" in museums. Recently, some museums have launched initiatives to rebrand as community spaces, acknowledging and attempting to harness the positive social energy around visitation. Could museums do this? around gameplay. How do these game companies steer the discussion?

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Game Influence Support Community 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.

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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.

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Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 21, 2008

In this post, an exploration of ways that museums can support promoters, convert detractors, and generally energize visitors to share their experience with others. Supporting Promoters Somewhere out there, there are people who love your museum. Ratings and Reviews Imagine a visitor who leaves your museum enthused about her experience.

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Museum Review Rate Voice 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 27, 2008

Joe explains some of the planned intentional dialogue events: First, for the opening night dinner, we hired a local dance company that is putting together pieces about visiting museums, punctuated by an actor/dancer asking provocative questions to the group. The VSA will be doing post-conference evaluations to find out.

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Studies Associations Houston Museum 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2009

Today, an interview with staff from a museum with an incredibly healthy attitude towards experimentation with social media. Three things stand out in this interview: Like the Brooklyn Museum , COSI’s social media strategy is focused on local community connections, not national outreach. I think, sadly, that we all know the answer.

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Conversation Columbus Change Museum 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 6, 2007

I used to teach gadget workshops for kids in museums. Looking through evaluations from many of these workshops, I was surprised to find that “smoking potentiometer” incidents educed better ratings of the workshop, not worse. Frank Oppenheimer famously said, “No one ever fails a museum.” Tags: game interactives.

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Game Museum Interaction Fun 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 25, 2007

But in museums, the exception is often the rule. Heck, I'm one of those visitors; there are many interactives in museums (especially computer-based ones) that I drop in frustration. What makes frustration okay for players in the game world, but not okay for visitors in the museum interactive world? Tags: game.

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Game Museum Fun Interaction 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 21, 2007

No one would contest the idea that most museum exhibitions, art shows, films, books, in short, most content experiences, have value both for the new and return user. Most visitor-generated museum experiences are about creating, not curating, content. Why would someone want to contribute metadata to the museum experience?

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Experiment Create Museum Amazon 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 8, 2010

It's evaluating people. I could imagine a delightful application on a museum website that would allow me to chat with a stranger about a featured artifact or artwork. The object and the context of the museum website would both provide framing and structure that would likely make for a positive encounter.

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Interaction Giving Museum Internet 26

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 5, 2007

Virtual worlds allow designers (and evaluators, and educators) to explore new modes of content delivery that are physically impossible in the real world, but may provide rich and new ways for visitors to learn. Most museums already have websites. It’s a little disjointed, but the key points are: 1. Let’s start with the basics.

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