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. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way.

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2010

This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The Participatory Museum. COST: Museum books tend to be expensive - because they are printed in small runs, the price for a 400-page paperback can be as high as $40.

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Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. This is a problem for two reasons.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. Making co-creation sustainable and powerful.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

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. Too often, cultural institutions design participatory projects that require visitors to learn new tools or make sacrifices to contribute. Tags: design participatory museum.

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Participatory Project Library Netherlands 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. Develop compelling, powerful participatory offers and promises for your prospective partners. Gain new community participation tools you can take home and adapt to your organization. And it's not just for museum people.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. People go to museums for leisure.)

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. He said: "Let's make a dynamic music video--and let's set up a tool so fans can help us do it."

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Participatory Music Project Video 48

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2016

When we say we want our museum to be "audience-centered," what do we mean? My career first got moving at a brilliant example of the customer-centered museum: the International Spy Museum. Many of my favorite museums, libraries, and zoos are customer-centered places. They care about visitor comfort.

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Museum Audience Music Arts 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 8, 2015

I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. On platforms with many participatory options, more people are more active. Last week on this blog, I tried an experiment. On Facebook, you can post, like, comment, add photos, play games.

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Game Museum Participatory Comment 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end. No one planned the love locks, but their success is rooted in the same principles that make all the best participatory projects work: it requires no instructions beyond its own example. Nor are they historic.

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Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2009

I'm working on a section of my book about sharing social objects and am writing about the most common way that visitors share their object experiences in museums: through photographs. Revenue Streams: Museums want to maintain control of sales of "officially sanctioned" images of objects via catalogues and postcards.

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Museum Photo Policy Open 54

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

Jasper Visser and his colleagues at the not-yet-physically-open National Historisch Museum of the Netherlands have impressed me with their innovative, thoughtful approach to developing a dynamic national museum. Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam. Tags: Museums Engaging in 2.0

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Museum Comment Experiment Participatory 34

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. The sheet gave people a lightweight tool to use in social interaction, to trade and share stamps. The museum itself was well-integrated into the event.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

It started as a handout for a session that Stacey and I are doing at the California Association of Museums, and then I realized it was so darn useful that it was worth sharing with all of you. The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55

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.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. I doubt this would be the perfect solution for every organization, but it really is amazing how quickly it has changed the nature of cross-institution communication at our museum. What tools do you use to stay connected behind-the-scenes?

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

JUNE 26, 2018

The talk is a 35-minute introduction to the OFBYFOR ALL framework, with a museum bent given the audience. We hope this project sparks a set of tools AND a global movement. I realized I was feeling the same fear and excitement that comes with any truly participatory project. I hope you enjoy it. I want people to take action.

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Action Video Participatory Global 32

Museum 2.0

MAY 23, 2008

And now, the research group Forrester provides new insights about different kinds of participatory styles among users of social media sites. I've written before about three types of museum users: contributors, lurkers, and judges. There are different levels of interactivity. But we're weak in the middle levels.

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Profile Audience Participatory Tools 26

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

AUGUST 9, 2011

Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. Lisa was thrilled that her work was on display at the museum. We started a pretty fascinating (and yes, a little frustrating) dialogue about the puzzle and the question of what constitutes desired engagement in the museum.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 29, 2014

In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. fundraising participatory museum risk Technology Tools Worth Checking Out' How can you invite them to participate alongside you to save species? That''s what building a movement is all about.

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Action People Conservancy Africa 46

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 5, 2008

Cultural Connections is a group of museum professionals who meet up a few times a year and host excellent programs on a variety of topics. This week, they hosted "Let Them Be Heard: Visitor Participation in the Museum Experience," featuring four presentations on incorporating visitors' content into museums. Here's what they did.

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Case Study Participatory Studies Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2010

Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. During the ensuing discussion, one woman asked, "Which audiences are least interested in social participation in museums?" So what's a museum to do--especially one that is funded to encourage youth and teen participation?

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Teen Social Museum Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 1, 2006

Ready to turn your institution into a site of participatory engagement? specializes in designing museum experiences and exhibitions that are community informed, socially stimulating, technologically ambitious, and intriguingly experimental. Want to bring the spirit of this blog to your colleagues and projects?

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Museum Professional Service Participatory 21

Museum 2.0

JULY 15, 2010

Dear Museum 2.0 My book, The Participatory Museum , has done incredibly well so far, but there's a problem: the interactive components aren't working. The problem is that at least so far, the tools I've provided for discussion on the book's website are not gaining traction. readers, Today is my birthday.

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Participatory Chapter Museum Case Study 32

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

I spent the weekend queuing up posts for my forthcoming blog-cation--nine weeks of guest posts and reruns from the Museum 2.0 You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more.

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

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

OCTOBER 23, 2018

This project wove together many different participatory threads. Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. You can download it for free right now. What did we learn? We co-created it from start to finish with community partners. There were over 100 partners. We commissioned new collaborative artwork.

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 10, 2008

Thank you to Susan Spero and all the folks at JFKU and Left Coast Press for starting a highly stimulating conversation this weekend at the colloquium on Museums and Civic Discourse. There were, as we say in the museum business, some good aha moments. What role should museums play in promoting discourse?

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Museum Site Facilitation Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2015

A small room, packed with gadgets, packed with fossils, packed with tools, packed with PEOPLE everywhere making and exploring and building and learning. There are lots of great science museum resources, but not where these kids can walk after school. We make sure that kids can grab materials and tools without staff intervention.

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Green Interview Share Community 20

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.

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Museum Library Participatory Wikipedia 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The election season, as well as a recent research study on museum membership, has change my perspective on this. A national election is the ultimate participatory project. Why WOULDN'T a science museum engage members in the crusade to draw clear lines between science and pseudoscience? We need more tools to open it up.

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