Out there: museum and user generated content on social media sites

An increasing number of museums are reducing risk by putting user generated content on sites such as Flickr and YouTube. These sites are at arms length from the museum so inappropriate content is potentially less embarassing and they serve as a useful storage place, taking the pressures off the museums’ own servers. More importantly putting the content on these sites has the huge advantage of taking the museum to the community and exposing it to new audiences. Using V&A examples and others, this workshop will look at how museums have used social media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or have utilised other people’s blogs. It will look at how museums are both constrained and liberated by this approach and will consider whether skills in task setting are still relevant when activities are based on other people’s rather than the museum’s own website. The workshop will include practical activity. The aim is to provide a large number of relatively simple workable ideas that people might take away and adapt for their own museums.