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Ten Years Past ... Ten Years Future?
as we move towards the closing plenary -- where we'd like to take a look as a group at how Web 2.0 strategies and tools might be used in museums -- i'm wondering if people have some good examples of things we should consider. what to you points the way towards the future of our museums on the web? what's key to the future of the museums and the web community?
all suggestions, thoughts and ideas welcome!
jennifer
Here's a link to the powerpoint from yesterday's plenary -- we'll get the list of sites up in a more useful manner soon. But for now, if you view the slideshow, the links will be live.
Thanks to everyone for making MW2006 so much fun - and the source of so many good ideas.
jennifer
j. trant co-founder Museums and the Web | partner archives & museum informatics www.archimuse.com
I've written a response a few times and, in typical museum fashion, I've redone it a few times because it wasn't perfect. Instead of paragraphs and paragraphs of long-windedness (talk to me in person for that version), I decided to force some brevity on myself.
Here are a few poorly crafted haiku.
Your visitors are part of the experience
flickr, del.icio.us
Science Buzz, Web 2.0
we are not alone
Interconnectedness
we've built grand cities
alone on the dusty plain
bikes, cars, trucks, trains, planes.
In aggregate
an ant by itself
a simple thing does one thing
many move mountains
I've been very inspired with the social networking ideas at this year's conference, but I think there could be a little more emphasis upon the people that use museum services: the society that makes up the network, if you will.
For instance, when I see a post in a blog that I agree (or disagree) with strongly, I want to click on the name of the person who made it. Then I want to see all the blog posts they've made, at all the museum sites they've visited, not just the one where I found the original post. I also want to be able to browse a gallery of all the objects they've ever tagged.
I also want to be able to browse all the objects tagged with a specific term by 10 year old school kids, or look at all the blog entries posted by post-graduate researchers, either from a specific museum, from a selection of museums, or from them all.
The underlying data model for steve that we were shown ought to support these outrageous demands of mine, particularly if used in tandem with semantic web and web services technologies that I heard about elsewhere. But I think the one thing that needs to happen more than anything for such a system to be possible was mentioned in the opening keynote by Cynthia Copeland- museums have to work together as a community and be willing to share their users as well as their content.
My current obsession is trying to figure out how we're going to connect the general public to the vast collections we're now making available, digitized, online.
Many museums are spending lots of $$ and making a lot of effort to move collections on-line. DAMS, content management, etc. are all great things but I think we're a little behind when it comes to thinking about the value, to our general audiences, of having all that content on-line. By and large, our audiences connect not with individual artworks, but with interpreted exhibitions. We groups artworks into our shows for a reason: because they're related to each other and we can talk about those relationships, and put the artworks into some context that gives visitors a way to connect to the artworks.
We're getting better and better at building the on-line analogs to exhibitions, and we've seen some great examples of that at MW2006, but we haven't made a lot of similar progress in the "collections" areas we have on a lot of our web sites. How will we connect visitors to these vast, relatively uninterpreted collections?
I've been working on steve for a while, but I've really only been totally sold on it for a few weeks. I might even go so far as to say that it's the only way I've seen to get visitors to really look at artworks when they're clicking through the pages in an on-line collections area. Of course I mean not just steve, but any form of tagging that asks people to stop and say what they see in the picture. I'm finally ready to say that all this effort we're putting into digitization and distribution might have serious benefits not just for us internally, and for the research audience, but for typical museum-goers just wondering what they might see when they come in next week.
[edit: OK, I have an addition. I think IMA-style thinkmaps can also connect average visitors to the collection. So now we have two (count 'em) ways to do that.]
I think this comment highlights one of the really exciting aspects of the folksonomy approach, namely the level of engagement it engenders in the user. So many web sites strive to engage the user through ever more seductive use of technologies to tell interesting stories. But the role of the user in such sites is relatively passive: to understand and recall. Tagging brings into play higher level cognitive skills such as analysis, comparison, selection and synthesis that from an educational perspective are much more powerful...so Im hoping tools like steve will offer a lot of potential to designers designing learning activities for museum web sites. Stephen Brown
Stephen Brown
That last comment really resonates. As I type I am looking at the poll about "most important features of an on-line community". The most popular tool, by far, is online discussion. For me, that's the most fun part in many of the older communities in which I participate. But I don't think that is something that pulls people in as much as the "blog" way of doing online discussions (think about it - blog post are hardly different from topic stgarters), or of tagging, or of being able to comment on previously static material, or to store groups of annotated, tagged bookmarks (locally on a system, or via del.icio.us or other external tools) - the vocabulary has changed. We may value the discussions that come about as the most important part of community, but the ways we get there using web 2.0 tools are differently engaging from the old, formal, log in, navigate a hierarchy of discussions, search to see if your subject has already been discussed, jump in" model.
In the end, online community is both about building personal relationships, but also, in a more general sense, about creating engagement - to people, to ideas. Web 2.0, in part, is about saying that we don't have to live in boxes. We can mash things up and create interactivity in all of the ways - or as few of the ways - as we want, and then stand back as others mash things up differently and construct different narratives. Web 2.0 is about conversation as both metaphor and reality.