Comments on: A New Way Forward for Museums

By: constructii metalice

constructii metalice — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:17:30 +0000

practically the best blog ever

By: sostac

sostac — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 07:22:33 +0000

sostac…

[...]OpenCulture » Blog Archive » A New Way Forward for Museums[...]…

By: Profiles base

Profiles base — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:12:04 +0000

Profiles base…

[...]OpenCulture » Blog Archive » A New Way Forward for Museums[...]…

By: A New Way Forward for Museums | o dubbel d

A New Way Forward for Museums | o dubbel d — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:22:12 +0000

[...] doorlezen, maar dan krijg je ook een glimp te zien van het museum van de toekomst op deze blogpost: A New Way Forward for Museums. Dan lees je opeens zaken zoals: Where once there was the socialist and egalitarian principle of [...]

By: Collecting [&] 1000 fans « museum geek

Collecting [&] 1000 fans « museum geek — Mon, 16 May 2011 07:54:14 +0000

[...] week a post on Open Culture caught my attention. It proposes A New Way Forward for Museums and issues a call for museums to “get smart and get excited about culture, reach out and [...]

By: Mia

Mia — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:35:16 +0000

Nick, I’m thinking aloud but I suspect you’re conflating the aggregation of content (good) with the aggregation of interfaces (problematic).

The small groups Suse and Ed mention, and the specialist collections Judith describes would not be well served by an iPad app designed to sell as many licenses as possible. They *would* be served by content discoverable on the first page of Google, which is only going to happen if museums work out how to aggregate content, whether it’s trays of dead worms or a single point of entry to museum picture libraries.

The the supply chain model you describe has a point of failure - niche, specialist interest content with small potential audience figures, and little transactional value in the content itself. Privatising the publication of this isn’t attractive to commercial organisations, so where does that leave museums and their audiences?

By: Ed Rodley

Ed Rodley — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:41:14 +0000

The longer I am in the profession, the more convinced I become that we respond to examples of success or failure more readily than anything else, be it a report, a government initiative, or strategic vision. I look forward to seeing the repercussions of the Yale decision.

I’d second Suse’s comment about the power of small groups. Every collection can’t appeal to the masses. They never have and never will. But there is an audience out there for just about any subject. Our challenge is to find ways to connect our content with those audiences.

By: Suse

Suse — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:04:55 +0000

Judith, to think big and maybe dream a little, when you want to explain why digitised dead worms would be worth the effort, don’t consider the ‘general public’. Consider the 1000 people in the world who are absolutely fascinated by worms, and who know and understand more about worms than you of I ever could. And that those 1000 people might be spread all across the planet with no way to access the information that’s currently stored in your collection… but by putting it online, one of those worm-obsessed people might be able to see something in your worm collection that might prove to be a major breakthrough in ‘wormology’ that makes an impact on better ways of planning for environmental degradation or composting or … something (I’m not a worm expert, so I can’t tell you what it would be).

The Internet is leading to so many great innovations in the world because of the way that people can share ideas and bounce off one another, rather than working in ideas silos. We cannot possibly know the repercussions of putting information online and making it accessible to small communities of passionate amateurs and experts, but by doing so, we have a chance to find out.

I am being a little Utopian here and truthfully I am not sure what we do to make our collections meaningful, findable to the right people, and useful. But just because we don’t know what the use of digitised dead worms are doesn’t mean that they don’t have a use. It’s the accidental discoveries of knowledge that make the world interesting, and maybe museums should be encouraging them and staking our place in digital discovery.

By: Judith

Judith — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:55:58 +0000

Following up on Mar’s comment: In many museums, such as natural history collections, we curators have difficulty explaining why digitized dead worms would be interesting to the general public and therefore worthy of the monetary layout to make the effort. You have made me think about how someone just needs to find a way to ‘digest’ this data into an app so it can gradually/eventually pay for itself, even if the return is not monetary.

By: Mar Dixon

Mar Dixon — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:49:15 +0000

I agree that there is room for a hybrid and that so many decisions are based solely on funding rather than the audience. We own a small private museum and we are currently working on getting our catalogue digitised (via e-Hive) in order to get as much out there as possible. Does that lessen the list of people who come to visit us? No, if anything it encourages them.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to keep the traditional, eg Victorian. However, it *is* possible to hold on to the values of the past while embracing the ethos of modern day-technology. It doesn’t need to be ‘two groups’ or ‘us vs them’. It needs to be common sense prevailing. If a collection is too large to be digitised, then perhaps looking at only doing significant collections.

As far as the new way forward – my main contention is doing whatever it takes to kids into museums as they are our next generation politicians and money deciders. We need to start ensuring that these institutions work with parents/schools/carers in making museums fun, engaging and worthwhile.