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Museums and the Web Conference 2010

By: Dr Lynda Kelly, Category: Museullaneous, Date: 27 Apr 2010

Links to papers and online summaries from the 2010 Museums and the Web Conference.

Museums and the Web conferences are held annually and are always full of exciting riches. This year's conference in Denver, Colorado seemed to be no exception. Even not being there physically the wonders of Web 2.0 enabled many people to participate online. The Twitter feed was especially active and you can download a transcript of it here.

Some online summaries below.

Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum: Short report on Museums and the Web 2010

• "museums and Wikipedia were sometimes talking at cross purposes – with some misunderstandings and misconceptions on both sides"
• "general consensus that more liberal licensing on museum content as a whole might achieve the same end goals as direct collaboration with Wikipedians – but without the resourcing, scaling and sometimes difficult community management issues"
• great quote about content and authority from Aaron Straup-Cope’s paper Buckets and Vessels - some interesting insights here
• recommends this paper as essential reading: Hiding Our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"

Allegra Burnette, MoMA: Notes from Museums and the Web

• at this conference there was an "emphasis on apps and mobile sites"
• "thinking about how museums extend our online presences beyond our own museum websites"
• "emphasis is more on the content, reach, and experience than the specific technology used"
• "Our kit of tools keeps growing, but unless we are delivering material that you, our visitors, want in a format that you want, we haven’t really done our jobs, have we?"

Other papers I found useful:

• The Impact of Blogs and Other Social Media on the Life of a Curator, Erika Dicker, Powerhouse Museum
• Clearing the Path for Sisyphus: How Social Media is Changing Our Jobs and Our Working Relationships, Jeff Gates, Smithsonian American Art Museum, USA
• NaturePlus - Developing a Personalised Visitor Experience Across the Museum's Virtual and Physical Environments, Ailsa Barry, The Natural History Museum, UK

Given that we are doing a couple of projects now on mobile technologies have gathered the mobile papers here:

• Old Masters at Your Fingertips: the Journey of Creating a Museum App for the iPhone & iTouch, Elena Lagoudi and Charlotte Sexton, The National Gallery, UK
• The iPhone effect?: Comparing visitors’ and museum professionals’ evolving expectations of mobile interpretation tools. Loic Tallon, Pocket-Proof, UK and Matthew Petrie, Fusion Research + Analytics/Pocket Proof, USA
• Mixing Social Glue with Brick and Mortar: Experiments Using the Mobile Web to Connect People, Objects, and Museums. Jeff Doyle and Maureen Ward Doyle, Open Museum, USA
• The Museum Is Mobile: Cross-platform content design for audiences on the go. Nancy Proctor, Smithsonian American Art Museum, USA

Some very inspiring stuff here!