During a discussion with Vincent de Keijzer from the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Niels Huijbregts of XS4ALL, and Nir Nussbaum and Marijn Koolen of the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, the idea rose to create a platform of museum professionals working in the field of opening up museums through new media and technology. In the spirit of this idea the platform should be open too, accessible for anyone with an interest in this field.
A working title that was coined is The ‹Open Museum Network›. This network should bridge the information gap between audiences and museums, and will focus on pragmatic experiments with new applications, projects and otherwise simple and elegant solutions to make museums more accessible and audiences better equipped. Topics of interest are such imaginative examples of the ‹Wikimuseum› (Powerhouse Museum), the ‹Flickr-exhibition› (Tate Modern) and the ‹Open Source Activities› (n8).
A work in progress, however an acute one, looking at the many international projects on the horizon. Would anyone reading this from abroad be interested in joining the discussion?
Related posts: Internet Smackdown: amateurs vs. professionals // Re:Open Museum // Come join the Open Museum Network at PICNIC ‘08 // Open Source Museum of Open Source Art opens in Second Life // n8 will host Open Museum symposium at PICNIC 08 //
This entry was written by , posted on maart 10, 2008 at 7:18 pm, filed under Culture, Heritage, Museum, MuseumLab, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and tagged elegant solutions, Informatics Institute, Powerhouse Museum, University of Amsterdam, Vincent de Keijzer. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
I am curious what you think the implications of these new media access points will be for the educational role of cultural institutions? Do these empower visitors or do they create a learning divide that parallels the digital divide?
Thank you for your comment. These experiment should lead to innovation that takes away barriers instead of building new ones. I do think they will empower visitors, or at least give visitors more incentives to participate, investigate or merely browse the museum’s offerings.
What is your experience from your professional perspective?
Are you familiar with a new organization called the Museum Software Foundation. http://www.museumsoftwarefoundation.org There first project, in partnership with the Museum Computer Network is now available at http://www.musetechcentral.org
While this is focused more on museum professionals, I think one possible outcome of this is to have a place to share code.
Calls for participation in the 2008 MCN conference are now available at http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp if you were interested in bringing the discussion here.
Hi Richard,
thanks for your contribution. That sounds like a welcome opportunity indeed, will have a look at the sites.
Juha,
as you know, these are all topics that will be discussed in Montreal at Museums and the Web April 9-12, 2008.
for those who can’t make the meeting, the papers are online. See http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/speakers/index.html
past papers (more that 1000) can be searched from http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/speakers/index.html
and we’ve an 800+ member on-line community of cultural heritage informatics professionals.
jt
Working for the Dutch Natural History Museum Naturalis, I am overwhelmed by the complexity of the impacts that the digital technologies have on museums. Everything is changing, and we are facing questions like: “what is the object to present in cyberspace”, “how are we going to make sure the object has a unique digital identity, such that it can operate in a semantic web”, “which set of metadata will be valid for at least one hundred years”, “how to organize participation of non-professional experts and harvest their contribution”, “how is the museum to make money” and, above all: “what does that mean for the internal organization of the museum?” The contrast of the high-speed dynamics of the Internet, sometimes working in days, and the long time horizons of museums, having responsibilities spanning decades or centuries, present some, eh, interesting challenges.
The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is in the process of formulating its policy on information management. One of the chapters in the plan is concentrated on experimenting with new approaches of information(exchange). We want our curators to be more aware of and creative in sharing information and interacting with our audiences.
For this purpose we want to create a.s.a.p. a low profile place for sharing and discussing ideas and experiments. We want to start this discussion with the curators and slowly invite people from outside.
These are my first thoughts on this matter:
Þ Experiments should be based on day to day practise of the museum staff
[no extra tasks but a small extra effort on things they do all the time (answering information questions, studying objects/collections, writing articles etc.]
Þ The discussion on formulating an idea/experiment should be public [starting on a small scale but with the possibility to introduce more people - also from outside the museum]
Þ Experiments should be based on free available software
Þ We can try to cooperate with the UvA / Haagse Hogeschool for designing experimental pages/sites/systems
Þ Successful experiments can be “translated” to full scale applications in the gM information system
Dear Jennifer,
thanks for your contribution. I am aware of MW, being present as I write. However, the forum does not seem a lively place for discussion, how interesting the topics are. I know there is a community scattered over the Web, from Mike Ellis to Seb Chan, but not at Archimuse. But I might be mistaken. This idea about the Open Museum Network fits perfectly within the themes of MW, so here is food a dialogue during the break.
Congratulations on your conference, I look forward to the sessions.
All the best,
Juha
I am happy and proud to announce this season’s MuseumVisie published an article of mine, on the differences between a physical exhibition and an Internet presentation, and the consequences. In Dutch.
As a curator working on a large exhibition project, that among other things should function across the border between virtual and physical world, I am heavily interested in a network like this. We are some danish curators with digital interest who has tried to start some discussion af Facebook in the group Museums in the Digital Age - could be worth a visit.
Thanks for your contribution Mikkel. Might I point out that we are hosting the Open Museum symposium at PICNIC in September in Amsterdam? Perhaps we can all meet there. In the mean time it could be good to open a Google Group or Ning.
Hi everyone, we have just updated the information on the Open Museum symposium at PICNIC ‘08.