An excellent recap of the Open Museum marathon is in the making at Seb Chan’s blog.

Openness is a way for museums to be seen to be ‘creating new value’ from the old - and to assert their relevance in stimulating new creativity, economic and cultural production. Museums can collaborate with the community to improve findability through tagging of various kinds; and make discoveries, create communities of interest around their collections and in so doing improve their research and collection data.

With each other and other sorts of knowledge providers, museum openness can create richer value for researchers, scholars and even general browsers by connecting collections and research with broader context and richer resources elsewhere - moving from being a singular ‘destination’ to simply a high value node in a knowledge network/web (I equated this to the function of a reference librarian).

All in all the Open Museums part of Picnic was one of the most successful ‘Picnic Specials’ along with Surprising Africa. The attendance was solid and the ideas discussed traversed the different interpretations and permutations of ‘openness’ - from reaching out to non-traditional museum audiences, to inter-institutional data sharing and co-creative visitor interactions.

There are more reviews here (in English), here (Dutch), here, here, here and a preview here by PICNIC programme director Monique van Dusseldorp.

Related posts:  Come join the Open Museum Network at PICNIC ‘08  //  Tagging on Museum Wall  //  n8 will host Open Museum symposium at PICNIC 08  //  Join the Open Museum social media masterclass by Seb Chan  //  Open Museum Network  //

This entry was posted on maandag, september 29th, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Business, Media, Museum, MuseumLab, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.