Day two of MW2008 began at 8 am this morning, with the ‘Birds of a Feather’ breakfast. Our self-created table ‘Enhanced Museum Events’ inspired an interesting dialogue with Jonathan Bowen, who is presenting Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums in the midday session. Before that, I visited talks about Web 2.0 Metrics by the ever enthusing Seb Chan, and Web 2.0 tools by David Greenfield from the Loyola Marymount Universit.

The afternoon schedule brings a much anticipated and needed discussion on openness, by ’solutions architect’ Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly. Hopefully there will be time for lunch and more in-between-the-lines-discussions about the Semantic Web, public-private-ventures and enhancing actual museum visits by means of ultranew media.

Due to rather unfortunate circumstances I have not been able to send in my paper to MW2008; however the organisation has been kind enough to give us a slot at the demonstrations on Saturday. If you are interested to hear about the Amsterdam Museum Night, physical museum events and interactive media, social networking in the context of a museum festival and other ‘interreality’ examples, join us tomorrow at 9.30 am at booth 16.

Both editors of MuseumLab are currently attending the Musee 2.0 symposium at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Speakers include (a.o.) Peter Weibel (director ZKM, Karlsruhe), John Stack (director, Tate Online, London) and Alain Depocas (director Fondation Daniel Langlois, Montreal). You can watch their presentations via a live feed on their website.

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?

A rare post about ourselves, nevertheless one with a wink: the Dutch Bloggies Awards have longlisted museumlab.org in the category best News Blog. This is a surprising support at the end of our first year of existence online (this site started in April 2007).

A warm welcome to our new visitors.

Museums and the Web is an annual conference that deals with “the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line.” It is an inspiring four day event held in North America. This time it will take place in Montreal, from 9-12 April 2008.

Next year’s programme has just been published online. Amongst its participants are delegates from museums worldwide, such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Tate Modern in London, and MoMA in New York. MuseumLab editor Juha van ´t Zelfde will also be present, for a second consecutive year. He is scheduled to give a presentation in the Technology - Mobile Computing session, on the findings and results of the Amsterdam Museum Night.

Museums and the Web is organized by Archimuse. See who attended the conference in 2007.

“While being faced with a seemingly inevitable and partially beneficial rise of web-based communication technology and human interaction, museums can and should offer an alternative for the exchange of artistic expressions on the web if only to maintain a much needed balance between the quantity and quality of art.”
Michiel van Iersel

“It is very likely that ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and ‘radical trust’ will increasingly affect museums, but I believe that as long as there are moral, economic and legal incentives to conserve our heritage, there will be agents – curators, programmers, critics – who will be rewarded for their expertise.”
Juha van ‘t Zelfde

Virtueel Platform has published the article Brave New Museum. A Conversation about Museums in the Digital Age, written by MuseumLab editors Michiel van Iersel and Juha van ‘t Zelfde.

Download the pdf.

After a Kafkaesque disorientation museumlab.org is back online. With fresh energy from a Parisian adventure, we will continue to bring news and the occasional insight from what lies beyond museums.

While upgrading Wordpress last night our images have been displaced. We are currently trying to recover them. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

[photopress:arcspace_Multimedia_Building.jpg,full,pp_image]

The architecture and design magazine Arcspace has realised an online projectspace in Second Life, the so-called Multimedia Building, where it will enable visitors to run videos, conduct forums. exhibit projects, listen to music and a lot more. They are currently running a Gehry (yes, from the architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) Technologies flythrough video, produced by Vanilla Five for the exhibition Digital Project at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. The first exhibition will be up in September.

Join Second Life (Membership is free)
More about the project in arcspaceSL announcement