Museums and Web 2.0 – an illusion of access?

During my online search I found this interesting research proposal by Lena Maculan, PhD candidate at the department of Museum Studies of the University of Leicester (UK): Museums, Web 2.0 and the illusion of access: The divides and challenges of the new publishing and broadcasting models of communication for Europe’s digital culture.
http://www.impala.ac.uk/projects/museumstudies.html

In this abstract Lena Maculan reflects about how museums could make their collections more accessible. Her research aims to extend existing theories on interactivity, accessibility and user empowerment. Furthermore, she wants to theorise the shift from the traditional museum to a web 2.0 memory institution. In this context, the author questions the notion of access: “Over the last years many cultural heritage institutions have undergone extensive digitization projects. Every day more and more information from and about museums, is uploaded to the World Wide Web. Yet, it seems that the massive amount of digitized cultural content, produces an illusion of access.”

Maculan has a particular interest in podcasts as a new communication medium for cultural heritage institutions. In Web 2.0 times users have increasingly diverse options as to where they retrieve information from. In addition to that, information retrieval becomes increasingly mobile, as more and more services are offered on mobile phones and PDAs. This allows the audience to be more selective about when and how to access information.
This brings me to another interesting experiment about podcasts in museums: I came across the art mob project of a student group of the Marymount Manhattan College in the United States. They are creating, unofficially, audio guides for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“MoMA of course already offers audio guides (for a nominal fee), but we want to make our own, and to invite others to do so as well (…) we are democratizing the experience of touring an art museum; we are offering a way for anyone to “curate” their own little corner of MoMA. I’ll give you a taste: One of our audio guides captures the smart, irreverent banter between a student and an art history professor as they view works by Chagall and Picasso. Others offer music composed and performed by student musicians inspired by several art works.” (David Gilbert, member of the Art Mob group)
For more details check here: http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/
These podcast interventions are a way of “remixing” shows with different opinions, soundtracks or also critical questions. This opens a new perspective on the role of art history and the general theoretical approach towards artworks – and provides a genuine 2.0 experience.

MINERVA – Digitising Content Together

http://www.minervaeurope.org/home.htm

This website gives a good overview about cultural digitisation projects all over Europe and lists national competence centers as well as best practice examples. MINERVA aims at improving accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources since 2003.
This EU-funded project (within the framework of IST) is a network of Member States’ Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation.

What are the outcomes of this project so far?

Minerva has established an extensive editorial collection in order to supply the visibility to the results of its working groups and NRG activities along with a Good Practices handbook which can be inspiring for decisionmakers in the cultural field. Furthermore, they have set up national competence centers as key advisors for cultural digitisation projects in the respective EU member states. Those competence centers vary widely in each country – usually those centers are run by national libraries, museums, archives, universities or dedicated digitisation bodies. Another relevant outcome is the ongoing list of digitisation guidelines, which are interesting for any memory insitution which plans to extend their activities on the digital field. The selected guidelines, which are permanently updated, have been produced by public and private institutions. Some are for guiding the digitization projects, others are related to digitization programs where the Guidelines want to reach the strategy and mission of single institutions – the criteria followed for inclusion was that of general interest for professionals worldwide.

Weblog on virtual museums and metamuseums

http://www.virtual-museum.at

The Virtual Museums-weblog is aimed at communicating and discussing development concerning virtual museums and meta museums both on the net and elsewhere. They provide an interesting overview of web resources about digital museums and online museology, as well as information on museum ontologies and metadata in general.

However, it seems that this weblog has not been very active lately. Some of the articles are outdated in the meantime. But there are some interesting texts, like the reflections of Werner Schweibenz on the shift of traditional museums into memory institutions. He shows how digital media influences the curatorial practices in European museums. Furthermore, he compares a variety of definitions of museums and shows how much these concepts have changed over the last years. And I found this quote of Tomislav Sola, which I regard as essential concerning the future development of museums worldwide:
“When we are collecting objects we are collecting information” “The traditional museum piece, an item, a three-dimensional fact, is only a datum among a complex of museum information, of a message. We do not have museums because of the objects they contain but because of the concepts that these objects help to convey”.

Unlocking the Value of Cultural Memory – The DigiCult Report 2002

http://digicult.salzburgresearch.at/

The DigiCult report by Salzburg Research provides recommendations for decision makers of European archives, museums and policy makers.
This paper presents the results of the strategic study “Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy – DigiCULT” completed at the beginning of 2002. The report covers the topics: national policies & initiatives, organisational change, exploitation, and technologies for cultural heritage institutions. Furthermore, it addresses the key issues that were selected on the basis of input from over 180 experts and provides recommendations for policy and decision makers in the cultural heritage sector.

The Role of Museums in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

http://www.mincultura.gov.co/patrimonio/patrimonioInmaterial/secciones/descargas/documentos_unesco/roles_of_museum_in_safeguarding_pci.pdf

This UNESCO position paper for the Expert Meeting April 5-7 2004 gives a good overview on how UNESCO and ICOM envision the future roles of museums when it comes to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage. It focuses on two questions:

1. How can museums contribute to safeguarding living heritage, especially on the level of local communities?

2. How can museums contribute to the visibility of forms of living heritage, in accordance with the aims of the UNESCO Convention 2003?

The Mobile Museums – Interview with Hans J. Wiegner

Interview with the Berlin-based artist Hans J. Wiegner, initiator of the Mobile Museums, a travelling artists museum, together with Susa Pop, cultural manager in Berlin.

A Travelling Artists Museum
The Mobile Museums, supported by the European Commission / Culture 2000 programme, challenged the traditional notion of a museum as a continuous memory institution with a permanent residence.
The Mobile Museums tour from Berlin over Vienna to Barcelona was conceived as a Travelling Artists Museum. Public Art Lab Berlin, an interdisciplinary platform for intercultural exchange, invited artists to design their individual museum.

Modular Space Structure
Each artist received a construction kit consisting of modular recycled sheets with which to build an individual museum whose floor area could measure a maximum of 10 square meters. The three Mobile Museums were designed by German artists Hans J. Wiegner and Franka Hoernschemeyer, together with Austrian artists Gilbert Bretterbauer and Hans Joachim Roedelius. The three individually designed museums were accompanied by the Mobile Museum Studio.

Mobile Museum Studio
The Mobile Museum Studio’s programme was curated by the cooperation partners in each city, and were located centrally due to the programme, which included artists living in each city. These urban interventions have so far been characterized by an inclusive, open art process that allows for an intense dialogue between local visitors, the artists and the adjacent institutions.

When I asked Hans J. Wiegner how the concept of the Mobile Studios evolved he refered to Mark Rothko first. „He did not like big museums“ explains Wiegner, “he would have rather prefered a number of small museums, spread all over the country, each of them devoted to one particular artist.“
Wiegner also likes the idea of the museum as a small, accessible cultural space where people quickly check in and out while roaming the streets of a city. „I think that our cities need more museums as perception cells, which are placed in the middle of the streets. You just enter them and you experience a different atmosphere from the world outside. This is an instant way to mediate art and culture – and it happens right there where the people are: in the streets.”
Usually, people visit museums on Sundays or during vacation. Those small Mobile Museums provide immediate access to culture in the midst of the urban sprawl. The Mobile Museums are also a site for artistic interventions in the public space, thus enabling manyfold experiences about the living culture of a particular place. And it seems to be a good instrument to showcase what you call intangible cultural heritage also. A mobile structure definitely offers a broader array of opportunities than a permanent residence, because you can always keep track with developments in a city and go to where the people are.