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”.