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 California Files – Side Effects of Cultural Memory

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2007/californiafiles/

This exhibition, curated by Ariane Beyn, examines the reassembling of artefacts out of cultural storage systems and archives – with an eye towards the side effects of cultural memory.

The curator presents a variety of artistic works which are all based on an archival approach, be it a collection of print ephemera or an archive of African American culture.

The starting point for this exhibition is a group of California-based, self-organized archives that assemble collections of uncommon materials and process them in inventive ways. Why am I presenting this exhibition on the museum & intangible cultural heritage research platform?
Because I think it is an excellent example of sampling practices which are already existing on the internet, thus increasingly influencing the way how culture is produced and presented these days. In my opinion, museums are facing a shift not only from object to process, from the tangible to the intangible, but also from display to re-use. This is due to an ever-growing number of source materials which are stored in museums and the need to re-contextualise them. The vast storages of museums contain not only artfecats, but also stories, interviews, links and so on. I believe that in the years to come, more and more museums will have to think of ways of how to re-use what they have been storing over the course of many decades. This approach would “resist a continuous narrative or a comprehensive representation”, as Ariane Beyn writes in the introduction of the California Files catalogue.

It might be an interesting task to open museums storages to young curators and let them compile what they find in there. Maybe this would bring up interesting new approaches of how to sample tangible and intangible expressions of culture? Why is the concept of found footage mainly known in the film/video domain? I would be curious to see the results of a curatorial call for storage & archive compilations of museums worldwide.

Or has this been done already? My web search on this topic led me to the sites of found footage filmmakers, such as Craig Baldwin or Joseph Cornell. And I found an interesting blog which deals with the Recycled Cinema: http://recycledcinema.blogspot.com/

Is it true what Michael Zryd claims, that found footage filmmakers mine the unconsciuos of film? And if so, is it possible to take this approach into museums? What could we learn about our relation to the past? About the things we have inherited, about things we want to maintain and safeguard and others which we deliberately let sink into oblivion?

ICOM – International Council of Museums

ICOM News 06

ICOM (International Council of Museums) is regularly publishing strategy papers regarding the future roles and positions of museums worldwide. Their latest issue deals with the question of intellectual & cultural property. Like many other institutions, not only those which are closely connected to the internet, they are struggling to find recommendations of how to face the changing intellectual property perspectives. ICOM sees this task framed into three major developments:

1. a transformation in the global knowledge economy: museums are digitising their intangible cultural heritage, thus creating access to new and remote audiences,

2. the increasing autonomy of indigenous communities in preserving, safeguarding and disseminating their cultural expressions,

3. calls of these communities to create standard-setting instruments to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights – especially in the field of the intangible cultural heritage.

Following up on this, please have a look at the very inspiring debate between Michael F. Brown, Professor of Anthroposophy, and Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Institute of Folkife and Cultural Heritage, concerning exactly this topic:

http://www.culturalcommons.org/comment-print.cfm?ID=12

Museums and Web 2.0

http://www.museumtwo.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

I recently came across the very interesting blog of Nina Simon who started her Museums & Web 2.0 blog to “explore the ways that the philosophies of Web 2.0 can be applied in museums to make them more engaging, community-based, vital elements of society.”

What does she have to say about museums and the newly evolving paradigm of the architecture of participation?

“What do I mean by 2.0? “Web 2.0” is not just a buzzword; it’s a definition of web-based applications with an “architecture of participation,” that is, one in which users generate, share, and curate the content. The web started with sites (1.0) that are authoritative content distributors–like traditional museums. The user experience with web 1.0 is passive; you are a viewer, a consumer. Web 2.0 removes the authority from the content provider and places it in the hands of the user. Now, you are a participant. You determine what’s on the site, and you judge which content is most valuable.

I believe that museums have the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing. I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions. Web 2.0 opens up opportunity, but it also demonstrates where museums are lacking. The intention of this blog is to explore these opportunities and shortcomings with regard to museums and interactive design. I hope you will join the discussion, and help frame the future of museums–Museum 2.0. “