Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008
in museums and experiential.
How can you design museum spaces so that exhibits and artifacts become social objects–things that people want to share with each other? This summer, I wrote about situations that bring strangers together in conversation by focusing their attention on a third party (the dog, the stuck elevator, the surprising event). While that post focused on conditions for talking to strangers, this one looks at the object of attention itself around which triangulation and social behavior happens.
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in museums, digital and collections.
The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools, the museum complex’s new chief said recently. “I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society,” said Secretary G. Wayne Clough in his first interviews since taking the Smithsonian’s helm in July. Clough, 66, who was president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years, says he’s working to bring in video gaming experts and Web gurus to collaborate with curators on creative ways to present artifacts online and make them appealing to kids. “I think we need to take a major step,” Clough said in an earlier interview. “Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that.”
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in web sites, books and museums.
This is a website companion to a past physical exhibit featuring “illustrations that captured the sensations of being by or in the water. For this virtual version, there is more information about the stories and their illustrators of the sort you might learn during a gallery talk.” Click on images near the top of the page to see larger pictures and annotations. From the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University.
Swimming in Picture Books website
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in museums and experiential.
If Portuguese is seen as the step-sister to the rest of Latin America’s Spanish, then someone should tell the Brazilians.The Museum of the Portuguese Language in downtown Sao Paulo is a popular destination with visitors and one of the most visited in Latin America.
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in museums and green.
Museums tend to be famous for what’s on their walls. But at the new Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) in Michigan, the art has taken a back seat to the walls themselves. Last month, the $75 million, 125,000-square-foot building became the first art museum in the country to receive a LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council in Washington. (LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is considered the benchmark for green construction.) The fact that a second museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, will soon gain Gold status is just one sign of the greening of US museums.
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Published by rwatstein April 6th, 2008
in education and museums.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 legislation requiring public schools to demonstrate annual progress in reading and math instruction through standardized tests, has taken a toll on art, science and history education, according to a new report from the Center on Education Policy. Other recent reports paint a similarly gloomy picture of America’s educational priorities and persistent ignorance. The silver lining, however, is that museums are playing a vital role in supplementing formal education and providing informal learning opportunities.
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This virtual museum is for the new generation of librarians who may not be familiar with the tools and methods used before technology and the digitization of library catalogs stepped in. It is also for those experienced librarians who have been in the profession for many years; perhaps the museum will bring back a bit of nostalgia. This site provides a look inside the history of libraries and librarianship. Librarians have always worked hard to adapt to the constantly changing technology that is meant to make libraries more efficient. The changes vary from the methods used to catalog items to the tools used to catalog them. Within these pages can be seen the transition, innovation, and the differences from one method or tool to the next.
Virtual Museum of Cataloging & Acquisitions Artifacts web site
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in museums.
Which is more inclusive: the place where staff curse constantly or the place where they ignore you? Which has more social impact: the place frequented by educated art lovers or the one populated by blue collar joes? Which has more aesthetic value: the famous one-of-a-kind masterpieces or the images people love enough to put permanently on their bodies?
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in libraries, library services and museums.
Museum 2.0 writes, “Here’s something to be proud of. Museums (and libraries) are trusted sources of information. In February 2001, AAM commissioned a study about the trustworthiness of museums and found that “Almost 9 out of 10 Americans (87%) find museums to be one of the most trustworthy or a trustworthy source of information among a wide range of choices. Books are a distant second at 61%, and a majority of Americans find print and broadcast media and the Internet to be not trustworthy.” Last month, the IMLS published a report on a survey of 1,700 people, with similar findings about trustworthiness of museums and libraries, and some great added information about how use of the internet benefits both museums (with higher in-person visitation) and visitors (with more ways to find information of interest). But here’s the problem. I don’t entirely trust these reports. They were both commissioned by organizations whose purpose is to support museums and libraries. Would you trust a survey report about consumer confidence in meat safety commissioned by the beef industry? And here’s the bigger problem. It’s great that museums are a trusted source of information. But is that really our mission? And more practically, is being a trusted source of information a key value proposition?”
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Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008
in museums.
A new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art presents fresh talent in data visualization and other design disciplines that could have far-reaching business applications. If you were at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos last month, you may have attended a popular panel featuring design curator Paola Antonelli of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Antonelli cast designers in a context relevant to any business seeking to “innovate,” or create new products or services that add value to a company’s bottom line. She described designers—industrial designers, Web designers, and architects, among others—as people who translate cutting-edge technologies and scientific research into useful (and profitable) objects and devices. Not to mention the graphic and interactive designers who transform complex data into visually striking images that are more easily digestible than mere columns of numbers and statistics.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in museums and OCLC.
The $145,000 grant will be used to further develop standards for museum data exchange. OCLC will use the grant to fund projects involving OCLC Programs and Research and seven RLG Programs art museum partners to build an information architecture and model behaviors that museums can use to routinely exchange data. This initiative will result in the creation of a low-barrier/no-cost batch export capability out of the collections management system used by the participating museums (GallerySystems TMS), as well as a test of data exchange processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
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Published by rwatstein January 26th, 2008
in web sites, museums and mapping.
“Get Lost is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary. “Get Lost brings together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present, and future.” Browse by artist. From the New Museum, New York.
Get Lost website
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Published by rwatstein January 20th, 2008
in social networking and museums.
“Usually, when I start posts with a question in the title, it’s a cheat. The presumed answer is “yes” your museum needs a blog, a pony, or a set of comfy couches. In this case, it’s debatable. Does your museum need a custom online social network? Maybe not. Let’s discuss what it means, how it works, where it can go.”
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Published by rwatstein January 5th, 2008
in innovation and museums.
It’s one thing to experience and or be confronted by content that is uncomfortable, either in the form of an exhibition or a program. But what about interactive exhibits that give visitors active roles in the uncomfortable situation? Two examples, both from science museums.
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Published by rwatstein December 9th, 2007
in web 2.0, children and museums.
At children’s museums, visitors ARE participants. It’s hard to fool yourself into thinking you define the museum experience when your visitors are jumping on, chewing, and giggling at your content. Children don’t have the same social hang-ups as adults and are likely to share their experience with strangers while in the museum. Visitors use the exhibits as owners and come back to reuse again and again. Finally, children’s museums are the original home of user-generated content, from face-paintings to puppet shows to take-home projects. However, with an audience of mostly young children and families in primarily non-collecting hands-on museums, most of them small, what are the best web strategies?
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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007
in museums.
What kind of membership inspires such loyalty and participation? Weight Watchers. It’s social, it’s supportive, and the membership is sustaining. They have an innovative model: pay when you start, then attend for free once you have reached your weight goal. Slip, and you’re back to a paying membership. The leaders, who are paid, are all former members who reached their goal. Museum membership is not nearly as healthy as that of Weight Watchers. Museum members aren’t ideological, like members of a political party or a movement. They aren’t social, like members of a church or team. They aren’t motivated by support for a perceived community service, like members of NPR or the Sierra Club. Today’s museum members are mostly “value” members, people who join based on a calculation of savings in admissions fees over a number of yearly visits.
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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007
in museums.
Let’s say you wanted to find a model museum using Web 2.0 to support programs and exhibits. A place that blogs, that engages in social networking sites, that tries experiments, and reports about all of it honestly. A place that truly sees these initiatives as part of their mission to serve their local community. A place that does all this in the context of a fairly traditional collections-based museum. A place that makes it all pretty darn cool. Is there such a place? You bet. It’s the Brooklyn Museum. They’ve played with Twitter. They just finished a YouTube video contest. They even created a Facebook application. Today, an interview with Shelley Bernstein, the Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum.
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Published by rwatstein November 20th, 2007
in education and museums.
You’d never see an English department chair reporting to the vice president for advancement instead of to deans and provosts. University of Oregon professors want to know why that principle doesn’t apply to the art museum. This summer, Oregon’s president took the uncommon if not unheard-of step of deciding that the director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, who has historically reported to the provost, would report to the advancement office instead — prompting faculty opposition that took the form of a University Senate resolution recently. More broadly, the shift in structure underscores a question that’s been raised as a number of college leaders have raided their art museums to raise funds in recent years: To what degree is a college art museum considered central to an academic mission, and to what extent is it seen primarily as a financial asset?
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Published by rwatstein November 3rd, 2007
in museums and technology.
Presenting the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) inaugural Leadership Lecture on Oct. 22 in Washington, D.C., nationally recognized communications strategist and author Robert L. Dilenschneider acknowledged that libraries and museums have “tremendous assets.” These include rich content, knowledgeable staff with expertise in dispersing this information and, invaluably, the public’s trust. But, he told assembled library and museum leaders, the more than one million people who serve America’s cultural institutions must keep pace with rapidly changing technologies—or run the risk of atrophy. “The paradigm is rapidly shifting in your world, and you must prepare for a great leap forward using technology as a teaching tool,” Dilenschneider said.
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Published by rwatstein November 3rd, 2007
in museums.
The Heritage Emergency National Task Force continues to gather information about damage to cultural heritage from the devastating California wildfires. Fortunately, service disruption has been the biggest setback for most museums. With improving weather and fire conditions, all major attractions in San Diego reopened over the weekend of Oct. 27. Not all museums escaped damage, however. Several historic structures in rural areas of San Diego County sustained serious damage, including several adobe structures; some were completely lost, such as the Bratton House, which dated to the late 1800s.
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Published by rwatstein September 29th, 2007
in museums.
Pop quiz: How much does it cost to go a museum? And I don’t mean cost in a global bottom line sense—I mean how much does it cost to walk up to the admissions desk and buy a ticket? How much for a family? How much for a student? How much for an adult? The answer, of course, is that it varies. Museums can range from free to about $30 for admission. There are secondary admissions fees, like parking, and optional fees, like for IMAX shows, traveling exhibits, and other add-ons. It’s often confusing to wade through the choices: do I want the underwater pony show or the artist-led splatter tour? But even more than this confusion, I believe museums suffer from a lack of consistent expectations when it comes to price and purchase options.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in children, virtual worlds and museums.
When you talk with museum people about virtual worlds, the conversation usually centers on Second Life. And sure, by some metrics, it’s the biggest, most fully realized 3D world out there, full of user-generated content, sex shops and waterslides, and a whole lot of buggy, experimental experiences. But Second Life isn’t the biggest, and it isn’t the fastest growing. It’s just the most open. If you want to see where the real action is, waddle over to the igloo. Chances are if you know a kid between 6 and 12, you know a kid who uses Club Penguin or Webkinz, or both. These virtual worlds are, as one father put it, “the cuddly G-rated version of Second Life.” And they’re booming. Club Penguin has 700,000 subscribers (at $6/month), about 12 million users, and was just sold to Disney for $350 million with a $350 million additional earn-out. And unlike Second Life, Club Penguin is 2D, highly controlled, and its primary users are too young to type.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in Pew Research, 3D and museums.
A system that makes three dimensional images solid enough to grasp has been unveiled by Japanese firm NTT. It could let businesspeople shake hands from across the globe or allow museum visitors to feel precious exhibits that are normally out of reach, the company says. The prototype Tangible 3D system combines a 3D display with a “haptic glove”. The display creates lifelike images appear in just in front of a flat screen. It creates the illusion of depth by showing slightly different images to each of the viewer’s eyes. This means no special glasses are needed.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in museums and architecture.
A sleek glass, copper and concrete visitor’s center in the new headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may become a Seattle tourist attraction when it opens in 2010. The foundation, the largest in the world with $33.4 billion in assets, has given museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates the task of creating a 15,000-square-foot center that explains the nonprofit’s work in global health, development and education.
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Published by rwatstein July 21st, 2007
in libraries and museums.
Beginning July 3, Toronto Public Library users can borrow a Sun Life Financial Museum and Arts Pass, in the same way they can borrow a book or CD from the collection. The pass provides full admission to a family of up to two adults and five children to the Art Gallery of Ontario and at least four other Toronto cultural institutions.
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Published by rwatstein July 2nd, 2007
in museums.
Two scathing reports on the Smithsonian Institution’s governance and spending practices and the recent resignation of the institution’s second highest-ranking official were among the issues discussed at a Senate oversight hearing on June 26.
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