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Many museums want to use Web 2.0 applications or feel the pressure to do so. In doing so, they might encounter a significant problem as Web 2.0 is based on the notion of radical trust and unrestricted, equal participation, two concepts that are contrary to the museum’s traditional concepts of authority, communication and participation because until recently this institution used to be in total control of its content. The crucial question is how much control of its content the museum can afford to lose regarding the fact that it highly depends on its reputation and has to justify its trustworthiness.
The paper analyses the role of authority, its influence on traditional and future museum communication and its effects on participation and trust. The challenge for the museum is to find a way to cede authority and control over content without losing its status as a trustworthy institution and to open up for social media and user participation in order to attract new audiences and maintain existing ones.
Many museums and other cultural institutions offer online exhibitions on a regular basis and there is even a considerable amount of research literature describing the venture of creating exhibitions in the digital world of the Internet. Nevertheless, there are some popular rules of thumb which will result in really bad online-exhibitions.
The presentation describes the major pitfalls that should be avoided in creating online exhibitions. It is based on a literature review containing a wide range of studies and projects in the museum field. Outline Research on online exhibitions Some rules of thumb for creating online exhibitions Why these rules of thumb do not work Conclusions.
(19 slides)
Many museums and other cultural institutions offer online exhibitions on a regular basis; in addition to this hands-on experience there is a considerable amount of research literature describing the venture of creating exhibitions in the digital world of the Internet. Nevertheless, a handbook, guidelines or evaluation tools are still missing. Instead, there exist some popular rules of thumb, often considered to be tricks of the trade, which will not result in successful online exhibitions but in really bad user experiences for virtual visitors.
This article describes the major pitfalls that should be avoided in creating online exhibitions. It is based on a review of the research literature covering a wide range of publications and studies in the museum field.
1 Introduction
2 Some popular rules of thumb for creating online exhibitions
3 Why these rules of thumb do not work out
4 Conclusions
5 References
This paper is a revised and extended version of the German language paper "Wie gestaltet man in bester Absicht eine schlechte Online-Ausstellung? Hinweise aus der Forschungsliteratur" published in the journal: Museumskunde, Bd. 76, 1/2011. 90-99.
This article analyses some major issues of the complex relationship between real and virtual museum exhibitions.
While museums have a long tradition and experience in setting up physical exhibitions, they seem to be reluctant in creating virtual exhibitions. A hindering aspect seems to be the relationship between object and reproduction on the one hand and mediated and unmediated museum experience on the other, including the intricate issue of the aura of the original object. With the exhibition traditionally being the discursive space of museum communication, information technology is about to change the relationship between museums and visitors, culminating in the question of whether virtual exhibitions will replace the real ones.
For a deeper understanding of this issue, it is necessary to take a closer look at the motivations for visiting in person and online. In order to create content that is intellectually accessible for both physical and virtual visitors, it is important to consider the relationship between digital collections and virtual exhibitions.
BAM, the joint portal for Libraries, Archives and Museums in Germany, considers itself to be a digital memory institution. Currently the portal holds more than 40 million records from a wide range of cultural institutions, some 37 million data sets from six libraries or union catalogs, 2.9 million data sets from eleven archives, 300.000 data sets from twenty museums and 800.000 data sets from other institutions.
These significant differences in numbers of data sets are not only due to the size of the holdings of the participating institutions but also to “cultural differences” between libraries, archives, and museums in creating records and collaborating in union catalogs.
The paper describes those differences from the perspective of the BSZ, the hosting organization of BAM, and a major contributor to BAM, the Foundation Prussian Cultural Heritage (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz), Berlin. The point of view is specific for the situation in Germany and might differ from the situation in other countries. There are certainly other important issues that are not mentioned here as we chose to take a perspective specific for BAM.
The paper describes the services of MusIS, the South-Western German Museum Network, for the curation of digital heritage. These services range from an object documentation software and the application of controlled vocabulary to a content management system for presentations on the Web and a joint portal for libraries, archives, and museums (the BAM Portal). The BAM Portal offers the possibility to connect selected content to the German Wikipedia and to improve the access to this content via this online encyclopaedia.
BAM – the joint portal for libraries, archives, museums in Germany intends to become a single point of access for cultural content and serves users who do not want to search several different databases at different servers using different search interfaces and vocabularies for access. In addition to combining different information services from different institutions in one point of access, BAM can also serve as a portal for a single institution’s libraries, archives, museums and media centres. BAM also tries to increase the visibility of the digital objects in the collections of the participants by cooperating with Wikipedia Germany and enriching articles with a link to content in BAM.
Table of content:
1. Introduction
2. BAM – A Joint Portal for Libraries, Archives, Museums
3. BAM Local – Uniting Different Branches of an Institution in one Portal
4. Increasing Content Visibility by Collaborating with Wikipedia
5. BAM and its Users
6. Conclusions
The ICOM Statutes of 2007 define the museum as an institution that acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity. What is missing in this catalogue of tasks – and consequently in the definition – is documentation.
This is important to notice as documentation is what can be called the “missing link” between the museum’s five central assignments. This can be visualized by the following illustration [...]: The diagram shows that documentation is the fundamental task that serves as a foundation for all other assignments to the museum. This fact is quite well-known to the staff responsible for the collection management system. However, it is obviously not in the focus of attention of the other museum departments. Especially when planning personnel and budget for both projects and routine activities, the important role of documentation is often neglected. Consequently, it is essential to reconsider its function and significance for the daily museum work as a cross-sectional task.
A clearly structured collection documentation can be used for many purposes inside and outside the museum. How would museum work look without documentation? The answer is obvious. Gaps in knowledge where ever you look and objects without contextualizing information. As CIDOC rightfully states: “Documentation is essential to all aspects of a museum’s activities. Collections without adequate documentation are not true "museum" collections.”
Since the mid 1990s, MusIS (Museum Information System), a service of the Library Service Centre Baden-Wuerttemberg (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden Württemberg BSZ) runs a documentation network for museums.
Among the members are the State Museums of the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and several larger and smaller institutions from other branches. MusIS hosts a wide range of services for museum documentation and management. An important goal of the network is to create high quality documentation in a consistent form that can be used for multiple purposes inside and outside the participating museums. In order to achieve this goal, MusIS established a set of strategies and guidelines for quality control in museum documentation:
- Quality measures during data migration
- Consulting in documentation
- Application of controlled vocabulary
- Rules for entering data from index cards or inventory catalogues
- Data revision
These measures, techniques, and strategies lead to a certain degree of consistency and quality of data and documentation.