The conference – day 1

It’s all over and I’m now days away and cities away but luckily I took good notes.

Blogging

The first session I attended was a pre-conference workshop on blogging given by the talented bloggers and web guys at the Walker Art Centre. They could often be seen blogging live, as were plenty of other people including a fellow Sydney museum web person.

They’ve nicely left a wiki of their notes from the workshop. I thought it was pretty cool that they’ve managed to get their director blogging.

Here are some interesting points I left the workshop with:

blogging can be like curating with the blogger compiling web info on a particular area for their audience

behind-the-scenes and guest writer blogs are popular with readers

museums are already seen as authorities so museum bloggers would start off with some pre-existing credibility

musuems have their own information, knowledge and stories to draw upon for blogs, a lot of which probably isn’t getting out to the public

blogs can be a good way to get word out, or respond to news instead of using the more traditional method of a press release

Opening plenary – all information available to everyone

The day started with an inspiring opening by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive arguing that it’s possible for all the information in the world to be available to everyone. He continued to demonstrate how digitisation projects to archive all the books, audio and video in the world are completely within our grasp, some of it having already happened.

The big question he leaves us with is that digitisation is happening, but who is going to control it – the public or private sphere? It’s easy to leave digitisation projects to the big tech companies by making excuses that it will be too expensive, but while these companies might appear to have the public interest at heart now, what’s to say they don’t change their minds in the future? Think about who already owns most of the web: NewsCorp owns MySpace, Yahoo owns Flickr and Google owns YouTube, and that’s just to name a few.

If this sounds inspiring to you then you’ll like some more details from the blog of the Walker Art Centre guys. If it sounds like the rantings of a hippy then you’ll probably prefer to read this slightly different opinion.

Web 2.0

This was the hot topic of the conference – everyone wants a piece of it, and with good reason.

Jeff Gates from the Smithsonian American Art Museum guided us through his museum blog, and the process that they’ve created to make blogging viable at their institution. What I found interesting about their blog is that it’s a very polished piece of material, treated in the same way as an official publication would be. I think this goes against what blogging is really about, but I hear it’s wildly successful so it’s great to hear they’ve found a way to make blogging work for their organisation.

Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth of the Brooklyn Museum were the talk of the conference because of the cool web 2.0 stuff they’ve been doing to engage their local community with the museum. The web 2.0 stuff seems to be working for them because, firstly, interactive material is incorporated into the live museum experience, and secondly because the web team are active members of the online communities they’ve created. Check out their strong presense on Flickr, and read their paper complete with photos and screenshots.

Mike Ellis of London’s Science Museum talked about addressing organisational barriers to web 2.0 in a very practical way. The best point I think he made was that the reputation of museums are at stake if we don’t embrace web 2.0 technologies because that’s the direction the world is heading in. Good stuff on this topic can be found in his paper.

Redesign

It was great to get an insight into the resdesign process of SF MOMA. I was surprised to hear that their current site is almost 10 years old because the design has held up really well. I was also surprised to hear that their redesign process will in total be 2-3 years. Not long after I realised that my own museum’s website redesign should take longer than we originally thought too.

It’s late and this post is getting long so read more for yourself in their paper.

After hearing about SF MOMA from the web people I then got to go to SF MOMA for the opening night reception. I was too busy talking to people from New York, Saskatchewan, Cape York and Amsterdam (check out the annual Museum Night in Amerstdam – I’m linking to 2006 because the 2007 site is only in Dutch) to actually see any of the exhibitions, but luckily I made time to go back there on Sunday morning.