fresh + new(er)

This is the blog I mentioned at the staff meeting this morning. It's called Fresh + New(er) and is written by Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse. If you have any interest at all in digital media and museums then this is a great place to find out what's happening at the cutting edge. If you want a short-cut into the site use the 'Categories' on the right sidebar to dip into areas that interest you most or check out this post about the digital strategy for The 80s Are Back exhibition.

Fresh + New(er) was originally set up as an internal 'repository and sounding board' and is now one of the top 10 most visited sections of the Powerhouse website. I think the disclaimer from the organisation is also an interesting feature allowing Seb and his team the freedom to talk about things that may never happen, went wrong etc without it reflecting on the 'brand'.

If you like what you see why not subscribe by email (also on right-hand sidebar)? It is not a daily or even weekly blog so you won't be bombarded with emails and you can save them or print them out to read later.

New Strategic Plan for Powerhouse

The Powerhouse have just released a new Strategic Plan. It's only a few pages so take a look when you get the chance. The document is landscape so if you enlarge it to read it on screen make sure you slide the tab across the bottom all the way across.

For me there are some very interesting comparisons with things we either used to do (Advisory panel -Strategy5B), currently do (programs and event aligned to festivals, milestones and anniversaries - Strategy 1C), have tried to do (research program - Strategy 3E) or would like to do (dissolve boundaries between exhibitions, programs, publications and web content -Strategy 1D & E).

For me though the stand out is the work on succession planning and the adoption of the '10% plan' (Strategy 4A) for content development where staff have one day a fortnight to work collaboratively on their own creative projects ...oh yeah!

Caz

Exhibition inspiration

How would you feel about letting someone else do some of the curating? Here are a couple of different approaches to curating exhibitions that you might not have considered.

The first is Powerhouse's The Odditoreum which began life as an idea for a small school holiday program but resulted in a popular exhibition, book and limited edition print. The project had many constraints including a budget of only $7000 (excluding staff time) and was conceived as a 'low-tech' way of engaging visitors with the permanent collection.

The show was 'curated' by children's book author Shaun Tan. Tan chose 10 objects from a long list he was sent by the Public Programs Producer who had compiled and refined the list in consultation with curators, registrars and conservators. He then wrote fictitious labels of approx. 100 words for each object. Visitors were also invited to write their own labels. The 'real' label information was also included by only at the end of the exhibition.

The show was a hit and is a good reminder that you don't always have to spend a million bucks to pull off a good idea. It is also a good 'real-life' example of a the type of engagement people are also seeking online.

The other idea comes from the Brooklyn Museum and is called Click!: A Crowd Curated Exhibition. This exhibition was inspired by the notion of 'the wisdom of crowds' as espoused by business and financial columnist James Surowieki. Rather than try and explain it just click on the link for a short, sharp explanation.

Does anyone else know of any interesting exhibition concepts? Why not let us all know about them by leaving a comment below!

Caz

Four well dressed men holding beer bottles

Here is a great example of how Web 2.0 applications, in this case Flickr, encourage public interaction with public collections. Do you know about Flickr Commons? The Commons was set up as 'your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections'. Participating organisations include various international institutions such as Library of Congress and New York Public Library but also Powerhouse, State Library of NSW, State Library of Qld and the Australian War Memorial. Institutions upload collections with no known copyright restrictions and visitors help describe images either by commenting or 'tagging' (more about tagging and folksonomies in another post).

The Powerhouse photostream is as usual very well set up. This interesting photo is from the Phillips Glass Negative Collection. Check out the comment stream below the photo. It starts and ends with the usual boring 'great photo' type comments but in the middle is this amazing exchange between two people who go on a web quest to try and work out if the unidentified men are actually painters of the Heidelberg School! Even if the result is inconclusive the way in which they go off to other sites and come back to report their findings shows how even an unidentified image can fire the imagination.

There are already a number of performing arts-related images on the site including several from the State Library of NSW. Imagine what we could do with our photographic collection?

Caz