Nings and things!

Do you know about nings? They seem to be breeding at a great rate. Basically they are social networking sites for people interested in specific topics. You can just read things if you like or you can sign up and join in by asking for information/ideas or commenting on other people's projects. It's just a big love-in really.

I found this post about museums and education on Museum Australia's new ning, maNexus. You might also like to check out the Museum 3.0 Ning (although content seems to overlap substantially) and the CAN outreach blog which has some very interesting content.

Happy ninging

Caz

Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll Pt 2

You may remember I recently sent through a post about Brooklyn Museum's new photographic exhibition, 'Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll'. This is a follow up post showing how they cleverly intergrated new media into their public programs. Although the exhibition is about rock 'n' roll, the focus of the show is photography so they sent out a call for people to come along and take their own rock shots at a live gig set up by the Museum. Punters were then encouraged to upload their images to the Museum's Flickr stream and legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen viewed the work and commented on his favourites both on Flickr and on the Museum's blog.

This sort of program may well be quite manageable for us as it had a very definate start and end date lasting just four weeks. The set up was not that different from our AC/DC Back in Black Friday gig. Next time we could advertise the 'call to arms' on the flyer, we already have a Flickr account (although we haven't actually started using it) and we know lots of great photographers who might have been interested in being involved. Maybe we could try something for 'Women in Rock' - what do you think?

Caz

How objects tell stories

Juggling balls used in "Tex" Glanville's rope spinning and variety act during his career c.1928-1965. Performing Arts Collection

The other day I mentioned in a meeting about the vibe we've been getting from the Dept. of Education about not wanting anymore 'boring Phar Lap-type' collection images. Similarly when Trish attended an all-day FUSE session with teachers they seemed to be more drawn to photographs and documentary images such as posters and lyrics. They too seemed to be a bit non-plussed by images of things like a Melba costume and the Camelot horse.

All this has led me to thinking about the special nature of what we do in interpreting history using objects. If you think about it traditional teaching methods are very much based on the written word. While teachers may also be able to 'read' other media such as photographs, paintings and moving image it is quite another step to being able to 'read' objects without lots of written context.

In my web travels I have come across a couple of sites that acknowledge this boundary and make an attempt to step through the process of using objects to tell history. The best one I have found is the Smithsonian's Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators of the National Museum of American History. The site is aimed squarely at an educational audience and allows students to learn about using objects for history by encouraging them to follow the path of one object. Once you have chosen your object you have access to a contextual video, primary resources and curator interviews about that object. You also have access to web links for further information and get the chance to make your own virtual exhibit.

I think we sometimes forget that not everyone 'gets' what we do. Maybe somewhere down the track we could do our own web project addressing this issue or maybe we should keep it at the back of our minds when developing the 'Treasures' shows? I'd love to know what you all think about this so don't be shy about using the comments box at the bottom of this post!

More soon

Caz

Remember me?

Poster advertising rock band "Chain"at Berties nightclub, Melbourne, 1970s, Performing Arts Collection

Sorry about the lack of posts over recent weeks. Julian and I have been very busy trawling though the Collection to try and find the right material for our Australian Music, Circus and Creative Process packages. It has been a steep learning curve for both of us. I have had to look at the Collection from a very different perspective thinking about connections to curriculum and about how to make historical material engaging in a new medium.

We have started on the Australian music interactive timeline and have been looking at including some of the posters from Bertie's and Sebastian's. Coincidently, I received this blogpost from the Brooklyn Museum featuring some groovy psychadelic posters from their collection.

More soon

Caz

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

8th Australasian Emu User Group Meeting

This years EMu User group meeting was hosted by Sydney's Australian Museum. Some of the Papers are well worth a read and have just been published on the KE website here http://www.kesoftware.com/content/view/1153/437/lang,en/

Some fantastic things are happening online, with EMu as the driving force behind some revamped Collections Web pages at Museum Vic and Te Papa.

Matthew Churchward & Ely Wallis discussed the development phase of Museum Victoria's soon-to-be-released History and Tech Collections website. Analysis of their web stats revealed that most people land on their web pages via a search engine that took them directly to an object's catalogue record page. So they took the approach of designing the object page as the starting point and allowing visitors to navigate from there. The result is a detailed (and very nice looking!) catalogue record page rather than a top-down approach to web design - some sneak previews are included in the presentation.

Another great paper worth a read is Adrian Kingston's demo of Te Papa's new website which is driven from EMu Narratives, Catalogue, Parties and Thesaurus Modules. The Thesaurus Module enables web users to simply click on the familiar hotlinks to browse to other objects, or gain more information about a person or topic by clicking on the word.

Have a look around here http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/ and notice the basic level of catalogue entry they provide is even less than our skeleton records. In 2005 when Te Papa released their first catalgoue records online, they published a highly edited and detailed set of 3000 records (just as we did!), but soon realised that a wider sample of records with less detail was a more useful approach to providing greater levels of public access and getting their content out into the world. All food for thought before the Arts Centre's Website is redeveloped....

Rowena

The Future of Museums

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame originally uploaded to Flickr on July 10, 2006by ricardo.martins

You may have heard that Radio National have just aired two very interesting interviews about the future of museums. You can access the transcript for Part 1 here if you don't want to annoy your colleagues or you can listen to the audio file. Part 2 aired this morning and can be heard as an audio today or as a transcript after midday tomorrow (if you are a quick reader the transcripts are quicker to access than the audio).

Even if you don't follow most of the links in my posts I think that these ones are worth it. Part 2 in particular is worth a look for Michael Cassin on the importance of using everyday language to communicate the 'magic' of collections; Margaret Birtley on national standards for the digitisation of collections and Seb Chan (Powerhouse) on making social media and community engagement relevant to museums.

Don't forget to check out the links at the end of each Radio National page too!

Caz