In-Heritance

Blog redirect to "Museums without Borders"

2009-02-26T07:51:00.007-05:00

Dear Readers,

Thank you for checking out In-heritance, the blog that has served Heritance for over two years. In keeping with Heritance's new program focus, Open Museum, we are consolidating our two separate blogs into one: "Museums without Borders" .

In "Museums without Borders", you'll find two to three new posts per week on issues related to curating a collection on Open Museum (OMo): issues such as costs and benefits to the OMo curator, strategies for planning and building an online collection, intellectual property and copyright law, and OMo's web 2.0 technology as a tool for community outreach.

Please visit us at Museums without Borders and consider bookmarking the blog as well as Open Museum so that you can follow developments ( and get as involved as you choose!) in helping to build what we hope will become the global museum.

Best wishes,

Maureen Doyle
Executive Director of Heritance
Co-Founder Open Museum

Weekly Member Update

2009-02-16T15:06:00.005-05:00

Heritance supports Open Museum, Open Museum is a non-commercial, participatory exhibit space open to all. Open Museum hosts exhibits of museums, organizations and individuals from around the world.

NEW COLLECTION: Open Museum has launched a new collection, "Kate Emlen, the Paintings". For Kate, who received her MFA at Yale and resides in Vermont, the world is her studio. Her paintings depict a range of settings and themes, from still life to New England seascapes and Italian landscapes. To experience this collection

OPEN MUSEUM BLOG: The Open Museum Blog, Museums without Borders, gives a brief, daily update on what's happening at Open Museum You can see photos from exhibits and learn about new features. Bookmark or subscribe in your RSS feed reader.

NEW FEATURE: It is now possible to "email this page to a friend" and become a "friend of a museum" on Open Museum. Museums will soon be able to share their news with their Open Museum friends.

WEEKLY DIGEST: This week it will become possible to subscribe to a weekly digest of new objects on Open Museum. The digest will highlight six objects, giving a photo, link and short description.

TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Open Museum now offers more technical support to the visitor. Take the introductory tour on the Home Page or Select "Learn more about..." while exploring the Museums, Collections, Objects and Tours.

CURATOR OUTREACH: Open Museum continues to give demos to prospective Open Museum curators. Next week we will be meeting with the Hood Museum at Dartmouth. This week we met with the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire and will begin to train our first co-curator, Kiku Langford from the AVA Gallery and Art Center.

WEMUP, Weekly Member Update

2009-02-02T14:23:00.003-05:00

Heritance announces that Open Museum is now available to the public!

Open Museum -- a non-commercial, participatory exhibit space -- is a free service provided by Heritance, a US-based 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Open Museum is in Alpha release, which means it is under development and in need of testing.

If you are a friend of Heritance, a lover of museums, an amateur of web 2.0 or just plain curious, visit now.

Take an introductory tour; register; browse the collections and join a museum tour. If you feel like it (and we hope you will!), please help enrich your own and other people's experience of Open Museum by rating and tagging objects or contributing comments in the form of text or photos.

Give the site a workout -- as much or as little as time permits -- and tell us what you think. Don't worry about breaking anything! What doesn't work is as important to tell as what does, and no problem is too small! We value your opinions and count on your critiques, compliments, and comments to make the site better.

Post your thoughts as a comment here or send a messages through the feedback link on Open Museum or by an email.

Also, invite your friends, family and colleagues to check out Open Museum:

Weekly Member Update (WEMUP)

2009-01-15T09:33:00.002-05:00

OPEN MUSEUM ONLINE, OM_o: OM_o has built a fifth exhibit, the Upper Valley through the Artist’s Eye, a collection of 37 oil on canvas landscapes by the Spanish artist, Félix de la Concha. To view the exhibit: www.openmuseum.org
Keep in mind that the site is still under development. OM_o is planning a public release in February.

CONFERENCES & DEMOS: Heritance has been accepted as a presenter to the annual, national conference ‘Museums and the Web 2009’ (MW), April 14-18 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jeff Doyle, Heritance Director of Technology, will be giving a demo of Open Museum online. OMW is the largest international conference devoted to the exploration of art, science, natural and cultural heritage on-line.

OUTREACH: Heritance will continue to give demos of OM_o to representatives from NH/VT cultural organizations. The list to date includes: AVA Gallery, Baker Library at Dartmouth, the Hood Museum, Scuplturefest, the Vermont Arts Council, Barro Sin Plomo, Norwich Historical Society, Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance, Vermont Historical Society, as well as numerous individual artists. Next week there will be a demo for the Aide to Senator Patrick Leahy who is an avid photographer and supporter of the arts. If your organization is interested, contact us: info@heritance.org

TWITTER: Follow developments at Open Museum online on the Twitter account “OM_o”. It’s a new technology that permits brief, frequent communications and whose purpose has yet to be fully developed. If Twitter is new to you, go to Twitter, register for an account (free), search “OM_o” and click “follow”. It is possible to follow a number of museums and arts organizations, including the Hood Museum which recently launched a Twitter presence.

RESOURCES: Flickr Commons is an exciting new resource available to all of us for free. In their words, “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.” Many institutions are using Flickr Commons, including the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library; they have all launched ambitious projects to share and co-curate their photo collections.

WEMUP

2008-12-21T13:05:00.002-05:00

Heritance Weekly Member Update (WEMUP)

TWITTER: Follow developments at Open Museum online on the Twitter account “OM_o”

OPEN MUSEUM ONLINE, OM_o: Alpha testing is underway for three pilot exhibits. OM_o is building a fourth exhibit, Sculpturefest 2008. It is possible to view the site, at this time, but not register till 2009. Note the new abbreviation is OM_o, the same as the twitter account name.

BLOG IN-HERITANCE: From now on, the WEMUP news will also appear on the Blog/news page of the Heritance website & http://blog.heritance.org/

BLOG OM_o: Open Museum online (OM_o) has named its blog “Museums without Borders”. To read the latest post “Won’t OM_o steal my visitors?” http://blog.openmuseum.org/2008/12/wont-omo-steal-my-visitors.html

CONFERENCES & DEMOS: OM_o has submitted an application to do an OM_o demo at ‘Museums and the Web 2009’ (MW), April 14-18 in Indianapolis, Indiana. MW is the largest international conference devoted to the exploration of art, science, natural and cultural heritage on-line: http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html

Changing Faces: Museums & Community

2008-12-09T11:03:00.003-05:00

A recent study conducted by Museum Insight Audience finds that only 11% to 21% of core visitors to museums find that the museum adequately reaches out to the community and connects with it. And that is "core visitors"! "Non core visitors", which is a growing segment of the total population, doesn't think museums connect at all.

MIA points to the need for museums to build a strong relationship with their communities: The face of the American population is changing rapidly; as the proportion of Americans who comprise the traditional museum audience will shrink considerably over the next thirty years. Building a strong relationship with the local community is an important method of creating and maintaining relevance to an evolving audience.

Sporting events or museums: did you know...?

2008-12-07T21:10:00.003-05:00

.. that according to the same NPR article mentioned earlier today, over 6 times as many people attend museums as major-league sporting events? About 140 million people in the U.S. will attend sporting events this year; about 840 million attended museums last year. Of course, many more watch sports online, but that's instead of attending. On the other hand online museums "serve as teasers"', actually inspirintg people to visit real-life exhibits.

A poem on Heritance

2008-12-07T16:42:00.006-05:00


Not Alone

                     For Lewis Hyde


                     light snow
                                       light
                     snow

                                       The capacious is

                                 a heritance
                                 across  a land

                     resembling waves ,


*

(c) Peter Money
Reprinted with permission of the author.

Peter sent a note saying that he had been inspired to write the poem by a NYT article about Lewis Hyde (author of the Gift Economy)

npr: 'The Memory of Mankind'

2008-12-07T16:54:00.004-05:00

On November 24, National Public Radio launched a series on museums in the 21st century . The first broadcast, which you can hear now tells the story of what the former Director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello, calls "The Memory of Mankind". The story wends its way from the ancient Greeks (who coined the term "mouseion", a temple to the Muses, who kept watch over the arts and sciences) up to the Museum of Online Museums .

Newy Newness

2008-02-05T18:53:00.008-05:00

New York City is kind of like a giant curio cabinet, many little cubbies of visual distractions. Even the brand new, modern-till-it-hurts, New Museum of Contemporary Art is hard to pick out from the surroundings. It's not easy to identify it as a special destination, a draw, as a place you'd slap down $12 to tour. There's a lot to compete with. It was designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, and was completed in December, 2007.

My friend Ash and I, dressed in many warm layers, walked to the new New Museum a cold Thursday night to take advantage of the free hours night. We waited in the coat-check drop-off line in the lobby, a glassy floor-to-ceiling area that includes a gift and book shop, a café with uncomfortable chairs and a narrow exhibition area, then with our plastic coat check chips in hand, we took the green elevators upstairs.

The galleries felt a little like a suburban basement where the guests sleep on the pull-out couch: cement floors, clean, but closed off, with only high, narrow windows. It was flatly lit, kind of like a racket ball court. Designing simple, flexible gallery space is a challenge – there is nothing like white to exaggerate corners, edges, shadows, doorways and floors. The New Museum made me appreciate the re-design of the MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, by architect Yoshio Taniguchi that was completed in 2006. This is maybe an unfair comparison considering the MOMA, on 53rd street, reigns over 630,000 square feet (58,529 sq meters) and the New Museum tends a narrow 60,000 sq feet (5,574 sq meters). At the MOMA, moving around the museum there's enough variation that you feel like you're continually discovering, moving between the closed in and the open, down passageways, around corners and up stairways. Navigating around, there are opportunities to overlook other parts of the museum, the courtyard or the surrounding streets. A slice of window will show you a floor of the museum where you were just standing minutes ago and you ou can look across the atrium on the second floor and watch people shuttering by the cut-outs up and down the building, or standing at their own perches looking at you.

Outside at night, the New Museum is a woolly tower of squares that rises over the Bowery, a busy avenue in lower Manhattan. The surface of the building is pinned with a lacey network of industrial steel weaving and tacked onto the façade is a glowing rainbow sign with the words "Hell Yes!" I could probably look this up and find the artist, or the idea behind the sign, but ..yeah, it's a big rainbow glowing sign with the words "Hell Yes!" on an otherwise gray building. "Hell Yes!" is much more noticeable than the museum's own self-ID, a street-level digital sign which glows on a large monitor hoisted up in the lobby.

Museums in New York City use many techniques - flags, signage, outdoor lighting and new architecture - to draw attention to themselves, with varying success. Museums that stand out from their neighbors architecturally probably need less exuberant signs (photos courtesy of Flickr):

MOMA gets by with not-so noticeable vertical flag (I can't tell you how many tourists I've directed to the MOMA from down the block from it)

and its next-door neighbor, the American Folk Art Museum, follows a similar tactic

the MET, has flags to promote special exhibitions, but a main flag, which they might put up at times, I'm not sure, would in any case be sort of like a celebrity wearing nametag

The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, with an addition and renovation by Renzo Piano, has a sign fixed into the ground.

the Rubin Museum of Art (art of the Himalayas) employs all its windows to promote its exhibits, as well as flags, but its main sign is flat against its front, and subtle .

The American Museum of Natural History

The Whitney has a version of vertical signing, also relatively small

MORE about the New Museum of Contemporary Art:

Main website : http://www.newmuseum.org/

You can read about the branding of the New Museum of Contemporary art on the Under Consideration blog, Brand New.

Check out this extraordinary time-lapse video of the construction of the New Museum, lapsing a time period of over a year.

Out of Africa - by Maureen

2008-02-15T13:30:00.003-05:00

Here's a photo of Ian Player, a distinguished South African ecology activist, contemplating what fate has served up to him. Look closely at the cream. What do you see? I saw it only after Ian exclaimed, "Why, it's Africa!"

This pudding was the punctuation of our meal together at Phuzamoya ("Wind Spirit" in Zulu) the farm Ian and his wife Ann have lived on for decades. Along with my Heritance ( Jean, Sheila and Claire) I was invited to spend the weekend with them as part of an initiative to preserve, share and promote Ian's life work. The Player house which is filled with a rich and extensive personal library, photos and awards, as well as papers, recorded interviews with Zulu trackers and films is a testimony to Ian's productive career. And Ann's undaunted support for her husband's controversial, at times adversarial, stance vis-a-vis the South African government and society.

Ian, renowned for being a remarkable person, is credited: with the creation of the national park in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa, the founding of the Wilderness School in Durban, the successful initiative to save the white rhino, and the preservation of the Zulu Indigenous Knowlege System transmitted to him by his friend Magqubu Ntombela.

Unfortunately wikipedia doesn't yet have any information about Magqubu, an oversight which I am sure that Ian would want to see corrected. At a pivotal moment in his life, he recognized Magqubu as "the better man" and dedicated the rest of his life to learning what Magqubu could teach him about the ecosytem and the good life and fighting to preserve and promote both.

It seems to me that wikipedia could provide a useful tool and departure point for the Heritance Player project and for that matter for many other museums projects in which there are documents to archive.

2008-03-02T17:15:00.002-05:00

This is just part of my pin collection, picked up from New York City sidewalks. I usually find a few every week.

What's good governance?

2008-05-20T13:49:00.003-04:00

An interesting document by UNESCAP -- What is Good Governance?

"Governance" is not new. It is as old as human civilization. Simply put "governance" means: the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented)...

Good governance has 8 major characteristics. It is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law. It assures that corruption is minimized, the views of minorities are taken into account and that the voices of the most vulnerable in society are heard in decision-making. It is also responsive to the present and future needs of society.

South Africa, What's Next?

2008-06-10T08:43:00.007-04:00

Throughout May, there were violent attacks on immigrants in South Africa. Helene Vollgraaff, a Heritance participating professional who lives in Cape Town and is the Sectretary/Treasurer of the South Africa ICOM, recently sent us these maps from the May 24 Die Burger and the following summary of dates and places that violence took place:
11 May: Alexandria, Johannesburg
16 – 18 May: Attacks spread to East and West Rand of Johannesburg including Diepsloot, Tokoza, Actonville, Tembisa, Primrose, Cleveland, Jeppe, Berea, Hillbrow, Zandspruit
17 May: Attacks in Mpumalanga in Lebohang and Leandra
20 May: KZN: Umbilo (Durban)
21 May: Sebokeng, Vanderbijl Park in Gauteng; Villiers in the Free State
22 May: Knysna (southern Cape); Spread in KZN to Bottlebrush Squatter Camp, Chatsworth and Cato Manor
23 May: KZN: Quarry Heights & Kenville in Durban
23 May: Cape Town: Khayelitsha, Guguletu, Nyanga, Philippi, Strand, Du Noon, Masipumelele

Helene also asked Heritance to distribute the SA ICOM Declaration regarding the xenophobic, ethnic and crimincal violence in South Africa. This declaration

calls on the heritage and museum sectors, national and international, in terms of their mandate to engage with public issues of social change, to support efforts to address the root causes, avoidance and ending of such violence.

Philippe Denis, a member of the Heritance Council of Advisors who lives in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, confirmed that everyone is South Africa is concerned by the violence and that foreigners are afraid, in particular African and Asian immigrants and their descendents.

On the positive side, the public sector, in particular the universities, NGO's and churches, rose up in protest against the violence and the attacks have ceased. The underlying problems fueling the xenophobia, however, have not been resolved and a new crisis has emerged. Immigrants are afraid to return to the Townships. There are approximately 100,000 displaced people, many of them living in unhygienic and overcrowded tent towns, church halls, etc. Furthermore, the country is entering winter, which can be very cold and wet. Although many groups have reacted to the call for the donation of food, clothes, blankets, and so on, the needs are greater than the means and the xenophobia in the townships persists.

The Limits of Open Museography

2008-06-10T16:44:00.007-04:00

In fairness, no discussion of Open Museography can avoid acknowledging the potential pitfalls of any public discussion of contentious topics. I am sure we can all think of ‘hot button’ topics on which the differing parties are deeply committed to irreconcilable points of view.

In Rwanda, the constitution makes it a crime to question the government's version of the genocide. That is, of course, pretty raw history, but then, in the United States, the two words “Enola Gay” are enough to send most curators scurrying for cover.

Unfortunately, the playground rule that "your right to swing your fist ends where my personal space begins" doesn't translate quite so smoothly into the realm of narrative. We can't simply say "Your right to tell a story ends where my story begins." And yet, silence is not a solution. Peaceful coexistence depends upon dialog and reconciliation.

Perhaps what Cicero said of advice holds also for exhibitions: they are judged by results, not by intentions.

Open Museum Online RFC

2008-10-23T13:19:00.002-04:00

Heritance is currently working on the development of Open Museum Online.

Open Museum Online is a Web 2.0 service that allows any individual or organization, regardless of funding, location, or current technological capabilities, to create dynamic online exhibits of their collections. Exhibits can include text, photo, video and audio contributions, all of which will be automatically aggregated into a global museum. Open Museum Online users can participate as curators (creators of exhibits), or as visitors to the exhibits. Visitors interact with the exhibits on a variety of levels, including commenting, rating, tagging, making guided tours, contributing content, and joining in community-wide discussions. (potentially a screen shot here of the listing of facets in the global museum with a tag cloud?)

A bit dry, but here's the summary report of the Heritance Request for Comments on the concept of Open Museum Online....

Heritance recently created a preliminary market research survey to gauge interest and gain feedback regarding a proposed Open Museum Online project. Heritance sent an email with a Request for Comments to 104 museum industry professionals who subscribed to Heritance's WEMUP (Weekly MEMber UPdate).

The RFC outlined the concept of OMO and asked recipients for feedback on several aspects of the project: proposed product features, cost to participate, enticements to adoption, and stumbling blocks to adoption. The survey also asked recipients for any additional comments they would like to add. Heritance set a deadline for responses of (date).

25 of the 104 total recipients responded to the survey. 22 respondents answered all the questions in the survey; 3 responded to the email but did not answer some or all of the questions.

Many features of the proposed Open Museum Online product appealed to respondents. The most appealing features to respondents in the survey were the perceived ease of use of the product, its accessibility, the idea of OMO as a venue for collaboration and mentorship, the potential for interaction between museums, and the potential opportunities for younger museum employees to get more involved in planning and creating museum exhibits.

Respondents also expressed multiple concerns about some of OMO's proposed features. Recipients listed 18 different concerns they had about potential OMO features. One respondent was concerned about displaying objects out of the context of the museum; another suggested that the project would require extra work for an already overworked staff. Several respondents worried that a rating system of exhibits could lead to overly negative ratings, making it necessary for museum personnel to expend additional time monitoring the exhibits. Other respondents felt that features were missing, including a 360-degree view or different angled view of objects.

Responses about how much museums would be willing to play for a service like OMO were quite mixed. Several respondents were unable to provide a concrete figure, while others suggested figures ranging from a few hundred dollars to a thousand euros. Others suggested it be a percentage of the museums' marketing budgets, or a sliding scale, and some simply responded with $0.

When asked what they envisioned as the biggest stumbling blocks to adoption, respondents indicated they were concerned about busy staff or lack of staff; lack of time, technical ability, and technology (internet); cost; constraints on creativity and collaborative creating; and the risk of trivializing objects by taking them out of context. Respondents also expressed concerns about copyright, multiple languages and lack of digital material.

When asked what they thought would entice museums to implement OMO, respondents offered several suggestions, including a demonstration of effectiveness with other museums and communities; targeting a larger and different audience, such as younger users and users in different countries; using OMO as an education tool or for curriculum development. Some respondents suggested that ease of use, visual attractiveness, and a working online sample would be enticements for museums to try OMO. Other respondents suggested that the possibilities of interaction between research and professional colleagues would be appealing to museums, as would OMO's use as a marketing tool or working tool for co-curating exhibits, and the idea of contributing to global bank of information on objects.

While respondents have some reservations about aspects of OMO, 20 out of 25 indicated that Heritance should pursue development of OMO. 1 respondent indicated that Heritance should not and 4 were undecided. Based on the positive response to the RFC and subsequent conversations with some respondents, Heritance has decided to proceed with the development of OMO in concert with Zirgoflex, a registered Vermont L3C (designated low-profit) social venture specializing in the design, development, and deployment of web-based products supporting public sphere collaborative content production.

Stories from a Wounded Country: South Africa

2008-10-04T13:36:00.003-04:00

Philippe Denis and Radikobo Ntsimane, announced the release of their new book: Oral History in A Wounded Country: Interactive Interviewing in South Africa, Philippe Denis is professor of History of Christianity and Radikobo Ntsimane is a researcher in Oral History and Religious History, both at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Philippe and Radikobo are collaborators with Heritance on the Mpophomeni Ecomuseum in the former black Township of KwaZulu-Natal. They are respectively the director and the deputy-director of the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

They write: With the end of apartheid and the exciting, but elusive, advent of a new nation, South Africa is witness to the emergence of a new generation of oral historians whose aim is to develop a broader, more inclusive and culturally sensitive understanding of the South African past. In a country still wounded by a legacy of racial discrimination, the retrieving of oral memories is a task more urgent than ever.

Oral History in a Wounded Country shows how the cultural, political, socio-economic and intellectual evolutions that gave birth to South Africa as we know it today affect the oral history process. It seeks to help practitioners, whether they use oral history as one technique among others to gain a better knowledge of the past, or envisage oral history as an academic discipline in its own right, to reflect critically on their practice and find better ways of handling the interview process. The challenge is to appreciate the complexity of South Africa’s diverse histories, while being attentive to the dynamics of the interview and their effect on both interviewers’ and interviewees’ sense of identity.

The book can be purchased on-line via Kalahari.net and will be available on Amazon.com from the end of October.

Openness in the air

2008-09-23T17:46:00.003-04:00

Although some museum curators and directors fear that technolgy poses a threat to the quality of exhibits and the integrity of the institution, many other museum people see the Web, in particular Web 2.0, as an opportunity to make the museum into a public institution that engages with its environment. Open Museum Practices, including Open Museum Online, are the raison d'être for Heritance. Heritance is not alone. This year dozens of annual museum conferences are focused on technology and its democratizing effects. Here's one such conference and a good explanation of the growing interesting in the Open Museum.

Hidden Treasures for Museum People

2008-09-19T11:41:00.003-04:00

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the US National Parks Service has created a clear, simple and comprehensive Museum Handbook that is free and available online. Given that the Parks Service is responsible for the stewardship of hundreds of parks (I stopped counting, when I arrived at "C" in the index and already reached 40 parks), I should have realized sooner that museums, as much as parks, are their core business. They maintain an attractive, but limited because it is static, website , that gives you a feel for the scope and value of the collections in their care. The site carries the somewhat uninspiring name, Museum Management Program that points to a web 1.0 creation whose end ought to be near. I'd love to see this site undertake to engage visitors through the Web 2.0 technology that is available.

Looking back at 1988 Yellowstone Fires

2008-09-06T14:55:00.003-04:00

NPR did an excellent story this week about the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park and how the media coverage of the fire led to public outrage and misunderstanding.

I'd recommend a listen to anyone who's interested in how public sites of national symbolic significance can be recast depending on the story that gets told and the facts shared.

Listening to the report, I also wondered how the emotionally charged handling of the story at the time created a lasting impression in the American public about the essential meaning of wildfires, and the drama and emotional tone of wildfire stories.

The report is by Liane Hansen and Laura Krantz.

MoOM

2008-09-05T11:09:00.003-04:00

Museum of Online Museums (MoOM), the invention of Coudal Partners, is a hip site that has recently received lots of recognition. As CP recounts on their website:

Tons of new listings and exhibits have been posted for the summer at our Museum of Online Museums. The MoOM was featured on All Things Considered and in the NY Times. It was also selected as one of Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites and was discussed on a recent episode of NPR's Hello Beautiful!

MoOM features a variety of exhibits which it groups into three categories "museum campuses" ( linked to "bricks and mortar" institutions), "permanent collection" (of particular interest to design and advertising) and "galleries, exhibitions and shows" (ecclectic and ever-changing). Although a visit to MoOM is worth the detour, it does not permit the full range of visitor participation you might imagine in today's Web 2.0 world where tagging, rating, comments, and reviews are the norm.

Voice Mail Museum, what next?

2008-08-28T07:53:00.005-04:00

How far can museums go with interactivity? Voice mail museum is a nifty experiment in content creation by visitors. Is it just a kooky and creative anomaly or a premonition of the way museum's do exhibits? The popularity of the Brooklyn Museum's exhibit, Click, whose collection consists of photos taken and selected by the public suggests that the latter is highly possible. Even probable. We may be living through what historians will later see as seismic shift in what the public expects and gets out of the museum experience.

NPR Story about Music and Contemporary Art in Houston

2008-08-19T17:25:00.001-04:00

NPR All Things Considered story by Wade Goodwyn highlights the pairing of music and artwork.
(Thanks to Kathy for picking this up)

Music and Museums

2008-08-18T16:24:00.005-04:00

One part of culture that I feel that museums struggle to represent is
music. You might say - but music isn't meant for museums! It's meant
for concert halls, stages, cafes and venues of all kinds, but not the
dry silence of a museum. (It is kind of striking how it seems
everywhere you go - the grocery store, old navy, the elevator, the
dentist, Wal-mart, a soundtrack is pumping out, but museums are usually
dead quiet).

Cleveland's Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame tried to find a way to show and
represent music history, with mixed results. It's been criticized for
being overly commercial and vapid, and the building an eyesore.

A couple years ago I visited the Morgan Library and Museum in New
York, and on the top floor was an exhibition of priceless original
musical scores - the original handwritten sheet music by famous composers.
What the curators did was pair these scores with recordings and
headphones of the music performed by orchestras, so you could listen
and follow along. In some cases you could listen to several versions. There's something thrilling about getting inside the mind of a composer by seeing his handwritten notes and hearing the
music simultaneously.

How do you imagine music could be represented in a museum?
Take our poll on the left-handside of the page !

American Museum - Music Part of Human Origins

2008-08-19T11:25:00.003-04:00

At the Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, there's a section on the origins of music. I hope to check it out soon.