Museum 3

what will the museum of the future be like?

"Repurposing content": Making Web 2.0 easy

One of the biggest gripes I get about implementing Web 2.0 in an organisation (not just museums) is the time it takes to do Web 2.0. I have already answered that question on the Project AMEP blog post (i.e. 12 minutes and week + 2 large glasses of red wine!), but another idea I'm toying with is the notion of write once, publish many times.

I have attached a model that Bliss and I developed after working on our Project Evil audience research and be interested in feedback and comments. We're writing this up further for the next edition of the Exhibitionist.

Tags: 2.0, audience, research, web

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One way my museum stretches content is to put temporary gallery exhibits online. After an exhibit closes we take photos, and the exhibit text and post it on our blog. It's a great way for people who missed the exhibit to get a look at it. It's also very little work.
Thnx Jason - this is really cool and a great example of re-purposing content easily and simply, plus making an exhibition sustainable in the long-term. Good one!
Curators at the PHM practice this too! example

Curator Geoff Barker writes a narrative it goes up here:

I will blog it here

the tweet and facebook it

the geoff will then probably do a talk at the Museum on the subject also.

It's a great model, i would just probably add "Write Once, resuse often" but know the line between over using it, ie with Twitter it is tempting to tweet the same thing multiple times during the week the blog post will be up.
I feel 're-use' in this sense is too narrow - it should extend to different platforms beyond just the web. The long sought 'business model for the web' might actually be the ecosystem of content lifeforms that emerge from re-usable content.

Write once might mean create the record once which goes to the web, to the gallery labels, to the mobile devices of visitors, and aggregated into blog posts and elsewhere. Then, once it becomes archival, it might take on yet another form.
Thnx Erika and Seb. Perhaps it is 'write once, publish broadly'.
shoudl have added 'across a range of mediums'
On the subject of "stretching content", I followed Jason Adair's blog which leads to the exhibit The Tradition of the Carousel.
This is exactly what the idea behind CollectShow started, the preservation of the content of temporary exhibits. CollectShow is a Web2.0 application for museums specifically designed for this purpose, which is being developed now. Museums can use this service and link their content from there to their own site. For information about the project go to the CollectShow Ning-Panel, and help us with your experience on this subject. I'm glad Jason mentiones that it is very little work, because the "extra work" is one of the objections I hear from museum professionals.
Seb Chan's remark about the ecosystem of content lifeforms that emerge from re-usable content, is the next step after having made the first one, which is to put the content online. Do you agree?
Erika Dicker mentiones that curators at the PHM practice this too! Does anyone know any other museums that follow this practice of reuse?
Hi Hans and thnx for this. I read that Seb was saying content can be used anywhere, at any time, both now and in the future, not just on the web. That's what I was thinking when musing about the idea of "write once, publish many time across a range of mediums".

One point we;'ve found with our All About Evil blog and Facebook experiment is that you can actually start developing your content on the web in conjunction with your audiences, then use it in a physical exhibition. That excites me as we no longer need to go the other way, ie from physical exhibition to online, which is how it's been done in the past. Everything is connected and content can emerge from anywhere.

Thanks for the link to CollectShow and best of luck with it - looks really interesting.
Lynda, I agree it's very exciting! I have just put up an exhibition proposal that may incorporate some of these ideas for us.

Part of the proposal is to open the exhibition/space unfinished and have visitors both at the museum and virtual help to finish it. Another part is to write almost no labels and use content that has already been created, online database, online narratives, our blogs ect.

one other thing about repurposing is..it's cheap!
That's so cool. Can't wait to see how it pans out for you guys. Please keep us posted.
I just posted our second online version of a closed temporary exhibit and found something interesting; the online version was better than the real thing. Because of the limitations of ordering an exhibit that was basically a full size diorama of a camp site, I didn't feel like the story of it was easily accessible. When I converted it to a web page, I could move images and text around to more effectively tell the story. Bonus.
Hi Jason, Interesting stories and images in this blog post. But did you realise that it doesn't say anywhere what museum it's connected to? The intro, "Welcome to our Online Exhibits Page", says "In an effort to allow our visitors greater access to our permanent collection...", without actually saying whose page or whose collection. Some people (including myself) may come across this blog without going to your website first, eg: from a web search.

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