what will the museum of the future be like?

Art Babble

GLAM TV
A few months ago, and I must get people to write an affidavit to confirm this, I babbled away to a some colleagues/partners/clients in the local NZ arts, gallery and library world about developing what I called - GLAM TV - i.e. an online video/audio station/tool which would be a place where we could see and hear what was happening inside the Australasian world of galleries libraries, and museums.

In addition to giving local institutions a common living room to share and showcase performance/workshop/installation/seminars, a core part of the thinking was the notion that the video, or the audio record would be starting points to an online matrix of parallel or contextual sources.

Art Babble
Art Babble have cracked the code. Developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), it has a growing set of blue chip partners in the likes of LACMA, MOMA, SFMOMA, it also cites the The New York Public Library as a foundation partner.

I am over the moon with this puppy - it is a total inspiration.
I blogged it here , or just go straight to it , here.

Then ask yourself - is this a model for the the rest of the museum, gallery and library community - and if so how can we we leverage it both locally and regionally?

In the meantime - thanks to Art Babble - made my day!

Tags: art, babble

Comment by James G. Leventhal on April 22, 2009 at 4:33pm: totally with you!

http://loveitallabove.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-want-my-imatv.html

Comment by Seb Chan on April 23, 2009 at 3:54pm: Why wouldn't we syndicate our content to Art Babble and save reinventing the wheel? The international connections of our own material would be strong.

Comment by Paul Reynolds on April 23, 2009 at 4:49pm: I agree - but first of all we need to esptablish wether Art bable wants to go global - or is this a local play .
I hear you are in New York - perhaps you can find out for us?

Comment by Seb Chan on April 23, 2009 at 11:05pm: Hi Paul! I'm pretty sure that global is entirely within their plans . . . . if I were an in the art museum scene I'd be making a beeline for them - it is a no-brainer.

Comment by James G. Leventhal on April 24, 2009 at 1:58am: word is that Artbabble is commenting on Museum 3.0 on westmuse = triangulation

http://westmuse.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/confessions-of-a-5am-blogger/#comment-44

Comment by Paul Reynolds on April 24, 2009 at 8:17am: I love Seb's confidence that this is 'no brainer' however although this is true in principle, it would be great to get some clarity as to whether Art Babble do want to be the main carrier of this kind of content - can they sustain being a global hub - and what impact this would have on any nascent plans for a regional plays - whether out of Europe, Australasia, South America / Africa or Asia/Pacific - including multi language options.

I'm saying this because although I am a total fan of what these guys have done - it does not necessarily mean that they can provide the kind of nuanced focus a regional play might offer.

Also, by just handing the baton to Art Babble it negates the chance for the regional sectors to have a real conversation around collaboration projects like these .

Thats not to say that any other efforts wouldn't link to Art Babble whether semantically or tactical.

However, I do believe there is a bit more to this than just assuming its a no brainer.

Would love to hear others thoughts - i.e. should initiatives like Art Babble become global, or should their inspirational leadership become the focus for a series of multiple plays which are linked together by a common purpose?

best to all
paul

www.peoplepoints.co.nz

Comment by Seb Chan on April 24, 2009 at 9:14am: Hey Paul . . . . Babble scales well at the technical end of things. At the people-end of things they are already looking at models to move it forward maintaining a level of 'editorial quality'. Remembering that the site has just launched I'd give them 12-18 months to bed everything down.

If it was in the game of just starting out setting up a similar site I'd be putting my own project on ice for 12 months.

There's already good more generic options with Vimeo and even, shudder, YouTube HD.

Comment by Paul Reynolds on April 24, 2009 at 9:57am: mmmm - still not convinced by this argument.

First up, it doesn't answer my point around regional collaboration - scaling at the technical end, as we both know really well, often isn't the the hard bit: rather, the hard bit is to get institutional collaboration, both internally and/or as regional or domain partnerships.

Second. this notion of putting stuff on ice and waiting for Godot to come with new and better toys scares the life out of me - people need to assess their needs - create the project frameworks - and then pick the tools- not the other way round.

Doing nothing, is also a very dangerous message to give institutions who think they don't need to do any thinking for themselves - because others will do it for them.

Brian Kelly 's MWeb paper on Time to Stop doing and Start Thinking , makes some nteresting points around some of my concerns.

Moreover, as the debate elsewhere attents , which you contributed to, on who goes to Museums on the Web and who goes to AAM conferences, the gap between those who do digital stuff inside an institution and those who don't needs attention.

For sure, what Art Babble is trying to do feels a really important part of this discussion. However, in summary I am more interested in how Art Babble can help us do some thinking - as opposed to doing the thinking for us.

arra
paul
www.peoplepoints.co.nz

Comment by Seb Chan on April 25, 2009 at 12:33pm: Hey Paul

Of course everybody should be creating and publishing as much material as possible - but creating more 'portals' - especially ones that can't talk to each other just ends up splitting an already small community.

With video there's plenty of work to be done at the production and especially licensing stages - things that are arguably more useful - as the resulting materials can then be deployed everywhere.

Comment by Paul Reynolds on April 25, 2009 at 10:35pm: Agree wth this in spades apart from one thing - I am not taking about creating more portals - but rather creating frameworks that can share and exchange practice.

This means creating a semantic layer which the licensing and production layers are part of .

I guess the our differences are tactical - and that we agree Art Babble is a component of these. However, it still begs the question as to who insitutions can collaborate on shared strategies.

Comment