How Web 2.0 is Changing the Nature of Museum Work

Abstract

George Brown Goode, a former Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian in the late 1880s, said that the nature of museum work is not only knowledge creation, but also knowledge dissemination, and, ultimately, learning: ''The museum likewise must, in order to perform its proper functions, contribute to the advancement of learning through the increase as well as through the diffusion of knowledge'' (1991, 337). Elaine Heumann Gurian noted that: ''The use of the Internet will inevitably change museums. How museums respond to multiple sources of information found on the Web and who on staff will be responsible for orchestrating this change is not yet clear. The change, when it comes, will not be merely technological but at its core philosophical' ' (2010, 95). The catalyst for this change-and for accelerating the pace of change-is Web 2.0.

A Stakeholder Perspective on Heritage Branding and Digital Communication

“…Either one-to-many channels, such as webpages and blogs, or many-to-many (knowledge to knowledge, that is, wikis) are forms of transmitting and updating information, if one excludes the individual means such as emails. The new part museums play in the digital world is something curators and other professionals have been reflecting on for some time now (Graham & Cook, 2010;Kelly, 2010;Proctor, 2010), but do not always find appropriate ways to align clearly (Kidd, 2011). Trust and accuracy are an important part in this complex relationship (Parry, 2013), and these are uncontrollable in certain dimensions that escape consented delegation.…”

Linking and clustering artworks using social tags: Revitalizing crowd‐sourced information on cultural collections

“…In the early days of online museums, visitors' activities were limited to appreciating artworks or searching for information (Marty & Jones, 2008). This changed with the introduction of Web 2.0, which greatly improved the visitors' accessibility to art museum collections online (Kelly, 2010;Srinivasan, Boast, Furner, & Becvar, 2009). However, in the vast sea of online collections, it is often difficult for visitors to find a particular object in a particular collection, as they may not have expert knowledge or understanding of art.…”

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

“…I depart from the work of Kelly (2010) and Russo et al (2007) to shift the debate in a new direction. My discussion is inspired by an ethnographic experience related to two exhibits ( Figure 1), designed especially for teenagers and which, at least superficially,…”

“…Thus, questions of learning in the museum are often contextualized through ideas of participation, interaction, and co-construction of meaning, which are derived primarily from analytic descriptions of contemporary online practices (cf. Kelly 2010;Russo et al 2007;Simon 2010).…”