Social Media and Community Involvement in Museums. A case study of a local history wiki community

Abstract

The article focuses on a study of knowledge creation and organizing in a local history wiki. The background for this study was to understand how web 2.0 and social media might open new possibilities for museums to collaborate with communities and lay professionals in cultural heritage knowledge creation. Digital technologies provide tools that in many ways overcome challenges of physical collaboration between museums and amateurs. But technologies also bring in new aspects of ordering, categorizing and systematizing knowledge that illuminates the different institutional as well as professional frameworks that writing local historical knowledge into digital forms in fact represents.

Archives, libraries and museums in the Nordic model of the public sphere

“…In addition, museums (as well as some archives and national libraries) are encouraging citizens to contribute to the development of the organizations' collections, for example through submitting privately owned material to the collections, or through helping the employees in determining the origin of specific artifacts, or the locations represented in specific photographs. Many of these activities are carried out via social media (Jørgensen, 2011, Stuedahl, 2001. That citizens can contribute to the collections is nothing new, but the threshold for doing so is significantly lowered with such online communication.…”

“…49, -2009Meld.St., nr. 35, 2012 to become dialogical organizations, and actively involve the audience in developing its collections (Løkka, 2014, Berkaak, 2003, Stuedahl, 2001, Jørgensen, 2011.…”

Re-considering participation in social media designs

“…Aesthetic PD approaches have been suggested to explore engagement in exhibitions (Dindler andIversen 2009, Smith 2013), focusing on how to achieve a deeper understanding of visitors` motivations for engaging in activities in the museum. Meanwhile, the gap between new institutional practices of mobile and distributed museums (Bautista and Balsamo 2011), the participatory museum (Simon 2010), current museum, library and archive commons-based projects using web-based hybrid databases (Colquhoun and Galani 2013) or mobile photosharing for visitor engagement (Hillman, Weilenmann and Jungselius 2012) require new methodological approaches to understand emerging social media-based practices of memorizing, identity, place making and belonging (Giaccardi 2012, Stuedahl 2011, Stuedahl 2009). …”

Our Museum. Studying museum communication for citizen engegement

“…Other studies, also in the Nordic countries of Europe, have focused on museums' role for democratic participation and citizen engagement (Stuedahl 2011, Sattrup & Christensen 2013, Runnel & PruulmannVengerfeldt 2014 Eight projects study key areas of contemporary museum communication. The projects are selected based on an inclusive definition of what a museum is, since we surmise that such an approach best traces varieties in communication practices and organisational frameworks.…”