{"id":4305,"date":"2011-02-09T13:41:28","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T12:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2011-02-09T13:41:28","modified_gmt":"2011-02-09T13:41:28","slug":"behind-the-social-web-scene-at-the-museums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/behind-the-social-web-scene-at-the-museums\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the social web scene at the museums"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to MC Leon Tong, director at Drupal development house BrightLemon<\/a>, last night\u2019s \u201cSocial Web for Museums, Galleries and Education<\/a>\u201d session at Cass Business School was one of the most subscribed events of London Social Media Week<\/a>.\u00a0Sabina<\/a> and I were lucky enough to be on the list so that we could find out why.<\/p>\n

The presenters, given a strict 10 minutes each \u2013 a brilliant idea, but surely a strict five-minute communal Q&A could have been appended? \u2013 fell into one of two distinct categotries: the gallerists, curators and educators, who spoke about their social activities right now, and the techs, who spoke of what was to come.<\/p>\n

The former showed that the UK\u2019s major spaces are all very busy with contemporary \u00a0social technologies, but then again, they\u2019re exceptionally well positioned to take advantage. As the Tate\u2019s Kirstie Beaven<\/a> found out when she asked @Tate<\/a>‘s quarter-of-a-million followers just why<\/em> they were following, these organisations have killer brands.<\/p>\n

What’s more, social networks tend to work<\/em> when communities come together around content (the fabled social object<\/a> – think photos in Facebook). The M&Gs are hardly short of content, but even so, all of those presenting last night were supplementing their own stuff with UGC, including, in the case of the V&A, chicken cosies<\/a>. As the V&A’s Gail Durbin stated explicitly, it\u2019s about \u201cactively engaging users in the collections\u201d. Her big presentation-closing idea, to provide V&A fans with individual pages to curate their own slices of the V&A\u2019s collection, sounds like a winner to me.<\/p>\n

The tech side of things troubled me, particularly with regard to education. Certainly a site such as the Louvre\u2019s is not particularly well optimised for search, but Drupal-advocate John Fintan\u2019s suggestion that the museum compete with Wikipedia for terms such as \u201cMona Lisa\u201d ahead of focusing on user experience seemed strange, and slightly arbitrary, to me.<\/p>\n

Yes, he was using his son\u2019s school research project to illustrate the value of publishing data in semantically-friendly forms \u2013 but what struck home for me was not how tricky it was to find the best material, but rather how his son hadn\u2019t the wherewithal to get past Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Fintan himself defined education (via Wikipedia!) as society’s “transmission of accumulated knowledge, skills and values”. I’d suggest that self-reliance and individual initiative would be among those skills and values, and that educators should be mindful of the impact of task-simplifying technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to MC Leon Tong, director at Drupal development house BrightLemon, last night\u2019s \u201cSocial Web for Museums, Galleries and Education\u201d session at Cass Business School was one of the most subscribed events of London Social …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3484],"tags":[486,763,3122,3123,3124,3125,3126],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4305"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}