Tell Us! How Do YOU Use Open Museum?

Open Museum makes rich and varied collections available 24/7 to arts keepers, creators and lovers. Through visitors emails, comments, tweets, blogs… we have been delighted to learn that Open Museum also serves a a number of other purposes.

A theater designer contacted us to request permission to use Trina Schart Hyman’s “Trees Becoming Women, Women Becoming Trees,” a work that only appears online in Open Museum. She wrote to us about her search for an image to print on the playbill of the production:

"So I googled “women and trees” and jackpot, the image that I just requested was there. I showed the image to my director, who of course loved it, and she wanted to use it in the show.

We put her in touch with the copyright holder, the artist’s daughter, and both were delighted that she could use the image.

Similarly, an archeologist, specializing in the Caucasus region, asked to use pages from the National Museum of Folk Music and Instruments in her power point presentation at the International Symposium on Georgian Culture. The Georgian Museum was as happy to be pointed to in an international venue, as the archeologist was to share the content.

In a third case, the distant family member of a person presented in the Norwich Historical Society’s Faces of Norwich emailed us from England to inquire about the genealogy of the person in question. It turns out they were related and requested contact information in order to connect after the generation of separation.

Do you have a story to tell about Open Museum? How it helped you find, share, do something you wanted? If so, please tell us.

Whether you are a one-time visitor or returning member, post a comment below and include an image if you can.

Object of the Week: Grand Jatte

Laura Willis's"Grand Jatte" is part of the Corcoran College of Art & Design's Continuing Education 2009 Juried Exhibition on Open Museum. Willis created her piece from vintage zippers with a goal to "bridge the gap between alternative and classic work. . . My use of vintage zippers stems from an effort to recycle and reuse, and also to connect to the beauty that exists in using items that have been worn, used, and cherished by others."

The Corcoran College of Art & Design is Open Museum's newest charter museum partner, showcasing both student and faculty work.

New Open Museum Feature, Your Very Own Wall

Open Museum has implemented a new social networking feature, namely the personal wall. Friending people, direct messaging and personal recommendations à la Amazon.com will come later, but in the meantime it is possible to communicate with other members via their personal walls. These walls are visible to all registered users, meaning they are not private, but their content, like all comments in Open Museum, is not searchable by Google.

To see how the personal wall works, look at the photo on the left and visit my wall. Note that you can get updates of this discussion (and any other discussion in Open Museum) by selecting the orange subscription icon.

To start your own wall go to Home in the navigation bar and select My Public Profile, where you'll find the tab Wall and the invitation to enable visitor comments.

Once we complete the development of Open Museum's cell phone accessibility (in the next few weeks), we will turn our attention back to social features. In the meantime, we'd like to hear your thoughts on what would make Open Museum a more satisfying personal experience. Which features would you like to have available? In what order of priority? No ideas are too far-fetched to share!

Come Play With Us!

Too many Majas, 2009, by Jeff Doyle, CC Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike

Open Museum has launched the Association Game. It starts with an image posted by Ole Worm, a member of the Open Museum team and all round playful guy. The object of the game is quite simple; match Ole's pick with an image that resembles, suggests, alludes to, or reminds you of the first one. Or the immediately preceding image in the series; not everybody agrees.

As a matter of fact, at this point the rules are still in flux. Including whether there should be any rules, any winners, or any official way of keeping score. All these questions are under active discussion in the Game Discussion Forum. If you're interested, come play.

Any member of Open Museum is welcome to participate in both the game and forum. Borrowing from the OpenSpace Conference approach our guidelines are that whoever shows up belongs and whatever happens should happen. Of course, within the terms of our user agreement. The bottom line is every member of Open Museum agrees to respect the other members.

And in case you're wondering, the play is invisible to non-members.

Screencast: How to Create an Announcement

Here's a quick screencast that explains how to create a museum-wide announcement:

Arts Talk, New Forum in Open Museum

Open Museum now supports automatic email notification of Museum forums. Since museums can host multiple discussions on dedicated topics, it makes it easier for an Open Museum member to follow selected conversations (from various museums), without necessarily being a friend of those museums.

For instance, if you go to MeTA(Official openmuseum.org demo museum and home turf of the Open Museum team), you will see in the left side bar links to About Open Museum, Arts Talk and Curators Resources & Forum. Each webpage, includes a discussion, making it easy for any member to pose questions, raise issues, make suggestions on any topic they choose. We still welcome messages through the contact link, but hope that most meta-conversations will occur in the open where any Open Museum member can participate in shaping the particular aspects of the site as well as the culture of the site in general.

There's an interesting conversation underway on Arts Talk about the Moral Rights of Artists. Note that this conversation, like all others in Open Museum, are open to the Open Museum community. To join the conversation, register.

MacGuffins

Museums have been around in the real world for a while and a rich set of understandings and expectations have grown up around them. But the web is still something like a western boom town. We’ve tossed up some buildings overnight but we have yet to live in them for very long. Some are just facades.

So far museums have done a better job of putting their content online than they have of reproducing the social architecture and topology of "the old country." With only a few notable exceptions, most museums web sites are not "places" in a way that even remotely compares to their brick and mortar counterparts.

My sense is that most museum web sites do a pretty good job on the content side compared to how well they do on the social side. Museums don't necessarily understand the social function of objects and spaces in their own museums and thus aren't able to reproduce those functions online.

What is the role of this painting (Picasso's Artist and his Model) and this museum (Pinakothek der Moderne) in these young people's lives? I couldn’t even find this painting on the Pinakothek website, but supposing I could: do you suppose they would provide anything remotely resembling the same "value proposition" to website visitors the the physical museum is providing here? Has anyone gotten married to somebody they met at your museum website?

Museums are places to make passes at people who wear glasses. They are places to show off your new wardrobe, practice your French pronunciation, people-watch, eavesdrop, and show off the fun facts you learned about Matisse or the boiling point of helium, or just stroll with a friend...

Its hard to do any of those things at most museum websites, though if you think about it, you can do some of them on Flickr. Flickr has done a pretty good job at turning digital images into social objects.

Sociologists speak of boundary objects serving as interfaces between different communities of practice. There is a sense in which all museum objects serve as boundary objects. But the interactions occasioned by those objects are phatic as well as interpretive. Objects serve as pretexts for both small and big talk. They are the MacGuffins of our personal and public dramas; they create social possibilities that would not exist otherwise.

In object-centered social interactions, objects play the role of the ball in soccer, the cards in whist, the book of "Launcelot" in the story of Paolo and Francesca.

Obviously, people won’t do exactly the same things in online museums that they do in real museums. But they will certainly want an equally rich experience. And for that experience to have anything to do with a museum’s mission, it is going to have to include social objects. Otherwise we might as well go to bar or chat with our friends on Facebook.

Objects are props. They share a social space with humans. The social space they share is the museum.

This article was originally published as a guest post on New Curator.