Sociable Museums

Etiquetas: .us, Art, Museums, Seattle Art Museum, User Generated Content, What Museums Say...

Etiquetas: Art, Audioguides, e-learning, mobile, Museums, Sociable Museums, User's Experience

After several months of intense and exciting work, the project “Museums in Libya 2.0” is already available on the Internet.



lamusediffuse proposes the use of Social Web tools for the inclusion of non-dominant cultural expressions in the scopes of culture diffusion on the Internet. Accordingly with this objective, the project “Museums in Libya 2.0” is focused on two starting facts, the first is the lack of information about Libyan museums available in the website of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and the second is the apparent lack of museum websites in this country. As a consequence of this, the objective of our project has been overcoming both realities through the following actions,

• Overcoming the gaps of Web 1.0 by using a methodology based on Web 2.0 tools as a flexible, interactive and participative alternative option of information exchange,
• Proving Social Web academic usefulness and its tools as a valid and effective research tool,
• Palliating the lack of contents on Libyan museums on AFRICOM website by compiling, contrasting and structuring the information available on the Internet about the subject,
• Elaborating a reference map where gathering and locating the museums of Libya,
• Raising awareness about the online institutional forgetfulness situation of Libyan Museums at the present time in comparison with others in the rest of the world,
• Creating a methodological model for small museums and museums of developing countries or under conflict situations, reasonable in economic and maintenance terms,
• Encouraging museum professionals to Web 2.0 tools use as an economic, simple and effective solution to overcome any lack of computer science personnel or tools and digital technology,
• Emphasizing the importance and role of the Jamahiriya Museum of Tripoli and improving its online visibility for both international and local audiences,
• Finally, creating a reference document on the Libyan museums that will be published under a Creative Commons license of attribution and for noncommercial use,

You can find more details about this project on lamusediffuse's website.

From now on you can enjoy the wonderful Libyan museums strolling through the interactive map, where you will find information on each museum provided by our collaborators and Social Web users. Do not forget also consulting our wiki and updating it with new data. Besides, you can collaborate sharing your photos of Libyan museums including them in our group in Flickr, e-artcasting.

At this moment we leave you with the presentation we have made to present the project on next July 11 at the Medialab of Madrid (Spain,) within the Inclusiva.net encounter: New Art Dynamics in Web 2 mode. Besides, you can consult the references of the project in lamusediffuse's del.icio.us account. We hope meeting some of you there!

Etiquetas: Africa, Archaeology, Art, Heritage, lamusediffuse, Libya, Map, Museums, Professional, Small Museums, Sociable Museums, Sociable Technologies, Social Software, Web 2.0, Wikis

You are Sociable Museums' most precious value. Thanks to your emails, comments and contributions Sociable Museums' mission is increasing its diverse outreach.

One of Sociable Museums most active activities is located at the Flickr group. Users are about to contribute 1,000 wonderful and rare photos on art museums from all over the world, so it is hight time for celebration. Today we start a new section named, "Your Photos on Museums" in which we will rescue on weekly basis a selection of your best contributions at our Flickr pool.

For our Grand Opening, this exquisite image of the Ile Ife National Museum (Nigeria) taken in April 1958 and posted by Rabinal, who also shared with us a fragment of The White traveller in Black Africa, by Colin Wills,

The Creation of the World (Yoruba version). The creation of the world took place at Ife. Orafame. The Supreme Being, the Creator, sent Orishala out from heaven to create the world. The way was long and hot, and Orishala rested in a grove of palms. He was thirsty, and he drank palm wine, and fell asleep, a serious dereliction in one with such a high task. Orafame was disappointed. He called another demigod named Oduwa, and sent him forth to carry out the mission. Oduwa did not pause by the way. He took earth, a hen, and a chameleon. The hen spread out the earth and scraped it into a mound, just as you will see her do today. The chameleon moved over the mound, testing it with his light weight, feeling gently with his little feet. His delicate,tremulous movements which you can see today, are a memory of that great task. From the mound grew the Earth. It was there that Orfame set down the first man and woman, and from there stemmed the Yoruba people. The mound still exists; I will show it to you presently, said my guide. Oduwa, naturally, is worshipped by millions of Yoruba. The chameleon is also sacred, and the hen, though eaten, is regarded with great respect and affection. But the strange thing is that Orishala also has his devotees. One might expect them to be the wine-bibbers of the community. On the contrary, they are the teetotallers. When Orishala awoke and found that somebody else had created the world while he slept, he bitterly lamented his failure, and swore never to touch palm wine again. He never did, and neither do any of his followers. His failing remains an example forever, a warning to men of their own frailties.

Image: Rabinal: Museum at Ife, posted on September 2006.

Etiquetas: Africa, Art, Flickr, National Museum of Ile Ife, Nigeria, Photos, Sociable Museums, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Yoruba, Your Photos on Museums

Etiquetas: Art, e-artcasting, lamusediffuse, Museums, Second Life, SL, Social Software, User Generated Content, video, Web 2.0

What people say about the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad is certainly not enough. The shame that the looting of Iraq Museum in Baghdad meant to the so called “civilization” is nothing in comparison with its irreversible loss, better said: our irreversible loss. That crime was something that not only affected thousands of museum professionals, archaeologists, art historians, and researchers from all over the world; that crime was a looting of our history, of our humankind heritage.

The first sentences of the Iraq Museum Database created by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago can give an accurate vision of the scope of the looting,

No other museum can rival the collections of Mesopotamian artifacts in the Iraq Museum. Spanning a time from before 9,000 B.C. well into to the Islamic period, the Iraq Museum's collections includes some of the earliest tools man ever made, painted polychrome ceramics from the 6th millennium B.C., a relief-decorated cult vase from Uruk, famous gold treasures from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Sumerian votive statues from Tell Asmar, Assyrian reliefs and bull figures from the Assyrian capitals of Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad, and Islamic pottery and coins--an unrivaled treasure not only for Iraq, but for all mankind.

To the ones who maybe could think that the stolen objects be recovered with a lot of effort, money and politics’ will; we would say that nothing can be done to retrieve Iraqi antiquities to their original state before the looting, nothing. Apart from the massive pillage, lots of art works were literally destroyed and smashed as you could see in the video titled "Remember Iraq's Heritage, Our Heritage" posted on the social software by non-profit organization Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE.) This organization dedicated to preserve cultural heritage worldwide has organized “A Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq Museum” to raise awareness about that terrible crime.

April 10-12, 2007 will be the fourth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone is organizing a worldwide candlelight vigil to end the looting and destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq, and around the world.

With that aim, SAFE has interviewed Dr. Doony George Houkhanna, former responsible of Iraq Museum in Baghdad’s collection and currently visiting professor of Stony Brook University, in a video that we wish you will hopefully help to spread in blogs, workplaces and classrooms.

On April 10, 2003 news broke that shook the world. During three days and nights, thousands of priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization were systematically looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. As Director of Research, Dr. Doony George Houkhanna has been responsible of the museum’s collection for decades and became a witness to a terrible event.

lamusediffuse, the organization behind e-artcasting project, is an international collaborative team exploring the forms, impact, and possibilities of electronic technologies in contemporary culture. Our mission is improving lives for individuals by improving access to culture through digital technologies and their creations, and in fact, some of us are from Baghdad. Witnessing the looting that our beloved country has suffered and still does exceeds the irreparable impact of the pillage at National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, as it is accurately underlined by Dr. Houkhanna when he speaks about the loss and destruction in Iraqi excavations. As Dr. Houkhanna proposes, “Let’s gather together and see what we can do, so that people will not forget what happened.”



In addition to SAFE, some other organizations have implemented praiseworthy initiatives for the Iraqi cultural relief. Apart from the cited Oriental Institute of Chicago and its comprehensive website Lost Treasures from Iraq, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has implemented a specific webpage entitled Resources on Iraqi Museum Collections in addition to the Emergency Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk, which has been placed among other sad and shameful bunch of red lists on cultural heritage. Do not also forget to check the comprehensive SAFE List of Resources on Iraq.



“A Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq Museum” will take place on April 10-12, 2007 to, "show your support for Iraq. Demand the return of the missing Iraq Museums artifacts. And demand the end of the looting and destruction of the world’s cultural heritage." lamusediffuse will of course join this wonderful initiative and we will do it in different places.

At the moment, one of the venues in which we will be part of and where can not be a better context because it is a museum professional meeting, the Museums and the Web 2007 International Conference for Culture and Heritage Online at San Francisco. Another venue we are trying to implement will be at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. We will provide you more specific details about it at e-artcasting.

However, in some places this gathering call is going to have no visible face, because life for Iraqis working for humankind’s culture is not easy, as Dr. Houkhanna explains to Cindy Ho in this 38-minute interview to SAFE. We will be there, be sure. We just need you too.

Images
SAFE: Flyer of "A Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq Museum." 2007
savingantiquities: Remember Iraq's Heritage, Our Heritage. Posted on March 20, 2007
namirkh: End of Civilization. Posted on February 15, 2007
BI30: "Stuff Happens!" - Rumsfeld on looting after fall of Baghdad. Posted on August 01, 2006

Etiquetas: Archaeology, Art, Collections, e-artcasting, Heritage, Iraq, Iraq Museum, lamusediffuse, Looting, Museums, mw2007, Oriental Institute of Chicago

Past March 12, 2007, The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on its website, a “pioneering initiative to provide digital images to scholars at no charge.” This announcement has been immediately spread by the scholar blogosphere, as for example in the blog of The Chronicle of the Higher Education and The Attic.

This new service entitled "Images for Academic Publishing" (IAP) has been implemented in partnership with the nonprofit organization ARTstor. This service,

...will make images available via software on the ARTstor Web site. Initially, nearly 1,700 images representative of the broad range of the Metropolitan Museum's encyclopedic collection will be available through the more than 730 institutions that currently license ARTstor. Efforts to expand this accessibility are now underway and will be announced by ARTstor at a later date.

Although we consider this partnership among The Met and ARTstor a wonderful initiative and we really wish it would be imitated by other museums, we are especially concerned about the accessibility of this project.

This initiative is only applicable “for use in academic publications.” So, what would be considered an academic publication? Are publications outside universities and research centers -but signed by scholars- eligible? How is going to affect this to publishing companies? Are independent researchers considered scholars? About these issues you could read an interesting thread at Musematic.

Our second concern relates to the fact that, till the moment, only “the more than 730 institutions that currently license ARTstor” could have access to this service. In other words, this service is not for the overall academic community, it is just for certain institutions. Moreover, we could guess that although this service is strikingly announced as “no charge for scholars," becoming an ARTstor member required paying a fee, as eventually it was. But even willing to pay, not anyone could belong to the community because only institutions from, United States, Canada, Australia | New Zealand, and United Kingdom are eligible.

About this, and as a disclaimer, ARTstor explains on its website,

ARTstor participation will be limited, at least initially, to interested institutions in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Intellectual property and copyright law differs from country to country; most of the content in the ARTstor Digital Library will be available to international participants, but some copyrighted materials will not be available due to copyright concerns. In time, we expect to expand the availability of the ARTstor Digital Library internationally.

Eventually, we wonder what the best formula to provide non charged uses to nonprofit organizations is in an online context for art collections. At the end, internet uses of online collections are being regulated by each country’s legal frame and within the strict boundaries of economical power. So, access to online art collections still remain restricted to certain people and areas of the world while the utopia of Web 2.0 as a universal plaza remains still as a dream. This is however, a difficult problem that requires the will of establishing international suitable laws and more partnerships like The Met has done.

However, some other improvements could be easily done for a more accurate policy on who are the potential professional users of online art collections. We wish The Met will extented the IAP service to Museum Professional Associations, from the listed and not listed countries. Do we need to be "scholars" to need access to online collections? We can guess that the members of AFRICOM, AAM, AAMC, COVICOM, ICOM, Museum-Ed, or SMA (just to provide some professional associations examples) would really appreciate and get good benefit of this gesture.

Etiquetas: .us, Accessibility, Art, Copyrights, Met, Museum-Ed, Online Collections, Sociable Museums

The video embedded on the post in Spanish depicts the times in which there was neither Social Software nor internet and when TV was almost the only way to reach new audiences for museums. The recording was broadcasted some decades ago on TVE, the public television of Spain, in the times when there were only two TV channels and both of them were public. They were also times when smoking on TV was allowed :-(

Thanks again to the Social Software we can enjoy this debate on the El Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. The prestigious and unfortunately deceased art critic, Santiago Amón, discussed its mission, architecture and its art works climate conditions. We find especially interesting his advanced ideas about the advisability of urgently connecting museums with universities and other study institutions to train museum professionals to work and manage museums in Spain.

We wonder if such a media coverage on art museums could be possible nowadays. What it is certain is that Amón’s concerns addressed a hot debate these days in Spain, as the articles compiled at the blog of the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo reflect.

Video: Debate sobre el Museo del Prado en TVE, added on February 28, 2007 by kmalevich

Etiquetas: Art, e-artcasting, lamusediffuse, Museums, Prado Museum, Santiago Amón, Social Software, Spain, TVE, Web 2.0, What People Say...

We love Art, we love Museums, and we love Social Software. Logically, we should love the idea of art museums in Second Life (SL.) But until the moment, this is really more of a longing than a consequence of what this virtual environment is currently offering.

Although we adore the abstract idea of expanding the presence of art museums in all Social Software, we have the feeling that art museums in SL are facing basic problems of definition. So, for the sake of art museums -not only in SL but also in this first one- let us try to better focus their role in this virtual platform by starting a wish list that you can pass around to add more wishes.


1. Quality Graphics

The poor definition of SL images is an obstacle to really experience the sensorial aspects of certain kind of art works. Despite SL's efforts of to be as much realistic as possible, the truth is that the graphics do still lack compelling quality. This fact makes difficult to appreciate certain art forms based on the quality of the materials, the technique and the detail of the finishing. In other words, those who used to go to art museums to enjoy Rembrandt, Goya or Rubens probably will not be interested in visiting art museums in SL.

Although we have experiences engaging art works in SL, this wish just want to underline that certain kinds of art expressions need a better definition of the graphics for having a room in SL.


2. Improved Technical Service

Being in a SL Art Museum is an incessant back and forth of logins and getting backs because of the continuous interruptions users have to suffer even using broad band high speed internet connections. At any moment the system might crash your trip and boot you off to the real world. Then you would have to log back on and try to recover your latter experience. It is as if in RL (which in the SL lingo means, Real Life) we had to visit museums with the permanent expectation of being asked to leave them at any moment.

In addition to this, some newcomers complain about the demanding learning curve of SL in comparison with real museums, as Leslie Madsen-Brooks certainly remarks at Museum Blogging.


3. Freedom

Although anyone could expect from SL to be a truly revolutionary tool to overcome the current struggles of art museums in RL, the truth is that most museums are surprisingly imitating the worst part of reality, such as the restrictions imposed to visitors in museums regarding the care and conservation of the pieces. “Do not touch” labels, bureaucratic organizational systems, copyrights, admissions, etc.; are posted in the same style of any RL museum. Why, again, so many restrictions?

At the moment SL Art Museums seem to impose the same constraints to visitors/users than the ones of the real world. What if we take this second opportunity to overcome all these problems? Avoiding elements such as surveillance cameras or security staff, unavoidably necessary in real museums but not in SL ones, should be the beginning of a friendlier visitor experience in virtual museums.


4. Originality and Innovation

Imitation of reality seems to be a must in SL. Despite the pretended goal of being an alternative environment, SL is in general terms one of the best efforts recently implemented of recreating realism. This idea reinforces our suspicions about being currently living in a deeply Baroque period, in which the senses tend to be led till extreme sensorial experiences. Not in vain, our society remarkably relies on appearance, which is one of the reasons of SL’s success. This behavior is also present in some art museums in SL, which try to imitate the current displays of art works in RL (distribution of the art works; pedestals; use of archaic aesthetic evoking the times of Roman, Egyptian, and Greek antique cultural empires; etc.)



Is not SL able to produce a different and original concept of art museum or are we the ones who behave limited by our own conventions? Regarding this the always intriguing Richard Urban commented some months ago at Musematic,

I’ve also been interested to see how people are modeling the real world in Second Life, even when it’s not necessary (e.g. I really don’t need a wall to hang that painting. But I’ve put one there anyway). I’m looking forward to seeing how museums adapt to this new environment and whether we make some of the same choices (OK, kiddie avatars, lets line up in a group and listen to the nice docent avatar.) I’ll also be looking for ways that SL frees us from some of the first life limitations.

We are looking forward to listen his insights at MW2007. In the meanwhile, we hope he will continue building up his wiki.


5. Revolution

Like the best tradition of Science-fiction movies, SL seems to be constrained by the limits of the human social behavior and the restrictions of the capitalist mental structure behind this product. The common rule is; if you want to become different from the standard possibilities, you have to pay to do so. To improve your body, to own a land, to have a different standard; you have to pay. At the end, this virtual environment seems to follow the same economic rules as RL. Not in vain we should remember that behind SL there are real people making real money. In fact, we wanted to create a group of Art Museums in SL but even creating a group is expensive, not to mention a whole museum as Tom Goskar comments at the Museums Computer Group mailing list.

If it is necessary to pay only for gathering a group of people, we could easily conclude that SL is fostering a kind of economical elitism. So, instead of ‘Social Software,’ SL is more about ‘Club Software.’ Although the policy of ‘exclusivity’ is worthy of respect, it does not match very well with the essence of Social Software.

At the end, SL rules seem to be the same of the real life: Money.


6. Generosity

One of the shameful consequences of the cruelest side of capitalism sustained in SL is that it also has homeless individuals. The Spanish nonprofit organization Mensajeros de la Paz created two months ago a homeless avatar “warning the residents that many people still need help and everybody can do something against poverty, injustice and abandon”. Consequently, and very smartly, this organization asked for donations.

Fundraising is in SL, as in RL, the main issue to create and support any museum. Regarding SL's commercial nature, our expectations about finding there a context for art museums relieving from RL budget constraints, appears to be a far fetched dream. However, we will always appeal to generosity and that is why we want to take this opportunity to mention here some individuals and nonprofits which are doing it very well, such as InfoIsland, The New Media Consortium, or TechSoup. You could find most of them at Better World Island.


7. Cultural Diversity

Just this note to raise awareness about how are art museums in SL shaping the diversity of cultural conceptions about art. Is SL representative of the rich cultural diversity of the world? We would not like SL adding another cultural filter to the already globalized online presence of culture :(


8. Integrity

Why ‘integrity’ for art museums in SL? Just because we like this value in any organization :)


9. Self-Assessment

Second Life is a great opportunity to rethink and assess art museums' role in the current times. By asking what art museums should be in SL we are asking indeed about their role in this first life. About the nature and current role of museums, we find very interesting Tom Scheinfeldt’s reflections on Foundhistory and Bridget McKenzie’s comment in the Museums Computer Group mailing list

Is there anything different to expect from art museums in SL after all those replication efforts? What is the impact of SL Art Museums in RL? Leslie Madsen-Brooks provides some insights about this in “What can participating on Second Life do for your museum?” Do not miss her final list of advantages and disadvantages for museums in SL at the end of her article.

An interesting initiative regarding real art museums and SL was led by San Jose Museum of Art, as Mark Wallace featured at “Submit your SL Art to San Jose Museum.”



An interesting example of art museum in SL is the Aho Museum, depicted in the picture above. (You will find more photos about it at e-artcasting Photoproject.)

However, RL art museums have to deeply evaluate a possible involvement in SL. Regarding these concerns, Seb Chan describes at Fresh + New the thoughts of Powerhouse Museum,

My team here at the Powerhouse Museum has been toying with the idea of a Second Life trial too - we’ve had quite a bit of experience with 3D environments and reconstructions in the past. But a museum is unlikely to have the resources of a Dell or IBM to do a media friendly product launch type event quickly enough in SL to make a significant splash - these things in the museum sector take months (if not years) to develop properly and by the time they are done (maybe) the hype will have moved on.

In the comments to this article, a good suggestion by Richard Urban was,

“Another approach that museums may need to look at is not doing this alone as individual institutions. The New Media Consortium is creating a shared campus for educational institutions, and a collective of librarians has created Information Island (I & II). But who from the museum world is willing to play in a shared sandbox?”

However, some other people just say, "Get a First Life"


10. (…)

Finally, our wish is your opinion. Do not be shy about adding your wishes and passing your list around...


Image: NMC Second Life: Aho Museum View, 2006
Video: SamyoSam: Second Louvre Museum, 2007
Video: Amoration: ISEA Virtual Arts Videoblog, 2006

Etiquetas: Accessibility, Art, e-artcasting, lamusediffuse, Museums, Second Life, SL, Sociable Technologies, Social Software, Web 2.0, Wish List

In our former blog (disappeared at the end of August because of the mysteries of technology) we were telling that the organization National Museums Liverpool (United Kingdom) had organized a Web2.0 photographic project to document Liverpool. The project was called “Stewart Bale 2.0” and it was based in the Stewart Bale Ltd. Photographic Collection owned by National Museums Liverpool.

The organization invited both amateur and professional photographs using Flickr, to recreate the photographs of its collection. The project is currently an online photography exhibition.

This initiative is a wonderful example of how Web2.0 (a new generation of internet services which make use of collaboration, shared participation and tagging to crate 'social software') not only can engage new audiences to art museums, but also can get their collections being revisited by contemporary visions.

As it can be seen, it is not necessary having a contemporary art collection to understand new audiences and their relation with technology. Fortunately, there is an increasing number of museums understanding it in this way.

Images: Stewart Bale: Pier Head, 1959 (original) (left); Pete Carr: Pier Head, 2006 (right)

Etiquetas: .uk, Art, Collections, Flickr, lamusediffuse, Museums, National Museums Liverpool, Photos, Sociable Museums, Social Software, Web 2.0

Etiquetas: .fr, Art, Audioguides, e-learning, Gioconda, lamusediffuse, Louvre, Mona Lisa, Museums, Podcasts, Sociable Museums

Etiquetas: .es, Art, MACBA, Museums, Sociable Museums, Social Software, videos, Web 2.0, What People Say...

Etiquetas: .uk, Art, Museums, Sociable Museums, Social Software, Tate Modern, videos, What People Say...

Sociable Museums is fully committed to take the best profit of the Web2.0 tools to share experiences about Art Museums from all over the World. As the information about Art Museums available online seems to be uneven, I have started a project to gather, locate and share photos of Art Museums in Africa.

So, I encourage you to add your photos to the e-artcasting's pool at Flickr conveniently tagged with,

• Name of the museum,
• City or specific location,
• Country,
• Continent: Africa
  

Etiquetas: Africa, Art, Museums 2.0, Photos, Sociable Museums, Web 2.0

Etiquetas: Art, Sociable Museums, social media, Web 2.0