Saturday, May 2, 2009

YouTube museums

I am pleased about the growing number of museums using Web2.0 applications in communicating with the public. For example, Norsk Teknisk Museum has been using Twitter for quite some time, and their Joomla-powered web site includes an RSS feed, email newsletter subscription and a tag cloud (although they seem to have forgotten that foreigners might also be interested in their museum, and publish only in Norwegian). One museum that seems particularly successful in using social media is the Horniman in London. Last year, the Horniman exhibited "Utsavam – Music from India", utilizing web services such as del.icio.us, Digg, reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon in their promotion campaign. It is the placing of films from the exhibition on YouTube which seems most interesting to me, however.
One of the films is "The music of the Gurdwara Sikh temple", produced by Margaret Birley and Rolf Kilius. Besides being a way of giving source communities access to this material, having films out on YouTube attracts feedback through the comments function, which can enrich the museum's store of documentation.

No comments: