Last week we launched our new website. As I wrote last week it’s a connected website. With our website, we launched the INNL network. The INNL network is a semantic network of history and heritage websites.
Connecting online collections and communities
When we started the new website project, we realised that over the last couple of years many museums, archives and other institutions have digitised their collections. At the same time many created communities around projects and expositions. The result of all these efforts is a rich, but dispersed online presence of culture, history and heritage. If you know where to look, you can find almost anything online. Most people, however, don’t look further than Wikipedia and the top-3 results in Google (often the same).
We wanted to make it easier for people to discover history and heritage online by connecting different collections and communities. Sort of like Europeana builds an enormous database of European collections, but then focused at the normal Internet user, who doesn’t even know Europeana exists. This idea, the INNL network, allows people to enter anywhere in the network and experience the rich online collections, rather than having to search for them.
At last! The new website of the Museum of National History and its related semantic network are live. I’m very proud of the end result and thought I’d share it with our international followers. This post is a transcript of the presentation speech I gave, with some minor adjustments, so please forgive the enthusiastic promotional language. I’ll go into the juicy details later on this blog.
(Also, the website is in Dutch, which will be a challenge for Google Translate.)
Conversion is high and traffic from Facebook increased. Small and specific communities are built around projects, events and activities. We don’t have a physical collection, but I can see the same happening for objects in online collections.
Adding Like Buttons is as easy as copy-pasting. In fact, you can customise and copy the code on the Facebook developers website and have a Like Button online in under two minutes. Generic solutions might take a bit more skill and time (adding it to our 750+ activities in next week’s Week of History took about an hour).
With the ease and impact of the Like Button it’s an amazing tool for museums to connect with visitors and build useful connections online. Read the rest of this entry »
Today was the fifth edition of Mediamatic’s Kom Je Ook? conference.* Today’s topic was storytelling. Storytelling seems to be hot. As some of the speakers at today’s conference pointed out today, however, it’s nothing new. Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad used to be told as stories. That’s a long time ago. Storytelling once was the only real source of information sharing we had. The Moroccan storytellers who still tell the stories of A Thousand and One Nights are one of the many examples of this ancient tradition, still present today.
So, what we’re doing is trying to reinvent an old tradition. Fortunately, most of today speakers showed that we haven’t thrown away X million years of experience with storytelling. Actually, we might have made some small steps forward. Or regained some lost skills.
Nieuwe groeten uit… (“New greetings from…”) is a crowd-sourced, crowd-curated exposition in the city of Arnhem in the east of the Netherlands. Last Thursday my museum opened the last part of the yearlong project. In many ways it’s a special exposition and project, I think, and worth sharing.
Somewhat over a year ago FOAM photography museum Amsterdam, the ANP Historical Archive and the Museum of National History of the Netherlands came together to find a replacement for the traditional postcards. Most postcards show an old-fashioned image of Holland: cheese, cows and wooden shoes. The Netherlands has changed significantly over the last years, and Nieuwe Groeten Uit… was a search for new postcards.
The general public played a mayor part in every phase of the project: gathering the photographs for the postcards, selecting the best post-cards and even putting them on display.
