Posted: May 16th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Inspiration, Technology | Tags: advice, conversation, do's and don'ts, energy, experience, guidelines, lessons, tips | 10 Comments »
Photo from the Flickr Commons (Field Museum Library)
I’m relatively new to museums. Apart from a short intermezzo in an ecomuseum, the last year has been my only year within the walls of a museum. I do new media and technology. We do a lot of innovation. This is what I learned last year.
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Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology | Tags: advice, augmented reality, games, guidelines, mobile museum, mw2010, pilots, tips | 11 Comments »
How can we use mobile media to engage people in cultural and historical heritage? Last week I co-hosted a hands-on expert meeting dealing with this subject. Our objective: to find one or two pilot solutions that we can develop already.
The meeting followed on the post-MW2010 unconference about mobile games for museums I wrote about two weeks ago. Experts of DEN (Dutch Digital Heritage), the Dutch museum association (NMV), the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam and Beeld en Geluid together with host the Museum of National History, came up with a set of guidelines for pilot projects. We used user profiling and a tour through The Hague to develop these guidelines and a handful of ideas.
Our findings below represent what we think a mobile platform for cultural and historical heritage should look like, using contemporary technology.
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Posted: March 28th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Thoughts about museums | Tags: guidelines, lessons, museums, strategy | No Comments »
March 23rd Erik Schilp, CEO of the Dutch Museum of National History (the institution I work for) gave a compelling speech on the Canon of Dutch history and the museum of the 21st century. He gave his speech “The Dutch Canon as guiding principle for the new National Museum of History of the Netherlands?” at the Euroclio Conference in Nijmegen. And, fortunately for non-Dutch speaking readers of this blog, his speech was in English. You can read the full text of his speech as a PDF.
I full-heartedly agree with Erik’s thoughts and ideas about the role of museums in society and the changes they have to make to meet the new demands of visitors. Some excerpts:
On new media and technology:
(…) the influence of new media and technology has changed the concepts of museums even more rapidly and radically. With the whole world at their feet, at least digitally, people are making other demands on public institutions. They are better informed of the possibilities, are more emancipated and demanding and, on the whole, are also more inquisitive and have a greater appetite for information. The focus of attention is no longer the collection, but the visitor. It is not the collection that is important, but the story behind it. The collection serves as an illustration of the story to be told, and sometimes of what a visitor may wish to convey to other visitors.
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