Strindberg, innovation and a wrap-up of #kulturwebb

Innovation can be painful, in my translation of what Johan Ronnestam said.

Last week I presented at a #kulturwebb conference in the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm. My presentation opened with an 1888 quote from Strindberg, from his preface to Miss Julie (translated by Michael Robinson).

(…) people have believed in the possibility of creating a new drama by filling the old forms with new content; but this approach has failed, partly because there has not yet been time to popularize the new ideas (…) and partly because we have not yet found the new form for the new content, and the new wine has burst the old bottles.

Apparently, the debate about innovation in content and medium in culture is nothing new. Of course, I would like to add. When we talk about innovating cultural institutions, it’s not about starting to use Twitter or Facebook. We talk about continuously reinventing ourselves to stay meaningful in a changing world. Change and innovation are an on-going process. As the adage goes, change is the only constant (Heraclitus?). Read the rest of this entry »

Timing is everything – When do people consume your museum’s new media activities?

Photo by Diana Hammond.

With the rise of new media a paradigm shift has occurred in the time when people “consume” museums. In the old days people would pick a specific moment to visit a museum. Maybe dress up a bit, make it a day out. On an average they would pick two, maybe three moments a year to spend time with museums. Nowadays, using Twitter and Facebook, we try to make people interact with museums twenty-four seven. They don’t even have to be dressed to “visit” a museum.

By doing so, we’ve entered into the battle for attention of our consumers. And it’s a crowded battlefield.

Timing is essential when it comes to getting an optimal response to your cries for attention. As a museum that is closed on Sundays will miss out on a lot of visitors, a tweet send when all followers are asleep or busy is lost forever. So, when are people most likely to consume a museum’s new media activities?

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The INNL network – what it is and how it works

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.

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Museums, kids and new media – The Continuous Exploded Museum Fun Experience

Photography by Ramon Mosterd.

Last week I hosted a workshop on museums, kids and new media together with SETUP Utrecht and the Utrecht Museums Foundation (SUM). Some of my dear friends of the Innovators Network Heritage (INE) also added their good thoughts. The challenge: How to use new media to get more young kids (0-12 years old) and their parents to the museums in Utrecht.

I know little about kids. I know even less about kids in combination with new media. The Powerhouse Museum (who else?) recently launched WaterWox, which to me looks like a great new media application for (a.o.) kids. That’s about how much I know about it, so I was happy to have 45 talented people from different backgrounds look into the issue.

During the workshop participants globally came up with 3 strategies to use new media in order to get more kids to the museum in Utrecht: Read the rest of this entry »

28 low-budget, easy-to-do things to do with new media for cultural institutions

Update 09/17/2010: Added 4 new things to do contributed by readers of this blog. Thanks!

Last week some of my colleagues and I hosted a new media afternoon with workshops for participants in the Week van de Geschiedenis (“Week of the History”). During this annual event hundreds of cultural institutions in the Netherlands organise activities related to history. Over 250,000 people all over the Netherlands visit debates, tours, lectures, special exhibitions… I believe this week has an enormous new media potential.

Quite some of the participating institutions have zero budgets, work with volunteers and have limited or no experience with new media. Some of the visitors of the new media afternoon asked me what they could do with new media – taking into account their limitations. I composed this list of 28 simple things to do with new media for small cultural institutions to help them.

If you know of other low-budget, easy-to-do new media activities, please add them. It’s highly appreciated by the many small cultural institutions taking their first steps in new media.

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