Looking Back at the Museums and the Web 2009 Conference

By Erik Hekman on 4 May 2009

I had the pleasure to attend the Museums and the Web conference 2009 in Indianapolis. It were four full packed days of keynote speakers, panels, demonstrations and workshops all on the topic Museums and the Internet. As mentioned in an earlier post I was allowed to demonstrate the application ‘I Know What This Is’ during the demonstration rounds on Saturday. The application is part of the PACE project.

Looking back on the conference I noticed that The Netherlands is at the front row of cultural heritage and its digitalization. I met a lot of people from different museums and institutes who struggling with the notion what to do with Wiki’s and user-generated content. Marco de Niet (DEN) also noted that different Museums and Institutes in the USA are working on the front-end of their cultural heritage. They are trying to find answers to questions such as “how can we use our website to attract possible visitors”, whilst in The Netherlands we are more focused on digitizing our cultural heritage.

If you are already familiar with the concepts web 2.0 and social media this is not the conference to gain new knowledge. What I particularly missed were the insights and results of using web 2.0/social media. Museums and Institutes just throw their collection on Flickr the Commons without a clear goal or research purpose. Not that the latter is required, but in order to surf the wave of innovation you have to understand its implications.

tagged with: cultural heritage, web 2.0, pace, social media