Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource. Want to buy a book

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Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I was thinking I’d do a few alternative histories of museums for the first post of the last month of the decade. As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying. But I couldn’t get there.

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Museum Work Social Media Alternative 21

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

In 2009 , students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. You can explore the projects in full on the class wiki.

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs. The purpose of my thesis was two-fold: To research and analyze community and civic engagement practices, methods, theories and examples in other museum programs.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum Question Participatory Vietnam 45

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Gretchen Jennings convened a group of bloggers and colleagues online to develop a statement about museums'' responsibilities and opportunities in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Where do museums fit in? Here is our statement.

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes , on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. This is the question I ask myself anytime I'm working on something with a participatory intent.

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Participatory Question Work Artist 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. If you don't have a sense of an outcome--whether that be internal research, community conversation, or something else--you can't decide how or whether contributions should be documented or archived.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. You see the overall value of the project.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. When I look back at some recent projects that I''m most excited about (like this teen program ), I realize that I had very little to do with their conception or execution. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive.

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Museum Director Teen History 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Lovely grounds.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

Dear Museum 2.0 As of May 2, I will be the executive director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA (here's the press release ). I am closing down my consulting business at the end of April, but the Museum 2.0 Here are a few things that make the MAH an exciting museum to me: It's small.

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History Museum Arts Consultant 55

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Pop-Up Museum [n]: a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. a way to catalyze conversations among diverse people, mediated by their objects. Over the past few years, there have been several fabulous examples of pop-up museums focusing on visitor-generated content. This project is beautiful in its simplicity.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Who are all of these people?

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

One, from a museum director. PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it? Heck, no museum exhibition hits them all. High participatory quality, low technical quality. Invite the conversation about forms of quality, and the different outcomes of different forms. Core Museum 2.0 Any questions?

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

Jasper Visser and his colleagues at the not-yet-physically-open National Historisch Museum of the Netherlands have impressed me with their innovative, thoughtful approach to developing a dynamic national museum. Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam.

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Museum Comment Experiment Participatory 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what." Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others? Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Vietnam 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 8, 2015

I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. On platforms with many participatory options, more people are more active. Last week on this blog, I tried an experiment. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. of game viewers commented.

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Game Museum Participatory Comment 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 6, 2009

This post was written by Jaime Kopke , the founder/director of the Denver Community Museum , a pop-up community-generated institution that ran from Oct 2008-April 2009. This post shares her reflections on the project, its design, and its impact. The Denver Community Museum (DCM) was a grassroots operation in almost every sense.

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Denver Museum Community Participatory 29

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

I like to ask myself this question periodically, challenging myself to find substantive ways for visitors to contribute to our museum. To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. And when I think back on the past year, some of the most magical things that have happened at the museum have NOT been designed by us.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. The Brooklyn Museum just finished the public stage of GO , a "community-curated open studio project." Voting on individual artworks turned each one into a social object worthy of lengthy conversation. Full stats here.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. This philosophy steers our work, and it means that we do things a little differently than some other museums and galleries.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

MARCH 27, 2013

There's a constant dialogue in participatory work about how to make peoples' contributions meaningful. I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space.

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Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. institutional change relationships participatory museum Unusual Projects and Influences game visitors' Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means.

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

Three of them are being hosted at my museum , and one at a mystery location. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2012

We're looking for an Exhibitions Manager to join our team here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp is filling up. You do not have to be a museum professional to be part of this--we'd like a diverse mix of participants. Join the conversation. Come to Camp. This camp will be a 2.5

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Participatory Museum Blended History 32

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. They provide detailed case studies of projects in each area, including project descriptions, informal science education goals, participant training techniques, and evaluation outcomes.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother. Reducing intergroup bias isn''t a primary goal in all of our work, but in some projects, it''s of particular interest. This blog is about shared learning, and I went to engineering school.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

Sarah and some of her colleagues in visitor services feel disconnected from the work that happens "upstairs" in the office and in our creative project development. At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. participatory museum professional development'

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. I found this idea really powerful.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2013

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 29, 2014

The whole day was spent in passionate discussion about research projects, international crises, and serious, cost-intensive efforts for zoos and aquaria to take action to improve the fate of elephants and other species at risk. You can track exactly where what projects your money supports. That''s what building a movement is all about.

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Action People Conservancy Africa 46

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 9, 2017

I imagined an academic conversation stuffed with arcane, impenetrable vocabulary. I've met too many young, talented people of color who want to work in museums but feel belittled, tokenized, or unsupported in their careers. For example, I get frequent media requests, including about museum-related news items that I know little about.

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