Hello everyone. Greetings on this beautiful October day. Below is a link to an article that may be of interest. It prompted me to wonder about the nature of defining audiences as well as the benefits and drawbacks for brick and mortar museums.
http://conference.archimuse.com/biblio/opencollection_web_based_collection_cataloging_and_ac
Also, some related thoughts:
-Just watched a few episodes of Ken Burns' The War. It struck me that this was essentially a virtual museum; at least the manner in which the material is presented. Ideas?
-Museum2.0 has a great article on mash-ups and a fun video to watch. Highly recommended.
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From a collections management point of view, I would LOVE to see open source collections management software. In my experience, most Open Source projects are regularly updated and improved by their users--who are people passionate about the project. The propriety software is not only expensive to buy and support but also infrequently updated with insufficient input from users. Open Source could be a way to have truly functional, flexible collections management software that is really FOR collections managers.
I wouldn't want it to be all online, though, given that we lost phone and/or internet several times this summer at work due to lightening strikes.
-Mel
One comment in particular caught my attention in this article (well, after Whirl-I-Gig and Boolean combinations vs Boolean "NOT" operators) and that was this web-based systems allowed graduate students and other interns to continue their work after they had left the museum and returned to their respective universities. What a fabulous way to create a continuity of work that doesn't exist as of yet. Right now museums have people coming and going every few months. And each person requires time and training and might have slightly different ideas of how to enter/code something which all works to create a murky database. Add in the fact that this allows smaller museums to use a free, professional database to manage their collections and it seems that the only loser in this scenario is the companies that produce large, cumbersome, propriety software. (boo-hoo)
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