Whose lines are they anyway?
I’ve been thinking for a long while about ways in which I could be using technology to enhance access to museum collections and especially to open up possibilities for users / visitors / interested parties to use our material to create their own exhibitions / resources, with their own interpretive text. Some of these ideas became part of my ‘Distributed Museum’ concept; others I hope to put into practice with schools later this year.
- Podcasting audio tours
- Self-selected museum guidebook, with your text, or ours, or both - burned to CD/DVD or stored on our web space for others to view
- The museum-wiki
- Instant postcards - our stuff, your choice, your message
- User-created multi-lingual interpretation
- Interactive visitor book
- Multi-venue education events and activities
- Intercontinental interactives
- Handheld / smartphone tours (Bluetooth or wireless hotspot?)
- What’s in store - opening up the reserve collection
More to come…
August 17th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
All sound like great ideas to me. I guess the podcast idea could also be taken a step further, with packages developed to cover whole towns or cites that could be downloaded by tourists prior to a visit.
August 17th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
I suddenly have this awful vision of the commercial future - everything gets taken over by the marketing types and turned into trash and drivel. I guess it will be like all these things - there is a period of freshness, freedom, participation and innovation, then the PR hacks come in and ruin it for everybody. Lots of money gets spent on rubbish and a few agencies make wads of cash. Oh well.