“This reaffirms the importance of having different levels of content participation - and the primacy of content, the truism that has been around since the birth of the web. Most of your userbase will be lurkers, viewers - they won’t contribute - but if you can leverage and re-present the proportionally small amount of user-generated content you do get, then you are likely to be able to ride a wave of interest in your site.”

read the full post here:

Levels of Participation / Community

“Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.”
Wikipedia

This term was bandied about like candy corn on Halloween this year at MW2007. There were some great presentations and a lot of discussions of this user-centric future of the web and what role museums should/could/will play.

Here are a few highlights:

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Case Study: New World Blogging within a Traditional Museum Setting
This session delivered by Jeff Gates, who is the Lead Producer in the New Media Initiatives department of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), focused on SAAMs launch of their museum-wide blog Eye Level.

“The museum had been closed for renovation since January, 2000, and was scheduled to reopen July 2006. Our Web team wanted to connect our on-line content with our museum’s mission and soon-to-be galleries full of art. The goal was to engage our audiences in conversations connecting their American experiences with the artworks in our collection.”

Find the paper here:
Case Study: New World Blogging within a Traditional Museum Setting

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Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers
Presented by Mike Ellis from The Science Museum and Brian Kelly from UKOLN, both from the UK, this was a great follow up to the previous session and delved into how to work through the many institutional questions and concerns that Web 2.0 technologies can raise.

“This paper attempts first to identify why Web 2.0 is of particular importance to our sector; next, to examine common barriers in our particular context; and finally, to find ways practitioners might go about addressing these barriers in their organisations.”

Find the paper here:
Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers

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Building an On-line Community: Web 2.0 and interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum
Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth from the Brooklyn Museum showed off their forays into user-generated content and it was incredible. The two women detailed their launch of the Brooklyn Museum Community page, which went public in 2006. Not only did they open up part of their exhibition space at the Museum’s physical space to allow visitors to create their own grafitti, they also asked for submissions of photographs and videos created by visitors as a response to their visit to the exhibition. The response was overwhelming.

Read the paper here:
Building an On-line Community
and see the community page and it’s user-generated content here:
Brooklyn Museum Community

We Are Your Audience
This session was fantastic. Rachel Horwitz and Cathy Intemann, a librarian and a teacher respectively, from McKinley Middle School in
Albuquerque, NM, gave attendees an insider’s view into the classroom experience and what teachers and students look for in terms of web interaction.

“We propose to demonstrate how teachers align instruction to standards, how we choose a Web site from an Internet search, and how we integrate the museum Web sites into the classroom lesson to broaden and enhance instruction. We want our students to wonder at and wander through the museums of the world.”

The paper and the presentation were supplemented with a survey the two presenters took of their fellow colleagues at their school.
You can read their paper here:
We Are Your Audience

Our goals are two-fold, we aim to provide a daily-updated resource of current museum related inspiration. Our focus will be directed towards technology, web, education, design and beyond. We’re going to collect and share the big new ideas on the horizon so you don’t have to.

Our second focus is to create a more open forum within the institution. We hope to help drive communication throughout the departments of the Museum.