New Media Gives the Public a Role

The New York Times ran a great article yesterday about specific ways museums are using new media to interact with their patrons. As the author puts it, "While museums have been experimenting with the Web for years, these projects have often consisted of little more than an exhibit photo gallery or online guestbook. In recent years, however, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections." The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which isn't yet open has a Virtual Shtetl project to help collect photographs, videos and audio recordings "related to life in 1,300 towns with Jewish populations before and after World War II." The Smithsonian provides another example:

Last February the Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum invited Web users to help decide which paintings should be displayed in its visible storage facility, typically frequented by art historians and other scholars. Museum staff created a Flickr group called Fill the Gap, which allows users to suggest items to fill the bare wall spaces left when paintings are removed for conservation or lent to other institutions.

Fill the Gap represents a tiny but potentially precedent-setting step for the Smithsonian as a whole, where a larger conversation is starting to percolate around the changing role of curators in a Web 2.0 world. That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets. Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.

The Smithsonian’s new-media director, Michael Edson, described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift “from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation.”

“Distributive knowledge creation” can be a tricky business. While social-media platforms may open up possibilities for user participation, they also carry the risk of promoting bad information and questionable judgments and of eroding the authority of institutional curators. In this sense museums are grappling with the same technological conundrum as other cultural institutions, like universities, publishers and newspapers: how to reconcile institutional principles of order with the liberating impulses of electronic networks.

The rest of the article focuses on the last question, and while there are disagreements and the right method to handle shifting nexuses of power is still evolving, the discussion is worth reading.