MUVI

I’ve just been reading about a virtual museum project based not on physical objects but around collective community storytelling. It is the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lombardia, MUVI for short. From what I can tell this website collects and exhibits radio broadcasts and old photographs from Lombardia’s history. Family photos and stories belonging to personal family collections are collected. Also, readers of the website are invited to submit stories related to these cultural artifacts. This virtual museum is a constantly evolving community project that could not be recreated as effectively, if at all, in a traditional brick and mortar museum.

http://www.url.it/muvi/

sorry, the website is in Italian

Here is an interesting article, written in English, about the project, from Design Issues magazine.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/desi.2006.22.3.29#search=%22MUVI%20design%20issues%22

Blogger and Firefox

I brought this topic up briefly as a comment on Sanghyeon's blog but I just wanted to say a little more. When I first set up my blog, I had a lot of trouble with error messages in Blogger. One suggestion that I found was to use the browser Firefox, which is open source. I downloaded it and sure enough, all of my blogging problems were solved. (Except, I must confess, those problems that arose from me not reading the directions first! That's another more boring story.) Anyway, since I downloaded Firefox, I've been using it exclusively at home. I used to use Explorer at home and work but I'm finding that I really like Firefox. The top of the frame is uncluttered. It seems faster. The "find" function is more efficient and easier to use. I am still learning about open source software but Firefox is predisposing me to think that OSS is a good thing.

Cooper-Hewitt

In looking at virtual museums they seem to be sort of like the old faithful of the web world. You can count on them to have reliable useful content. At the same time though, there is nothing very exciting about them. A virtual museum is just a website. In a comment from Sanghyeon he asked, " I wonder what unique aspects virtual museums have in terms of information technology." I asked myself this same question.

For the most part, it seems like nobody is doing anything unique in the world of virtual museums. I just read an article though from The Washington Post that describes a project in the works at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. The Cooper Hewitt now has a traditional site but they are getting ready to launch something quite different. The new version of the Cooper Hewitt virtual museum will allow visitors to "curate shows, build virtual collections and circulate digital photos." It sounds like visitors will also be able to tag images as one tags websites in del.icio.us.

It is hard for me to imagine what this will actually look like. It seems like it could potentially be a real mess or it could create unimagined possibilities and directions for the collection. The article states that users will be allowed to vote on content posted by random web users and enough negative votes will take content off the site. The article also notes that there are many people across the globe with very detailed special interests who could contribute significant academic insight if they were able to access the collection.

Here is the article through Proquest if you are interested in reading more.

http://proquest.umi.com.libezproxy2.syr.edu/pqdweb?did=1001145951&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=3739&RQT=309&VName=PQD

About Me

I am a student at Syracuse University, taking IST611, Information Technologies in Educational Organizations. I have an MLS from the University of Alabama and am pursuing a Certificate of Advanced Studies in School Media at SU. For the first part of this class I will be commenting on and learning about virtual museums.

Currently, I work as a school librarian in Ithaca, New York. The students at my school all attend special education classes. I'm sure my work will influence my posts greatly. I have never had a blog of my own before and have found this process both interesting and frustrating. I am pretty sure that I have already posted an introduction to this blog but today I find that it is missing! So, here is a new one. Sorry blue teammates who have probably been looking for something to comment on and found nothing. I will briefly tell you more of my struggles with blogger in future posts.

virtual museums

Virtual museums are basically web representations of museums. They can cover any and all subjects just as regular museums do. In fact, it seems that most of the virtual museums out there are a sort of web version of a museum that you can visit on foot. A few virtual museums only exist online, for example the Virtual Museum of Computing, http://vmoc.museophile.com/. Some virtual museums have a corresponding real location but have some content that only exists online, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art http://www.sfmoma.org/. Check out e-space “created to explore new art forms that exist only on the web.”

It appears that virtual museums are not making much use of web 2.0 technology. I’ll talk more, in my next post, about what I find out in this area. In my personal experience virtual museums have been very helpful in allowing school children to view documents or artifacts first hand and use this material in their research. One nice virtual museums that I’ve used recently for this purpose is The Titanic Historical Society, http://www.titanic1.org/.

test

This post is just a test to find out if this will really work. Will it?