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