Hi everyone: For about 8 years now, I've had a bit of an agenda to see if we can move past relatively passive online catalogs and into enriching interpretive materials about the collections. I've been thinking a lot lately about possible methods for this, now that so many of us have our collections online, either on our websites or through social media. In my mind, there are four populations that have a hand in providing interpretive materials about individual collection items:
Curators Museum educators External experts (researchers, teachers) General public (especially people with personal stories) The first two generally have the task of responding to the latter two. I'm particularly interested to know if, by putting our collections out there, how much of an increase in research requests museums have received, and how that impacts the staff. Does this affect further online interpretation efforts? So I wanted to query the lazywebs and punt it out to you all to see if you're familiar with any studies around this topic. The only two I've found thus far (admittedly, just a surface search) is Erika Dicker's MW 2010 paper, "The Impact of Blogs and Other Social Media on the Life of a Curator" and Nancy Proctor's "The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?" Thanks! ~Perian
