The story Dan tells about his conversation with Brent Glass (director of the National Museum of American History, where I work) is instructive. He’s right that the social/intergenerational element of museumgoing is important and helps visitors engage with the material. Fortunately there are an increasing number of good tools out there to facilitate social learning online. What is left unsaid, however, is the fact that when you overhear groups of museum visitors discussing the exhibits, the amount of misinformation being passed around is pretty staggering. It’s almost a sport around here to share the latest funny thing heard on the floor. (At one time near my office there was a glass crystal reproduction of the Capitol – a sort of strange object, actually, but popular – and if I had a nickel for every time a parent pulled their kids over to take a look at the glass “White House,” I could retire early.)

I say this not to disparage our visitors, but just to underscore my firm agreement with the point some of you made that, while museums can certainly welcome and make room for contributions from anyone (after all, most museums conceive of their collections as “belonging” to the constitutents they serve, and in the Smithsonian’s case it’s almost literally true), I do think it’s pretty important to make clear who/what are the sources of information that appears in connection with our name. We also have an obligation to continue to use our expertise to provide the best quality of information that we can to hopefully inform these discussions. And so far, feedback from our audience indicates that these things are important to them as well. So while the Postal Museum folks may not have anything to lose by adding functionality to their Arago program that welcomes feedback from anyone with an interest in stamps, I also think it’s appropriate for them to call out content from contributors who have proved their creds as well as clearly indicate what is the work of museum staff.

We have experimented with this a bit on our own site – for example, providing a clearly-marked space on our online collection records for visitor comments (see for example http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=22). We’ve collected some pretty interesting feedback, which we publish without any implied endorsement. Sometimes responses are posted (see http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=193). We are also opening up a conversation on our blog to engage our audience in the larger philosophical issues about the role of museums in the 2.0 age (see http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu/osaycanyousee/2009/03/the-future-of-digital-history.html) I invite you to join our conversation there!

as background, can i point you to one small part of the puzzle: there are over 1,300+ papers on museums and the web and museum interactive technology — representing discussions from 1991 on — freely available online from http://conference.archimuse.com/researchForum

the papers from Museums and the Web 1997 include one by Peter Walsh that should be required reading: “The Web and the Unassailable Voice” http://www.archimuse.com/mw97/speak/walsh.htm it took on the questions of authority and authenticity over a dozen years ago.

we’ll also have all the papers that will be presented at Museums and the Web 2009 on-line before the meeting: since we believe strongly that conferences are about conversations, not about reading papers. maybe you could join us? see http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/ for details.

/jt

Also, not to open up an affirmative action debate on the Digital Campus, but I believe this is the first time you’ve had a woman on your show? And it’s one of the few shows when you’ve focused on the museum world specifically? I can’t think of an episode that focused more on the library world, or an episode that included the voice of a librarian. I think as you continue this show and find yourself returning to issues that have come up before, it will be important to make sure to include new voices.

I have a full time job in Canada entirely funded by our equivalent arts research funding body. It’s kept me contributing to the economy and routinely leads to research finds that are freely distributed to everyone and anyone.

However, that funding is only accessible to professors and the jobs from the funding can only be created by professors. My experience with arts and humanities professors is that they generally consider themselves researchers first and educators second. I’ve met very few who would consider themselves small business operators, even though they may employ several people to do research or administration.

Until they start thinking of their research as a small business, and a potential to provide jobs, the stigma that arts funding is not an economic stimulus will endure.

This comment is already epic, so I won’t go into the massive budget and time constraints that seem to be the real impediment, in my experience, to doing all these things everyone wants done.

Wikipedia: FlaggedRevs is the name of the MediaWiki plugin which does all of this. It can be used for good or for bad. I’m an admin on Wikipedia and we’ve been discussing this for a while. The current proposal is to have the default version be the “sighted” one rather than the current version. That’s a bad idea in my opinion. What FlaggedRevs needs to be used for is to mark featured and good articles to make sure their quality doesn’t deteriorate. The current version should always be default (unless you change that in your account) but it should give you the option of seeing the checked version… and not just checked for vandalism but community agreed upon standards in general so that you will know the level of an article (Featured, Class A, Good, Class B, Start, Stub). This should be used to make sure article quality doesn’t deteriorate (which is often a problem on more obscure subjects).