blogging, museum and knowledge politics, museum studies
Online spaces that escape the digital wall of the offical museum website
Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”.
Currently Manchester Museum staffers run seven: Egypt at the Manchester Museum, Lindon Man blog, Myths about Race, Our City blog, En-quire blog, Palaeomanchester and Frog blog. More might come.
As Kostas points out these are not part of the museum’s official website, but individual blogs, hosted on different platforms. Vice versa, visitors to the official website are invited to visit the staff blogs. In Kostas’ words, they open
‘new spaces’ where the Museum takes place; online spaces that escape the ‘digital walls’ of the official website of the Museum.
Kostas’ comment relates to the question about the relation between individual blogs and institutional communication that I raised in an earlier criticism of Batts, Anthis, and Smith’s paper on bridging the gap between blogs and academia. In other words, the issue here is not ‘blogs vs. website’. It’s not a question of platform. What’s at stake is individual vs. institutional online presence.
Would be interesting to see how other museums have solved the balance. For example, the staff at the National Museum of Health and Medicine run a joint private blog (A Repository for Bottled Monsters) which, as far as I can see, isn’t acknowledged on the museum’s official website. And here at Medical Museion we are currently runnng two joint staff blogs: this one in English and Museionblog in Danish, but maybe some staff members wish to start on their own — in that case I guess we would link to these from the official website.
04 Oct 2008 Thomas
Thomas, thanks for this. My point about museum blogs being hosted outside the main museum website aimed to highlight how museums go beyond their ‘traditional digital walls’ and infiltrate other web spaces creating in a way ‘museum colonies’ on the Web (although ‘colonies’ may not be the most appropriate word! I am giving a paper about this on this conference: http://www.iosa.it/www/content/digital-heritage-new-knowledge-environment-shared-spaces-open-paths-cultural-content). In this way, museums not only find new channels of dissemination, but also create new entry points to the museums themselves.
In this context, I’d say the institutional presence is usually evident. And, with regards to the Manchester Museum blogs, the statement on the museum’s website ‘visit our blogs’ etc is a clear indication that the link from the museum to the blogs is much more than just a hyperlink. That said, I assume if one arrives to the Manchester Museum blogs from elsewhere, one may have a different perception of them.
I think the language used on a blog, the content of the posts, the way authors present themselves, whether the blog is part of the website or not, whether the blog links to the website or whether the museum website links to the blog, if the author(s) is eponymous or not, all these contribute to the issue of individual/institutional presence.