Smithsonian 2.0

Moving beyond us vs. them

Recently one of our curators at NMAH came to me to discuss the aftermath of the Smithsonian 2.0 conference.  “You have an image problem,” he told me.  According to him, the buzz among his colleagues is that the conference was mostly a dump on curatorial authority, despite my protestations to the contrary.

Rethinking the role of credentialed expertise in a “crowdsourced” Web 2.0 world was certainly one of the subtexts of the weekend, and indeed of conversations in the larger online museum community.  And yes, some questioned the monopoly that credentialed experts have traditionally enjoyed over interpretation and allowed uses of our collections.  Dan Cohen and his crew over at the Center for History and New Media produced an excellent podcast on the subject as a follow-up to the conference that is well worth listening to for an informed outsider’s perspective on this topic.  On the podcast, Tom Scheinfeldt provides some useful historical context, reminding us that the question of who gets to interpret museum collections is as old as museums themselves, and periodically gets raised as museum practices change and evolve.

This is an area that really interests me.  I am convinced that as we continue to dialogue as a museum community, and collaboratively examine and experiment with new technologies to see how they might be of benefit, we will make progress toward solutions that threaten no one and benefit everyone.  Our NMAH blog is a good example of this.  When we started it last summer, it had a handful of advocates and contributors and many skeptics.  Now, it is really starting to blossom as more staff members come on board and use it to share their work and interact with the public.  Of course we hoped it would be an instant success, but in this instant-everything world, sometimes good old-fashioned persistence pays off (and Obama agrees with me on this...).

Speaking of sharing our work on the blog, I have started an effort to carry this very conversation to our blog readers and solicit their input on the role of the digital museum.  In response to an embedded survey about museums and trust, over 75% of our unscientific sample were of the opinion that museums would become even more important as trusted sources of online information (curators, take heart!).  Only 9% felt that museums’ role would diminish.  We will be using these responses to continue the conversation – please join us and follow along!

In addition, for anyone who will be at the AAM meeting in Philadelphia, I will be conducting an Idea Lounge discussion on the topic “Digitizing Museum Expertise.”  As museums continue to produce increasing amounts of digital data, how can we similarly expose our wealth of human talent by facilitating creative connections and/or collaborations between museum experts and online audiences?  Look for it on Sat., May 2 at 8 a.m.

Gorilla Marketing

This video—a marketing piece for the Grapes with Apes event at the National Zoo (tickets still available!)—brought to mind some advice we got from the experts invited to the Smithsonian 2.0 event in January.

They quipped that we could do more good distributing 100 video cameras to boots-on-the-ground staff than we could do with 100-times the money spent on consultants and systems. This is not to say that consultants and systems are unimportant, but the assembled digerati were amazed by the experts and collections they encountered here and were shocked that we weren't making more of each accessible.

The Grapes with Apes video was produced on a cheapo Cannon miniDV and iMovie by the Zoo's Rachel Meskin Jordan Watts. Rachel said "Just a little bit of creativity goes a long way."

Courage to go Open Content

Two recent stories may help give the Smithsonian courage to pursue an open-content strategy.

Item #1, MIT faculty votes for open publishing

Last week, MIT's faculty voted unanimously to mandate open access distribution of their scholarly articles. Other universities have open access policies within individual departments (Harvard, Stanford, and Boston University), but this is institution-wide. Their Office of the Provost will have authority and governance over the systems and business processes, in consultation with something called the Faculty Committee on the Library System. The policy allows faculty to opt-out on a publication-by-publication basis by submitting a request and justification to an as-yet defined review process.

MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal is quoted as saying that the vote is "a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas."

MIT's Web site says that "MIT's policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the United States."

I think it's especially encouraging that the faculty chose to go this direction since they do so from a position of experience - -  the remarkable MIT Open Courseware project.

More from Open Access News, and a very thoughtful/informative story on MIT's site.

Item #2, U.S. Representative Mike Honda (D-San Jose) blogs on open content and crowdsourcing

Last week, U.S. Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose) wrote a guest article on the O'Reilly Radar Blog,

"How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation."

He continues,

"Websites like [stimuluswatch.org] only become possible when government data is re-purposed to enable public participation. Until more government databases become available, however, the full potential of web 2.0 technologies will remain unfulfilled. A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met."