Cooper Hewitt’s Pen looked deceptively simple: a physical object visitors could use to collect and interact with museum content. Behind it was a much larger institutional system involving collections data, APIs, gallery design, hardware development, visitor behavior, branding, and years of iteration. These notes from Museums and the Web capture the project’s less glamorous lessons—trade-offs, technical dependencies, cost, failure, and the realization that a successful interactive can touch nearly every part of an institution.
Tag Archives: museums
Since No One Knows Us, We Decided to Social-ize: the National Park Service Northeast Museum Services Center
Staff at the National Park Service Northeast Museum Services Center faced a familiar institutional problem: highly specialized work that mattered, but remained largely invisible to the public. This case study follows their decision to experiment with blogs, Facebook, and Twitter despite limited staff time and internal skepticism. The project reframes social media as a way to explain hidden professional work, connect collections with audiences, and make institutional expertise more understandable and accessible.
Video Netcast: Jennifer Souers Chevraux on making museums relevant in the digital age
Jennifer Souers Chevraux argues that museums can remain relevant by thinking beyond their buildings and cultivating meaningful relationships with audiences through both experience design and new media. This short video introduces her broader approach to engaging a new generation of patrons and reflects an early moment when museums were beginning to treat digital participation not simply as promotion but as part of the visitor relationship itself.
Audio Podcast: Jennifer Souers Chevraux on the role of museums on the social web
Jennifer Souers Chevraux discusses how museums and cultural organizations can use new media to deepen audience relationships rather than simply advertise programs. The conversation considers relevance, participation, experience design, and the changing expectations of a generation increasingly accustomed to interacting with organizations online. Her argument anticipates a broader shift from treating digital media as a communications add-on to seeing it as part of how institutions cultivate communities.
Nina Simon on museum participation and curating a second life in the social space
Museum 2.0 founder Nina Simon argues that the most important lesson of social media for museums is not necessarily the technology itself, but the participatory philosophy behind it. This conversation examines audience involvement, the time required to sustain online engagement, and ways museums can redesign visitor experiences around contribution and interaction even without a digital tool. It captures an early articulation of participation as an institutional practice rather than a social-media campaign.
Preservation Today Netcast – May 2009
The World Digital Library debuts; the Museums and the Web conference addresses the social, cultural and technological issues of heritage online; The National Trust for Historic Preservation is bring back its popular This Place Matters social media campaign; The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is planning a nationwide cemetery preservation summit in Nashville (interview with Jason Church)
Video Netcast: Past Horizons Magazine, Heritage Travel Community, Smithsonian 2.0
This 2009 netcast captures cultural institutions testing a range of participatory digital ideas at once: online archaeology publishing, heritage-travel communities, Facebook fundraising, and the Smithsonian’s effort to imagine a more open and interactive digital future. Seen together, the stories document a moment when “2.0” thinking was moving from experimentation at the margins toward institutional strategy, with public contribution and digital access beginning to reshape expectations.
ICOM president visits Seoul, praises Korean museum system for protecting “intangible” cultural heritage
Alissandra Cummins, President of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), praised the achievement of Korean museums and their protection of intangible cultural heritage. She visited Seoul last week for the editorial and advisory meeting of the International Journal of Intangible Heritage of the ICOM-ICME ― International Committee for Museums of Ethnography ― which took place at the National Folk Museum of Korea.
Armchair tour of museums and Web 2.0
Nina Simon surveys early museum experiments with participation, user-generated content, online listening, and more flexible relationships between institutions and visitors. Her examples demonstrate that “Web 2.0” did not have to mean launching a large technology project; sometimes it meant paying attention to conversations already happening and allowing audiences to contribute meaningfully. The piece is an early field guide to the participatory museum idea that would soon reshape expectations across the sector.
A Date with Eternity: The British Museum
A visit to the British Museum becomes an experiment in coping with the abundance—and absence of context—inside one of the world’s great encyclopedic collections. Rather than attempting to absorb everything, Jeff Guin follows a selective guide and discovers how quickly significance can collapse into overload when objects become detached from story, place, and personal connection. The experience sharpens an idea that would recur throughout Voices: access to objects is not the same thing as meaningful interpretation.