In my days as a history student, I dreamed of one day designing exhibits for the Smithsonian. Back then, I’d pictured those exhibits “living” within the hallowed walls of old buildings in Washington, D.C., certainly involving multimedia but confined to a physical place. As I learned today in a very interesting interview on Socially Speaking (the social media focused Internet radio show hosted by Sun Microsystems), technological advances over the past 15 years have really changed what we think of as “exhibits” and made their subjects — whether art, or history, or science — exponentially more accessible.
Lincoln gets modern...
Socially Speaking host Sumaya Kazi interviewed recently Nancy Proctor, head of new media initiatives for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nancy is responsible for bringing the museum’s contents alive to a group much larger than those who can physically walk the halls in Washington, D.C. — a role very much in alignment with the Smithsonian’s mission to further the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” (Note: Sun is a Bite client)
If you’re interested, you can check out a recording of the interview with Nancy Proctor. Here are some highlights through my eyes:
- “Ask Joan of Art,” a free online service through which experts at the Smithsonian answer your questions about American art. Having been around for 16 years, it’s the oldest arts-related service of its kind.
- Proctor’s comments about collaborating with her counterparts in other parts of the Smithsonian for exhibits like the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial. You can text Abe, snap pictures of Lincoln from around your town and add them to the SIConnections/Lincoln in Your Home Town Flickr site, listen to Lincoln-inspired songs on a Lincoln’s iPod MySpace page, or participate in the Artful Abe online scavenger hunt involving outdoor sculptures of Lincoln from around the country. I can only imagine that tools like this make the subject matter a tad more interesting to the average fifth-grader than your average dusty textbook.
- And finally, the question Proctor raised about the term “audience.” She stressed that the Smithsonian American Art Museum thinks about communities rather than audiences, because their goal is not to talk “at” people but rather engage them in a conversation. At Bite, we talk about audience-centric communications but advocate the same approach. Perhaps the phrase “community-centric communications” would better capture the methodology we practice. What do you think?
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Great Post — In regards to the discussion of ‘audience’ vs. ‘community’. There is a long history of trying to define the museum goer as audience, patron, and nowadays community member. To read about that history check out this article.
Peacock, D., & Brownbill, J. (2007, March 31). Audiences, Visitors, Users: Reconceptualising Users of Museum On-line Content and Services. In Museums and the Web 2007 Proceedings. Retrieved October 31, 2007, from http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/peacock/peacock.html” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.archimuse.com Web site: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/peacock/peacock.html
Annotation: This is a somewhat philosophical article where the authors consider the ways in which the museum web site user is conceptualized and the implicit implications of such conceptualizations. The writing team present the different conceptions of museum web site users and explore how those competing conceptions are detrimental and cause frustration within the museum web development community, while the competing conceptions go un-noticed with the terms audience, user and visitor employed often interchangeably. Note this article was not empirically based.
Thanks for passing that along, Erin. In a way, it’s possible to get way too hung up with the semantics, but words do carry connotations that affect the approach we take with communications.
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