Meeting targets and parallel universes
Meetings are a regular feature of museum life - just like everywhere else, really. I wonder if we should set targets for numbers of meeting and attendees? Today I attended the regular joint meeting with Library Staff at the grandly-titled Library and Museums HQ. This is regular in the sense that we meet twice a year, largely to catch up on what we’ve all been doing and are planning to do, but sometimes to latch on to projects where we (or they) can make a contribution. On occasion it might seem like mere listing of stuff, but sometimes you hear things that you want to know more about.
I’ve been very taken with the potential of ICT and in particular with Web 2.0 (that wonderful marketing term). Apparently over in Alternate Earth (the one with the evil Captain Kirk) so have libraries, as they have conferences about Library 2.0 (kind of like Museum 2.0 with added books). It’s made me wonder whether, rather than forging off on our own, we might more usefully get together with the librarians to work on some of the ideas (like the Bebo site and the flickr photostream). After all, in doing this sort of thing the major cost isn’t the technical equipment or the applications, it’s people to actually do the work of creating and updating the content. So now I’m waiting for list of urls from Andy so I can see what libraries around the world have been up to.
The fact that libraries and museums are so often moving along parallel tracks in this way means that we spend a lot of time duplicating effort and relearning lessons that others elsewhere have already learned, making mistakes that others have made and developing applications (or more usually variants of existing applications and services) that have already been developed and are freely-available elsewhere, if only we knew about it. We end up wasting time working out the how to do it, when we should be concentrating on what goes in it. And as for what’s going on over in the Education Universe… How on Earth can we ever keep up with it all.
October 18th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Parallel universes indeed. Here at John Muir’s Birthplace just yesterday I was musing on whether we might learn from or share expexperiences with Scotland’s other, similar institutions - Carnegie, Burns, Miller, Livingston and more. Are there concerns we share? Things we do the same, or differently, comparions or differences with the wider museums sector? Lots more to ponder probably….