museumsandtheweb.com - website

The new website of the Musée du Louvre

Alfandari — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:28:01 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

Louvre

Keywords:

Web

Keywords:

real and virtual practices

Keywords:

territory

Keywords:

website

Abstract:

The musée du Louvre launched a new version of its web site in November 2011. With more than 3000 pages, www.louvre.fr gathers the most comprehensive information available on the palace and its works. The role of this new site is to make the museum accessible in every sense of the term, both physically and intellectually; at the same time it aims to be one of the most important links between the Louvre and its audience.
This new version offers a information architecture in order to, in particular, better serve the "novice" visitor who might be a little lost face in the size of the museum and its collections. The sitemap has been simplified and flattened, the masterpieces of the collections are brought to the foreground, the tools to help with preparation for the visit (practical information, maps, courses, reservations and online ticket purchasing…) are numerous and accessible with a single click.

The site will continue to offer many rich resources to the visitor who wishes to deepen his knowledge in the field of the history of art as well. A great dictionary of the history of art, a module for the identification of recurring characters and scenes (mythology, religion, ancient Egypt etc. ), will be added to the existing collections (such as "a closer look"). Because the site is also intended to accompany the teaching of the arts at school, modules specifically intended for student use will also be offered online, including a module for the analysis of three-dimensional works to understand composition, different techniques, the importance of format, of color, light etc.

RSS, sharing, recommendations, and an easy-to-navigate calendar are also available for most regular visitors to the site and the Museum. Visually, the site highlights more photos and videos, which helps us to give a much more immediate view of our programming. Video is also a way to spread content virally on the web. Louvre.fr indeed is not an isolated territory but one element in a much broader system integrating networks, blogs, community platforms and more.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations III

Site:

http://louvre.fr

Authors:

Agnès Alfandari

Bridging the Physical and Virtual Experiences: Two Approaches by the Museum of Inuit Art

aprocida — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:34:04 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Bridging the Physical and Virtual Experiences: Two Approaches by the Museum of Inuit Art

Keywords:

digital mobile museum tour

Keywords:

website

Keywords:

QR codes

Keywords:

Google Art Project

Keywords:

virtual tour

Keywords:

audience interaction

Abstract:

The Museum of Inuit Art has been experimenting over the past year with strategies to better connect our varied audiences with the museum’s collections. Many of our visitors are not local members of the community and so pursuing initiatives to share content with them on the web has been a primary goal. In late 2011, MIA is launching two new ways to bridge online content with the physical museum: installing a QR Code interactive tour in the museum’s physical space and also launching an interactive virtual tour of the museum on the web. With the first project, QR Codes will be placed around the museum on specific sculptures and artwork. Using a smartphone, guests can take a picture of a QR Code and be directed to a mobile Wordpress page with additional information, embedded Youtube videos, audio clips and even Google Maps coordinates showing the origin of the piece. The second project will create a Flash-based virtual tour of the museum, so that users online as well as sponsors of the museum can take a “Google StreetView”-like tour through the museum, partially inspired by the Google Art Project. This paper will compare responses to the two projects and comment on lessons learned for small museum entering these arenas.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations II

Authors:

Alysa Procida

Rob Mausser

Preserving Flickr and Other Sites of Interest to Museums

ryand — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:10:00 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Archiving Flickr and Other Websites of Interest to Museums

Keywords:

flickr

Keywords:

digital preservation

Keywords:

preservation

Keywords:

museums

Keywords:

internet

Keywords:

website

Abstract:

The digital turn, whether it be in photography, motion pictures, literature or other persuits, has forever changed the ways and means by which museums collect, interpret and dessiminate objects. Historically, museums have dealt primarily with objects that, in some way, are intuitiviely graspable from observation. Arrowheads are pointy, photographs are plainly seen, and writing read (with varying degrees of difficulty).
Digital information, on the other hand, is many times more difficult to intuitively grasp, and in many cases impossible to intuitively grasp. This has lead to a shifting approach in collection management: collect materials before they are scattered to the hard drives and floppy discs of history. With such a shift in approach, museums must become adept at preserving digital objects and ephemera in their original context, in many cases, a website. We examine one site of particular interest and complexity: Flickr.
Preserving Flickr has long been a popular subject of conversation among Flickr staff, alumni, and the museum community. Various tools and first steps have been taken, but no one to date has addressed the seemingly impossible task of preservation.
The authors of this paper are very familiar with its subject. Aaron Straup Cope is a Flickr alumni, and Ryan Donahue is the Manager of Information Systems at George Eastman House, an early partner institution of the Flickr Commons. Through our own knowledge and consultation with museum professionals, we shall address:

* The expectations of the community, that is to say, our assertions about the quality and characteristics of the information that is needed for preservation, which data is nice to have, and what is unlikely to be particularly important in the future, or even confusing.
* The state of Flickr today: What preservation mechanisms exist, the availability of programatic access to data via the Flickr API, and any ancillary issues pertaining to Flickr as it is today.
* Technical specifications of preserving Flickr: storage size, medium, formats, etc. and the rough costs of archiving when leveraging advances in archival storage, such as in-line block-level de-duplication, embedded metadata and non-relational data stores.
* Formulate a strategy for preservation that may be applied to other such sites of interest, integrating the foundational work of the OAIS model.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Megadata

Authors:

Ryan Donahue

Aaron Cope

One-to-one: supporting artist-visitor dialogue

silviaf — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:40:05 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

One-to-one: supporting artist-visitor dialogue

Keywords:

kiosk

Keywords:

website

Keywords:

dialogue

Keywords:

video

Keywords:

artist

Keywords:

twitter

Abstract:

Artists have been using the Internet since the early days of the Web, but no-one has done anything quite like Chinese artist Ai Weiwei who uses technology, Twitter in particular, as a way of sharing his artistic and political life with people all around the world.

Alongside his Unilever Series installation at Tate Modern, which opens October 12th 2010, the Turbine Hall has also been transformed into a hub of global conversation. Here, next to the artwork, a series of booths have been installed where the artist asks visitors to record a video, either asking him a question or answering one of his questions. These videos are then published on a dedicated website for all to see and to also engage those not able to visit in person. Each week until May 2011, Ai Weiwei is selecting videos to respond to and posting his video or text responses on the website, thus creating a joyful, worldwide dialogue between the artist and the visitors. People outside the museum can also join in the conversation via Twitter. Ai Weiwei will be monitoring and replying to postings with the hashtag #tateaww.

In this paper, we will describe in detail the principles, philosophy and technology behind the One-to-One with the artist project. Recent advances in the technology made it possible to realize the project’s ambitions in under eight weeks. We will also report on the effective usage of the kiosks and website by both the visitors and the artist, the challenges encountered in the development and implementation process, as well as the results of the evaluation that will be carried out in the upcoming months.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

User-Generated Community

Authors:

Silvia Filippini Fantoni

Kirstie Beaven

Ben Rubinstein