FOAM – Friend of a Museum
I was reading a DLib article about the Asset Actions Experiment that was conducted here at the University of Illinois with several other CIC members (it was actually going on a few steps from my old desk.). To enable annotations of images, they lifted the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) image schema.
Several museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum have created MySpace pages, Picture Australia and Brooklyn have leveraged and I’m a member of the Spurlock Museum‘s Facebook group.
A variety of web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. or popular blogs such BoingBoing make it easy for me to associate myself with them (if I choose). Either they provide an easy-to-use service, or give me the code to put a chicklette on my site.
So how many Museums offer people the opportunity to affiliate themselves with the museum online? e.g. here’s a quick piece of code that lets you post the museums calendar on your site, or an authorized image. Museums already have “friends” groups, what if I could declare my friendship to a museum online? Would people take the bait? Would I like the friends I found online?
What could my friends network tell me that I didn’t already know? How else might museums put themselves in the middle of interesting social networks?
March 16th, 2007 07:30
You ask a great question. Seems as if many people are doing lots of things with museum-related content and objects on social-networking sites. Social-networking takes time, and I wonder if that, combined with general fear of losing control of content, makes museums afraid to participate in online communities like this.
I fooled around a little with flickr and my space to see who is represented.
This is a good photo of a removed object: http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sheila/blog/2007/02/26/the-removed-object/
But also on My Space, have you noticed that museums must have genders? http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sheila/blog/2007/01/11/gendered-museums-on-my-space/
March 20th, 2007 15:04
I’m always having to remind myself just how far out on the edge of the curve I am. I think museums, esp. smaller museums will be discovering spaces like Flickr, etc. as good promotional tools. (the topic just came up today on MCN-L). Some of the bigger places like the Getty seem to have turned a corner and people like Ken Hamma are now pushing the idea that museums need to get out into the world, to let their images roam free.
Interesting point about museums being gendered. I have a feeling this is more a weakness of MySpace, but I will be interested to know whether it’s based on something other than the gender of the person who created the profile (and wouldn’t that be an interesing committee meeting…). For example here at GSLIS, our profile is female because we were established by Katherine Sharp.