Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Notes on library conference

Jennifer Howard, Switch-Tasking and Twittering Into the Future at Library and Museum Meeting, Wired Campus, March 2, 2009. Notes on the WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital Age (Washington, D.C., February 26-27, 2009).

... [Participants] seemed to agree with Michael Edson, director of digital media strategy at the Smithsonian Institution, who said in a presentation that “the future of knowledge creation is about putting it out there and building it collaboratively.” That’s how “tomorrow’s scholars” will operate, he said. ...

Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, told a story about how social networking can benefit a cultural institution. The museum posted some images from its collection on The Commons, a space on the photo-sharing site Flickr dedicated to public photo collections. Not much happened at first, she said, and the museum was about to abandon the experiment until a group of devoted Flickr users began to make use of the material. One was so taken by the museum’s photos of the 1893 Chicago Exposition that he started adding tags to identify different buildings. Like a good curator or archivist, he even provided sources. “Now we see people who have a real investment in these materials looking at them and helping us,” Ms. Bernstein said.

See also our past posts on Flickr Commons.