Hello all,
About a year and a half ago I was incredibly inspired by a talk that Koven
Smith, Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, gave at Ignite
Smithsonian. His concept has evolved from "What's the point of the museum
website?" to "the Kinetic museum," and essentially validates our work with
GLAM-Wiki by saying what we always say, "Use external platforms, go where
the people are. [and as one example...] Use Wikipedia."
This year, at MuseumNext Barcelona in May, he was even bolder in his urging
museums to adopt external platforms, and he has an entire portion of his
talk in which he very clearly articulates to museum professionals why they
are pretty much crazy to be re-writing the same content on their
collections databases over and over, when really they should just be using
Wikipedia.
The video is here:
http://vimeo.com/47589803
I'll note that he's a fast-talking-American, so it may be tough for
translations. But here is a transcript of the portion about Wikipedia. It's
truly great content for your "why Wikipedia?" questions of GLAM
professionals. AND it's coming from a GLAM professional (not us), which is
what's so refreshing. Be sure to attribute Koven if you use any of this!
(And let me know if you do; he'll be glad to hear it : ).
Building on this concept of an ongoing evolutionary construction rather
than growing your own content is looking at
communications.
We need to recognize that museums are part of a
content ecosystem now
> rather than the totality of that ecosystem. Developing information
> resources that compete with Wikipedia is insane. Developing information
> resources that compete with other museums is insane-r. There’s no reason
> for us to own content that is not unique to us; all it does is weigh us
> down and prevent us from moving faster.
So instead of positioning ourselves as an alternative resource to those
> information resources that already exist we have to learn how to use them
> to our advantage. I can’t imagine that if museums didn’t already exist,
> that we would initiate them by saying, “we’re going to be a competing
> information resource to Wikipedia, but we’ll be *way* better because
> we’ve got the power of scholarship behind us.” That ship has sailed.
> Wikipedia is more important as an information resource than any other
> single institution. We need to accept that and figure out how to work with
> it.
Wikipedia and resources like it are going to adapt to cultural shifts and
> interpretation way faster than you are and without you having to expend
> those resources. So instead of developing a competing artist biography,
> just use Wikipedia’s. That way when an artist dies or changes their working
> location, it’s no longer a “somebody has to change that information in the
> object record” problem. It’s already been done for you by the Wikipedia
> community. And now you don’t have to change anything.
This is one of the reasons why I like the Brooklyn Museum’s WikiLink
> project, recognizing that as a fact. It’s a resource that’s out there, it
> allows us to get in very deep with content, without actually having to own
> all of that process from end to end.
--
Lori Phillips
Digital Marketing Content Coordinator
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
703.489.6036 |
http://loribyrdphillips.com/