Blobgects: Digital museum catalogs and diverse user communities

Abstract

This article presents an exploratory study of "Blobgects," an experimental interface for an online museum catalog that enables social tagging and blogging activity around a set of cultural heritage objects held by a preeminent museum of anthropology and archaeology. This study attempts to understand not just whether social tagging and commenting about these objects is useful but rather whose tags and voices matter in presenting different "expert" perspectives around digital museum objects. Based on an empirical comparison between two different user groups (Canadian Inuit highschool students and museum studies students in the United States), we found that merely adding the ability to tag and comment to the museum's catalog does not sufficiently allow users to learn about or engage with the objects represented by catalog entries. Rather, the specialist language of the catalog provides too little contextualization for users to enter into the sort of dialog that proponents of Web 2.0 technologies promise. Overall, we propose a more nuanced application ofWeb 2.0 technologies within museums-one which provides a contextual basis that gives users a starting point for engagement and permits users to make sense of objects in relation to their own needs, uses, and understandings.

A Stakeholder Perspective on Heritage Branding and Digital Communication

“…So the question arises of how much of the traditional functions of intermediation between a site or an exhibition, on the one hand, and the visitor, on the other, are museums willing or capable to authorize and delegate. There is a clear distinction with the controlled environment of the museum itself, where digital advances occur in a sort of closed circuit, either in service providing or content management, even if the collections are publicly accessible through a website (Bertacchini & Morando, 2013;Srinivasan, Boast, Becvar, & Furner, 2009;Yeh, Chang, & Oyang, 2000).…”

Digital heritage in a Melanesian context: authenticity, integrity and ancestrality from the other side of the digital divide

“…These two digital heritage projects emphasise how communi ties located in dispersed areas and living apart from museum collections are actively engaging with digital technologies as a means to bring themselves -through remote access -in contact with cultural heritage and help reinvigorate their cultural identi ties. It demonstrates how indigenous communities are utilising digital heritage technologies as a means to support cultural self-representation or to document their own culture (Srinivasan et al 2009).…”

Digitizing migration heritage: A case study of a minority museum

“…The question of how digital technologies change museums' role as knowledge environments are widely discussed within museum studies (see, e.g., Cameron & Robinson, 2007;Flinn, 2010;Srinivasan, Boast, Becvar & Furner, 2009). The modernist paradigm that insists on museum staff's interpretative authority is challenged by a poststructuralist notion of each item in the collection having "a multiplicity of meanings and understandings attached to it" (Flinn, 2010, p. 47).…”

“…Multiple voices have increasingly been incorporated in both offand on-line museum exhibitions and within recent years methods of using social web software to let users contribute to museum catalogs have been developed. Ramesh Srinivasan et al (2009) have experimented with incorporating social software into an ethnographic catalogue of Inuit objects. They discuss how social software such as tagging, blogging, and bookmarking can be used to make room for the interpretations of source communities and thereby make engagement with the database more relevant to other users.…”