Museums as soup kitchens for the soul

Published on July 1, 2009 in Research enquiries. 3 Comments

If you think museums as soup kitchens sounds weird, try thinking of them as community hubs. Museums consultant, Elaine Heumann Gurian, has no trouble with visualising either, in fact it was she who developed these concepts. Elaine visited the Powerhouse Museum last week to discuss the changing face of museums with staff.
Elaine challenges the idea of Museums being institutions of passive education and exhibitions. She urges museums to interact with their audiences, by inviting community participation and collaboration in what is displayed. This is already happening online through social media such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, but Elaine suggests that participation go a step further – a face to face engagement with visitors while they are in the museum.
Here, Elaine writes about her ideal, an imaginary place of the near future, the Blue Ocean Museum.

3 Responses to “Museums as soup kitchens for the soul”

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  • Bob Meade
    July 8, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    Thanks for this.

    I had some difficulty following your link to gurian’s piece about her Blue Ocean Museum but was able to make my way there via a google search.

    There are some ideas there I would love to see implemented in the Powerhouse Museum.

    It would be great to be able to take my laptop computer to the musuem and have a conveneient place to sit down with free WiFi internet access so I could look up collection records from the PHM catalogue. The amount of informtion on the display cards adjacent to items in the physical museum is of neccessity brief. Often I want more.

    A useful companion to that would be a public wiki attached to each collection record so that some of the other public/viewer/customer/guest generated information could be added. This would be either in the form of useful internet links, reminiscences, criticism, etc. Some of this may be of low value as she has pointed out – but if it is clearly signposted then people can choose to read it or not, and attach appropriate value. The public can even ascribe an aggregate value to such contributions by an Amazon.com like voting system.

    An aid to both of these things would be an online map of the museum space with boxes to click for different display cases or areas which could then link through to the collection items. This would also help people to locate items online after a visit to the physical museum. At present, if you are trying to find the online record for something seen in the physical museum it can be slightly difficult due to a (my) lack of recall for enough details to key into a search.

    Gurian has got me thinking.

  • Bob Meade
    July 8, 2009 at 3:15 pm

    I’d also add that the cost in space, resources, IT infrastructure, and people is not inconsiderable.

    Who pays? What’s the value? All these qeustions …

  • Bob Meade
    July 8, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    p.s.

    It is pretty hard to find your blog location from the PHM website or even as a sidebar blogroll link from your other PHM blogs.

    For example no link to this blog here that I can see:

    http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/online/

    Get them to show you some link lovin’

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