UKOLN
Raising Awareness

"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries & Archives

Opportunities For Exploiting Web 2.0

A summary of the discussion groups on oppoertunities for exploting Web 2.0 at the UKOLN workshop on Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web organised on behalf of Renaissance East Midlands on 18th March 2009 is given below.

Note that the original source material for these notes is available on the workshop wiki.

Group 1:

  • Potential of facebook - live events in a museum can link to museum, promotional tool, twitter from a performance in a museum
  • A way to bring in new audiences who do not want to read paper
  • Wikipedia is a useful tool - entries have to be very factual
  • Blogging could be used instead of a newsletter, give the whole museum a voice through a blog, define the purpose of the blog first
  • Wiki can be used to flag cpd opportunities for teachers
  • Flikr and facebook - there may be restraints for schools to use this site
  • Bell foundry - have Flikr site, Blog and use You Tube. Videos of foundry bells could be linked from around the world
  • MLA website - sector facing, considering twitter and Facebook
  • Twitter - responses from a conferences can be sent in order to answer a question
  • Twitter feed can be placed on a blog or Facebook, use for communications or marketing, use to launch a campaign
  • Culture 24 could collect rss and twitter feeds and show regional events
  • Prepare for mobile technology future, add a question to evaluation forms - would you like us to tweet with you

Group 2:

  • Create a wiki page for each museum
  • Create facebook page and use feeds from other websites to populate it
  • Create content in one place such as you website, can be repurposed in other places such as blogs
  • Simple way to update content on the web, no html knowledge required
  • A museum web page can feed information directly to twitter
  • Promote your images but ask another party using your images to link back to your site
  • Provide small images and sell larger images for publication.
  • Allow users to take photos in your museum using mobile phones and put them on social networking sites