5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

3.6 Towards the ‘channel model’
Previously 211
A museum’s collection is presented
on the museums’ respective
website
Objects on a museum’s website
correspond to objects in the
respective museum’s collection
Emerging
Museums use various channels of
distribution e.g. YouTube, Flickr,
iTunes
‘The museum as Producer’
Museums go far beyond the
presentation of the collection, and
produce new types programmes for
those new types of distribution
channels.
Figure 9 Towards the ‘channel model of a website’
Another important development that one can observe in more recent times, and
particularly with the rise of social networking sites, is that museums are
beginning to use a variety of different online platforms to distribute content.
Until very recently, as indicated in Figure 8, the usual approach to seeking
objects online from, e.g. the National Gallery London, was to ‘go’ to the website
of the National Gallery. When one wanted to learn about the Tate’s collection
one ‘went’ on Tate Online. With the rise of social networking sites, such as
YouTube and Flickr, this logic is changing.
The Tate Gallery, for instance, published a number of videos in conjunction with
their Gilbert & George exhibition at Tate Modern. One could access some of
those videos on Tate Online, another in form of a podcast through iTunes, and
again others were made available through YouTube.
211 With ‘previously’ the approximately ten years after the earliest museum websites in the mid
1990s are meant. With ‘emerging’ those museum websites are meant, which developed since then
and which incorporated services that are related to the Web 2.0.
111