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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
These areas of expertise are not within most curators’ job descriptions and they
don’t need to be. They simply need to understand the potential of the wiki as a tool,
they don’t need to know how to actually build one themselves. Maybe what that
curator needs is support from someone who has the skills to build one, who they can
work with to make sure that the wiki is the right tool for the job and answers a real
need?
This kind of collaborative working and skill sharing, within a practical context, is
fundamental to the successful adoption and implementation of a digital publishing
agenda in the cultural sector. The people working, running and managing our cultural
organizations need to understand it enough so that they can exploit the technology to
their advantage without feeling they have to jump on every new bandwagon that
comes along.
A really nice example of collaborative working and skills development is the
National Museums Liverpool Blog. 7 Here, staff are working together to publish a
blog about their activities. They are tagging stories, sharing experiences. It is low
tech, low cost, low risk but high impact as the nature of a blog is that it is visible to
search engines because of the way they are built. It is also only a part of their overall
online activities, which also include RSS 8 feeds, online collections, events and a more
formal brochure site. Individually they are all simple but together they create a
sophisticated online offering that gives them a well-optimized Web presence.
Learning how to work with technology in this kind of open, flexible and collaborative
way is something that the cultural sector is going to need to do more of, and soon.
Aside from a growing handful of cultural sector blogs, the Web 2.0 phenomenon
has facilitated millions of people online to share their own personal content – stories,
ideas, rants and trivia. Technorati 9 currently tracks over 57 million weblogs and the
blogosphere continues to double about every five months. But does any cultural
content play a role in these blogs? Do bloggers want access to cultural stuff or are they
busy with other things?
Changing user behaviour on the 24 Hour Museum website
At Culture24 we publish a website called the 24 Hour Museum 10 and we found in the
last three years that we share a lot of traffic with blogs, although to find the touch
7 http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/
8 RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites,
weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever
wants it.
9 http://technorati.com/
10 http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
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