A comment on Smithsonian Blogs

The Smithsonian blogs. Eye Level is perhaps the best known of the blogs, and possibly the oldest. I've always found Office of Exhibits Central most interesting, even though posts are rare. And most of the others, I've not looked at.

A funny thing happened recently; I find myself on the press release email list for Smithsonian web based initiatives. This makes some sense; after all, here I am blogging about them. The most recent release is an announcement for The Bigger Picture blog, "which presents an inside look at the Smithsonian’s photography collections and invites audiences to engage in an online discussion about photography’s powerful impact on our world." So I hop on over to check it out. I am immediately annoyed by the layout. There's a small photo and a short paragraph before a jump, or a cut, or whatever you prefer to call the link which hides most of the content. This bugs me. I don't find it good for browsing; I don't want to click all those links, and then go back and clink more links.

As with the other Smithsonian blogs, I find the information and images presented on the blog to be intriguing. But I still feel like the real human voice is being hidden behind layers of editing. I could be wrong; maybe the Smithsonian is relaxing their approval structures, and I just prefer the hyper-personal voice for a blog (or something between the institutionally edited and the OMG LULZ!!!1!! voices, anyway). But it just feels disingenuous. [Edited to Add: Catherine Shteynberg sets me straight in the comments: Authors are not edited! Way to go, Smithsonian. I recall seeing a presentation about a different .si blog which showed a very layered process for creating content and tends to color my thinking about the way things are done. Then again, my biases are at least two years out of date.] I get the same sense looking at the comments; it almost feels like the various authors of the blog are required to post comments on the other posts. Only a few comments struck me as coming from individuals outside the project. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just strikes me funny when I think of blogs as a way to engage community and stakeholders outside the institution.

So, while I commend the Smithsonian for pursuing these avenues to disseminate information which might otherwise not be shared with a potentially large audience, I still have my misgivings about the way it's being presented. Oh. And here's a link to the press release: Click me.

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Another announcement! and organizational musings

Another one of those posts that a better blogger would split into two separate posts.

Lots of announcements here lately!

I just wanted to let y'all know that I've been invited, and have accepted, to become a contributer to Musematic. Glad to be joining the ranks!

What does this make? That's four and one half blogs! (Museumatic being a half, since it's not all me, all the time.) Well, last night I dropped it down to three and a half, letting go of my languishing knitting blog in favor of Ravelry.


Clicky for bigger.

Ravelry is sort of like LibraryThing for knitters and crocheters. It's still in beta, so you can't fully poke around. I'm kind of fascinated by these organizational tools for the masses. Ravelry allows me to catalog my yarn, my needles, my projects, my books, just about everything, in a fairly extensive way. In some respects, it's like PastPerfect with a social networking side of things.

Now there's an idea. What would a social networked collections management system look like? Would it be a mating of database with listserv? Would there be forums for the small museum? For the curator/registrar? For the collections manager/director? For the dedicated volunteer? ..... Would anyone use it?

It's kind of fun to think about. What if you could comment on other folks collections? As a curatorial tool, it could be very powerful. But realistically, there's just so much sensitive information in these kinds of databases, that it could become difficult to maintain it separately. Not to mention, there's so much going down in the world of caring for collections that the idea of social networking is almost laughable. Although, such a thing would have the potential to envelop the three types of social media communities proposed by the Radical blog in a recent post. Hmmmmm.......

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Mmmm metablogging

So if I blog erin82's metablogging, am I a metametablogger?

erin82 of Henry Art Gallery's HankBlog talks about voice, audience, and the messiness of blogging. Maybe the messiness comment is my own.

Maybe it's the archaeologist in me (I have a degree in that too) but I love how hands on and dirty (not in that way) blogging can be. The unrefined nature of what I conceive of blogs to be. Interesting situations can arise from this, as erin82 points out, but when blogs are run with a heavy hand (cougheye levelcough), I find they begin to lose their appeal.

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I has thesis!

I defended my thesis on Friday....




And I passed. I can, indeed, has thesis. (Click here if you do not get it. Well, that might not help, but maybe you'll get the idea.)

I wasn't given any revisions, just a few grammatical errors were pointed out. It was excellent. What was really gratifying to see is that it sparked discussion. The Q&A went on for nearly as long as my talk. I got really interesting questions on the topics of branding/institutional voice, calling blogs by other names (virtual exhibits?), and policy issues. There seemed to be a lot of concern about control.

In my opinion, things are much more interesting when you relinquish control. Some of the comment threads on Buzz Blog are very cool - especially when you can feel that school groups are really getting into it from the kiosks. And I don't know what sort of institutional control is exerted over the Exploratorium Explainers, but they voices in the posts are so genuine and spontaneous - they sounds like people just writing a blog. WHICH IS WHAT A BLOG SHOULD BE. Often I feel some blogs are written far too much in the style of an article; it's what keeps me from fully embracing the Burke Museum Blog (sorry Rebecca).

But maybe different things appeal to different people.

The point of this post was to let you know that I don't have my document for you now, but I should have it soon. I know you're waiting on pins and needles. Maybe tomorrow. :)

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