cultural institutions

Despite the proliferation of web-based news and information services, there remains a lack of online destinations from which to obtain reliable and authoritative cultural knowledge. In many countries, such knowledge is provided by cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. Recent discussion suggests that social media – including blogs, wikis and digital stories – may provide a creative solution to the ongoing interaction between cultural institutions and communities of interest.

Major museums worldwide are starting to use social media such as blogs, podcasts and online video to encourage users to participate in their programs. Social media are variously described as "online technologies and practices used to share opinions, insights, perspectives", "software-supported social networking" (Chan) and "many-to-many communication supported by web technology"(Watkins and Russo). This article argues that the social media space can be considered in terms of its effect on participation, communication and visitor incentive.

Burgess J. ‘Remediating Vernacular Creativity: Digital Story Telling, First Person’ International Digital Storytelling Conference, Melbourne, February 2006.

Russo, A. ‘Creating and maintaining communities of interest in the museum’. Museums Australia Conference, Brisbane, May 2006.

Russo, A. and Watkins, J. ‘New Literacy, New Audiences’. Museums Australia Conference, Brisbane, May 2006.

Watkins, J. and Chan, S. ‘New Literacy, New Audiences’, presentation to Australian Museum, May 2006.

Pham B. and Smith, R., ‘Metadata Augmentation for Semantic- and Context-based Retrieval of Digital Cultural Objects’, DICTA 2007 – Conference on Digital Image Computing Techniques and Applications, Adelaide, 3-5 December 2007.

Smith, R., Pham, B. and Choudhury, S., ‘A Digital Artworks Expression Language (DAEL)’, 11th IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 2007.