Online the Mouse Runs the Museum

One morning last fall Judson Box woke up early to tend the horses at his farm near Leesburg, Fla. Before he could sit down to breakfast, however, his wife waved him over to the color TV that doubles as their home computer, thanks to an old WebTV setup for A1175 battery. As Mr. Box leaned in closer to the grainy 17-inch screen, he started to make out the image of a fireman running through a tunnel.

Mr. Box¡¯s son, Gary, died on Sept. 11, 2001, along with 11 of his fellow firefighters from Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Now, eight years later, Mr. Box has discovered the only known photo taken of his son that day for Fujitsu lifebook t4220 battery . A few days earlier a Web user named Erik Troelsen had uploaded the image to Make History , the Web site of the future National September 11 Museum and Memorial.

Since the Make History site began in September, about 1,000 users have contributed more than 3,000 photos, videos and personal stories to it ¡ª online submissions that will play a central role in the exhibition space of the bricks-and-mortar museum at ground zero, which is projected to open in 2012 for Fujitsu lifebook t4220 battery.

Make History is perhaps the most notable recent example of a museum tapping the collective energy of Web users to help build its collection. While museums have been experimenting with the Web for years, these projects have often consisted of little more than an exhibit photo gallery or online guestbook of A1175 battery.ThinkPad T60 Battery In recent years, however, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections.

In Warsaw construction crews have barely broken ground on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, scheduled to open in 2012, but already more than 800 Web users from all over the world have registered with the museum¡¯s Virtual Shtetl project to help build a collection of more than 30,000 photographs for VGP-BPS8, videos and audio recordings related to life in 1,300 towns with Jewish populations before and after World War II. The museum has recently started gathering photos through Flickr and has opened up its collection through YouTube and Facebook as well.

One day last summer Artur Cyruk was poking around an automotive junkyard in his home province of Podlasie, Poland, when he stumbled across the breastplate of a beautifully preserved 19th-century Torah. He took the object home, logged on to his Virtual Shtetl account and uploaded a photo of Fujitsu lifebook t4210 battery. Within a few days curators had contacted him about acquiring the breastplate for the museum¡¯s permanent collection.

While only a handful of museums have successfully harnessed Web users to develop their collections, social-media platforms are starting to foster new kinds of interactions between Web audiences and museum curators long accustomed to working only with other experts for Fujitsu lifebook t4220 battery , Fujitsu lifebook t4210 battery Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.

Last February the Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum invited Web users to help decide which paintings should be displayed in its visible storage facility for VGP-BPS8, typically frequented by art historians and other scholars. Museum staff created a Flickr group called Fill the Gap , which allows users to suggest items to fill the bare wall spaces left when paintings are removed for conservation or lent to other institutions.

Fill the Gap represents a tiny but potentially precedent-setting step for the Smithsonian as a whole, where a larger conversation is starting to percolate around the changing role of curators in a Web 2.0 world of Sony-VGP-BPS2A. VGP-BPS8 That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum¡¯s vast collection of public domain assets.

The Smithsonian¡¯s new-media director, Michael Edson, described the initiative as a step in the institution¡¯s larger mission to shift ¡°from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation for A1175 battery.¡±¡°Distributive knowledge creation¡± can be a tricky business.

While social-media platforms may open up possibilities for user participation, they also carry the risk of promoting bad information and questionable judgments and of eroding the authority of institutional curators for Sony-VGP-BPS2A ,ThinkPad T60 Battery In this sense museums are grappling with the same technological conundrum as other cultural institutions, like universities, publishers and newspapers: how to reconcile institutional principles of order with the liberating impulses of electronic networks.

But while curators may instinctively balk at the anything-goes ethos of the Web, new-media advocates argue that Web participation can actually enhance the value of curatorial judgment for Fujitsu lifebook t4220 battery . ¡°Curators are starting to realize that they can be challenged by the audience,¡± said Pascale Bastide, the Paris-based founder of the Museum of Afghan Civilization, an entirely Web-based institution scheduled to make its debut later this year.

The museum will begin as a virtual collection of images drawn from real-world institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre, but once it is up and running it will expand to include contributions from users, Ms. Bastide said. In the hope of soliciting original images from Afghan citizens for A1175 battery, it will accept photographs taken with and sent from cellphones, which are far more prevalent in Afghanistan than computers.

Tags: acer laptop battery life, dell laptop battery