logo
EverydayChaos
Everyday Chaos
Too Big to Know
Too Big to Know
Cluetrain 10th Anniversary edition
Cluetrain 10th Anniversary
Everything Is Miscellaneous
Everything Is Miscellaneous
Small Pieces cover
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Cluetrain cover
Cluetrain Manifesto
My face
Speaker info
Who am I? (Blog Disclosure Form) Copy this link as RSS address Atom Feed

March 27, 2009

Long-tail museum

Jeff Gates posts about how the Smithsonian American Art Museum is facing the fact that it’s a long-tail phenomenon:

Our Web statistics showed that the number of visitors to our top ten sections paled when compared with the total number of visitors for all other pages, even though only a few people viewed each page. The challenge: how could we make it easier for our online visitors to find things of interest even if that information is buried deep in our site?

He continues:

Museums are changing. Like many other organizations, our hierarchical structure has historically disseminated information from our experts to our visitors. The envisioned twenty-first-century model, however, is more level. Instead of a one-way presentation, our online visitors are often interested in having a conversation with our curators and content providers. In response, many of us at American Art have been looking for ways to engage our public by designing applications that promote dialogue. By encouraging user-generated content and by distributing our assets beyond our own Web site and out across the Internet, we hope to make our content easier to find. In doing so, we are trying to fulfill our long tail strategy. In order to succeed we will need to approach our jobs differently.

And that’s just the introduction.

Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has expanded on its successful 15.7M views Flickr experiment and is now posting material at iTunes and YouTube.

Among the items Web surfers can expect on iTunes and YouTube are 100-year-old films from Thomas Edison’s studio, book talks with contemporary authors, early industrial films from Westinghouse factories, first-person audio accounts of life in slavery, and inside looks into the library’s holdings, including the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and the contents of President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination.

This is all getting just too cool. Time to put the toys back on shelves behind glass

Nah.

[Tags: smithsonian museums libraries library_of_congress everything_is_miscellaneous long_tail ]

Tweet
Follow me

Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: culture • digital culture • everythingIsMiscellaneous • libraries • museums • smithsonian Date: March 27th, 2009 dw

2 Comments »


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
TL;DR: Share this post freely, but attribute it to me (name (David Weinberger) and link to it), and don't use it commercially without my permission.

Joho the Blog uses WordPress blogging software.
Thank you, WordPress!