Museum Strategy

Set me Free! (Lass Mich Frei! in German)

 

....This will be the rallying cry for art lovers in Düsseldorf, Germany next May and June.
Düsseldorf has been a very prominent art city since the 17th and 18th century under the influence of Elector Palatine Jan Wellem and through its Academy of fine arts has produced figures as important as Paul Klee, Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter.

At the center of this mix of extremely diverse cultural legacies is the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf which is reopening its collection after two year's renovation. The "MKP" collections gather works from the Middle-Ages to today an on all media so its main emphasis is on richness and variety!

The MKP has used its most prominent characters from the collections to be the heroes of the reopening.They will be displayed throughout the city until the end of June 2011 and will change places each day to surprise visitors and inhabitants in their most familiar places to shop, work, travel and rest.

The MKP has organised a contest to celebrate the occasion; you can post a picture of you with one of the characters when you have found them, and there will be gifts for the best photo at the end of the campaign.You can also post via Tumblr.

Unfortunately the website is not available in English yet but the campaign is quite visual so you can take a look even so. 

Monumenta 2011 opens next 11 May

Hello everyone,

Here is a blogpost to remind you that Monumenta, a very special artistic Tour de Force will be opening next 11 May in the Nef du Grand Palais in Paris.

The concept is simple, yet it poses an incredible challenge: a gigantic, 13,500 sq meters place, the Nef du Grand Palais, welcomes an exclusive piece made especially for the event by one of the most renowned contemporary artists. This year Indian born, British artist Anish Kapoor known among other works for his iconic Cloud Gate, has worked on producing an object to confront the space of the Grand Palais.

In his most recent interviews, he has evoked how it is not just about being gigantic -and it will, with a piece that will be about 61 088 m3- but also about infusing all this space and volume with meaning.

It will be thrilling to see the process of building the piece, which has already started, as you can see on our Facebook page:

        

 
To follow the whole building/mounting process, we invite you to check regularly our Facebook and Twitter page. Several surprises and bonuses will also be added in the following days so the good thing will be to keep posted to see how you can - if you are in Paris - experience Monumenta and Anish Kapoor in many different ways and forms...shhh!

Keep an eye on the following days and see you at the opening, hopefully!

 

Why Become a Fan of FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE CULTURA on Facebook

The Institute of Culture of FUNDACION MAPFRE in Madrid now has an official Facebook page for you to become fans of.  But before you do so, let me present you this Madrid-based institution and the reasons why you may want to support it. 

As Latin America and Spanish-speaking world lovers, teachers, scholars and students:

An institution rooted in the Latin-American world, FUNDACION MAPFRE has kept at heart the objective of safeguarding the documentary and bibliographic heritage of Latin America. For more than 20 years now, It has tirelessly launched and supported initiatives making a huge sum of knowledge available.

These efforts were recently translated online with two exceptional websites, Historia y Cultura Iberoamericana Contemporanea for students and researchers and Enredarte, a website with an educative aim for children, pupils and teachers to get to know Latin American history in an interactive way.

For students, researchers or people interested in knowing better about Latin American history, politics, literature and arts, FUNDACION MAPFRE may be one of the places to keep in touch with.

As drawing lovers

With  focus on modern, 20th century drawings, the collection gathered by FUNDACION MAPFRE includes works by Spanish masters such as Picasso, Miro, Dali, Dario de Regoyes and Eduardo Chillida, as well as international avant-garde masters among whom  Matisse, Paul Klee, Francis Picabia, Lazslo Moholy Nagy, Kurt Schwitters or George Grosz.  Among others, It owns a complete set of the Vollard Suite, the most important collection of engravings in the 20th century, but its singularity lies in the prominent role played by the masters of Spanish modernism, such as José Gutiérrez Solana and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, and the complete  estate of major Art Deco  illustrator Rafael de Penagos. The goal of the collection is to embrace Spanish modernity and to lay empahisis on its masters that happen to be quite unrepresented in Spanish public collections.

The collection remains mostly unexhibited to this day, so don't miss the exhibition on modern drawings from the collection starting next 26 May in Madrid.

As photography lovers

20th and 21th century photography is the other focus of the collection, which includes essential names in the history of the art such as Eugène Atget, Lee Frielander, Diane Arbus, and Lisette Model, as well as contemporary artists like Fazal Sheikh, Graciela Iturbide and Dayanita Singh. The collection is about representing artists which have only a marginal presence in Spanish public collections for now. 

FUNDACION MAPFRE hosts monographic exhibitions dedicated to outstanding artists that have not had one yet in Spain. Right now and until 17 April, Adam Fusshas taken the floor with his camera-less photography. If your Spanish is up the scratch, here is Pablo Jimenez Burillo, General Manager of the Cultural Institute, describing his work, and if not, you can watch the artist in his own words here. Upcoming exhibitions will be on photography genius Eugène Atget and photojournalism pioneer Gotthard Schuh.

Easy access to art for everyone

 

The exhibitions at FUNDACION MAPFRE are free so that a maximum of people can enjoy them.
For the collection, which remains mostly invisible, there is now a website called "Colecciones Artisticas Fundacion Mapfre" where you can find the entire collection and observe every detail of each piece in high resolution. Accompany the Brown family from youth to mature adulthood in a unique chronological record comprising 35 photographs to date, and discover the whole photographic, drawing and art collection.

Each exhibition presented has its own website, where you can find information, images and, if you are not in Madrid, a virtual visit of the exhibition room by room. At the moment, you may want to take a look at Adam Fuss and the stunning exhibition of the Roman Art collection of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, which opens next 10 February.

FUNDACION MAPFRE also organises a movie festival named Festival de Cine 4+1, which is held yearly in 5 different cities of Spain and Latin America simultaneously, also on Facebook.

If you feel like getting to know FUNDACION MAPFRE better, Javier, who articulates exhibitions with  internet will keep you posted with updates on all activities carried out in Madrid and across the globe as well as with behind the scenes pictures and videos. Now if you want, feel free to show and spread the love ! (and the like)

 

Photos:

Enredarte Website
Rafael de Penagos, Sin Título, Gouache y tinta sobre cartón (1942)
The Brown Sisters series by Nicholas Nixon (1975-2010) on the "Collecciones Artisticas" website.
Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite, Faun Uncovering a Woman, Aquatint on Montval laid paper (1936)

 

Upcoming Glam-Wiki and Rencontres Wikimedia on Arts and Shared Knowledge

Dear All,

Here is a post to inform you of two conferences that will take place at the end of November and beginning of December, one in London, one in Paris. Both are organised by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with arts institutions who will be presenting and discussing their experiences on knowledge sharing and partnerships with Wikimedia in that regard.

Behind the Wikimedia Foundation are Wikipedia as well as most notable wiki-something projects that have developped and made popular the idea and practice of sharing information freely, and making knowledge and culture an experience that is done in common, valuing everyone's voice. As structured organisations with a deep sense of hierarchy and copyright protection of their pieces and collections,  arts organisations tend to present themselves as essentially resisting these notions, although avid readers of Museum 2.0, Museum 3.0, and French speaking readers of Mixeum are fully aware that the picture of museums today on these issues is a fragmented one.

Discussing how institutions envision their strategies in that matter goes further than a mere internal/external policy issue, it tackles subjects such as the digital divide, how one sees information in our societies and the part visitors should take in the museum experience. So let's discuss.

Interestingly, GlamWiki 2010, the British leg of the conference will be a two day format divided into a "policy" and a "practice" part which given the importance of filling some  blanks in the understanding of both arts organisations constraints and free information sharing implications, as well as in "just doing it" seems quite valuable to me. The French leg - 2 days too-  offers for its part a very rich and interesting programme of return on experiences mixed with some debates and technical updates. If combined, the outcome of both appears quite wholesome.

See you in London next 26-27 November or/and in Paris next 3-4 December.
Common hasthag #GLAMWIKI

2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition, Close to Home and a little Further

Hello everyone,

I have finally taken the time to read newly-published -quite newly, mid-September 2010- Horizon Report on Museums by the Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), the arts branch of the New Media Consortium. 

This is an excellent, well-documented and useful read on the future impact of technological trends within museums and their global outreach.

The report offers a useful timeline estimating the moment when each of the mobile, social media or AI-based techniques picked and presented in the document are most likely to make a lasting impact and be fully adopted and integrated by museums. The reports picks 6 of them as being the main key-trends for tomorrow. 

Within a year or less     

- Mobiles

- Social Media

Within 2-3 years

- Augmented Reality techniques (Digitally added content, QR Codes and their like)

- Location -based services (dynamically customized content according to customer's location, some of the most popular to date are Foursquare at MoMA and the Museum of London new app, Streetmuseum)

Within 5 years (attention everyone)

- Gesture-based Computing >>The IPhone, IPad type of experience developping interaction between the Collection and the visitors, simplifying, while at the same time enriching the experience on and off-site, like the fun and already well-publicised Sea Monster exhibit in Lisbon.

- Semantic Web >> everything that has to do with enabling computers and search engines to actually understand the meaning and context of the key-word search, not such to mechanically return the most mainstream results. Says report: "The promise [of semantic aware] applications is to help us see connections that already exist, but that are invisible to current search algorithms" 

In other words, intelligently -processed software allowing less time-consuming, more targeted and meaningful research leading to substantial workflow improvement. Check the "Modigliani test" , it extensively goes through the semantic-based process. 

The report  also identifies the key-interest of each technology falling into three categories: Education & Interpretation, Exhibitions and Collections, Visitor Services and Accessibility.

>> It is really worth-reading the 35 page full version enriched with the examples quoted above as well as many others if you haven't already of course.

Guest post no. 2 , Alice Lebredonchel, My Museum Next Review

As you may have noticed, I was finally not at the Museum Next conference last 22 -23 October, but present and thus giving us the opportunity of a second guest post was Alice Lebredonchel, French consultant in cultural communication and owner of Innovart, a blog specialising in innovations in culture, particularly dedicated to the theme of growing audiences through marketing. She provided us with a full account of her experience at Museum Next that you can only read with profit. The layout slightly differ, so you can find the original post at Innovart.

"Back from Newcastle, here is my report on Museum Next, a conference for worldwide museum professionals based on a great interaction between its participants through workshops, “unconference” sessions  and other debates, that is to say two intense days of sharing, exchanging and brainstorming among the participants. Approximately 70 professionals of the museum world were there among whom artists, curators, institutions directors, members of  education departments or consultants, an eclectic mix to think together about tools and strategies for involving audiences in museums in order to make them more lively and interactive.

This event was held at the Great North Museum  for the first day and at the Center for Life  for the second day

 

 Day One :

For the first moments of exchange between participants of Museum Next we went to a space specifically aimed for the young audiences of the museum imagined by the collective [re] design   , a sustainable exhibition designer group. Each participant was asked to test the scenery in groups,  from the design of a monster with a sock or a sculpture with paper cups.

 

  After these first moments of chatting and “creative stimulation”, we got to work with a presentation of every "wild ideas"  submitted by some participants

 Once these presentations were made, work could begin and groups were formed  each treating on one of the 6 “wild ideas”

Day two :

The second day began with a fascinating presentation by Nina Simon (slides available here ). The content of her inspiring remarks , relevant examples that she has contributed to, and the conceptualisation of ideas she presented - and the quality of the layout of her power point presentation:)-  have been, I think, an inspiration for all participants until the end of the conference.

Then followed 8 “unconferences” submitted by participants during the previous evening, two sessions of approximately 45 minutes held on topics as diverse as:

- How can we measure success?
- How to manage  visitors who came because they had to?
- How can social interactions be facilitated by digital devices in museums and so on and so forth

Then we got back to our  “wild ideas”.

During  lunch break I had the chance to visit the exhibition “Democracy” with some attendees accompanied by its designer Jim Richardson. This exhibition aims at being  as democratic as possible, with works chosen through a voting system which is continuously updated. You can visit the website of this incredible exhibition here  or listen to Jim himself :

 

 

Back to the Center for Life, we had the opportunity to finalise our proposals before presenting them to the rest of the participants.

All the videos are available here.Congratulations to Jim Richardson and Nina Simon for giving us the opportunity to think and create together and to leave Newcastle with our head full of ideas!"

 

 

Internet and the Museums: an October Agenda

Hello everyone !  

October is going to be a busy month for sure, but there are two events which I want to share more with you about in particular. In keeping with the bicultural spirit of Museum Strategy, here is one French and one English conference you should pay particular attention to :  

On 16 October I will be at the Louvre to take part to the first round of the Rencontre Web <>Musées organised by Yves-Armel Martin from the Centre Erasme and Samuel Bausson, the Muséum de Toulouse webmaster. This one day working session will be based on very quick and multiple returns of experiences and case studies on the possibilities offered by social media for museums. They will pave the way for discussions and exchanges between participants and speakers. This session will take place in French, and will be directed towards museum professionals. Speakers include Diane Drubay, Samuel Bausson, Alain Romang, Ana Laura Baz from Montréal.  

>> Three main sessions to understand web 2.0 /museums landscape today, learning about concrete and successful examples and thinking of how to extend a web 2.0 strategy tomorrow  

Later in the month, I will tweet from Newcastle Upon Tyne in what promises to be a goldmine of forward thinking ideas on how to engage audiences in the museum’s global project, including the curatorial sphere.  

>> Set up by Jim Richardson from SUMO and Nina Simon, the voice behind Museum 2.0, Museum Next lays on the principles of sharing and co creating from « wild ideas » chosen pre-conference, that will be discussed and shaped throughout the sessions. With nothing set in advance Museums Next « unconference sessions » will primarily depend on its participants’ will to discuss and develop key-topics together and bring wild ideas to life.   These two events are not exclusively but largely based on people within the French and North of England communities but the ideas developed surely go way beyond the borders of strictly geographic areas.  

Don’t miss on Twitter: if your French is up the scratch, follow the #webmus hashtag. Museum Next has got a feed and a hashtag, @MuseumNext and #MuseumNext  

… as well as a most excellent blog also mentioning the Democracy project you can check with profit to get a taste of the conference.  

Can Google Provide the Next Wave of Social Media?

Although Facebook set the platform for social media, and has adopted a home page fit for minute by minute updates of others acitivities largely copied on Twitter, the latter does not only makes it easier to keep up with social activity but has become a source of information that is without a doubt the most up to date, even though it may not always be the most accurate. With mobile internet connection as good as it is these days, Twitter has become the prime example of  real-time web and is known as the ‘SMS of the internet’.  Cultural institutions are constantly updating their pages to keep their fans up to date with events and information as to keep it strictly museumswise the recent success of Jim Richardson's ranking of museums on Twitter shows.

With more and more people seeking basic information on Twitter, Google has felt the need to up their game by promising the launch, at the end of the year, of their new application “Google Wave”. Although the project is still in development, some 100,000 people will have the opportunity to try out the application from 30th September. You may at this point be asking yourself, ‘What on earth is a Wave?’.  “Waves” are conversation windows, similar to a Facebook message in that you can add photos and links, but real-time in a Facebook chat window sense.  One can add or remove as many people to the conversation with one click, and if you have missed any previous posts, or “blips”, you can play back the history in the precise order each ‘blip’ was posted. With an application named Twave, which unsurprisingly allows people to tweet from the same platform, as well as many other applications such as automated spelling and grammar check, instant automated translation of text and the ability to add documents into conversations with contacts, Google Wave looks like a compilation of Facebook, Twitter and Google. But will Google Wave overtake its competitors?           

Many factors come into the equation. Firstly, do we feel loyal to certain social networks once we have signed up to them and therefore are we unwilling to change? Geographically we are living in a galaxy of social networks worldwide as no one single network has dominance. We can’t help but wonder if Google Wave ultimatey tends to create a uniform landscape instead of a somewhat messy one and combine the social and professional means that would make social networkers’ lives a lot easier. One thing that Google has in its armoury is the fact that they have, in one way or another, done pretty much everyone a favour, whether with their search engine, their mail services or with Google Chrome.

Other than the fact that obviously a lot of people will inevitably sign up to Google Wave, why will Museums and other cultural institutions want to sign up for marketing purposes? In recent discussions between my blogging colleague Claire and French museums' webmasters, the question was raised of the relevance of setting up a social media platform devoted to art, such as ArtBabble, as opposed to using the social network mess as a strategy. Is such a format relevant for what museums are looking for in a marketing strategy?  With a decent number of followers they could easily start Waves publicising exhibitions to all their followers; and the one advantage I see is the use of the translator which means everyone would be able to understand any publications, though approximately... If Google Wave is a roaring success, will corporations feel obliged to follow suit and switch from Twitter or Facebook?

I don’t personnally think many corporations or institutions will see the harm in signing up to Google Wave as it can hardly do their profile any damage: the ability to include documents within a Wave could prove beneficial, as putting yourself on every single map is logically the way to make sure you don’t miss out anyone. But back in 2006 I was more than reluctant to leave my Bebo account and switch to Facebook when all my friends were signing up; it was like having my favourite teddy bear taken away from me all over again!  I only did it because all my friends were moving across and I was reluctantly moving with the times, something people still fail to cope with when a new layout for Facebook is announced every so often.

There will probably never be one single social network of the world, but what bigger internet corporation could have a stab at turning our attentions towards one single social networking tool than the mother of all search engines! I’m compelled to find out how Google Wave fares, but only time will tell at the end of the day! What do you think? The floor is all yours to discuss.

Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary from the Brooklyn Museum take the floor

From the moment that Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary agreed to speak at this year’s conference, I joked about in the office that they were our Bruce Springsteen-style headliners. Anyone who has scratched the surface of museum use of social media knows that Brooklyn Museum is just hands down the best example of how to build a brilliant community online.

Their talk on the Friday morning of the conference was easily one of the most inspiring. For 60 minutes (that flew by far too quickly), Shelley and Will shared their key learnings in creating, managing and growing a museum community both online and offline.

You can read a full synthesis of the talk online by visiting www.communicatingthemuseum.com. Here I’d like to pick out a couple of points which I found most interesting. 

• Give your social media a personal face >> One of Shelley’s first points was that the person behind the Tweets, Facebook page, blog must be a real person with a real personality. This is something which Jerome Lascombe had emphasised earlier; social media should not be about organisation talking to client, but a person from the organisation talking to the client. Brooklyn Museum bloggers all have a biography so readers feel like they are getting to know the person behind the post. Something which helps with this is the fact that the bloggers are never censored. There is an overarching set of (fairly) strict guidelines but within these, they are free to write whatever they like. This freedom is an important part of making the Brooklyn Museum blogs honest and of course interesting to read.

• Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week >> For Shelley and her team, social media is a fulltime job – full full time that is. Saturday, Sunday, midnight. Shelley believes that to use social media properly, the institution must live through platforms in the same way that its audience does, not just 9 to 5.

• Transparency >> Transparency is also key for the Brooklyn Museum strategy. Too often, organisations are tempted to use Twitter feeds to broadcast rosy exhibition news when perhaps the reality is that behind the scenes, people are being laid off because of whatever reason. Shelley believes that being honest about such things will help your community gain trust in your organisation and make for a better and richer exchange.

• Ask and listen >> Online conversations follow the same rules as ordinary ones. If someone asks a question, always respond. If someone has a suggestion, make sure you think it through and talk about that process. If you’ve made a mistake, take feedback, discuss it and rectify it if possible/necessary. Brooklyn Museum have replaced all comment books with electronic versions so that feedback can be viewed by all concerned easily via the web.

• Online/Offline >> Be creative in helping the online experience complement and enhance the offline experience, and vice versa. Brooklyn Museum created a graffiti wall which was tagged by visitors during a graffiti exhibition. Photos were then uploaded to Flickr on a weekly basis for all to see and discuss afterwards. For the Black List Project they created a Youtube channel, where visitors could discuss their feelings after the exhibition and others could watch online. These things all add to an event at the time and afterwards – enhancing both the online and offline experience

The Brooklyn Museum chat was by far the most controversial of the conference. If I’m going to be honest (organisations with blogs should strive for transparency right?), the fact that Shelley Bernstein and her team were present and correct on social networks 24/7 both scared and annoyed a number of participants. “I mean come on, get a life” and “if I start using Twitter like that, I wonder if I’ll still be alive next year” were both phrases I heard at the conference after Shelley and Will’s presentation.

As a child of the social network generation, I personally don’t think that being on Facebook or Twitter 24/7 for work is a particularly big deal, it’s pretty much what I’m doing anyway with my friends and family, I regularly find myself on networks at the weekend or strange hours of the morning – I wrote most of this post sitting at Malaga airport waiting to board my horribly early flight to London. The brilliance of the Brooklyn Museum lies in the fact that they have created a community of friends around their museum; surely Shelley’s “work” must quite closely resemble my pattern of personal use of social networks? Having said that, I totally understand many of the participants’ concerns. For people who didn’t grow up on social networks, the idea of existing so prolifically in the virtual world must be a very alien concept. One thing that came out of some of the sessions is that museums really need to use their young people to help them understand these networks and why people use them; you can’t even think about an online strategy until you get why social networks are so popular and what they can offer their millions of users.

Getting Molly Flatt’s thoughts on the Brooklyn Museum session was great. She was very impressed by their work with social media but right to point out that you need to find exactly the right kind of person to manage a project like that. Shelley is clearly highly motivated, creative and dedicated; not every institution is lucky enough to have someone like that managing their online projects.

In the end, the Brooklyn Museum team is right at one end of the “use of social media in museums” spectrum. There’s definitely a balance to be found. It goes without saying that not all museums are going to be able to emulate their use of social media, nor should they expect to or feel they have to. As speakers and participants said over and over again, it’s about finding what works for your institution, your mission and your public and building a project around that. But with their online/offline projects, their monetized twitter feed and their unbelievably dedicated public, Shelley and Will definitely gave a lot of people quite a bit of food for thought.

Do we need conferences anymore? Unsurprisingly, we say YES!

I’ve just seen an interesting discussion spring up on Museum 3.0 entitled “Do we need conferences anymore?” Here at AGENDA we’re in full preparation for the Communicating the Museum conference – testing equipment, fielding last minute queries from participants, booking flights, putting final touches to the programme – and this topic has provoked quite a bit of discussion in the office. 

The basic premise of the chat on Museum 3.0 is that with tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, people can follow conferences without leaving their office or sitting room. Live streams, podcasts, videos, slide-sharing and online forums mean that conferences can even take place in cyberspace rather than a physical conference hall.

Everyone here is agreed that social media is a great way of enhancing the conference. We have set up a Facebook group so that people can start networking before they get to Malaga, a Twitter feed to give followers info and news about preparations and this blog to get readers thinking about social media and its possibilities before they arrive to discuss this year’s theme “Digital and Personal Networking: Making the most of the connected world.” We have also been on a few trips to podcast speakers and give our readers an idea of what they can expect during keynote speeches and possibly a chance to prepare their own questions beforehand so that they can get the most out of the conference.

We’re hoping that people will use tools like Twitter during the conference to take the discussion out of the the conference hall and online where their colleagues who couldn’t make the conference will be able to get an idea of the main ideas during discussions. By having one representative Twittering during a conference, an organisation can really increase its return on the initial investment of that one registration fee as colleagues can get a tailored summary of all the ideas which are particularly relevant or useful for their institution. And the great thing about Twittering is that it is isn’t limited to the hour or so duration of a speech; participants can Twitter about interesting chats they’ve had during coffee breaks or contacts they’ve made during dinner.

The thing is that all these things enhance a conference but are they enough to do away with the physical conference itself? Here we are fairly unanimous in our belief that nothing can beat face to face contact and networking during an event like Communicating the Museum. It’s not for nothing that the conference’s theme is digital and personal networking. The two things go hand in hand. When discussing this, Claire made the interesting point that online forums and twitterfeeds etc are great for exchanging ideas, but when it comes to concrete business and action, participating in a conference and making new contacts is where it’s at.

There’s one really good comment on the Museum 3.0 discussion which I thinks sums up our view on this debate best:

“You can't replace face-to-face contact, just as you can't replace museum objects with digital surrogates! The physical act of going to a conference means you're making time to engage with the topic - sure, in theory you can read the papers, blogs and tweets later, but how often do you have a spare moment to actually do that? I think twitter and blogs make conferences better value for organisations - if they send one person who commits to blogging or tweeting, everyone else in the organisation has a chance to pick up the main messages from the conference. IMHO, taking notes and writing them up later takes longer and is therefore much less likely to happen, which is perhaps why so few people do conference reports.” (Reply by Mia on May 19 2009, 9:32pm)

For some other views on this topic out there in blogosphere, check out some of these links:

• Museum 3.0 – Do we need conferences anymore?
• Dan Cull Weblog – An analysis of the first ever conservation conference conducted via Twitter
• Two Ls and a Y Blog – American Association of Museums and Twitter follow-up
• West Muse Blog – Why go to the conference?
• ABC Radio – A podcast and transcript of a radio discussion between 3 experts in conference organisation about the future of the industry 

Image: Participants of last year's Communicating the Museum conference in Venice working hard