Fresh & New(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums by Seb Chan

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Exhibit Files – social networking for museums pros?

May 6th, 2007 by Seb Chan

Exhibit Files is a community site for museum professionals to post their exhibition development case studies and or others to comment and review exhibitions. Whilst developed specifically for the ATSC, Exhibit Files has wide application for history and art museums as well. At one level Exhibit Files operates as a repository of information about exhibitions past and their development processes, but at another level Exhibit Files is like a LinkedIn for those working with exhibitions – allowing social networking and information exchange.

I am going to be encouraging our exhibition developers and designers to join and experiment with the site as I think that the potential opportunities and knowledge exchange are enormous. Of course, these kind of sites rely on a critical mass of users being reached relatively quickly and I can understand that some organisations may be hesitant about releasing information about their internal development processes (or actively opening up their exhibitions for peer review), but I’d encourage others to look seriously at experimenting with the site.

UPDATE – Nina Simon has posted an excellent interview with the crew behind Exhibit Files.

Tags: 5 Comments

  • lyndak

    Thanks for posting this Seb. I too think it’s an interesting experiment. Just seeing the amount of people who joined up recently is amazing, obviously the site may be fulfilling a need. I’m also curious to see if the interest is sustained and the lessons they learn as part of my current blogging experiment on my Audience Research blog with my intern Mel. I see you’re going to try try it out at the PHM too, but was wondering how the PHM might consider opening it’s exhibitions to review like that for all the world to see??

    I’m going to try and set up some interest from this end too.

  • http://exhibitfiles.org Wendy

    Thanks, Seb, for encouraging exhibit folks from down under to join ExhibitFiles and share their work. We were asked by the grant reviewers about the possibility of overly harsh critiques as a deterrent to contributing. We were able to point to two things: the tradition of courtesy on the ISEN-ASTC listserv, over more than a decade; and the plan to display members’ real identities on the site. We hope that as people see others contributing sincere and useful comments, they’ll be encouraged to contribute themselves. And likely we’ll all tend to post what we think of as our best work–or at least what we’ve learned from–which will help make ExhibitFiles a source of good ideas.

  • LyndaK

    Glad to see your response on here Wendy and the interview with Nina really helped me understand the thinking behind this great initiative. The amount and variety of people signing up even since I found out about it only five days ago, says something about the need for and interest in this kind of sharing I believe.

    I was unable to see a link anywhere on the site for general feedback? I had some questions and suggestions I wanted to feed in. There was a link to find a bug but that seemed to be for more technical aspects?

  • http://www.ideum.com Jim

    Lynda,
    We’d appreciate any suggestions you might have. Our development blog is still active at:

    http://www.exhibitfiles.org/blog

    We’re hoping to better incorporate and revise the blog as we move forward. We anticipate a “general call” for comments soon–but of course we welcome feedback at any stage of development.

    Thanks for your interest in the site.

    Jim

  • lyndak

    Thanks Jim – I just managed (I think?) to uploadd a reviewthen (after my seciond attempt – but a good learning experience!). I’ll blog you…