Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Blog post - DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

This session at Digital Humanities 2009 was also blogged by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth. Session description:
Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.
Kramer-Smyth notes that many of the amateur sites reviewed "get more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited."

Later in the post, she wrote:
This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.
Kramer-Smyth's notes are extensive and will get your thinking about what programs could be doing.


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2 comments:

Gary McGath said...

Would my filk book index count as professional or amateur? It's an unpaid project, but grows out of the knowledge I've developed at work.

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

Gary, yours would fall under amateur, I think, because it is your own personal project.