Simple example of Web 2.0 in a museum

One of the best examples at the Powerhouse Museum of Web 2.0 thinking across the museum (not just the web services team) is in fact our Preservation Department’s use of de.icio.us.

This was such a simple idea – but with profound impacts on internal processes.

Preservation get a lot of enquiries from the general public and also from small regional museums about preservation techniques. We needed quick and low-tech, dial-up friendly solution to offering the best and up-to-date information on preservation methods.

Traditionally this sort of issue would have been resolved with fact sheets and perhaps a static set of links. Both of these solutions would be time consuming but worst of all, ‘finished’ when they went online – and probably not updated for several years.

Using a del.icio.us account communally shared amongst the Preservation Department staff, staff can all bookmark websites of use to the public in answer questions about ‘how do I preserve . . . ‘. Each site is tagged with the type of object that it refers to.

Shortly the Museum will be presenting these aggregated links on the Museum’s website under a ‘recommended preservation resources’ section.

Rather than build our own bookmarking system Preservation opted to use del.icio.us because of its ease-of-use and social features. All the resources dedicated to the project have been from the Preservation Department who can work incrementally and add or edit a few resources at a time in an ongoing, continuous project requiring micro-efforts rather than a singular focussed time-limited effort.

Rather than fact sheets – which still may be produced from time to time – by pointing to other online resources we save reinventing the wheel.

And, as del.icio.us is all text based it is great for those in regional areas with slow internet connectivity.