I don’t know if you may already visited http://www.museumsblog.de, made by a professional museum expert, blogging about several museums, good ideas, bad examples, forgotten museums and related topics.

Greez

Klaus

I’m having a hard time telling which category we fit into on your 17 chart, I feel like a cross between 1 and 2 with some of 4 mixed in, but maybe that means we should focus more. Any professional feedback – on or off the record – for the Walker blogs?

And as our About page also states, this is a collaboration, both within our blog team as well as with our various audiences. In part our hope is that the dialogue about art that occurs daily behind the scenes is transposed and enlarged by our blog efforts.

Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to hear your how your working through blogging at a smaller museum. We have a bunch of blogs (well okay only 6) so we have fairly splintered our audience in the aim of delivering some targeted information. I think it’s safe to say most of our readers are not as internet savy as the folks who read this blog, it’s good to hear that reminder sometimes.

Your point #1 makes a lot of sense, I’m sure most people would rather send that email than answer in a public setting where any web surfer can come along and read their words. It’s like raising your hand at a lecture I would guess, people have questions but they are a little afraid to make a fool of themselves sometimes. Although blogging does offer some anonymity but I’m sure it takes a little while to get used to a “public” conversation.

Point #2 could be a real problem for surfers unfamiliar with dynamic pages. Have you tried mitigating that with your template at all? Of course since I do design thats the first thing i think of :) You don’t want to just change your site up like crazy once people are used to it but small changes or a small number of changes might get you less emails. I know blogger has a wide variety of templates. Maybe some of them forefront the categories more which could help people who get lost.

Sheila who commented earlier has a blog with a lot of history museum links. I’m not sure how many of them are small museums but it’s a place to start. While your there you might also like the root of that site at Clioweb.org. It has a lot of history links on it, sometimes to other organizations blogs.

Since I started this series of posts I have found it remarkably hard to find museum blogs, by any type of museum but especially contemporary art museums. I really don’t have any idea why that would be but regardless keep up the good work, and the positive posts.

Thanks for your response!

We have faced three problems with our blog:

1. At this point we get mostly emails, not comments. Our local readership from the public prefers this method. We aren’t sure if the comments link isn’t as obvious whereas the email link is to the side, or whether our readers feel more comfortable in responding by the more standard email.

2. Sometimes our volunteers have heard that we wrote about a topic but can’t find it on the page, requiring explanations of the archives, as well as permalinks.

3. We thought that links were intuitive but this has not been the case. We’ve gone back and changed the colour of links to stand out more. When a volunteer came back to us to say he still couldn’t find the link to another site within a post, we also added underlines and gave him a quick tutorial on navigating by links.

The part of our audience comprised of locals are devoted volunteers or members of other historical societies; the demographics of this group tend to be older and decidedly non-techie. What brings them to us is the promise of ongoing research into the history of the region and to have a look at our day to day happenings. Perhaps they are getting accustomed to blog mechanics – we have more questions about content nowadays.

The issues that aren’t being addressed in larger museums is the constraints that small community museums face. I work for this museum, which is owned and operated by community-minded volunteers; I also work for a much bigger city-run museum in another city. All the tasks in my position at the Port Moody Station Museum is done by nine individuals at the other museum. Most of us put at least 100 hours of volunteer work per year (including the blog).

We are also restricted by the terms of our grants. Mine, for example, ran out on December 31, 2005. I got a tentative extension. Another colleague’s runs out in March; he can only get one more extension but he is getting tired of the year-to-year stress. The downside is that, once we lose him, the continuity in our projects will evaporate.

It’s not merely that we are whining (we try to keep away from the overly negative in the blog). We also noticed that most museum blogs come from art museums, not community or historical ones. I would love to see more historical museums that serve communities discuss how they treat their volunteers, run their events and just the neat historical discoveries that happen every day.

Mind you, my background is art history, that’s how I came across the Walker blogs. I also think that the more of us there are, the more commonplace a museum blog becomes and the more people will look out for museums with blogs.

Thanks!

I’m curious about the issues that aren’t being addressed in larger museums. One of the reasons we started the Walker Blogs was to convince people we were not just a large faceless institution. We thought this would be another way for or staff to connect directly with the public and make ourselves more available and personal like many small institutions can be.

Our museum blog here at the Port Moody Station Museum in Canada tackles some of these problems. We write about day to day research as we develop a history of this formerly working-class city; we try to promote its history to the rest of Canada; and simply try to bring our resources to as many people as possible with a very small budget and staff.

Our audience is mostly locals mixed in with a few other museum professionals from around North America. One of the problems is that we have had to simplify and explain everything from links to the actual mechanics of reading a blog to our local readers.

Sheila, thanks for the link. I’ve only read through the post about podcasts so far but I’ll check back again.