Plenary Session – Affirming the Value of the Professional MuseTech Community
Monday, April 3rd: 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Presenter(s)
Drawing upon a collection of oral histories recently gathered from more than fifty museum technology professionals working in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia from the 1960s to the present day, this professional forum will explore the value of professional communities such as Museums and the Web for driving innovation in museum technology. Many of the participants in this oral history project described how belonging to a professional musetech community helps individuals and institutions build connections between different groups, inspire new ideas, develop a sense of value, and provide a network of peers who understand and support your professional work. For example: \”In the beginning, you know… you are a little alone in this, and one of the challenges was really to be able to sort of find a community of other people to talk to.\” — Costis Dallas, University of Toronto \”When I would go to MW, there would be transformational moments because of the networks that people were [part of were] really good. You’d go chat to people, you’d go to this session, you catch up with them, there were good mixes of people.\” — Seb Chan, ACMI \”The frustration, I think, that a lot of us felt in working in digital and in museums, is that we had established profiles externally amongst our peers at other institutions, but when we came back to our home institution, nobody cared… They had no sense of how that work was breaking ground and being hugely significant within our field.\” — Shelley Mannion, British Museum \”A musetech community that obviously transcends any one museum, because there were people there from all different museums. And in that way, thinking about invisibility within one’s own institution, in regard at least to certain kinds of work, both MCN and Museums and the Web — now MuseWeb — have been really central to my career in those ways.\” — Rob Lancefield, Yale Center for British Art What is the future of that musetech community tod Proposal ID: 11040 |
