Mallala on the Web?

Mallala Museum has been on a steep learning curve over the past couple of years as it has embraced the opportunities of the internet to promote the museum and to develop its collection.
The museum has enabled a variety of Web 2.0 components that each provide specific functions and benefits to the way the museum communicates. Our three Blogs (including this one) feed the ‘now’ component of our NowandThen wiki.
Our wiki website, whilst certainly raising the profile of the museum, has also enabled a true two way communication, between visitors to the site and the museum volunteers. New stories have been added by visitors, and museum generated content has been expanded, through the collaborative medium of the wiki.
Our Flickr photo storage site has complimented the wiki, by delivering the images that bring the wiki articles to life. The establishment of the Flickr site has also triggered the development of procedures and policies about online image access, and the change in mindset that evolved to deal with issues about ‘ownership‘ and ‘giving our images away‘ online.(All images on our Flickr site are in the public domain and distributed as Creative Commons, Non Commercial, Attribution licenced).
The committee is also embarking on a digitising project to make the rest of its document and image collection suitable for online access, and this ongoing project is the direct result of our learnings from the wiki experience.
Associated with the wiki is a YouTube page, that the museum uses for linking video to the Flickr site. We only have a few videos on YouTube, as we only have a small collection of video suitable for uploading. (Most of our film and video collection is restricted through copyright issues). We hope to expand the video material that can be placed online, and the local Primary School is keen to be involved in developing video content. This could be a really valuable exercise, and demonstrates the spin offs that arise, when you venture into new areas. We toyed with Twitter and Facebook, and these may also become part of our online experience in the future.
Of course, there is a penalty in this new direction, and that is the extra responsibilities that the museum takes on, in managing these various projects. It all takes volunteer time and energy, and these are always in short supply at the museum. However, we are always keen to persevere if we see something is benefiting the museum, and that is clearly the case with this initiative so far. We also see the possibility that the new technologies we are exploring, and the range of new tasks that this has generated, are a different skill set than the traditional museum volunteer brings, and so the projects deliver opportunities to attract volunteers from a different demographic with IT skills, who are perhaps less interested in the cleaning, cataloging and visitor services tasks traditionally offered to our helpers.

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