NARRATIVE
While labels in a museum are important, the sum of the labels are a sprinkling of facts that don't form a coherent narrative. These facts must be combined by humans into a interesting and useful narrative which can be traversed by visitors to learn about the museum's theme. This narrative should be delivered in a number of complementary ways (more on this later). But the best narrator is a human who can adjust the narrative to meet the needs of the listening audience.
LABELS Labels in a museum are important. However, they should be well written, aesthetically designed, with some detail yet concise, multilingual, give a tantalising modicum of information and a QR code that gives more information about the object. The QR code can lead to a blog post or a Wikipedia article, or even to a multimedia file but one which is made disabled friendly.
A GLAM (gallery/library/archive/museum) to serve society best must support open knowledge, use open tools and have open policies.
For Military GLAMs, one understands the need for access control and security classifications, but not for public GLAMs.
This requires us to consciously redesign the processes and policies of a Museum to achieve that objective.
“A museum is not a collection of objects. It's a collection of knowledge. And it is a collection of knowledge that has purposes. These purposes must include service to the common people. A museum serves to not only preserve heritage physically but also to inform, educate and arouse the people who visit.” : Me.
Musing on Museums is a small blog where I express my thoughts about Museums (and Galleries, Archives and Libraries). I hope to get my thoughts straight on how museums should be organised.