Museuminaday is almost exactly what it says on the tin: a museum website that we intend to design, build and launch in 12 hours.
Why would we want to do this?
Firstly, we (Dan Zambonini and Mike Ellis) have written and talked a lot about how making (museum) websites should be easy. We’ve written and talked, talked and written, and now is the time to put our money where our mouths are. Mouth is. Or something.
Secondly, we think if we document everything that we do along the way then it’ll be a useful resource for anyone else (museum people and maybe non-museum people too) who wants to set up a similar web presence.
We’re not experts, by the way. We’ve built a few websites in our time, and hung around the cultural heritage sector for long enough to know roughly how it works, but we also expect some things to go wrong. These will be part of the learning process for us, and hopefully will either help people avoid these issues or be able to take part in a conversation about how best to approach stuff in the future. If at the end of the day we utterly fail to create a museuminaday then that will be a learning piece, too.
“But wait…” (we hear you cry) – “…setting up a museum in a day is one thing – keeping it going is quite another..”. We agree, and that’s why we intend to commit to at least a year of updating our newly built museum website.
We intend to be completely open about the whole process, and will be giving talks (starting with one at DISH 2009 about what we learned. We’d be delighted to have you along for the ride, too. You can follow us at http://twitter.com/museuminaday, or here at http://museuminaday.com – or see the Follow our progress page for some other stuff.
Dan Zambonini (@zambonini)
Mike Ellis (@m1ke_ellis)
Sterling work so far!
Just so that I understand it correctly – are you making a museum website “project template” that could be picked up and used by others in a day, or actually building something for a specific museum?
If the former, then the documentation on configuring stuff together would be a real valued contribution I’d expect.
If the latter, then it would be interesting to see how coordination of the records could be done (scraping perhaps?) This reminds me of the Birmingham city Council website-in-a-day – http://bccdiy.com/ – project, which has produced some magnificent results. However, this isnt “officially” related to BCC…
Good luck
@Steven – thanks!
We’re going to deliver an “actual” museum website, albeit for a new and online only museum. So yes, we’re building for a specific museum, just not one that exists
We definitely intend for the output to be transferable – in documenting everything we do we hope to capture each of the stages of the project and also be able to comment on what went well and what didn’t.
In terms of records, Dan and I are aiming to build up a collection of virtual (and possibly real..) objects. We might also do something cunning with our other side project, hoard.it but that’s yet to be decided..