Abstract:

The project “Living Museums” is based on the development of technological and educative proposals that promote the collaboration and participation through social networks in the construction and recovery of heritage collections. We see a “Living Museum” as an open digital repository of stories centred on a topic and constructed through a technological platform in a socially & collaboratively way; we propose to use the technologies integrated within the Web 2.0 as the work support the way to communicate and to induce social and digital interaction. Using the technological support the users may organise snippets of information, digital stories, narratives or other significant objects for them.

This project (http://www.museosvivos.es/) is being funded by the Pyrenees Work Community and the different partners are the Basque Country University (San Sebastian), the Public University of Navarra (Pamplona), the University of Zaragoza (Zaragoza), the museum of History & Art of Zarauz (Gipuzkoa), the Sciences Society “Aranzadi” (San Sebastian) and the Planetarium of Pamplona, all, of them in the north of Spain.

In this work we would present the technological platform, based on a CMS (Drupal), that has been developed to reach the needs of the different users of Living Museums.

We relieve that we have to organise the “Living museums” Project in a manner that the user can make a clear difference between these 3 main things:

A.- the general portal (Web site) of “Living museums” (possibly with forums and other tools to discuss at this level),
B.- the “factory” site, which is the workshop where every user can construct his digital narratives,
C.- The different experiences carried out (for the moment we are “inducing” them, but in the future it would be desirable to study how they can be triggered by users initiative and how such a kind of system is sustainable)

To create a Living Museum the users/authors need to create, produce, capture, etc…our digital pieces that will make their digital narratives. For that they are using normally different Web 2.0 tools, and in general, depending of the profile of the end-users they may choose one set of tools or another, of course taking into account what kind of digital piece we need.

Then we need to allow the users to “upload” their productions somewhere, to show them, to share them, and to allow others to talk about them, and if possible to make them evolve.
This is the “factory” site.

The platform we describe in this work solves the first point, a web site, where we can:

1.- Register a new “Living museum” (ad-hoc implemented Drupal module)
2.- To find (registered) “Living Musems” using tags and/or to read about the last “Living Museums” registered and to read about the last digital stories created within the registered museums (using RSS facilities within another ad-hoc implemented Drupal module).

We are at this stage finishing the implementation of the “Living Museum” platform, where we will gather all the experiences made during the last months (at the current moment we have organised several experiences with at least four kinds of communities, students from different education levels and citizens from a small town).

Keywords:

museums, education, social networks, content management systems (cms), rss, web 2, 0.