Museums and Twitter

MuseumNext conduct an online survey about Twitter and the way that museums should use it. They asked museums to have their followers help with the research and over 1000 people participated.

Over ¾ of those who follow museum tweets are over 25. More women follow museums then men. The public mostly wants to use twitter for exhibit and events info.

Over half of people had actually visited the museums they follow and when asked if they would attend an exhibition if suggested by a friend 93% said yes.

When asked what they were looking for with the museum’s tweets people responded:
- To engage with people interested in that museum or gallery. To make people feel special. To have a conversation
- Extending the museum experience beyond the gallery walls, exhibit news, discounts, discussions
- Tell background stories and share information that will make you want to go and see an exhibition even more: enrich their program
- Informing people about new exhibitions, news relating to the museum, talking to people about the exhibits if they have specific questions
- Help further its brand — is it a fun place for families and kids? Then tweet funny facts based on the collection. Is it a gallery with amazing art? Tweet about commentary and opinion of that art. A lot of followers are not local, so don’t tweet exclusively about events. Point me in the direction of related topics, for instance, a nat hist museum could tweet about a recent paleo find in China.

It appears that there is a place for Twitter to be used to attract new visitors and keep interests in exhibits.

Looking at Perspectives Online

This week I reviewed two articles from the May 2007 issue of PerspectivesOnline which is published by the American Historical Association.

Edward A. Riedinger in his article “Enhancing Internet Use for History byCategorizing Online Resources” talks about the importance online resources. He states that there are. Three types of resources essential for scholars are:

• periodical literature indexes, listing what has been published in a field or specialization;
• library catalogs, describing what an institution holds of what has been published and detailing bibliographic data on the holdings; and
• full-text retrieval databases of articles and books, often digitized facsimile versions of the texts.

He then talks about the differences in each area talking in depth about sources of information available online from synopses to full articles, journals and books. Never before has it been so easy to obtain information outside of the physical library.

In this article “Creating a Virtual Student Community at theUniversity of Maryland” Bud Burkhard talks about the concerns many have with so many internet classes. He stated that online class enrollment in history classes accounted for 85 percent of enrollments by 2005. With this large amount of online students it is very important to maintain contact with the students in an attempt to make them fill part of the department.

One thing there instituted was a secure online discussion site into which all students seeking a history major or minor are automatically enrolled and allowed for easy communication between faculty, current students and alumni. They also sought for online students to be involved with Phi Alpha Theta the history honor society, even to holding online inductions. He ends his article with something similar to what I have said about students and people in general that the main factor in a student’s success depends on them and how active they want to be in obtaining their goals.