Open Museum
Open Museum [1] is a participatory exhibit space for fine artists, art museums, and art enthusiasts. Also a not-for-profit digital outreach tool for artists and museums, its purpose is to help make the arts more accessible to everyone and support museums in engaging people around their collections. Visitors can explore Open Museum through Objects,[2] Museums,[3] or People.[4]
Open Museum also offers educational and inspirational games for art and museum lovers, such as The Association Game (t.a.g.),[5] which everyone is welcome to watch, but only members can participate in.
Open Museum is a kind of “Facebook meets Blogger and Flickr for the visual arts.” By being a simple, web-based tool and keeping the object at its center, the museum fills a niche: a destination site for art students or enthusiasts and a tool for visual artists or art museums wanting to use the internet to optimize its outreach and connect with other arts professionals. Open Museum is ideal for exhibits that have no permanent home in a museum’s exhibit space, or for collections that have no catalogs. For museums without an actual building, Open Museum provides a permanent (virtual) home away-from-home for collections that would exist nowhere else.
Collection
The museum currently features approximately 1000 Objects,[2] as well as rich media supporting material for those works, by visual artists from around the world. A unique feature of the site is that inspirations, sources and studies for works of art are provided for most objects.
Blog
The Open Museum Blog [6] features articles about the Objects,[2] Museums [3] and People,[4] which is presented on the Open Museum site.
How it works
Any Open Museum visitor can explore any area of the site. Registered visitors (members) can participate in a variety of additional ways, ranging from reading and participating in conversations, posting photos on their walls, "favoriting" objects, friending museums, and playing t.a.g. (the association game). Registered members can also apply to be curators of their own collections, in one of the following categories: art museums, independent artists, artist collectives, schools of art and design, history museums.[7]
Any Open Museum curator — regardless of financial and technical resources — can create participatory exhibits that engages visitors around their collections. Furthermore, Open Museum harnesses the power of social networks to share and promote these collections. The curator selection process is juried. To start a collection (curate), applicants register (i.e. become a member) for Open Museum and send an email inquiry. Each category has a separate jury and a rigorous selection process. To curate as an independent artist, the applicant must submit a resume and sample work. To curate for an organization (museum, collective, school), the applicant must demonstrate his or her connection to this institution and his authority to curate on its behalf.[7]
The museum is a free and not-for-profit service, has been funded exclusively through the generosity of our donors and the free elbow grease of its founders. In the future, Open Museum also hopes to raise revenue through fees for special services, sponsorships and grants. Currently Open Museum hosts content on its servers free of charge to Open Museum users.[7]
Open Museum is a collaborative project between Zirgoflex L3C and Heritance, a 501c3 non-profit organization that promotes open museum practices worldwide. Zirgoflex, one of the first Vermont designated low-profit social ventures, has built the technology. Heritance, also based in Vermont, provides the Open Museum service and training workshops, consultations, and technical support to Heritance partner museums.[8]