Watch it or your museum or library will die!

Flickr – The Commons. Search Term: Swimsuit

Above: Young Woman Riding on the Back of a Turtle at Mon Repos Beach (State Library of Queensland, Australia), Ours et ses deux conducteurs (aka Musee D’Orsine, har, Biblioteque de Toulouse), Salon de Fete, 1900 (Brooklyn Museum on Flickr), Zbyssko (Library of Congress on Flickr)

Museum 2.0 is launching an experiment in collaborative exhibition design. This one-week test will hopefully be followed by many more progressively ambitious projects to develop new tools for museums, scientists, artists, experience designers, visitors, and all kinds of folks to work together to create high-quality exhibitions.

Cringe on the “experience design”, but the idea is a neat one and kudos to the Hall of Science a lot of credit for giving it a shot.

The is the second in a still-unnamed Suggested Donation regular feature of pictures of people posing with the same object in a museum.

many more below…

all pictures via flickr

A new website, happybirthdaykatrina.com, was designed to offer information on the continuing crisis and recommendations on how you can get involved in the reconstruction. 

Also, on the archival tip, check out the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which has collected thousands of stories and images.

More images of New Orleans’ Katrina-devastated libraries here, here, here, and here.

Stephen Asma doesn’t live near an inner city bus stop, but he does write about edutainment and museums, in his cuddly-titled book, “Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums.” Asma relates the story of a T. Rex named Sue, a glam-rock covers of Johnny Cash dinosaur exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum.

Asma also examines the phenomenon of “edutainment” including the ways in which museums use spectacle and fantasy in order to illuminate and educate, how much of current museum offerings are driven by a quest for large visitation numbers and the question of the relationship between big business, politics and what we learn at any moment in history.

Less than fifteen percent of the Field Museum’s funding comes from admissions. In order to raise the $8 million to acquire T. rex Sue, the Field partnered with Disney World and McDonald’s. “To my mind,” Asma writes, “Sue represents the best and the worst of edutainment.”

We take pause to wonder how this is in any way the best of edutainment, but I guess we’ll just have to buy his book!!!~!!

Elsewhere in the edutainmentsphere:

• From the far reaches of blogs which use inappropriate gradients comes “Edutainment and Convergence Today” (no joke!), which manages to synergistically combine two of the most annoying buzzwords of the last 50 years in one irrelevant blog title.
• Another edutainmentblog, this one merely called “Edutainment” has a piece on how to draw Web 2.0 logos. Awesome!
• Is edutainment more acceptable if it’s historical (or perhaps if we just call it “engaging education)? The US Holocaust Museum, which, we read, has sworn off all “disneyfication” and edutainment, added the Bergson Group to an exhibit, a troupe of edutainers who performed during WWII to bring awareness to the burgeoning holocaust.
  
• Finally, KRS-1 / BDP’s 1990 LP “Edutainment.” Dude was writing about edutainment spheres in 1990!

 So grab the sphere of life and aim it /and you’ll be guided by Edutainment.

above: the edutainmentsphere in cube form

Here is another awesome Steve who lives on the web.

We snark, but SD kinda likes this project, although we hope their populist naming scheme wasn’t inspired by Microsoft Bob. And a +1 for the dot-museum suffix. May it never leave beta.