Purposeful Museum Blogs

To complement the third VAM member White Paper being released today, entitled Blogging: An Introduction for Museums, this blog post highlights a few museum blogs that we have come across that we think are innovative, purposeful, and provide a conversational 'voice' for their museums.

Wilton House Museum’s Found in the Collection
Museum and Gardens’ Hermitage Collection Connection

These are two innovative blogs that use the museum collections to give life to the blog posts.
The blog posts reciprocate by giving life to objects, telling their stories, and discussing the
overall story the museum has to tell in the process.

Library of Virginia:
Multiple Exposure: Catablog of the Prints and Photographs Collection at the Library ofVirginia
Out of the Box: Notes from the Archives at the Library of Virginia
The LVA has two blogs. They’ve used the first, their “Catablog,” to post prints and photographs
from their collection. The second is similar to the Wilton House and Hermitage blogs in that it
focuses on collections from the LVA archives. I think these collections-focused blogs are great
because they not only enrich the experience of learning about the collection for visitors, but they
extend the museum’s reach and ‘flavor’ well beyond their walls by hosting ‘conversations’ about
their collections for a worldwide audience.
Gari Melcher’s Home and Studio at Belmont: Special Events blog

This is a smart marketing move, aimed at people who may want to rent facilities at Belmont for
a special event such as a wedding. Chocked full of great pictures and stories, I’m sure it’s
enticing for those looking for such a venue!

Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum’s Pushing the Envelope

This is an interesting blog in that it highlights the history behind various stamp designs, and it
shares the content of letters written at different times in history. It’s a smart move for this
museum to have a blog, since they have a lot to offer the very-niche-but-also-very-passionate
audience of stamp collectors around the world.
As stated by Nina Simon of the popular Museum 2.0 blog,
“I believe that the museum blogosphere is still underdeveloped and there's lots of room for people to share their inspiration, experience, and ideas.”

Check out the rest of her post, where she outlines six MORE museum-related blogs that show promise
(December 2010: http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-museum-related-blogs-you-mightnot.
html).

If your museum has a blog, please share that with us - we're always looking to connect to museum blogs!