My name is Ned Prutzer and I am an intern for the Museum who is majoring in English and American Studies at the University of Maryland – College Park.  I have worked with social media in prior internships, and I anticipate a productive discussion regarding the manner in which the Museum can extend its current use of social media while maintaining the professional nature of its mission.

What I would like to pose as a topic for discussion is how the Museum can implement its use of social networking into the visitor’s experience of its exhibits – that is, how it can provide a more interactive experience on each end of the spectrum, to those who are coming to the Museum and those who are active on our pages.  How can we use varying mediums of social media to replicate the experience of visiting the Museum as best as possible?  How could we go about making an exclusively on-line experience of the Museum for those who are unable to come to DC and visit interactive without making it seem inauthentic?

It is clear that other prominent institutions are facing similar questions as they enter the realm of social networking. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, for instance, has digitized some of its collections through ArtShare, consolidated its web pages through the SimplyRSS application on Facebook, and utilized Electronic Comment Kiosks in their exhibits, for which they gather user-generated comments and post them on the walls of the exhibits.

Likewise, over the summer, the Museum hosted an innovative tour focused its architecture that encouraged participants to Twitter on their thoughts and post pictures as the tour was going on.  There’s an interesting blog on the event by Robert Michael Murray of boxednoise that I think is very pertinent to the issues being raised in the un-conference.  Could we extend such an initiative into Twitter-based tours where groups can ask questions for guides to respond to and leave comments for each other to see?  This is a great example of the issues that arise from the questions I proposed earlier, and though the issues I am raising may not be enough to sustain an entire session, I think that these are questions we should keep in mind and address during the un-conference.