El Blog

This post was going to be a report on and assessment of Museums and the Web 2010, the annual MW conference held in Denver, Colorado, from 13 to 17 April, about which Conxa already advanced some information in her previous post. The conference brought together over 600 specialists from around the world to consider issues such as the uses and design of culture websites, the management of online collections, the construction of social networks in 2.0 environments and mobile multimedia resources for cultural institutions.

That’s what this post was going to be, but something happened at the conference which made us decide to change the focus slightly — something we are very excited about: the Museu Picasso won the award for the best work in the social media!

Each year the M&W presents the Best of the Web awards in recognition of those projects in various Internet-related areas which provide the most creative and effective response to the needs and aims of the museum or institution.

The various award categories include those for best online education project (this year’s winner was the MoMA’s MeetMe project), the best exhibition website (the MoMA again, with the site for the show Bauhaus: Building for Modernity), the best low-cost small-format project (Dulwich Picture Gallery, for Dulwich OnView), research (Victoria & Albert Museum, V&A Search the Collections), innovation (Royal Observatory, Greenwich, SolarStorm) and social networks, the category for which the Museu Picasso was nominated.

The international competition is open to cultural websites from all over the world, which are reviewed by a panel of judges made up of leading professionals from major museums and cultural institutions and web design and software companies. This year’s panel included representatives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago), the British Museum (London), the Getty Institute (Los Angeles) and the University of Art and Design (Helsinki).

So it was a great honour for our project to be singled out for approval by such experts as the best in its category in 2010. We are very grateful for this recognition of the work we have been doing here at the Museum represents. Of course, this award is really a tribute to all of the Museu Picasso team, whose day-to-day work is what gives us stories to tell and provides the social networks we have constructed with significance.

And we are also very grateful to all of you for reading our blog and keeping in touch with us on Twitter, our fans on Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and all the other social networks we have taken part in: we want you to know that without you none of this would make sense — your contribution really is invaluable to us here at the Museum.

Conxa Rodà and Anna Guarro