I guess you have to be careful about having long lunches in the company of your creative friends. Since it's out of a conversation over scrumptious Italian food & drink that this blog was born.
A little background Since the middle of last year (2005) my library colleagues -- they of the bibulous lunch -- and I have been happily toiling away at a blog dedicated to news and information on world indigenous arts. All of us work in The Robert Goldwater Library, a publicly accessible reference library dedicated to the arts of sub-Saharan Africa, native and Precolumbian America, and the Islands of the Pacific. The library serves the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In deference to the museum's adminstration we've kept the blog password protected while the museum studies the implications of having a blog emanating from within its walls: This is after all new territory. Should the museum host it on its own server? With its own software? How much legal hoo-hah does this expose the museum to? How much administrative and editorial oversight ought the museum exact? Must it 'look' like the museum's other web pages?
Suffice it to say that it's taking a while to sort through all these issues. In the meanwhile we continue to post our blogs to its necessarily limited audience, as well as troll the blogosphere for clues to the effective hosting of blogs in a museum setting.
The concept I originally contemplated this blog as a workaround for the password protection: posting inoffensive 'copies' of the posts that appear on the library's blog. I may yet post selected entries here.
It now seems as if this might better be the place for a 'meta'-discussion of using blogs for outreach, dissemination and gathering of news and information, and reference. Discussions around the library blog might find a more appropriate home here, keeping the other blog more on topic. Secondarily I think this can still be a blog funnel for the library's blog, maybe even generating a modest groundswell for unfettered access to the library blog.
It remains to be seen whether this blog will retain its meaning and purpose when the wraps do finally come off the other blog. By then it might well have taken on a life of its own. Stay tuned.
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