A Survey of Museum Blogs & Community Sites

We’ve just finished our first survey of museum blogs and community sites. The complete report is available as a PDF at the bottom of this post.

We found 26 sites and collected basic information about each. The sites range from Art Museum blogs to Science Museums community-sites to personal blogs about museums. Here’s a portion of the Summary and Methodology from the Survey…

The purpose of this survey was to get a sense of the level
of activity within the museum field when it comes to
blogging and developing community-based sites. While
conducting research for various papers and presentations,
we couldn’t find a single source anywhere that contained
all of this information.

A number of sites included here were quite helpful in
pointing us to additional museum blogs and sites. In
particular, the Walker New Media Initiatives Blog (one
of six that the Walker Art Center Hosts) and Mario Bucolo
Museums Blog, were great sources. To a certain extent
these two very different blogs are representative of
what we found. The Walker Blog is over a year old, is
made up of six separate blogs, has multiple contributors,
and is sanctioned by a museum. Mario Bucolo’s blog is
just two months old and is a personal blog focusing on
museums. As you’ll see, the sites listed here are quite
diverse in how they operate and who they serve.

In terms of sheer numbers, museums have been slow to
develop blogs and community sites. Along with following
links from site to site, we searched various Web and
blog search engines. We found a total of 26 sites that
are either produced by museums for the public, or that
focus on what museums do. Technorati, a popular blog
search engine claims it searches 29.6 million blogs (as of
March 3, 2006). Apparently, museum blogs are literally
one-in-a-million.