Museophile discussion forums
Jonathan Bowen, South Bank University, United Kingdom
http://forums.museophile.net/

Demonstration: Your Colleagues - 2

This demonstration will show a discussion forums Web site aimed at museum professionals. There are a number of local forums and also feeds from over sixty museum-related electronic mailing lists and news sources from around the world, regularly updated on an hourly basis. The latter are accessible after a simple and free registration process and the selection can then be personalized for subsequent visits to the Web site's homepage. Anyone is welcome to read and contribute relevant items to the Web site, although inappropriate submissions may be modified or in extremis deleted if not relevant to the museum community. The underlying technology for the feeds is the XML-based Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the software is a highly configurable database-driven open source forums system. The system could be adapted to work on individual museum websites if desired. An associated survey on museum discussion forums has been undertaken and is also being presented as a paper at the MW2003 conference. The Web site was produced by Mike Houghton (who installed the underlying software) and Jonathan Bowen (who generated much of the content) with the support of the Business Award Support Scheme (BASS) funded Museophile project at South Bank University, London, UK.