I came across this lovely perspective on the content visitors create with museums:
We didn't start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn't really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren't highlighted.
When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now.
From the post 'Show your work' at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog.
It's talking about work created during physical visits to a museum rather than virtual visits but I think I noticed it because there's been a spurt of discussion about user-generated content and visitor participation on museum websites on the MCG mailing list following a workshop at the London Museums Hub on 'Understanding collections use and online access across the London Hub'.
A study presented at the event found an apparent lack of interest from museum website visitors in user-generated content, but in discussion at the event it appeared that the findings might have been different if the questions had been asked differently (with examples of some possible outcomes from UGC, perhaps 'would you like museum collections to be more discoverable because other visitors had tagged them with everyday words you'd use' rather than 'would you like opportunities to comment or upload content'), or if the focus groups hadn't been recruited from people who were physically visiting a museum and who were therefore fairly traditional museum-goers.
This lead to some interesting discussion about the differing reactions to the idea of opinions from other visitors versus real-life stories from other visitors; and of the idea that sometimes the value in user-created content lives with the person who contributes rather than those who read their contributions lately. This last idea was also raised at the User-generated content session at Museums and the Web in Montreal, my notes are here. I think the role of authority and trust and the influence of the context (type of museum or collection, user goal) need to be teased out into a more sophisticated model for analysing user-generated content in the cultural heritage sector.
There's a lot of research into user-generated content, participation and social software going on in the UK at the moment, it'd be great if there was somewhere that results, and ideally the raw data too, could be shared. Perhaps the MCG site?