Museums and the Web is one of the annual events par excellence for cultural sector professionals from all over the world interested in research and innovation. It has been held annually since 1997 in various cities in the United States and Asia and brings together cultural managers, developers, students, researchers, technology experts, etc., to present practical cases and digital tendencies.
Museums and the Web has become an important network of knowledge regarding the most outstanding museum projects of recent years thanks to its online professional forum, the papers presented at the conferences and its “GLAMi Awards”, previously known as “Best of the Web”. The name of the awards has been changed with the idea of reaching beyond the web and being able to award prizes to any project responding to the initials GLAMi (Galleries/Libraries, Archives and Museums Innovations).
At the twentieth edition of the MW conference, which is to be held in the first week of April in Los Angeles, the CCCB Lab Blog has been nominated for the GLAMi Awards, together with 95 other international projects. The nominees represent interesting practical cases of how museums are working with education, the opening-up of archives and collections, participation and relations with audiences or scientific and cultural outreach, among other subjects.
The CCCB Lab Blog, a window on cultural innovation
The CCCB Lab Blog has been running since 2009 as a window from this department of the CCCB specifically devoted to research and innovation in the cultural sphere. Over the years it has become consolidated as a digital magazine with an editorial and art-based approach, with a professional community of followers behind it. Every Tuesday it publishes an article specialising in subjects such as new audiences, open science, the digital transformation in museums, expanded education, etc.
The Blog has two possible routes to winning a GLAMi Award:
- People’s Choice. Registered members on the website of Museums and the Web can vote until 7 April 2016.
- Through a judging committee formed by specialists at the Conference who decide on the winning projects. These will be announced publicly on 8 April in Los Angeles.
In the year 2011, the CCCB was awarded a prize for the exhibition project “The City of Horrors” and in 2009, the Picasso Museum and the MACBA won prizes for Social Media Strategy and for the MACBA Web Radio project respectively. You can see a list of MW winners from previous years on Wikipedia. This project is one of the four Spanish projects presented to the awards. The other three are the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Museo del Prado and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
CCCB to participate at Museums and the Web Los Angeles
This year, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona will be represented at the Los Angeles event, thanks to a scholarship awarded by the event’s sponsors to Lucia Calvo, journalist and contents editor of the Centre’s website. Ultimately, if the CCCB is lucky and the CCCB Lab Blog is chosen as a winning project, she will collect the prize.