The Variable Media Questionnaire is a project of Forging the Future, an alliance dedicated to building tools to help rescue digital culture from oblivion.

"LACMA’s website has begun releasing publication-quality digital images of out-of-copyright works in its permanent collection. It appears to be the first major museum to do this, and that’s big news. It may herald the end of 'zombie copyrights.'"

The uncanny similarity among the three designs — the painstakingly protracted approaches to the galleries — underscores the challenges the architects faced when trying to preserve the essence of these museums while making room for the cafes, bookstores, event spaces and education departments that have become regular features of the contemporary museum experience.

But there is something else behind the uniformity of these plans as well. What were once eccentric creations have become polite and well behaved. Gorgeously crafted, they are about reinforcing the existing cultural consensus — not rebelling against it.

Blythe House was built in the early twentieth century as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The building is shared between the Science Museum, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum as a storage facility for small and medium sized objects.

The Science Museum occupies over 90 rooms, which are filled with 203,000 artefacts relating to the history of medicine, science and technology. Within the rooms, the majority of objects are either floor standing, or laid out on shelves or in cupboards with glass doors, so that they can be made available to visitors, researchers and staff. Daylight is blocked out by covering windows, which also reduces dust levels, and the environment is monitored, with a pest management strategy in place to reduce the agents of deterioration. Some rooms contain air filtration systems to remove acidic fumes, for example from the early plastics collection.

Also at Blythe House is a conservation laboratory, a photographic studio, a quarantine area (where incoming objects are checked before being transferred to the main rooms), a research room and the collections logistics office. The logistics staff maintain the store and make the objects accessible for use in exhibitions, loans and public events. The unit includes the object movement team who transfer the objects between museum sites and the storage coordinator.

Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination for the incurably curious. Located at 183 Euston Road, London, it explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. The venue offers visitors contemporary and historic exhibitions and collections, lively public events, the world-renowned Wellcome Library, a café, a bookshop, conference facilities and a members’ club.


Part of Wellcome Collection, the Library has over 750 000 books and journals, an extensive range of manuscripts, archives and films, and Wellcome Images is one of the Wellcome Library's major visual collections.

Through its collections and services, the Wellcome Library provides insight and information to anyone seeking to understand medicine and its role in society, past and present. More than 30 000 readers visit each year, including historians, academics, students, health professionals and members of the general public.

Open source archive software!

Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin Core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.

Interactive chart of cultural institutions in NYC sortable by price, hour, and location.

From the wonderful FAQ on UbuWeb

Quaquaversal:

Q: When did UbuWeb Start?
A: UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.

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There is no giftshop:

Q: How do I purchase something from your site?
A: You can't. Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum.

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Stance on copyright:

Q: What is your policy concerning posting copyrighted material?
A: If it's out of print, we feel it's fair game. Or if something is in print, yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure, we'll take a chance on it. But if it's in print and available to all, we won't touch it. The last thing we'd want to do is to take the meager amount of money out of the pockets of those releasing generally poorly-selling materials of the avant-garde. UbuWeb functions as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web. Our scanning, say, an historical concrete poem in no way detracts from the physical value of that object in the real world; in fact, it probably enhances it. Either way, we don't care: Ebay is full of wonderful physical artifacts, most of them worth a lot of money.

Should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.

Let's face it, if we had to get permission from everyone on UbuWeb, there would be no UbuWeb.

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We're not here for that:

Q: How do I download MP3s?
A: There are thousands of resources on the web to learn how to do this. That's not what we're here for.

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An archive not a blog:

Q: Why isn't new content posted every day?
A: UbuWeb is an archive, not a blog. It has accumulated slowly and steadily and shall continue to far into the future.

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As if to say, "you come to us:"

Q: I'd like to receive notices of UbuWeb updates. How do I do this?
A: UbuWeb refuses to advertise or promote itself. Most of all, we detest the idea of filling inboxes with more unwanted material. A few times a year, we post our updates to select mailing lists; that's what they're for, aren't they? For UbuWeb updates, best to just keep checking back on the homepage, where notices of all new content appears.

couches in galleries!

The Met has created its first app, to accompany the guitar show. It is embarking on the daunting task of wiring its huge building for Wi-Fi, he said, so that patrons will eventually be able to read and watch videos about art museumwide on their phones and tablet computers. And it is venturing as never before into the rapidly evolving field of what museum administrators call “visitor engagement”: a social science aimed at trying to reach every patron, from the first-timer to the seasoned scholar.