Social Media and Community Involvement in Museums. A case study of a local history wiki community

Abstract

The article focuses on a study of knowledge creation and organizing in a local history wiki. The background for this study was to understand how web 2.0 and social media might open new possibilities for museums to collaborate with communities and lay professionals in cultural heritage knowledge creation. Digital technologies provide tools that in many ways overcome challenges of physical collaboration between museums and amateurs. But technologies also bring in new aspects of ordering, categorizing and systematizing knowledge that illuminates the different institutional as well as professional frameworks that writing local historical knowledge into digital forms in fact represents.