Attending the Inclusive Museum conference in Vienna, Austria, was a very interesting experience. It was a fairly small conference in comparison to some I have attended with thousands of delegates – there appeared to be around 200 participants attending in person and in the online space.
The conference began in one of the fabulous old buildings in the Museumsquartier, the Welt Museum, after two keynotes in that space we moved to where the remainder of the conference would be held. The Museum Quarter is incredibly beautiful with museums built in various architectural styles from different periods, including Mumok, the largest museum of modern and contemporary art in central Europe.
The conference was held in the Barocke Suiten – beautiful rooms, and only 3 of them, which meant that every presentation had a good number of audience members.
‘Collecting in the Online Space: Responding to Memories and Other Voices’ presentation discusses the Mayday Hills Virtual Tours Project. Our presentation was on the first day, and I really wanted to make the point that Mayday Hills will never have a physical museum devoted to it, and artefacts collected after its disestablishment were dispersed to various museums and, even then, rarely exhibited, mostly stored in archives. Our website is like a virtual museum – people can visit the two sites physically, but they can’t look at the artefacts or hear stories that our
participants have told us which link real people to people in history that shouldn’t be forgotten.
We are quite excited about the potential of the new technologies that Tim Crutchett and Patrick McKenzie bring to the research project, and we look forward to sharing more of our work through the online platform.
Jenni Munday travelled to Vienna in September 2024 to receive the Inclusive Museum International Award for Excellence on behalf of our research team. Our article published in 2023 “Collections from the Asylum: Past Lives, Present Tense.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 16 (1): 53-73 was selected from the ten highest-ranked articles emerging from the peer review process. As an Award winner, we were invited to present Collecting in the Online Space: Responding to Memories and Other Voices at the Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Download the Conference Abstract: Collecting in the Online Space: Responding to Memories and Other Voices pdf
Download the Inclusive Museum International Award for Excellence pdf
Explore the Beechworth Cemetery Virtual Tour
Explore the Mayday Hills (formerly the Beechworth Asylum) Virtual Tour
