Author
Hi! I’m Alli Burness.
I’m an Australian-based museum writer and content creator. With a background in collection management, I now create projects which foster meaningful conversation about the museum experience and produce online engagement projects.
This site started in 2013 as part of a ‘Museum Pilgrim’ project which involved traveling through 16 countries on 4 continents in a 12 month period. I visited 205 museums in Australia, North Africa, Europe and South America, exploring museum practices and the visitor experience. See the Hit List for the museums I visited and the Journey for a map. The project was shared across a number of social media platforms (see links in the right-hand menu). Together these engaged a large community whose involvement in turn shaped the project. As a Museum Pilgrim, I fell in love with the world and its network of collections, changing both who I am and my career.
After the journey, I became involved in new media at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and obtained a Masters degree in Museum Studies at the Australian National University with research examining the #museumselfie. I launched the community-building Sydney Museums initiative and led the first Australian Digital Invasions museum tour during 2014.
In ongoing projects, I edit the Museum Selfies website which tracked the early stages of this type of photograph through to its emergence as a popular museum activity. I continue this research with a view to assisting museum staff to use selfies created by their visitors as an evaluative data source. I also foster the use of short video in the museum sector, using Vine to explore the visitor experience. Check out my LinkedIn profile to find out more.
I’m always keeping a museum ‘hit list’ and love to hear rumors and testimonies about great museums around the world. Use the Author page to contact me, or catch me on Twitter.
Museum in a Bottle