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Lifevest under your seat - an African museum networking initiative takes offJoris Komen , National Museum of Namibia, Namibia Subsidiary
Session: International Focus: Canada and Namibia
There has been fantastic growth in communication at 13 African museums
which have, thusfar, been recipients of assistance from the Swedish
African Museums Programme and the International Council Museums in the
past two years. Many of these museums have undergone major technological
(r)evolution in a very short time, and many of them no longer use their
fax machines!:-) The museums have all indicated significant savings
in telephone bills and overall communication costs. Furthermore, and
perhaps most important, email is increasingly being used by more and
more personnel at these museums. The beauty of this African internet
development project lies in the fact that with a little bit of enthusiasm,
a relatively small seed fund, minor capital equipment purchases and
some basic training a wide spectrum of African museum personnel have
now become free to communicate quickly and cheaply with counterparts
all over the world, neatly side-stepping repressive bureaucratic and
financial barriers that have constrained their international and regional
communication to date. In so doing, they have developed greater institutional
independence, greater personal freedoms and greater international associations.
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