Social Networking sites have never been blocked at the museums I have been associated with, and my guess is this is as a result of the fact that the museums want to leverage Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. I know the Walters was incredibly concerned with bandwidth being used to watch videos on YouTube, but with this being chosen as the purveyor of video content for many institutions (including the Walters themselves) there was no way to completely block access - many valuable tutorials, commentaries, etc have been posted there and some are required for staff to do their jobs. Access to instant messaging services such as AOL(AIM) , Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google chat were all disabled. Chad Petrovay | Collections Database Administrator | MIM-Musical Instrument Museum 8550 S. Priest Drive | Tempe, AZ 85284 | 480.481.2460 main www.themim.org From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Armstrong Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 12:08 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Non-TMS, Museum related question Hello everyone, This isn't TMS related, so if you want to reply off list, that is probably the best way to do it. My question has to do with policies regarding access to social networking sites at your institution. By social networking, I mean Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. Does your organization allow them? If not, why not? For the longest time, MOCA has prevented most of the staff from accessing social networking sites. They have been blocked mostly do to security concerns, and also bandwidth concerns (ie, links to YouTube and other streaming video). There is some discussion about allowing access to them, and part of that discussion involves an interest in knowing what sort of policies other organizations have. I'm interested in whatever anyone has to say on the subject. On a related tangent, are there other listserv or similar resources for more general museum discussions (like this one)? David Armstrong Database Administrator MOCA THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART