This is the first post in what will be a regular series from the MCG highlighting a few (read: totally non-exhaustive) interesting links, conversations and highlights from the web from the week just gone.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be inviting guest authors to curate this post, writing about the things they’ve read which they think are interesting, important, funny or just plain silly. If you’d like to volunteer, use this form to get in touch.

This week, some random bits and bobs that I’ve spotted…

– Nick Poole from the Collections Trust kicked off an interesting discussion on the MCG list about digital and real: “…we’re likely to see more ‘back to basics’ rhetoric as the Public Sector Recession bites deeper and there are fewer opportunities for speculative digital projects“. See also the Kids in Museums Manifesto.

– BoingBoing’s post “Burning the library in slow motion” has a take on copyright extensions and suggests that these are leading to orphan works..

– Stuart Jeffries wrote a great thought-piece on the use of camera phones: “…when another friend visited the Taj Mahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times”

– While the ongoing financial future of HE in the UK looks particularly bleak, The Smithsonian reported a 20% leap in museum visitors. Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy announced funding of £680 million to go towards digitisation of the content of French museums and libraries

– Finally – for some reason(!?) this piece on “How to make the most of a museum visit” has been generating a fair amount of Twitter buzz. “…although some of the staff may not be approachable, most people who work in museums do it because they love it and love talking to people about the museum and its collections…”