Brochureware, aggregators and the messy middle: what's the point of a museum website?

MCN 2011, Hyatt Regency Atlanta, What's The Point of a Museum Website, November 17th
Photo: nealstimler

Back in November I attended the Museum Computer Network (MCN2011) conference for the first time.  I was lucky enough to get a scholarship (for which many, many thanks).  During the conference I was part of a panel discussing 'What's the point of a museum website?' with (from l-r in the photo) Koven Smith (@5easypieces), Eric Johnson (@ericdmj), Nate Solas (@homebrewer) and Suse Cairns (@shineslike).  I've posted about some of the ideas covered in the WPMW session, but this post is my attempt to think through 'what is the point of a museum website?' in the context of our MCN session.  I'm not lying when I say 'attempt' – this post is a draft, but since it's been a draft for months now, I'm going to take a deep breath and post it.  I'd love to hear your thoughts, challenges, props, whatever, and I'll update the post in response.

I've started thinking of museum websites as broadly fitting into three categories:

1. The practicalities. Unashamed brochureware may be enough for some museums (and may be all other museums, such as local authority museums tied to larger infrastructure, can manage): the practical, get-people-through-the-door stuff: why visit, how to get there, when to visit, what's on. Facebook and Google are competing to host content like this, so presumably visits to these sites are generally going to decrease over time.  This category reflects economic and organisational restrictions more than user requirements.

2. Collections online.  An important, opinionated caveat: unless your 'collections online' interface is a destination in its own right, or adds unique value, I think the point lies in aggregated collections.  Repositories like Europeana (and national aggregators like CultureGrid and Gallica), Collections Australia Network, Digital NZ, and the future Digital Public Library of America bring heavy-weight resources, SEO and discoverability and sheer scale to the 'collections online' work of a museum website.  But this scale brings new problems – these big, chaotic pots of content can be difficult to use.  Their sheer size makes it hard to highlight interesting objects or content.  Meaningful search results are difficult*, even for the patient, expert researcher, because they tend to contain so many different kinds of content about a range of subjects, taken from a variety of source museums, libraries, archives with hugely variable metadata quality and schema.  Better search engines, faceted browsing, etc, may help, but aggregators aren't really designed for humans**.  See also: 3a, 'The carefully curated and designed experience based on a particular concept' for a different view on collections online.

3. The messy middle.  This includes all kinds of things that general audiences don't seem to expect on a museum website – exhibition and marketing microsites, educational and family activities, public engagement experiences, games, lists of objects on display, research activities, etc.  It's a pretty safe guess that some of this content is online because it reflects the internal structure or requirements of the museum, is re-purposed from exhibitions, or is designed for specialist users (who may, however, also under-use it unless the collection is notably comprehensive or is one of the top hits for a Google search).  For museums, the point of a museum website may be editorial voice, control, metrics, or an attempt to monetise their images.

We know that lots of the messy middle really works for our audiences – for example, good games and other activities have metrics through the roof.  But without more research it's hard to know whether the content that audiences should love is less used than it might be because it's not easily discoverable by non-visitors to the website, isn't well advertised or consistently available on museum sites, or is competing with other groups that meet the same needs.  Does the trust people place in museums translate into trusted online content – how much do audiences really know or care whether an online experience, mobile app or the answer to their kid's homework question was provided by a museum?  Do they value 'authority' as much as we do?  When does museum content go from being 'on your website' to 'being on the web', and does it still matter?

For one potential point for museum websites, I need to refer back to the collection aggregators.  In an ideal world, the availability of images, reusable data licenses, organisational processes, and machine-readable data that populate these mega-collections would make it easy to create more tightly-defined cross-collection experiences based on carefully chosen sub-sets of aggregated collections.  In other words…

3a. The carefully curated and designed experience based on a particular concept.  From the Google Art Project to Europeana's Weddings In Eastern Europe, sites that draw on digital objects and expert knowledge to create audience-focused experiences could be the missing link between the in-gallery exhibitions museums love and the audience-focused born-digital experiences that are appropriately rich and/or snackable, and could be the source of the next great leap forward in museums on the web.  Museums can take the lessons learnt from years of topic-specific cross-institutional projects and research on existing audiences, and explore new models for audience engagement with museums online.  And perhaps more importantly, work out how to fit that into places our audiences already hang out online and let them share it promiscuously.

So, what's the point of a museum website?  At the simplest level, the point of a museum website is to get visitors into venues, and maybe to sell them tickets or products.  Ideally, the point of aggregators is to surface content hidden in the deep web so it's discoverable on your Google search results page and can be put into context with other resources.  The very messiness of messy middle category makes it harder to answer the question – it's the fun stuff, but most of it is also hardest to measure or to justify in terms of return on investment.

This is where asking more specific questions becomes more useful: not just, 'what's the point?' but 'the point for whom?'.  In the cold light of the budget cuts, perhaps it's better to ask 'how do you prioritise your museums' web work?'.  Both the 'practicalities' and the aggregators are broadly about access – getting people into the galleries or to catalogue records so they can discover and make the most of your collections.  The messy middle bit is broadly about engagement, which I suspect is key to broadening access by providing better ways for more people to access our collections.

As a museum technologist it hurts to say this, but if your museum isn't genuinely interested in online engagement or just can't resource it, then maybe the point of your website is to meet the practicalities as well as you can and push your content up into an aggregator.  I think we're still working to understand the role of online content in the relationship between museums and their audiences, but despite my final note of doom and gloom, I hope museums keep working at it.  As Bruce Wyman tweeted at the MCN session, "current visitors most frequently give *incremental* ideas. You need different folk to take those great leaps forward. That's us". 

Do we lose more than we gain by separating 'museum as venue' from 'museum as holder of collections' and 'museum as space for engaging with culture, science and history'?  And is it acceptable for some museums to stick to brochureware if they can't manage more?  What do you think?  


* The aggregation model also potentially applies to museum shops and picture libraries (ArtFinder, Culture Label, etc) but, perhaps because commercial profits are riding on the quality of the user experience, they tend to have more carefully tended information architecture and they're closer to the 'curated experience'.

** I've also written about audience issues with aggregation (boo) and the potential for 'Museum data and the network effect' (yay!) in 'Museums meet the 21st century'The rise of the non-museum (and death by aggregation)Rockets, Lockets and Sprockets – towards audience models about collections? and (back in 2009) Happy developers + happy museums = happy punters.  One reason aggregated collections aren't a great user experience is that paucity of museum collection data, though that can be improved with crowdsourcing, which as a bonus appears to be a great way to engage audiences.

[Update: there's a post on the Huffington Post (I know, but what can you do?) on 'What Makes for Compelling Museum Websites? When to Break the Rules' that posits 'Viewer Focused', 'Mirror' and 'Augmented' design principles for exhibition microsites.  This model seems to be about how strictly the microsite matches the objects in the exhibition, and whether the visitor can comment or use a variety of methods for navigating through the content.]

8 thoughts on “Brochureware, aggregators and the messy middle: what's the point of a museum website?”

  1. Thanks for a couple of great posts on museum websites. I just realized, that most of the sites I have done or managed myself probably belong to the "messy middle" ;-)My comment however is in regard to brochureware. We have probably all been there. If not now, then at least in the early days of the web, when we didn´t use it as a tool of communication, but more as a place to "publish information". Not information as in "information and knowledge about the topics the institution reasearches and exhibit" but information meaning "the information you will need to visit and get information and knowledge onsite".I have very large respect for the fact, that small institutions do not necessarilly have the ressources and skills to have an elaborate, online presence. But I believe, that there are a lot of factors challenging the value of "brochureware". If the main content of a museumwebsite is visitor information, who will find it and how? Such a website will be of great use and value to the person, who is planning a visit. But if it is not visible on the web (eg. findable in Google) it will primarily be found by people, who allready has knowledge of the museum, and intention to come visit. So, brochureware may need a lot of help from marketing and campaigns for potential visitors to find and use the site.An example: The museum in "Museumshire" has a great permanent exhibition of objects from a famous, local porcelaine factory. But if someone googles "porcelaine", "Museumshire, the names of artists or patterns associated with the factory – the "Museumshire Country Museum" is not listed among the suggestions. The museum website has only little information on the topic of the exhibition. The content is not optimized for search engines, and the content about porcelaine is not comprehensive or interesting enough for other sites to link to. The "digital esteem" of the site will be influenced by a lot of factors, such as content not being well optimized, not many incomming links, not a lot of traffic on the site – and what beomes increasingly important today: not much social sharing going on. For someone to find and use the site, they would have to have been inspired to do so by off- and online adds, posters, etc. This is also expensive and timecraving. So, my point is, that money saved on digital could become money, that has to be spend on marketing and advertising.I don´t know what the "solution" may be, but maybe it could comprise a more "overall view" on digital presence as a whole? Small – but very seo-focused sites, maybe made with a blog-tool to engage with users, presences on a few, carefully chosen, relevant social platforms, collaboration with other, larger knowledge sites – and all stitched together to create synergy?I am very interested in hearing other viewpoints on this (although I work for a rather large museum) since this is a challenge for all heritage people. So I hope someone will comment. I will share a link to the latest recommendations of the Danish Heritage Agency , which highlights the importance of focusing on "actual" content on museum websites(in Danish though)

  2. Thanks for your comment! I'm still trying to work out what types of website are in the 'messy middle' – it's not a very useful category on its own. I'd welcome your thoughts…

    Leaving aside the issue of collections-level discovery (for your person looking for local places with porcelain collections) for the moment, brochureware is really just the bare minimum, and as you point out, needs to be supplemented with activity elsewhere. I think it's worth labelling 'brochureware' as a type so that people can gather together some simple ways to make those sites more effective. e.g. a simple blog-as-CMS can work quite well, as they tend to be optimised for SEO and can bind together content created on social media sites (possibly including image galleries of their porcelain objects on Flickr, Facebook or specialist sites). I'd hope any visitor attraction is also claiming its spot on Google Places, Maps, etc as well as getting listed in traditional tourist and local guides.

    Returning to the original post, Bruce Wyman posted a link a few weeks ago, 'No Corporate Website? You Don't Need One. Welcome to the Post-Web era', http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/no_corporate_website_you_dont_need_one_welcome_to.php which is an example of the kind of thinking that influenced my thoughts about sites as brochureware. I don't think 'brochureware' has to carry the same stigma it did back in the late 90s because as the article says, "Yes, you do need something for potential customers to bring up in their browsers when they type in companynamedotcom. But you also don't need to put a lot of effort into its creation".

    Many museums that resort to brochureware won't have the resources to put much time into the 'Other People's Marketing' the article mentions, unless it happens to coincide with existing curatorial or outreach activities (which starts getting into a whole different question of creating authority and interest by being generous with your knowledge and time – a lovely idea but not easy in a time of cuts).

    As you say, an 'overall view' is key to the success of any museum digital presence and to making the most of scarce resources, no matter what form the site takes.

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