Category: Museums

Some feedback to MW2008 and other conferences

There's a thread on the Museums and the Web conference site asking for suggestions for MW2009. I was a bit zombie-like by the time I filled out the feedback form, so I'd added some more comments.

I'm posting them here because I think they apply to lots of conferences and these are things I'd like to see generally. It might look like a lot of comments but I'm probably inspired to write because overall the conference was so good.

There were suggestions to have Pecha Kucha style sessions for people to talk about their projects. I think that'd be really useful – people in the early stages of a project could get a range of feedback and suggestions from some of the best researchers and most experienced 'doers' around; and the vast majority of projects that will never be written up as big conference papers can still pass on a few valuable lessons in a few minutes. It'd also help build a pool of people who had some experience presenting.

I also suggested having afternoon versions of the Birds of a Feather breakfasts. I'm one of those people who's not at all sociable in the morning, but an afternoon session in a coffee shop or pub would be perfect. It'd also give you a way to meet people and maybe go on to dinner or drinks – it must be really difficult if you don't know anyone there and are a bit shy. I'd imagine you could find people who are interested in the same topics more easily this way because it offers a bit more structure than just drinks.

I don't know if there are any guidelines when writing papers but I'd like to suggest one – it's really useful when people talk about how their projects worked in their institutions/sector, as it helps everyone work out how to champion and implement similar ideas when they get back from the conference. Or maybe that's a thread for one of the museum geeks lists…

It would be really useful if each session listed the audience (managers, technologists, educators, etc) and the level of experience it was aimed at (e.g. absolute beginners, practitioners, people looking for a practical learning session) in the program. A lot of the papers did a really good job covering a range of potential audiences, but I might have skipped other sessions if I'd realised they were aimed at an introductory level.

Museums and the Web conferences are brilliant because they put the papers online, so this is a minor quibble, but it would be handy if the papers were available as pdf (or similar) downloads so I could load them onto my phone or laptop beforehand. That way I could follow them during the presentations if there isn't any network connectivity, or review them afterwards.

Finally, it would be so helpful if all presenters had to put their slides online somewhere, tagged with the conference tag and linked from the conference site. The one paper I've blogged about so far had their slides online, and it helped me immensely when writing up as I could check my notes against theirs. As more people blog about conferences, you might need tags for each session – a bit more overhead, but I'm sure you'd get great conversations between people who blogged about the same sessions and hopefully with presenters too.

A slide projected in a 'fancy hotel'-style conference room. The text says: 'miaridge: if 2007 was about UI to differentiate UCG and 'expert' content, 2008 could add machine generated tags to the mix #mw2008'
A tweet projected, the text says: 'miaridge: if 2007 was about UI to differentiate UCG and 'expert' content, 2008 could add machine generated tags to the mix #mw2008'

Electronic exhibit templates?

Ideum and the Association of Science-Technology Centers are looking for feedback on "a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate three open source software templates that will allow museum professionals’ to assemble electronic exhibits for the museum floor."

They've put together a survey "to gain insight into the state of electronic exhibits at a variety of museums, to gauge interest in the Open Exhibits software templates, and to better understand museums’ technical expertise and constraints". You can read more at their original blog post or go straight to their survey.

They don't really define an 'electronic exhibit' but perhaps that's part of the exercise. They also say they'll share the results with everyone who took part, which is nice.

Museums as social spaces – the good, the bad, and the (ugly) conversations of others

I've linked to two articles about museums as social spaces or the behaviour of the public in museums; one refers to virtual and the other to physical space but the issues are related.

In museums, social situations, control and trust, Jennifer Trant says:

as soon as you put museum collections in a public place, the public will do what they do …. search logs show us that many look for 'nude' … and if you let people comment, they will: they will tell you about your typos; they will tell you that their child could have made that painting; and they will argue about the significance of works. they will also tell you things that you might never have known, and you can learn from that. but what happens when two branches of a family choose your museum's site as the venue for a dispute about what was 'true' family history?

She also makes the point that museums "can't demand control" and have to trust that users will respect their content when they allow users to use their collections in the users' personal space.

This is one issue that probably causes a lot of anxiety within museums at the moment. We'll only really find out whether users will respect our content when we let them respond to it. What kind of visitors have the means and self-motivation to comment on, link to pages or display images, or otherwise respond to cultural heritage content?

On another note, is it worse to be disrespected or ignored?

I'm just quoting one more bit from her post before I go on, because I thought it was worth repeating:

"there are a number of different value propositions for distribution of reproductions of works of in their collections. there may still be some great icons that will sell. but in many cases the value of having a collection known may outweighs worries about lost revenue, particularly when the images being released on the public web really aren't large enough to do that much with."

So from visitors respecting content, to visitors respecting other visitors, and perhaps to whether museums respect the visitor experience…

Giles Waterfield relates his experience of the crowded New York MoMA in The crowds swamping museums must be tackled – soon and makes some good points about "the over-population and over-use of the museum space":

"the predominance and ready availability in our society of visual images can mean that apart from the (sometimes over-exposed) icon, works in a gallery risk becoming another form of rapidly-absorbed consumer fodder. … visitors at many contemporary art museums now often behave similarly, pausing only to take pictures of celebrity works"

This matters because:

"looking at art is a difficult experience, one that has to be learnt and that requires concentration. Little art was created specifically for the museum or gallery, at least until recently, and the museum is not necessarily the best place to appreciate it. If the museum experience becomes one in which the visitor is regularly concerned with negotiating a way through the crowds and avoiding noise, the status of the museum as a vehicle for displaying art becomes highly questionable.

…the series of subtle, intense and inter-linked experiences that are created require an appropriate environment. The Demoiselles may just about survive, but quieter works of art drown and the carefully considered relationships between them disappear when the pressure of visitors means it is hardly possible to concentrate or to view more than one work at a time, if that."

His article is specific to art galleries, and the types of attention, learning and reflection may well be different for art works and social history objects; but the effect of interactions between the space in which the object is seen and of encounters with other visitors is interesting.

In my own experience, I have to force myself to go see blockbuster exhibitions because I dread the crowds – not only can is be really difficult to have a decent look at the art or objects; the sheer number of people means that tempers are shorter and the atmosphere is slightly more 'Oxford Street on a Saturday' than 'quiet temple of contemplation'.

If you give up waiting for a chance to read the captions or panel text over someone else's shoulder, it's easy for objects to appear only as visual entertainment.

Museum technology project repository launched

MCN have announced the launch of MuseTech Central, a project registry where museum technologies can 'share information about technology-related museum projects'. It sounds like a fabulous way to connect people and share the knowledge gained during project planning and implementations processes, hopefully saving other museum geeks some resources (and grey hairs) along the way.

I'd love to see something like that for user evaluation reports, so that institutions with similar audiences or collections could compare the results of different approaches, or organisations with limited resources could learn from previous projects.

More on cultural heritage and resistance to the participatory web

I've realised that in my post on 'Resistance to the participatory web from within the cultural heritage sector?', I should have made it clear that I wasn't thinking specifically of people within my current organisation. I've been lucky enough to meet a range of people from different institutions at various events or conferences, and when I get a chance I keep up with various cultural heritage email discussion lists and blogs. One way or another I've been quietly observing discussions about the participatory web from a wide range of perspectives within the cultural heritage and IT sectors for some time.

Ok, that said, the responses have been interesting.

Thomas at Medical Museion said:

This are interesting observations, and I wonder: Can this resistance perhaps be understood in terms of an opposition among curators against a perceived profanation of the sacred character of the museum? In the same way as Wikipedia and other user-generated content websites have been viewed with skepticism from the side of many academics — not just because they may contain errors (which encyclopedia doesn’t?), but also because it is a preceived profanation of Academia. (For earlier posts about profanation of the museum as a sacred institution, see here and here.). Any ideas?

I'm still thinking about this. I guess I don't regard museums as sacred institutions, but then as I don't produce interpretative or collection-based content that could be challenged from outside the institution, I haven't had a vested interest in retaining or reinforcing authority.

Tom Goskar at Past Thinking provided an interesting example of the visibility and usefulness of user-generated content compared to official content and concluded:

People like to talk about ancient sites, they like to share their photos and experiences. These websites are all great examples of the vibrancy of feeling about our ancient past.

For me that's one of the great joys of working in the cultural heritage sector – nearly everyone I meet (which may be a biased sample) has some sense of connection to museums and the history they represent.

The growth of internet forums on every topic conceivable shows that people enjoy and/or find value in sharing their observations, opinions or information on a range of subjects, including cultural heritage objects or sites. Does cultural heritage elicit a particular response that is motivated by a sense of ownership, not necessarily of the objects themselves, but rather of the experience of, or access to, the objects?

It seems clear that we should try and hook into established spaces and existing conversations about our objects or collections, and perhaps create appropriate spaces to host those conversations if they aren't already happening. We could also consider participating in those conversations, whether as interested individuals or as representatives of our institutions.

However institutional involvement with and exposure to user-generated content could have quite different implications. It not only changes the context in which the content is assessed but it also lends a greater air of authority to the dialogues. This seems to be where some of the anxiety or resistance to the participatory web resides. Institutions or disciplines that have adapted to the idea of using new technologies like blogs or podcasts to disseminate information may baulk at the idea that they should actually read, let alone engage with any user-generated content created in response to their content or collections.

Alun wrote at Vidi:

Interesting thoughts on how Web 2.0 is or isn’t used. I think one issue is a question of marking authorship, which is why Flickr may be more acceptable than a Wiki.

I think that's a good observation. Sites like Amazon also effectively differentiate between official content from publishers/authors and user reviews (in addition to 'recommendation'-type content based on the viewing habits of other users).

Another difference between Flickr and a wiki is that the external user cannot edit the original content of the institutional author. User-generated content sites like the National Archives wiki can capture the valuable knowledge generated when external people access collections and archives, but when this user-generated content is intermingled with, and might edit or correct, 'official' content it may prove a difficult challenge for institutions.

The issue of whether (and how) museums respond to user-generated content, and how user-generated content could be evaluated and integrated with museum-generated content is still unresolved across the cultural heritage sector and may ultimately vary by institution or discipline.

New ways of experiencing museums

This article presents a lovely perspective on the ways different audiences now engage with museums. It's also interesting to wonder how these changing perspectives affect the online experience of a museum, exhibition or single object.

The idea of a museum visit as a kind of promenade theatre event is a comparatively new one for me. I am typical of my generation, I suspect, in still expecting a trip to a gallery to be improving – with the emphasis on it as a place where one will be educated, and above all, somewhere one will be infused with morally uplifting sentiments.

Younger gallery-goers, by contrast, go in search of a more immediate experience – looking for something emotionally challenging, against which to measure the tide of information that floods us, in our engulfing sea of online information.

Or, in the case of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall or the V&A's Friday Late, they simply go to hang out with similarly inclined others, for the shared sense of occasion.

Last weekend's outing to Tate Modern succeeded in convincing me that the excitement of the encounter is an important part of today's visit to the museum.

…

According to the French intellectual Andre Malraux – Minister for Culture under General de Gaulle for 10 years from 1959 – whereas once the visitor went to a museum to be provided with answers, now, the responsibility lies with us, the visitors.

The museum experience exists most richly in our own imaginations, created out of a collection of images we each carry with us, gleaned from books, magazines, photographs and film. We bring remembered visual material with us into a museum space which has thereby become imaginary. The installation or exhibition merely acts as a catalyst, prompting us to ask our own questions which we look to the artist to answer.

From the BBC, Making contact

More Jonty! A tour of the Museum of London

Jonty's tour of the Museum of London

It's also up on Google video (Museum of London tour, Museum in Docklands tour) where I'm guessing more people might see it. I'm really curious to see if they bring in new visitors, and how much they increase awareness of the museums.

Jonty's tour of the Museum in Docklands

You probably didn't realise that one of the Museum of London's visitor assistants was in the UK Big Brother 2007 household. He's popped back into the Museum in Docklands to give a 'personal guided tour of his favourite things at Museum in Docklands', and it's available online now at www.museumindocklands.org.uk/jonty.

Where should social networking 'live'?

Chris Anderson says social networking is a feature, not a destination:

Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination.

So far, so good – but Chris Anderson's day job is at Wired, which is definitely a destination site with a huge audience. Cultural heritage sites are useful for a range of people, but I suspect most people stumble across our content incidentally, through search engines and external links – they don't think "I'll spend my lunch break browsing the Museum of Whatever's website".

But another of his projects is much smaller so the issues are more relevant to the cultural heritage sector:

So we've been debating internally whether we want to shift to a distributed functionality strategy (AKA "go where the people are"), where most users interact with us via a widget on third party sites, clicking through to our site only when they want to go deeper. We're embarking on some experiments with a few partners we like to see how that goes. Hopefully a distributed strategy will help us reach critical mass as a destination, too, but right now we're simply experimenting to see what works.

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I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

So how would this work for us? Would our visitors gather around specific institutions, around institutional collections, around meta-collections that span several institutions, or around the sector as a whole? Would they, for example, gather around a site like Exploring 20th Century London, which has a very specific temporal and regional focus? Or are these potential users already on sites that meet their needs, at least to some extent? Our collections will inevitably still form a valuable resource for discussion, no matter where that discussion takes place.

Who knows? I think it'll be fun finding out.

I keep meaning to post about Ning. As the post above says, "Ning is not a destination itself–instead, it provides hosted social networking tools for niche sites to create their own destinations."

It could be a useful tool for smaller organisations who want to get into social software but don't have the means to build their hosts or applications, or for small ad hoc team working.

The New York Times on what the American public want in a history museum, and some discussion of the value of multimedia and interactive exhibitions:

if memorizing dates and place names hold little appeal, history museums still rate very highly with the American public. "What people say they’re excited about in terms of history museums is contact with real stuff of the past,” he explained.

They also want to find themselves — spiritually, socially and intellectually — among all that material
…
"In the visitation research that's been done for many years," Ms. Davis said, "the thing that we hear most is that people want to see something about themselves and that they trust information the museums are giving them even more than they trust what schools are telling them and even the stories their grandmothers are telling them.

"People want to see themselves in the exhibit. And the research done at individual museums suggests that when they do find themselves there, they fare much better."

All fair enough. But the article concludes with a quote, "The greatest danger is not that people get a version of history that is dramatized. It's that people don't pay attention to the past at all" but to me that contradicts the responsibility museums have as trusted institutions. The stories we present should be real; if they're not real, both the sources and the areas of fabrication or uncertainty should be clear.

History’s Real Stuff (Sorry, Miss Grundy)