The Internet KILLS Museums!

Err, actually, it's the opposite of that.

A study came out just recently that showed visits to museum websites correlate positively with in-person visits to museums.

http://interconnectionsreport.org/

I've only looked at the conclusions Powerpoint, but this looks like a powerful argument in the face of Internet Fear. If visitors use the internet, they're more likely visit a museum. How cool is that? In a time when people spend all day looking at screens, it seems reasonable that they might then wish to see real things in 3D for part of the time when they don't have to look at screens (this is me blathering, and not from the report. All wild conjecture here.).

And, dang, I wish this report had been available when I was writing my thesis. It looks like it's full of good stuff.

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Digital Museum Webinar: Planning for Technology

When I heard about this webinar I was excited. Then disappointed. As someone fresh out of grad school, I don't have a lot of disposable income to put toward professional development, even very reasonably priced professional development. But, hark!, AAM's EMP (that's Emerging Museum Professionals, not electro-magnetic pulse or Experience Music Project) was offering a limited number of fellowships to EMPs. So I applied for one and was lucky enough to be selected. I just finished with the first Webinar, and it was pretty neat. Plus I received a copy of The Digital Museum: A Think Guide for being a participant.


I am taking webinar notes directly into Blogger. Keeps me focussed!

First of all, the technology issues: What's an online seminar about technology with technology issues? I assume these were all on my end. I couldn't get the audio to work. I'd run the tech check last week and it showed up fine, but it was frustrating to catch the first few words of something and then it would drop for an uncertain amount of time. Luckily, there was also a call-in number. I had to dial it about 5 times before I got through (busy signal) so I bet I wasn't the only one with this issue.

I've gotten through! And am making funny faces! Also, please to note my complex system of post-its.

And then I had troubles with Adobe Connect Professional, particularly with the polls the presenters could do: they didn't come up fast enough for me to participate in, alas. I imagine this has to do with my internet connection, even though my pre-webinar tech-check gave me the thumbs up. Heavy sigh.

Now that I've got the tech-whining out of my system, let me just say it was great. I really enjoyed this webinar. I don't have the resources to make it to MW2008, and this felt like a little piece of that: People who get technology talking about technology.

Two of the presenters talked about planning. One, Len Steinbach, focussed on Return on Investment Analysis. Angela Spinazze focussed on more general planning for technology. I enjoyed these presentations, because one of the things they focussed on was one of my harping points: know why you want to do things before you do them! Angela also brought up that it's okay not to implement technology. Yes. Not everything is for everyone.

The third presenter, Holley Witchey, spoke on morals and ethics - the little issues that we don't like to talk about because we tend to transgress them on occasion - as they relate to museum technology. All the presenters brought forth great ideas and gave the participants a lot to think about. I found it invigorating to be part of such interest about technology. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the sessions.

You can still register for the three upcoming sessions. I've put my (unintelligible) notes below the jump, for those interested.



Len Steinbach: Return on Investment

- Be sure to consider the direct costs, the indirect costs. How will you maintain your project? What is your perceived benefit? Take everything into account in your planning. This is return on investment analysis.

- What kind of return do you want? $$$ or mission? How do you evaluate mission based returns? How will you?

- Is there a champion in your institute? Who makes technology happen? And will there be momentum to maintain the change after the champion leaves? Make the plan to make it happen.

- Balancing multiple projects. Return on Investment will make your reasoning transparent. Provides a strong case and creates measurable expectations.

- The risk of too much success and the needs of staffing. How can small museums manage their success? engage in partnerships. buy external hosting with giant bandwidth. What is the worst case success scenario? What is the cost?

- Resources on best practices, ROI: the book, Len will post links to resource docs in forum. Management: part art, part science. No exact formula.

Angela Spinazze: Technology Planning

*grr! I'm having a bear of a time with the Adobe Seminar thing. I'm not getting the polls loaded, the slides, the presenters. Arg. It's so frustrating.*

Planning: Assess needs. define purpose, priorities, goals, objectives. Identify stakeholders. Set Timelines. Calculate costs. Manage Expectations. Evaluate Outcomes. (And now the adobe thing is working. but too late to participate in the polls.)

Assessing needs. Do it! observe, determine. What needs are you meeting?
Stakeholders: Anyone involved, anyone with an interest. Possible funders? Competing project people? Who are you up against?
Timelines: project, roll out, testing phase. Build in times. Testing!!
Costs: See Len's. Understand what your immediate costs, your contingency costs, your long term costs/maintenance costs.
Expectations: Do the needs assessment to find out what people's expectations are, and be able to address people's concerns as you go. Be prepared to explain if things go wrong.
Evaluate: Do it!! Learn from what you've done.

Planning process will take as long as it needs to take. Take it as seriously as you would an implementation phase. Resolve problems as they emerge, if you can.

Questions to consider: (things for needs assessment - the obvious of why we want/we need things and why?) How will it relate to/support/advance the mission? Cost (develop/maintain/UPGRADE)? Ease(resources?)? How will this effect other museum priorities and activities? Demand (from where? Is there any?)? How does it relate to branding? What is the rep/age of the technology(established?)? Transition Plan? Who needs to be on the project team?

Advice! Plan extensively (3-5 years!!!). talk with people, find resources, find other plans. Start small and build. Don't do it all at once (because you can't. no one can). You don't have to do it. Making mistakes leads to learning opportunities. Be creative, have fun.

What are you trying to do for whom?

Examples, inspirationary places: 59 smartest orgs online:http://www.squidoo.com/org20, http://www.tasi.ac.uk/, http://www.wethepeople.gov/projects/index.html, http://www.techsoup.com/

Planning for the future: Keep your eye outside the box. Keep your finger on the pulse of trends. Look outside the museum community (or community in which you work). http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

Retroplanning: Look at what you've made without planning and evaluate it and move forward. (ie old websites, dodgy online exhibits, etc.)

Holly Witchey: Morals and Ethics (you Kant make me)

*love any title with a pun in it*

Ethical issues in one place may be legal issues in another. Museums like to talk about BIG and IMPORTANT and GLAMOROUS issues. These are pretty easy to discuss because they're entertaining and generally involve other people.

What we don't like to talk about: Personal copies? Music on comp/networks? Copyright issues in powerpoint presentations? Borrowing tech? Personal browsing? THE SMALL ISSUES, institutional culture.

Everyday tech costs money too!

Solid vs. Chameleon Ethics. Fortune cookie: The fact that others are bad does not imply that you are good *what a depressing fortune cookie* How can we start conversations in places where values come into conflict? (Exhibition/preservation) Choices.

For a CoE to be valid: Involvement with production. Coherence with general principles and conscience. Coherence with company's officers behavior.

Guidelines for dealing with conflicts: articulate, analyze, personalize (look at your values), escalate (if needed).

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A beginner's guide to cool museum stuff online

I am really lucky. The folks involved in creating the museum at which I work are interested in the potential of new media for involving the community. But, they don't have as much exposure to the cool kinds of things museums are doing as, say, me! So a couple of weeks ago I put together this sort of "beginner's guide" for one of the professors with whom I work. And I thought I'd share. I think, if you read this, you probably know which applications and institutions I'm the most impressed with, but, hey, why not? :D

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The Brooklyn Museum has a great all around approach to new media and community: CLICK

Australia's Powerhouse Museum is doing exciting things with their collections online, not just having them there, but allowing visitors to "tag" the online entries with keywords they find useful: CLICK

Eye Level, blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum: CLICK

The Walker museum in Minneapolis has 6 blogs and are quite good. I especially like OffCenter and the New Media Initiatives blogs: CLICK

The Science Museum of Minnesota has a pretty cool area called Science Buzz with a blog that posts current science stories, polls, and offers registered users the chance to post at top level. There are also interactive kiosks inside the museum from which visitors can comment: CLICK

The Victoria and Albert has a section on knitting which incorporates their collection, but goes beyond it: CLICK The V&A also have a couple of artist blogs.

That's an overview of some of what's out there. The Powerhouse and Science Buzz are two of the most exciting things, in my opinion. Many museums are podcasting; many are creating facebook groups or profiles; some museums are venturing into Second Life; and some are playing with Twitter. Pretty much, any new application which catches on with a segment of the population, museums are starting to experiment with.

Leslie of MuseumBlogging.org had a pretty good series on museums and social networking sites: CLICK

Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 writes very thoughtful and thought provoking posts at her blog: CLICK

Two final things: If you want to look around at museum blogs, http://museumblogs.org/ has a list of 208 museum and museum-related blogs. And the sidebar of my thesis blog has about 100 museum blogs, not all of which are on museumblogs.org: http://museumblogthesis.blogspot.com/.

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Whatcha think? What did I miss that's supah cool?

Oh! I got up the nerve to submit an abstract to MW2008. It's not really anything new, but I thought it might be an appropriate place to share my thesis research. If it did get accepted, I think I'd put up a new, modified survey to beef up that side of things. I won't be heartbroken if it doesn't make it in, but it'll be pretty nifty if it did. Anywho. I'm hoping to go either way.

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Everything is Miscellaneous

Are you guys catching this? Leslie Madsen-Brooks is posting a multi-part series on Museums and Social Networking sites. So far, three parts are posted: 1. Introduction and Facebook, 2. Myspace, and 3. Flickr. She's offering a lot of great observations and pulling together a lot of writing and links. I'm looking forward to the next installment featuring social networking services of a different color: YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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I'm currently reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. It's one of those really entertaining, interesting, and provoking reads. I haven't yet had a chance to synthesize it, but one thing that really seems to stand out is the potential for messy data. And I mean messy data in a good way. Weinberger speaks of the "new digital disorder" as a third order method of organization - a method not bound by the rules of a two dimension paper based system.

Of course, in order to open up, say, digital collections to third order methods of organization, like tagging, museums need to have their second order organization in hand. A lot of museums can't say that their collections are completely cataloged in databases such as ARGUS or PastPerfect. And if the museum doesn't have control over its objects, it isn't sensical to start to relinquish that control to tagging projects.

And then, when you do have your second order ducks in a row, how do you get people to participate? As the sidebar to the Powerhouse Bulk Collections tagger states: "One of the key problems we have identified with social tagging of our collection is that there just isn't enough tagging going on and although the tags that are added do have significant benefit in terms of making certain collection records more easily discoverable only about 3000 records have been tagged so far." Yeah. What do people get from tagging? Tagging personal images, blog entries, bookmarks, what have you, has a use for the average person on the Internet. Tagging stuff for kicks? That's what museum people might do, not your average Myspace user.

Same problem as always: It's cool, we know why we're doing it, but how come no one's coming to play with us? The Powerhouse Museum is trying to address this issue by aiming the bulk tagger application to museum professionals and amateur groups.

Or, next to each collections object, have one of those nice buttons that say "Digg This" or "del.icio.us" so that the tagging is done through already beneficial applications and then find a way to mine that data.... Except for all those tags that'll just say "museum."

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We are the future

We are the future. And we want your collections to be accessible online. And we want them indexed on search engines so we can find them.

I'm sitting here in the Wallingford Chocolati (chocolate, espresso, and wireless. What more could I want?) with Larissa, the Museology program digitization queen. We're here with the purpose of creating our defense presentations, but we haven't quite gotten to that point.

We've been sidelined talking about the places where our theses interact. Larissa's all about digitization of collections and public access to those online. And I'm all about, well, blogging. Duh.

Why are there no blogs that take you behind the scenes in collections? Why? Or are there and I've missed them? Every once in a while I'll see them take a peek, but rarely. Most museum visitors are not aware that there is vast collections storage beneath their feet, much less of the COMPLETELY AWESOME stuff that goes on in collections and is held in the collections (is my bias showing? Oops.). I think that Glenbow's Dear Miss Griffis does a pretty cool job of using their archives as their blog, but this is not what I'm talking about.

Can we juxtapose the Botany Photo of the Day blog with the Powerhouse Museum's Collection Database with your average blog? Yeah yeah yeah, I know there are copyright restrictions - I'm thinking of historical collections primarily, not art. If I weren't a museum person, that is what I would want to see. Cool old stuff. Not just the 3" by 4" placard of information from an exhibit, but the story. Stories. Museum 2.0 just had a thought provoking post on the power of stories.

What are the really successful blogs? Boingboing? Yeah. It's the places where you find all the cool little stories that not too many others know.

Am I being totally coherent? No. But I am excited by the possibilities! It's not only the possibility of making collections accessible to the public, it's making collections accessible online for researchers, for everyone. It's using Flickr to encourage accessibility and invite participation.

This is what I want the future of collections to be. Collections so often gets the short end of the stick, but the potential. The potential is huge. So much potential countered by so much institutional Fear. But look out museum world. We're coming and we see the potential and we have the Trust.

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The I-Generation

One of my LJ friends posted a link to this nerdcore video:



And it fits in with what I've been thinking about lately. Trust vs. fear. Younger vs. older.

When I presented at Rethinking Museums last Thursday, there were some interesting questions, some stemming from my use of the Creation Museum Blog as an example. Museums are afraid of the appropriation of their words and images from blogs by other organizations with goals counter to those of the museums. I have trouble understanding this fear. That is, I understand the fear, but I have trouble understanding how it can be contextualized anew. Museums had this fear when they first started going online, but they decided the benefits outweighed the costs. And, even with the fear, words and images can be appropriated from printed material. I don't fully understand why this is fear is being transferred to social web application. And it frustrates me.

I've called it The Fear. Museums have The Fear. But maybe it's me and my generation; we have The Trust. We grew up with or got involved at a relatively young age with the internet and then with social applications. We Trust others online. We share information, personal opinions, stories, photos, and more with people online who are "strangers." Some my best friends today, I met online first.

Maybe I can really only speak for myself in this capacity, but I Trust. I Trust that people are basically good and basically well intentioned. I know that my words could be appropriated for use beyond my control. But it's beyond my control, and there might be someone out there who finds what I have to say interesting and useful. It's worth the cost.

I've heard people older than myself say that they were scared at how trusting younger people are. So I wonder if this Trust v. Fear thing comes down to Younger v. Older (gross generalizations, of course). As the younger people of today gain footholds in museums, I wonder what will come out of it. More of the cool open tagging initiatives like the Powerhouse Museum has? More blogs? Avenues for freely uploading visitor produced podcasts? Something else? And what about people who've been doing social networking since they were 12 and didn't start easing into it at 18? What is their worldview? What kind of initiatives comes to someone who literally grew up participating online?

The future is wide open. I trust it.

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