Archive for February, 2008

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 5: Sharing Content

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

This is Part 5 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archive to access the first four parts.

Robin: Here’s a real world example of a museum actually soliciting ideas from its audience and acting on them.

Brooklyn Historical Society logo

The Brooklyn Historical Society started a project where they invite community groups to propose subjects for exhibitions, and then use material in the BHS collection to create those shows. They’re saying to the incredibly diverse population of Brooklyn, “It’s your history and your stories we want to tell” and people who never attended the museum before are coming. Right now there’s a show called Lost in Transition: South Brooklyn, Williamsburg & Coney Island, which includes pictures taken by teenagers in the Urban Memory Project.

Let’s not only capture your interest, but feed it!

Holly: Well, after collecting all this information about what web visitors are interested in, wouldn’t it be great if museums could respond by feeding their interests? Since you liked this, you may also want to know about that. Like Amazon and other vendors who lead customers from one purchase to others — how can museums tailor their information to the individual’s interests? The commercial world has set a standard for customer responsiveness that, for good or ill, museums must now meet.

Amazon recommendations

Robin: Exactly – what Amazon and other sites use is called recommendation software. Museums could track visitors’ interests through the audio and video tour stops they select, for instance. For the moment though, it seems like visitors are feeding each others’ interests rather than waiting for museums to do it, and museums are offering blogs, and other platforms for them to do this. The New Museum’s new site, for example, has a Share link so you can share info from their site with your friends, either by email, or by adding the url to your del.icio.us account, or to a shared calendar, or to StumbleThis.

New Museum's share links

What’s happening is that the museum visitors are becoming the source of news – sharing information about common interests from myriad sources, rather than relying on one source.

Think about the relationship building that would occur if the museum’s experts also participated in these information-sharing networks. It will be great when museums figure out how to do that, and even how to position themselves as the go-to source for information about stuff that YOU are specifically interested in.

Holly: In the meantime, your stories – at the Cantor Art Center, and the Austrian Museum — are wonderful examples of the interaction between museum and visitor becoming a conversation instead of a one way broadcast. It doesn’t in any way denigrate the authority or the knowledge of the people who work in the museum. It only acknowledges that everybody has a chance to learn something, and that both the staff of the museum and its visitors are still learning. And that’s very much in keeping with what’s happening in the larger culture, where exchange is increasingly peer-to-peer-to-peer and hierarchies of all kinds are breaking down. Because people have access to so much information now and our confidence in authority figures has eroded, perhaps beyond repair.

Robin: The days of the museum as wunderkammer are gone but they still have absolutely unique content, and things that can inspire a state of wonder in visitors. Museums need to take that message out to places where people are, and make it available on technologies that people use – their computers, iPods and cell phones.

Holly: It’s a much more competitive environment now than even ten years ago, with so much more information and choices coming at people, all the more reason why cultural institutions have to get very clear about their real intentions regarding visitors as well as very savvy about their public relations and marketing. They have to seriously confront cultural change – demographic change, technological and economic change, global movements of population and money, even climate change. All these trends have an impact on museums, and if they’re not actively engaging these issues they’re going to be actively affected by them.

Robin: So we agree that while there are unprecedented opportunities for museums in using web 2.0 technologies, implementing them is a challenge. Museum leaders need the vision and commitment to genuinely open their doors wider on the web, but they also need a strategy for how to do it most effectively. Only then can they take charge of defining their presence on the internet, and engage on many levels with old and new audiences.

Posted in Brooklyn Historical Society, museums, recommendation software | No Comments »

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 4: Using Facebook

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

This is Part 4 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Robin: Museums are putting their videos on YouTube and creating a presence for themselves on other social networking sites to cultivate new communities of viewers. An excellent example of how to do this successfully is the Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklyn Museum on Facebook

Why make the commitment to be on YouTube, FaceBook and Flickr? Because that’s where everybody else is – not only your potential visitors but also your competitors. Every other type of major entertainer / content provider – movies, games, sports teams, travel and tourism promoters, etc. – is using these vehicles for the same reason. They’re going to where people are, rather than waiting for audiences to come to them. The Warhol Museum is another example of a success story in this environment. They were so effective at creating an attractive profile on MySpace that 10,000 people wanted to become friends of the Museum, creating quite a backlog of people to respond to!

Holly: In the work we did at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, we learned many things, but two “rules of thumb” emerged from that experience which are especially relevant here. First, in the matter of engaging audiences, you have to start where people are. You cannot expect the uninitiated to leap in one jump to your level of knowledge and engagement. A second “rule” is that you will be more successful if you cross the river where it’s narrowest – that is, reach out first to people who are most like your current audience. That is not to say that museums shouldn’t try to diversify their audiences culturally, economically, and in other ways, but it will cost a lot less in time, money and effort to reach people who are similar to the museum’s current demographic.

The Warhol Museum on MySpace

Robin: Yes and museums can use social networking technologies to engage their current audience, and through them bring in new visitors. SFMOMA’s use of a blog for the Olafur Eliasson show, which we talked about earlier, is an effective way of doing this.

And of course social events provide some of the best opportunities for reaching out to friends of friends. But I still think one of the most compelling experiences you can have at a museum is talking to the experts – going on a curator led tour, for example. Obviously I’m not the only person who thinks this is cool because often museums offer curator led tours and conversations as a perk for higher membership options – to the people who are already on the bus, so to speak….You know, when visitors get to talk with curators, and see how their passions can breathe life into art, history and science, this greatly enhances the chances they’ll have a positive experience, and come away with new things to think about. We’ve already talked about a few examples like this.

Library of Congress flickr page

Holly: But I go back to where we started this conversation. Shouldn’t the basic motivation for a museum’s public programming be to get people to think – to engage with the strange, the unknown or maybe the very familiar, but basically to stimulate their minds? If that’s really the motivation, then shouldn’t these institutions be interested in what people are thinking as a result of their visit, isn’t that the logical next question? “Okay, we gave you our ideas, now what are your ideas?”

Robin: Yes, web 2.0 applications are all about that – encouraging people to share ideas. All of the content on Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, for example, comes from people contributing their expertise, opinions, experience, as well as pictures and videos. It’s experts and amateurs coming together. Del.icio.us and other sites allow people to collect and tag the web pages they’re interested in and share that with friends. FaceBook and MySpace allow users to present themselves, what they like and think, and find others with similar interests. And the museums that understand this phenomenon – the Walker Art Center, SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum – are inviting audiences to share their thoughts, pictures, and videos about exhibitions and events. The question is what happens as a result of all these comments? Museums are providing opportunities for people to share their thoughts, but then what? Are they taking action based on the comments? Have they figured out how to sustain an ongoing dialogue that deepens the connection and commitment to the museum? That’s definitely the next step. Our conversation concludes in Part 5: Sharing Content.

Posted in Brooklyn Museum, Facebook, Walker Art Center, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 3: Using Podcasts

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

This is Part 3 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Robin: Science centers have been cultivating students for much longer than art museums have, in part because science is always part of the curriculum. Schools and art and history museums have only recently begun to see each other as natural partners.

Holly: Our culture values science, and we value the uncertainties of science. We believe that inquiring about the unknown – at least in the sciences – will produce something of value. We know that science is being made every day, and it’s “bringing good things to our lives.” We don’t have that idea about art and history. We don’t think: “There are historians out there creating history and what they make will be valuable to us,” or “There are artists out there asking questions and making us see things in new and unexpected ways and that will add essential value to my life.” In my view, the curators and the museums that do convey that sense of discovery and engaging value really stand out from the rest.

Robin: But also most people don’t see a connection between themselves and these subjects – science, history and art. And when they go out to spend their time and money they’re looking for places where they can make a connection, have fun, be entertained. And if they can’t find those things at museums they’ll go to other places, or stay home and choose from a zillion choices offered to them by Netflix, the web or TV – the phenomenon known as “cocooning.” So, what’s a museum to do?

BMA's First Saturday party

Holly: Well, look at the the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturdays. They’ve become one of the hottest things happening that night. These events are wildly popular with people of diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. The museum has initiated “meet ups” and social networking strategies, Web 2.0, etc. They’ve developed a range of mechanisms for getting groups of young people in their 20s to think of the museum as the place to socialize. People want to have novel experiences, they want to meet their friends, they want to do things that are fun. The more museums understand that phenomenon and develop strategies to meet different cohorts’ needs, the more successful they will be. What you and I want to do is different from what our teenagers want to do, but we could both do it in a museum if that institution were sensitive to the varieties of experience that all of us want. But doing that is really tough.

Robin: But not impossible. And museums can provide experiences an opportunities that are absolutely unique. Actually, this summer the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna opened Museum inside out where they literally brought the work of the museum – registering, digitizing, evaluating objects from their collection – into the galleries so visitors could see what staff do, and ask questions. And they did it as an experiment to create a dialogue between experts and visitors. Like the Cantor Center show we were talking about in the Using Blog post, it’s a unique opportunity for visitors to interact with museum staff, to observe, ask, share, learn and increase their appreciation of the art and the work of the museum. Plus, it’s a reason to go there – you get to have an experience you can’t have anywhere else.

squirrel skull

The American Museum of Natural History, used to do something wonderful once or twice a year: they’d invite people to bring in bones, rocks and other stuff they’ve found and show it to a curator who would identify – hopefully – what it was. One year we brought a little skull we’d found in Quemado, NM. My son was six at the time. And he was so excited to show it to a real scientist. Of course it turned out to be a rabbit skull instead of a little dinosaur head. But it was so cool to have a conversation with an expert about something that was important to us.

Holly: Everybody wants to be in on a secret. The Austrian Museum certainly understood that. All these institutions have tremendous mysteries to share, whether it’s how you conserve a painting or prove it’s not a fake, or how you put a show together and discover connections between one artistic tradition and another. Let people in on the magic! Videotape and other media offer great ways to allow a lot of people “behind the scenes” without actually having them traipse through the Conservation Department. And why does it only have to be just one day a year? If you do it on a regular basis more people hear about it, more people get involved. You have to start where people are – and cross the river where it’s narrowest.

AFA Larry Poons video podcast

Robin: Sure – meet the curator, meet the conservator etc. Mystic Seaport has produced video podcasts like that – available for download from iTunes. Another theme is “behind the scenes in history” the story of how something really happened. For example, we recently produced a series of video podcasts for the American Federation of Arts to accompany their traveling exhibition “Color As Field: American Painting 1955-1975.” It’s at The Denver Museum of Art now. We recorded a conversation between the exhibition curator, Karen Wilkin, and the artist Larry Poons. He describes very vividly the behind the scenes relationships between the artists, critics and dealers, and as a result you get a sense of what it was like to be part of that intense ’60s art scene and you think about the paintings differently, even if you don’t get to see the show itself.

Podcasting is relatively easy to do and many museums are interested in it, so I’ll be doing two Video Podcasting Tutorials at the AAM Conference in Denver in April.

Posted in Brooklyn Museum, museums, podcasting, science centers | No Comments »

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 2: Using Blogs

Monday, February 18th, 2008

This is Part 2 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Holly: There’s a real tension between scholarship and entertainment. Scholars should not necessarily be expected to be entertainers and vice versa. But museums are public institutions and if they want to make a claim on public money and philanthropic money (which, given the tax advantages of philanthropic giving, in a sense is another form of public money) and attract visitors, then they must pay attention to what visitors are attracted by, what’s interesting to them.

Visitor Voices, published by ASTC

Robin: Here’s a very interesting example of such thinking. I was reading about an experiment organized by The Cantor Art Center at Stanford, in a new book called Visitor Voices edited by Kathy McClean and Wendy Pollock. In 2004 The Cantor opened “Question,” a presentation whose purpose was to address questions from visitors such as: Who decides what is art or who is an artist? Where is the meaning in a work of art? This looks like my kid could do it so why is it hanging in a museum? They put it all out there for ten months letting visitors know that no question was inappropriate, making people feel comfortable in that space of not knowing, and there were lots of opportunities for them to enter into conversations with staff and docents. Visitors really got into the spirit of the show, and follow up studies showed that it has deeply affected the way the staff collaborates and incorporate learning goals into exhibitions.

Holly: Why does the way objects are displayed and the experience of moving through an exhibition have to be so staid and formal? Break it up, cut it up, have more fun. It may not guarantee that younger visitors will come, but without such incentives, they are likely to give museums a pass. There are just too many juicy alternatives.

Giving people a chance to participate and have a dialogue makes it juicier, without eliminating scholarship.

Robin: Actually we suggested an early version of this to the Newark Museum back in 2000 for their web site, when we were producing the multimedia components for their American Art Galleries. We wanted to set up a place on their site where visitors could email questions to the curator, who would respond on a weekly basis.

Now there are over 250 museum blogs where directors, curators, staff and visitors have dialogues about objects, exhibitions, best practices – you name it.

Holly: It’s really about how genuinely a museum wants to engage an audience — any kind of audience but particularly a new audience. One of the great examples for me – it’s almost 20 years old but it’s still a model for how to engage a new audience – is Kathy Halbreich’s work with teenagers at The Walker Art Center. When Kathy first got to the Walker, very few teenagers were connected to the museum in any way, which is too bad because it’s a museum about contemporary culture. Kathy and her staff convened a committee that represented “24 hours in the life of a teenager”: the school superintendent, people who ran youth clubs, the coaches from the local sports teams, people from Dayton Hudson department store. She tried to get people who interact with teenagers in a variety of ways to sit down and talk about how the museum could be more meaningful to them. She got a lot of ideas but one of the most important was: Talk to the kids themselves!

Walker Art Museum's teen website

So the Walker composed an advisory committee of teenagers. The teens visited every department in the museum; staff talked to them about what was interesting and what would be appealing to their peers. Together the kids and the museum staff designed an array of programs that have since blossomed, including employing teenagers in various departments, strategies for engaging teens in shows and activities, and developing marketing plans that consider teen audiences. The point is they took the time to learn about this “new” audience and then developed programs and offerings of authentic interest to them. The museum has maintained their conversation with the kids over time and the result is increased attendance and real credibility with a new and enthusiastic demographic.

Robin: In fact the Walker has just launched a new version of their teen website; one half, the business side, is for museum educators and other grownups, describing The Walker’s current teen programs. The play side of the site is composed entirely of blogs generated and produced by WACTAC, the Walker Art Center Teen Art Council. They blog about music, art, films and events both Walker related and not, and post their art works and interviews – it’s a museum-sponsored site for and by teens. Since this age group is comfortable with blogging and social networking, it’s an appropriate technology for attracting teen participants.

SFMOMA's Olafur Eliasson exhibition web page

And speaking of museum blogs, here’s a daring example from SFMOMA. For their current retrospective of Olafur Eliasson, they’ve created a blog on the exhibition website itself, where visitors can directly post their comments about the show. In essence visitors become guides who share their collective experience of the work. SFMOMA is allowing visitors to critique the exhibition, to contribute interpretations, optimize the experience for others and consequently, engage a wider audience. Our conversation continues in Part 3: Using Podcasting, Part 4: Using FaceBook and Part 5: Sharing Content.

Posted in art, blogs, Cantor Art Center, teens, Visitor Voices, Walker Art Center | No Comments »

Museums and Visitors: Interacting on the Web and in the Galleries – Part 1: Using YouTube

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Recently I had a conversation with Holly Sidford, President of Helicon Collaborative, a cultural development company.* Holly and I are, to use Salman Rushdie’s term, “museum brats,” growing up near the Mint Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively. We are both very interested in how new technologies have begun to impact cultural institutions, as they try to sustain and expand audiences. Our conversation ranged over a number of themes, including the benefits of using web 2.0 applications.

Brooklyn Museum, courtesy National Archives

Robin: The traditional experience of going to a museum was kind of a silent, private affair where you went to appreciate the artworks or objects, mostly because you were already interested in them. You didn’t need to be convinced of their value or meaning. But that way of thinking has really lost currency in the last decade. These days it seems visitors want to be engaged rather than left to contemplate, and they expect museums to support their particular interests – with audio-video tours, computer interactives and opportunities to share their thoughts.

Holly: It seems to me the vast majority of visitors to museums are sampling, they’re after pleasurable experiences. More and more, people come to museums with expectations shaped by their experience in commercial venues so they expect things to be highly mediated, tailored to their individual interests; they expect things to be very fast moving and stimulating. They expect their opinions to be valued – or at least they expect to be able to share their opinions at some point in their visit.

Robin: They expect a lot more from museums than they used to!

Holly: A good example of this is the video talk-back program that was part of the New York Historical Society’s exhibit, Slavery and New York. The exhibit designers, Richard Rabinowitz and Lynda Kaplan, made it possible for people who attended to share their thoughts about the show, and about slavery itself, about race and racism and other issues, on video – to talk back to the museum and reflect on their experiences. Thousands of people took advantage of that invitation. That’s just one demonstration of people’s hunger to have their own opinions validated and to have some sort of interaction with the material on the wall.

New-York Historical Society Talk Back video on Youtube

Robin: And not only were the video talkbacks available at the Historical Society, they were also posted to YouTube for everybody to see! This is a really good example of using social networking media – YouTube – to link the museum and its exhibition to a broader audience. Most of those clips on YouTube received fewer than 100 views but one of the shorter ones has over 1,000 views. The Historical Society’s new exhibition on the Marquis De Lafayette, by the same curators, continues with video talk-backs so they are demonstrating their commitment to hearing from visitors. In the process N-YHS wlll learn a lot about what their visitors think, and if they continue to post them to YouTube, they’ll carve a niche for themselves with a larger audience and attract new visitors to their galleries. YouTube and other video sharing services will be the focus of another report coming soon.

It seems like a win-win situation, but many institutions don’t see it that way. They’re reluctant to give visitors a chance to voice their opinions. Perhaps they don’t really want to know what visitors think; perhaps they’re afraid to yield some of the power they have to control the exhibition narrative and define the meaning of the objects. It’s understandable, but how can museum staff overcome that resistance? How do curators keep the scholarship bar high, while making visitors feel engaged and respected? The conversation continues in Part 2: Using Blogs, Part 3: Using Podcasts, Part 4: Using FaceBook, and Part 5: Sharing Content.

Posted in museums, New-York Historical Society, Uncategorized, web 2.0, Youtube | No Comments »