Archive for the ‘mw2008’ Category

Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Tagging

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

On Social Tagging by Native Communities

Tagging can help museums understand how visitors perceive the objects in their collections. While the goal of many tagging projects is to provide better access for the public to online collections, Shelley Mannion, at the University of Lugano, is using it to learn how native communities respond to their own art. Mannion’s findings have implications for how museums can help these communities strengthen their connections to their own culture. She described her research in a lucid presentation, “Seeing Tibetan Art Through Social Tags.”

Seeing Tibetan Art tagging screen

Working with the open source tagging tool available at http.steve.museum, she asked young Tibetans in Zurich and a control group of Swiss Germans to participate in her research project by tagging six images – five traditional works and one contemporary one. She also interviewed the Tibetans in order to understand how they felt about tagging these works.

What she discovered was that often the young Tibetans didn’t have a lot of knowledge about their own culture, and they felt bad about that, which made them somewhat reluctant to tag the images. Tagging by both the Tibetans and the Swiss Germans showed misunderstandings about the images – what Jennifer Trant calls “teachable moments.” “Tag vocabulary is a window into what people notice. It’s interesting as much for the aggregate, (what many people notice) as for the outlier (what’s noticed by only one).” J.Trant’s blog, March 7, 2008.

Through tagging, visitors “teach” curators what they know about the works, what interests them, what they see and don’t see. Since tagging can expose where the gaps in people’s knowledge are, curators also learn what they need to be “teaching.”

Also, tagging can help to identify individuals in the native community who can translate the concepts of one culture into another. These “translators” can help the museum create materials to support the community’s engagement with objects from their own culture. Mannion’s presentation concludes with some advice to bear in mind when designing tagging systems for communities: Think about what would motivate them to participate, and what type of interface would facilitate their participation – something game-like, perhaps.

Mannion’s research, funded by The Rubin Foundation, is ongoing. The tagging project website Seeing Tibet Through Social Tags is inviting Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in New York to participate in the tagging research project. So, log on and tag. It will make you think.

Posted in museums, mw2008, social tagging, teens, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Usability

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

On User Expectations & Personalization

Steven Smith, whose consulting firm United Focus is based in Australia, ran a mini-workshop on User Expectations. He discussed the types of personal factors that influence users, as well as the external factors – such as a visitor’s level of web experience, previous knowledge of your museum, their entry point, the page they land on when they arrive on your website.

 

He ended by highlighted key factors influencing web visitor expectations now:

- the rise of social networking sites

- sites that enable user generated content

- the improved speed of access.

- personalization

 

Increasingly sites are emulating Amazon’s personalized approach – that “Hello Robin” greeting I get every time I go there – and people will begin to expect to see content filtered to their taste on every content based site. He left us with this thought: “the visitor is king, not the content.”

 

Of course we all have to be more aware of our visitors these days, but actually content is the only reason that anyone goes to any site on the web, and museums are bursting with content. The challenge is to figure out how to make it more accessible and more appealing. Seeding your content to social networking sites by establishing FaceBook pages, Flickr accounts, etc, lets you create connections with niche audiences anywhere in the world. You need a strategy for how to create this new, expanded presence on the web.

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Museums and the Web 2008 Conference – Metrics

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

The Session on Metrics Was Great

Sebastian Chan of Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia gave an eye opening evaluation of the metrics generally used by museums to understand how successful their websites are. Typically you rely on information about the number of new visitors, page visits, amount of time spent on a page, and podcast downloads, for example, to tell you about the usefulness or popularity of various pages or features on your site. Yet as he explained in his excellent session, these statistics are seriously skewed – by search bots crawling your site, open browser tabs on people’s desktops, and RSS feeds, nor is there a way to track whether podcast downloaders actually watch or listen to your programs.

Powerhouse Museum home page

Chan went on to talk about social networking sites as places where museums can learn more reliable information about how they are perceived in the great big internet community, whether or not they have a formal presence in these spaces.

If your museum has pages on MySpace or FaceBook, videos on YouTube or Blip.tv, hosts blogs or has Flickr accounts or a presence in Second Life, take a look at the interactions occurring in these places to see how people are responding to your content. Chances are you will find comments that don’t appear on visitor surveys.

But even if you haven’t created a presence for yourself in these social spaces, other people will be creating one for you – blogging about a visit to your recent exhibition, posting pictures of your building to Flickr, etc. Chan recommends doing “what are known as ‘ego searches’ for [your] brand name, event or exhibition name.” You can search all of these sites to see what people are posting or saying about you, and do blog searches through technorati.com, for example.

These things will tell you more about how people perceive your museum, more about your “presence” on the web than straight metrics ever will. Then you can use this information to begin, or to continue, to develop your web presence in ways that serve your audience and your museum. His excellent paper is online here.

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Museums and the Web 2008 Conference

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Museums & The Web

Virtually everyone who went to MW2008 in Montreal earlier this month is already deeply committed to moving their institutions further into the social media/web 2.0 space. There were 600 or 700 people there, so for a conference it was an intimate event, and also international, with participants came from museums in Australia, Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Germany, the US and 18 other countries.

Over the next few posts I’ll give you a round-up of the themes, good examples and memorable stories from the sessions I attended. If any of you were also there and have something to add, please do!

One of the themes I heard expressed most often was that you never know what knowledge visitors have about your collections until you give them an opportunity to share their comments. A terrific example of this is the Library of Congress initiative on Flickr. Several months ago they uploaded thousands of photos from their collections and have invited the public to add tags and comments. Why did they do this? Because, to quote from their Flickr page, “the identifying information that came with the original photos… can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and also your general reactions….More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.” If the Library of Congress trusts ordinary people to provide worthwhile information, perhaps your institution can take advantage of this untapped knowledge source as well.

Another related theme was that visitors have a very different perspective on objects and artworks than curators do, and those view points are often refreshing and help us see things in new ways. A case in point comes from The Brooklyn Museum. In her presentation, Shelly Bernstein reaffirmed the benefits they’ve experienced from making the Museum’s collection available on multiple social sites, and from inviting the public to respond to it. Their current example of collaborating with the public is the exhibition project Click.

Click!

Inspired by the high quality of visitors’ photographs of works in their collection, and posted on Flickr, they are now organizing an exhibition of photographs of the changing face of Brooklyn, taken by the public, and then curated by the public. As their website says, “The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.”Read all about it here.

Another point that kept bubbling up to the surface was that “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.” Often there’s no consensus within the museum about whether to embrace any of “this web 2.0 stuff” or how to do it. In these cases a common tactic has been for an intrepid curator, web producer, marketing person, or educator on staff to just start putting videos on YouTube, or blogging, or constructing a FaceBook page and calling it an experiment – for as long as possible, under the theory that it’s easier to sell an idea once you have some results.

I’ll be posting more on some of the specific sessions – about emerging audiences, user generated content, metrics, YouTube, social tagging and a cool very user friendly programming language, so stay tuned. The conference website has all the session descriptions, speaker bios, papers and of course, blogs, so check it out.

Posted in Brooklyn Museum, museums, mw2008 | No Comments »