Thoughts on MW2009---An outsider looking in

These are the musings of Brad Hemminger, as an outsider looking in, at the museum profession.  I have been fortunate to observe and participate in the transition of three fields from analog media to digital media, caused by advances in information technology.  First medicine, then libraries, and now museums.  Based on my experience, museums are in early stages of this transition, and lots of exciting developments are occurring, with many of them being developed by people attending the 2009 Museums and Web conference. 

As an outside observer who studies disciplines and how information technology changes them, the most important thing for people working in the domain is to think outside the box and look for the “transformative” changes.  When technology changes practice it is common to replace the mechanics of one process with that of another (computer for typewriter) and to miss big picture changes that are enabled (individual publishing, sharing via the web).  I think of the former as incremental changes, and the latter as transformational or revolutionary changes. 

There are a number of incremental changes occurring in the museum world currently.  Some of what I consider to be examples include
* Marketing and communication via the web
* Using museum website to show some of the museum’s content
* Build specific APIs to allow others to access the museum’s content
* Replacing dedicated audio guide devices with handheld mobile devices like iPhones

While this type of work helps move the field along, none are really transformative by themselves.  The exciting ideas and changes that will really transform museums I think are only just beginning to surface.  The major ones that I see happening are:
* Virtual Content/Virtual Museum.  This covers several areas including museums that have only a virtual presence, museums that create a virtual presence in addition to a physical presence, and the scanning and capture of museum content or entire exhibits.
* Using technology in new ways to engage and interact with your audiences
* User contributed content, user communities built around museum data and user contributions (comments and data)
* Open Content:  Make all content open (freely available)
* Supporting metasearch across all objects in all museums. 

There are a number of good examples that are pushing forward in these areas.  Below I mention some that I observed at the Museums and Web 2009 conference.  I’m sure there are many others I missed.  (numbers in parentheses are the booth number of the demonstration project)

Virtual Content/Virtual Museum. 
* Only a virtual presence: Jewish Women’s Archive
* Museums that build virtual presences, many examples using simple web interfaces to catalog.  One of the more interesting ones I saw was Ball State’s museum spaces in 2nd Life (Hybrid Realities, #45).  
* Scanned or captured digital versions of content items is common at many museums.  Only starting to become common is scanned exhibits (from fixed viewpoint photorealistic capture like Synthescape’s capture of “Joe Fafard of National Gallery of Canada”, to the photorealistic and physically accurate spaces that can be walked through like Virseum (digitized exhibit “Plum, Pine, and Bamboo: Seasonal and Spiritual Paths in Japanese Art exhibit from  the Ackland Art Museum).

Engage and interact
* Reciprocal Research Networks (#61): ability for users to make their own collections, annotation, keyword tagging, users’ submission of metadata
* Steve (Friday session: Steve project briefing):  user tagging, user ratings, quality score (awesomeness meter)
* Library of Congress (#65):   multi-touch table top interface for national political convention data
* Ball State Hybrid Realities (#45):  music pipes, where virtual spaces are tied to physical art exhibits, and the two effect each other through live interactions
* Patchwork Prototyping (#52):  investigating what the right visualization interfaces are for searching against large set of federated collections from many sites
* Many, many new types of engagement and interaction are supported on mobile devices.  This includes suggested tours and computer produced tour guides, supplemental material (same theme, related content, more works by the artist), social networking, user comments, etc.  Koven Smith made a great statement in his slides during the Handheld Handbook session, saying that the emphasis should be Mobile Content NOT Mobile Devices. While most of the examples were inside the museum there were also good examples from outside the museum (an initial evaluation by Parks Canada of their Explora Project).   For a good discussion and references see http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/Museums-and-the-Web-2009-Workshop.
* Utilizing museum spaces in new ways, for instance the Ontario Science Center hosting a meet-up for YouTube (888) because these are the creative, transformative types of young people we want to engage.
* I’ll mention two other projects from our Virseum lab (not presented).  First is Supplemental Virtual Display, where the traditional content item is supplemented with an additional fixed display (large touch screen panel near original item).  This touch screen displays the item (which could be marked up, you could see annotations, see related material, see user comments).  This allows traditional viewing of the original item, but live interaction using the virtual one.  The second project is an entirely Virtual Content Display.  This is done without original physical content items.  Instead the user selects (or on the fly dynamically defines) a collection, which they then interact with on a large wall mounted touch screen (or could use table top display).  We are planning to evaluate this in several environments including single workstation (person viewing from home/work), an exhibit room in museum with 10-12 pictures hung on walls (flat panels), and in a large collaboration room with four video walls (supported by 12 separate projection systems).

User Contributed Content, Communities
* Reciprocal Research Networks (#61): news feeds about updates, new user collections
* Steve (Friday session: Steve project briefing):   user tagging, user ratings
* Museum 2.0 sites (Science Buzz), co-creation of knowledge, the user comments on museum provided content (Thursday afternoon session).
* Users publishing their collections via web, or book formats (Blurb, Lulu)

Open Content: 
* Powerhouse Museum released Tyrrell photography collection to FlickR Commons.   They see 20 times amount of traffic on FlickR as compared to their website.  Tyrrell sales change was neutral or slightly positive (there was no loss of revenue from sales when the images were made freely available). More importantly was the significant benefit in promotion, community development, and awareness of museum holdings because of this. 
* ArtBabble (#32):  Video about Maya Lin exhibit  exposed the text from video, which allowed the material to be indexed by Google, and discovered in search results, which led users directly to that video.
* Open Museum
* While not directly Open Content, one step that may help lead to open content on the cloud is the significant number of museums that are moving to hosting their content on the “cloud” for economic reasons.  Particularly exciting is the development of the DuraSpace interface for providing repository level access (DSpace, Fedora) to cloud computing and storage resources. 

Metasearch
To enable searching across all content, which is what users want, museums must publish their content through standard interfaces such as OAI/PMH (and now OAI/ORE) so that content can be harvested.   Using APIs for each institution does not scale well.  Also, to allow dynamic federated searching, the material must have already been downloaded by an outside harvesting agent and indexed to be searchable in real time (think how Google is successful while library catalog interfaces that require selection from many individual resources are not).  Furthermore, this cannot be done by pulling live collection data in real time from all museum sites via individual interfaces.  Another important lesson is separating content from presentation--defining your content in generally accessible terms so that it can be utilized in many contexts by many audiences.  This means Dublin Core type high level description, with finer grain metadata standards for more in depth searching.  The above recommendations are what will bring truly transformative changes to how museums operate facilitating incredible new mash-ups that will bring user attention to museum content.    The closest examples I’m aware of are the types of mid-sized collaborations where a group of museums or archives have agreed to pool their resources for metasearching.  Nevertheless, these are important first steps:
* Reciprocal Research Networks (#61) is a great example showing many aspects not just of combined access to multiple sites collections, but also of the possible user interfaces.  Especially significant is their exploration of faceted browsing in conjunction with text searching to discover resources.  Also, their interface for exploration (visual cloud tagging of items by name, with size corresponding to collection size) is a nice example of an effective and engaging interface.
* Patchwork Prototyping (#52): pooling together collections from many sites (to investigate search interfaces).

Of course it’s important to leave you with some challenges to address  :).

* How can we get to “Open Content”?  We need better ways to license acquisitions so that they will be openly available (i.e. possible Creative Commons extensions for Art). We need better business models that do not include revenue from licensing content. 
* How can we get our audiences to spend more than the average 3 seconds looking at the content items on display from our museums?   What interaction and engagement techniques should we utilize?
* What’s the role of some types of content (e.g. photocollections) in this day and age, when there are millions of great photos available for free on the web (FlickR commons)?  How does this fit with our highly curated, limited collections of restricted images?
* We need a Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) for all the wonderful content currently placed on the web that may be lost to us in 10, 50, or 100 years (YouTube, FlickR, etc).   Do we save all of it, and if we curate it somehow, who does this and by what/whose standards?  Are there automatic curation methods in development?   The content is mostly digital now (no physical media needed), but we still need progress in digital preservation so we can read today’s formats in 200 years.

When I have the opportunity to attend Museums and the Web again in a few years, I am hopeful that I will see more of these transformative changes in progress, and a revolution underway in museums and how they interact with the public.

Brad Hemminger (http://ils.unc.edu/bmh/)
April 2009
Museums and Web conference