1. Introduction
"The Content Economy is an economic system where people and organisations produce, distribute, exchange and consume digital content products and services." (http://www.thecontenteconomy.com/2007/02/definitions.html)
The world and every facet of our lives are increasingly being experienced and understood through filters of various devices and online experiences. In museums, digital literacy, online capability and our technical capabilities to produce useful and engaging content are continuing to transform all aspects of our organisations. Governments and businesses are also more aware of the important role museums and the creative industries can play as drivers for innovation and economic growth in the broader economy. Whether we call it a content / digital / experience or creative economy does not really matter. What matters is that we are operating in a rapidly evolving environment where the digital content we produce is increasingly important to the operation and positioning of our organisations.
"The Digital Economy is the Economy and the Economy is Global" (David Thodey CEO of Telstra, Australian National ICT Forum, 10 March 2011, Melbourne).
Active involvement in the museums' local, national and international communities requires a broad approach that connects the museum to people in the ways most useful for them. Most successful museums have a very clear and sophisticated engagement with their audience. Audience and stakeholder expectations are high, and certainly in Australia there is a strong desire for online delivery of museum programs and services.
Are museums on the correct path with their approach to participation in the content / digital economy? I believe the answer is yes; however, it's a very complex issue and varies significantly by organisation and country.
Museums have been active and in many cases early adopters of technology physically and online. There are also many instances of museums that have changed little, rejected technology and stayed with the power of the iconic object, shunning interpretation and contextual presentation.
This paper seeks to present a number of case studies from Museum Victoria that demonstrate different ways that external collaboration has built capability, secured external funding, driven organisational change to produce innovative content products that help build reputation and value to stakeholders, and often lead to new income streams.
As the MW2011 conference session is a professional forum, the paper also seeks to provoke discussion.
The term economy for museums encompasses the system in which they operate, broadly covering all the aspects that link the museum into to the overall system in which it operates. Key questions about business planning, commercial operations, budgeting, strategic alignment, return on investment ,and profit surround many content initiatives reflecting the high cost of content development. In not-for-profit organisations, many of the financial concepts underpinning business in the for-profit world are complicated and distorted when applied to museums.
"Making Museums Matter" (Weil 2002) introduces the notion of how to analyse the benefit of a particular activity to ensure that maximum quality is delivered to the organisation. Weil's four factor test can be applied to particular activities to determine their value and quality to the organisation.
The four factors are:
- Purpose - clearly expressed that holds longevity, and is reasonably attainable
- Capability - including resources whether fiscal, physical or human
- Effectiveness - has the museum made a difference, an impact, on its audience?
- Efficiency - the least important - however, "it is not unimportant and waste cannot be condoned" (Weil, 2002).
When museums choose which projects, products and services to develop, proposals need to be assessed carefully to ensure they are serving the needs of the organisation. Strategic planning frameworks are part of the answer. With so many choices and potential channels for delivery, the simple factors put forward by Weil take on a new importance. Certainly at Museum Victoria we are increasingly struggling to select the right mix of projects and products to resource. Return on investment for museums is usually far more than a positive financial return and is usually tied into social and community benefit.
Rina Elster Pantalony 2003, explored the notion of sustainable business models for the development of museum content in the experience economy. She presented a list of key considerations before embarking on any new
- Distribution and effectiveness: do you have the brand awareness to gain enough traction with a particular idea / project/ product?
- Collaboration to achieve effective distribution of content / who and how
- Control of quality - if collaborating, don't sacrifice control of the product
- Never lose site of the big picture: which I interpret as, stay true to your organisational values
- Where the object is to generate income, don't expect to make a profit overnight: be patient (hard for organisations)
- Governance structures to support the initiative need to be appropriate
- Know your audience: don't hesitate to change approach if it's not working
The seven points make an excellent check list when assessing any new content development proposal.
2. Digital Content
The creative sector has a unique capacity to address and satisfy the demands of diversity in the community by producing digital content that reaches across art forms and fields of knowledge. Opportunities may be found in the wealth of existing cultural content which could be re-released on a multitude of delivery platforms and distribution channels. This extension of cultural production presents new commercial opportunities for niche and emerging markets - the so called 'long tail'. In addition, through innovation and digital delivery, the creative sector also has the potential to create new digital products and services for a global audience. (Building a Creative Innovation Economy, Cultural Ministers Council February 2008 p.12)
At the National ICT Forum in Melbourne, a number of speakers told of the rapidly emerging era of connectivity. Numbers were staggering: it is anticipated that over 500 million devices will be connected to the Internet in Australia alone by 2012. For a country of only 22 million people, this is extraordinary. Already in 2011, globally the number stands at over 500 billion. The immediate response to this for me and colleagues at the forum was, as Michael Parry from the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) put so well on Twitter, "content anyone".
This new era of connectivity impacts museums most directly in the explosion of powerful mobile devices already available for in-gallery use, including smartphones, iPads, iPods, and other tablet and netbook type devices.
The nature of the creation, transmission and retention of personal and cultural information is changing fundamentally. As people increasingly produce, acquire, share and hold information by means of digital media, communal and collective history, family memory and private reminiscence are being transformed. (Digital Lives, British Library 2010)
Over the past ten years, structural change within our museum organisations has steadily shifted emphasis onto digital content production for presentation on screen and online. This is not unique to museums; we are part of the larger information, research, education and entertainment sector. Twenty years ago our content products were very simple: exhibitions, publications, research output - lectures and public programing, including education. Now we make our content available through a myriad of channels, websites, interactive multimedia, collection API's, shared information services (TROVE, OZCAM, DigitalNZ etc.) that sit alongside our traditional content delivery methods.
What we are producing and for whom? The breadth of content development in museums is quite staggering - the following list is not
- Exhibition related
- Stories / Narratives
- Labels - objects
- Theme panels
- PR / Marketing Materials (including TV commercials / Media Advertising / social media)
- Public Programming / Lectures
- Education resources
- Online resources - websites
- AV immersive experiences / interactives
- Video / Movies / Animations
- Expert Commentary / Documentary
- Publications / Catalogues
- Blogs / Vodcasts / Podcasts
- Planetarium shows
- IOS Apps / Other Software Applications
- Research Content
- Papers / memoirs etc.
- Raw data
- GIS data
- Collection data / includes parts of many other lines
- Publications - Research and Coffee Table
- Online resources / Collections etc.
- Education outcomes
- Conference presentations
- Images / Video
- Field Trip data
- Documentaries
- Interviews
This list documents an incredible range of output from most large museum organisations. But many potentially useful types of content still go unrecognised and are still undervalued within organisations. Examples include exhibition labels and text panels which rarely find their way online or into collection management systems even though they are the result of an extensive research and writing effort within the museum by expert staff. Many multimedia and AV pieces of content developed for in-gallery exhibitions are still not captured for re-use either.
One solution to this problem is to form multidisciplinary teams who develop exhibitions that from day one include all the possible uses and delivery channels for the knowledge output generated during the exhibition development process. This great outcome makes far more effective use of organisations' scarce resources. There is no doubt this model has made our working lives more complex. It is also fair to say that the traction of this approach is far from universal. However, on the whole most large museum organisations are on this path - change is gaining pace as senior management, audiences and stakeholders have come to expect and demand increased access to the outputs of our work.
Increased project complexity is driving the need for efficiency and streamlined workflows. We seek to ensure duplication, and dead ends are eliminated within the structures of our organisations. This is sometimes a very painful and disruptive process. The often quoted "create once, use many times" is at the heart of making more effective use of institutional knowledge and information.
All large museums create and/or commission multimedia for exhibition installations. We also support a strong and well-funded research program that includes research into museology.
The result of this work in a number fields and specialties produces a broad range of content that is used in exhibitions or publications, and when appropriate is licensed or sold outright to other organisations. Recent examples include the PLACE-Hampi Exhibition which after a worldwide tour and 18-month showing at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, has been sold to JSW Steel in Karnataka, India for permanent display in a purpose-built museum. We have also licensed the multimedia, exhibition graphics and text to the current North American tour of the Pompeii the Exhibit: life and death in the shadow of Vesuvius which has just launched at Discovery Times Square in New York. The re-use of the content developed by Museum Victoria in this way is relatively new for us and points to the future where born digital content makes this possible in ways that were not possible previously.
We have developed touring exhibitions for many years but never really explored reuse of the individual exhibition assets. The exception is science centre exhibits consisting of stand-alone Interactives that lend themselves to reuse.
3. Collections
Collections are a museum's core asset and the differentiator of museums from exhibition venues and other display venues and centres. Online delivery and presentation of our collections is challenging and rewarding at the same time. Large legacy collections pose enormous issues for museums; simply digitising the parts we want to for use online is a great drain on limited resources. Still, there is little doubt that once completed, many uses can be found for the digital records created. I will steer clear of the debate about mass digitisation and simply say that Museum Victoria is digitising collections for specific uses and projects and not undertaking a wholesale digitisation project. We have identified approximately 2 million items and collections from 16 million for digitisation. Currently, approximately 1.4 million items have machine readable records of varying quality. Perhaps 200,000 records are considered high quality with extensive metadata and supporting documentation, including images, video, etc.
The History and Technology Collections Online Project (http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/), completed twelve months ago, made sections of the museum's collections available in a rich and meaningful way for the first time. Considerable organisational change was required to deliver that project and has produced lasting outcomes and cultural change within the museum's curatorial areas. The simultaneous development of an API (http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/help/api) to allow external re-use and querying of the collection data was part of the original intent of the project. Museum Victoria collections are being re-used in large numbers >1,000 on two external websites (Picture Australia part of TROVE and DigitalNZ). This is a terrific result and paves the way for more of this type of information sharing and re-use.
Collection items are the museum's most basic content building blocks online and in exhibitions. The major information sharing and aggregation services in Australia have been developed and managed from the Library sector. The National Library of Australia's TROVE project (http://trove.nla.gov.au/) is the current standout example of a massively collaborative and comprehensive project to deliver access to millions of records from hundreds of organisations, including many museums. TROVE currently contains over 80 million unique resources, including 4.4 million images and 39 million pages from archived Australian websites gathered since 1996. It is an amazing resource.
4. Partnership & Collaboration
Collaboration stretches our research dollars further, spreads risk, favours serendipity, propagates skills and builds critical mass. It is increasingly the engine of innovation. (Powering Ideas, an innovation agenda for the 21st Century, May 2009)
Museums have always worked with partners to mount exhibitions, build networks and develop standards. We are now working with many new and different partners as the world becomes more connected and the value of cultural content is recognised. Museums have collaborated on the development of exhibitions for over a century and have worked on many online projects in the past 15 years.
A number of major national collaborations are active in the Museums sector.
The Museum Metadata Exchange (MME)
(http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/museumexchange/) project is a joint project of the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) and Museums Australia which has been set up with support from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative. The project is being hosted by the Powerhouse Museum. The MME has been designed to harvest collection level descriptions from a number of major museums and the National Film and Sound Archive and to supply that data in a standardised format to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
The establishment of this project was complex and involved a degree of angst as sectoral issues, personalities and jurisdictional boundaries were resolved by peak bodies. The issues associated the MME are not unique: most large collaborative projects are difficult to establish. The trick is putting in place an effective governance structure to allow the ongoing conversations and planning necessary for the successful delivery and future of the project to be worked through productively. The resulting project emerging from its pilot phase now has produced some excellent content and demonstrated an effective way to allow research access to museum Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) collections information.
Victorian Cultural Network and Culture Victoria website:
The Victorian Cultural Network (VCN) is a collaborative partnership among five of the State-owned arts agencies: the Arts Centre, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) Museum Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, and State Library of Victoria. Its public face is Culture Victoria (CV) (http://www.cv.vic.gov.au) which delivers diverse access to the digital collections of all the VCN partners and a range of metropolitan and regional organisations through a single website. The project is funded through Arts Victoria. A governance committee drawn from the five key partner organisations provides oversight for the project. Established in 2004 as the Victorian Cultural Broadband Network, the project has now been running for six years with two significant rounds of funding. The benefits of the project have been many. First amongst them has been the networking and collaboration environment that now exists among the five key agencies. Not many capital cities can claim that the major museums, arts galleries, libraries and public records agencies work closely together on a range of partnerships and projects.
The Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums Project OZCAM
(http://www.ozcam.org.au/) has aggregated specimen occurrence data from museums across Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), totaling 2.3m records from faunal collections databases in Australian museums. OZCAM is an initiative of the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC), which is the peak body representing Australia's publicly accessible zoological and paleontological collections, primarily within the jurisdiction of government at all levels (regional, state, territory and commonwealth). OZCAM has been a key component allowing the effective participation of Australian Museums in the Atlas of Living Australia Project.
The Atlas of Living Australia
The Atlas of Living Australia was initiated by a group of fourteen organisations, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), state museums, the Council of Australasian Museum Directors, the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections, the Council of Heads of Australian Entomological Collections, the Council of Heads of Australian Collections of Microorganisms, The University of Adelaide, Southern Cross University, and the Australian Government. It represents a true national partnership with clear and significant goals.
Australia's biodiversity is a significant part of global biodiversity and the worldwide effort to understand, conserve and manage biodiversity. The Atlas collaborates with a number of international organisations to share biodiversity data, resources and learning on a global scale. It is an overseas partner of the Encyclopedia of Life, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the European Union's Distributed Dynamic Diversity Databases for Life (4D4Life) and the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE), and a participant node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
The Atlas of living Australia (http://www.ala.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ALAfactsheet_Oct2010-1.pdf) is providing significant funding to Museums with natural history collections across Australia. The scale of the ALA with a $40 million budget spread over four years is helping develop a stronger and more effective biodiversity sector in Australia. The collaboration is providing significant benefit to the participating museums and helping to bring the sector closer together while dramatically improving the quality and quantity of data available on biodiversity in Australia.
Convergence
For the past 15 years, convergence has been a key driver of innovation in cultural agencies. Museums are in a somewhat unique position, almost a crossroads between traditional practice and leading edge experimentation, in many fields. A key area of opportunity that Museum Victoria and its partners identified is the intersection between multimedia art forms and traditional museum exhibition practice. Museum Victoria has actively encouraged the merging of artistic and visualisation technologies to create new interaction techniques to tell stories and present ideas in unique ways. Partnering with universities, artists and technical experts has resulted in a rich mix of skills and disciplines.
The results have exceeded Museum Victoria's expectations, sharing a real spark and making a difference that has really engaged our visitors. Examples include the award winning (http://www.mediaandtechnology.org/muse-awards/past-winners/2010-2/interpretive-interactive-installations/) Panoramic Navigators (http://museum3.org/video/wild-exhibition-panoranic) used in the Melbourne Museum Wild: amazing animals in a changing world (http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/discoverycentre/wild/), the Virtual Room (http://www.vroom.org.au), a collaboration with four university partners. A lasting partnership with iCinema at the University of New South Wales in Sydney has resulted in three successful Australian Research Grants (ARC) producing totally new virtual heritage content presented in new visualisation environments: Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment (AVIE) and PLACE (http://www.place-hampi.museum/) and (http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_hampi.html); see also (http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/infra_avie.html).
Dr. Sarah Kenderdine will present Cultural Data Sculpting: Omni-spatial Visualisations for Large Scale Heterogeneous Datasets at MW2011; it will outline some of this work in detail.
Collaboration and partnership are the future as we are connected ever more tightly to each other and traditional boundaries are removed. It's hard work, but the rewards are many and the outcomes more than we can ever achieve individually.
5. Museum Structures and Content Development
Content is a key currency in our connected world and something cultural agencies have always been set up to produce. As already discuss, we have the capability and capacity to produce a wide variety of different types of content. Issues arise, however, when we need to change the volume and type of content - "markets" are changing, and demand and expectation are emerging factors for cultural institutions. This is not new; however, my perception is that we are increasingly being offered and in some cases led to develop content we may not have considered even a few years ago. Co-creation and crowd sourcing are also providing expanded opportunities for rapidly growing content in areas previously thought too expensive or difficult to tackle. An example is the distributed transcription project Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program (http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/get_involved/) run by the National Library of Australia (NLA). An extraordinary statistic from the TROVE on 12 March: 105,321 newspaper corrections were made by members of the public.
Within organisations co,ntent production is achieving a new prominence. At Museum Victoria this is giving rise to increasing tensions between traditional content producers - curators, scientists and publication staff - and new groups, including designers, online producers / editors, social media producers, film / documentary producers, animators, PR media, exhibition producers, education and programs staff. The latter groups are all involved to various degrees in online delivery of content - the primary destination for most new content. The new multi-channel delivery of content is a challenge to traditional content development and authority chains within organisations.
By adopting more networked internal structures we are effectively increasing the likelihood that connections will be made between people and projects, resulting in a richer output from the organisation. Internal partnerships within organisations can yield amazing results. Within Museum Victoria, we have embraced this approach, and the partnership between the Public Programs Department and Information Multimedia and Technology Division has resulted in several exciting educational projects that clearly demonstrate the value of working together to achieve outputs that are far more than the sum of their parts. The development of content for the education sector has been a growth area for Museum Victoria.
Collaboration is also at all levels, from the Director and Department Head who concentrate on stakeholder management and positioning / advocacy of the organisation through to the workgroups and teams who deliver the projects. Two of these collaborations will be examined in more detail - the Biodiversity Snapshots Project and the 600 Million Years in 60 Seconds education program at Melbourne Museum.
Biodiversity Snapshots
The Biodiversity Snapshots project was developed by Museum Victoria to assist students and teachers on field trips to report on their local fauna. It is intended that a broad range of environments in south-eastern Australia will be surveyed, including urban, bush land and coastal areas. The project was supported by funding from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development - Innovation and Next Practice and the Atlas of Living Australia. Key online tools were developed in association with EarthWatch and the Atlas of Living Australia. Project development was also informed by the Department of Sustainability and Environment's Land and Biodiversity White Paper, the Victorian Biodiversity Strategy, and the aims of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010 (http://biodiversitysnapshots.net.au/BDRS/home.htm).
Developed as an extension of this project was the Field Guide to Victorian Fauna, an App available in both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions. The app combines detailed animal descriptions with stunning imagery and sounds to provide a valuable reference that can be used in urban, bush and coastal environments. See the following link to information about the app being presented at MW2011 as a demonstration by the developer Simon Sherrin. (http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/programs/release_your_local_species_into_the_ios_ecos).
600 Million Years in 60 seconds
Museum staff led a class of students allowing them to explore the 600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves exhibition and develop their understanding of evolution and the fossil record by creating a 60-second movie clip. The program is fast-paced, multimedia-rich and multidisciplinary. Focusing on Science, media, ICT and communication, students work in teams, using real museum objects and video cameras to create a clip that communicates how life has evolved through the ages. Students edit their clips, and are able to take their clips back to school to work further on the topic (http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/education/education-programs/600-million-years-in-60-seconds/).
The content of these programs is delivered online and onsite; in both cases there is museum- generated and user-generated content produced.
Funding
Funding for these projects has come directly from the Victorian Education Department through competitive grants programs. The new ultranet (http://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/directions/ultranet/whatis.htm) portal and FUSE (http://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/pages/Teacher.aspx) content portals for the education sector need content, and the Museum and other cultural agencies are seen by government as a key part of the delivery strategy for schools.
Museum Victoria has collaborated with the State Education Department to produce several mid-sized (~$250k) projects over the past three years, something we had not had the opportunity to do previously.
Similarly, the Department of Business Innovation (DBI) through the Community Internet Infrastructure Fund (CIIF) has provided support to enable Museum Victoria and Museums Australia Victoria to build a Community Collections Management System - Victorian Collections to allow local collecting organisations to easily create records for their collections, and securely and permanently store these records online. The systems builds on the "Collectish" online initiative developed in 2009 by Museum Victoria: a Web 2.0 site for amateur collectors.
Victorian Collections (http://www.victoriancollections.net.au/) will enable community museums and galleries, historical societies, sporting, church, military and other service groups to record their local heritage and culture to ensure collections are well-documented for the future. This online database will be useful for groups that require a new digital catalogue system or simply a way to back up existing catalogues, with the added option of sharing records with other Victorian collecting organisations and the general public.
6. Benefits
The slightly unexpected benefit, and there are many from these collaborations, has been the number and quality of digital assets produced as part of the projects. This content, directed back into the collection management system, Discovery Centre databases, education websites and blogs across the museum, has been significant. Digitisation targets for collection material are being exceeded without 'direct' funding for them. We entered the partnerships knowing this would be one of the key outcomes for the Museum, but even so, the effectiveness of this approach in achieving our longer term aims has been most welcome. The momentum developed and the increase in capability that has resulted from the mix of project staff have broad benefits for the permanent staff and organisation.
7. Emerging Themes
- The opportunities for effective collaborations are increasing and delivering more value to the organisation - largely supported by social networks
- Digital content creation linked to the development of exhibitions is expanding rapidly - generating more and higher quality digital content.
- Sharing of data across the cultural sector in aggregated services is increasing, blurring the old sector lines e.g. Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM)
- Open data sharing as a key operating principle across government is being pushed from central government in many countries
- On-line content delivery channels are increasing, and the demand seems inexhaustible
- On-line delivery of museum content for the education sector is expanding rapidly in many countries
- Organisational change is increasing, alignment to online outcomes is increasing, and a critical mass of skilled staff is being achieved
- Network management models are proliferating
- Organisational capability and awareness of online opportunity is now very high
- The adoption of social media within museums is also proliferating.
8. Conclusion
In our massively connected world, content is indeed king, and museums, if they take a close look, will find themselves well placed to deliver highly sought-after content to an ever-expanding audience. Collaboration is emerging as the critical enabler in taking full advantage of the opportunities now available for the delivery of museum online content. Collaboration needs to be both internal and external. The work being done at the Smithsonian establishing the "commons" is an excellent example of organisational change being driven by internal collaboration. The number and quality of national data services now operating is making museum content available for researchers and the public in numbers and types unimaginable only a few years ago. Opportunities abound, and although many challenges remain, I believe we are moving into the era of connectivity from a position of strength. The ground work is laid in most large museums to allow them to participate in providing access to the full range and wonder possible in museum-generated content.
9. Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of colleagues from Museum Victoria: Dr. Sarah Kenderdine for her unique and wonderful insights, Dr. Patrick Greene, CEO for his support and wise council, and Dr. Ely Wallis for the terrific discussions we have and her invaluable help editing this paper. I would also like to acknowledge Kate Irvine for discussions around partnership and collaboration in the Australian Library sector.
10. References
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