What’s the point of a museum website?

Ed,

Great post! As usual, you articulate the message more succinctly in one sentence than I was able to in five minutes of hoarse yelling: “…we continue to make more sophisticated versions of a kind of construct that is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the people who we want to use them.” Love it, love it, love it.

The reference to Kristin Purcell’s keynote is interesting–I’m particularly interested in that first bit: “People still need trusted experts to help them discern when information is accurate and trustworthy.” In further discussions with museum/library people after MW and Ignite, one thing that is starting to become clearer is this issue of trust and authority. I tend to think that we in museums entered the digital domain assuming that the authority we acquired in the physical domain would transfer there easily, and I’m not sure that has proved to be the case. It’s something I mentioned briefly in the Ignite talk, but haven’t really had a chance to parse out too much yet–asking whether we’ve actually earned the authority that we assert on the Web or not. I think that we actually might have to start that process over again, and earn trust and authority by becoming an online destination that people come to again and again.

Still trying to figure this out. Again, fantastic post, Ed!

Koven – I agree that we have not yet earned trust in the digital domain. I think that museums just assumed the associated gravitas of the physical realm would carry over, and I’m not sure that it is the case. After all, it’s a lot easy to make people gape in awe when you have giant buildings to humble them…

As you know, I spent lots of last week exploring museums and galleries over NYC. Whilst there, I was thinking about what I could want from an art/museum website that could make art new again – that could make me want to bring it into my home and explore and actually use a collection site. And while looking at the Picasso guitar exhibition at MoMA, I started thinking about how cool it would be to be able to self-curate a collection of works of art, and have them ‘on display’ in my own home… so, if I was having a 50s/60s party, I could curate myself a collection of pop art from the era, and have that ‘play’ in my own home for the duration (on something like a large ipad, or a wall display etc).

To do this, we would need to be able to link art collections together across institutions; to make the information and images customisable to people’s needs, and to do something similar to the new Tate website and have different levels of information available for different types of users. But by somehow linking these artists and art stories together, I think we could create new journeys of discovery, and could make old art new again.

What’s more, I think doing something like this could potentially drive people back into the Gallery. If you’ve been able to look at a series of Van Gogh’s in your own home for a couple of months, then naturally if you have the choice to see them in the flesh at any time you’d do so, because you have an actual connection to them in some way. I don’t know – maybe I’m assuming too much – but I think we need to give people the chance to have a new relationship with art.

Glad you liked the talk! I do want to be cautious here, though–I’m not necessarily saying that “museum websites suck” or that they’re overrated, but rather that they’re (often) based on a template that hasn’t really ever been proven to work, or at least hasn’t been proven to serve an obvious function for potential web audiences in the same way that born-digital properties like Wikipedia do. I also don’t necessarily want to throw out that template entirely, either (though I suspect it may be necessary to throw most of it out), but I want to have a clear need be served by anything and everything that we put out.