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One of the best things that came out of this year’s Museums and the Web conference in Philly was an “unconference” session I organized around re-thinking and re-imagining what museum websites could/should be. It was a great conversation, with lots of interesting viewpoints. I hope to do a longer post about this in the next few days, but for now, here’s the video of a talk I gave at Ignite Smithsonian a few days ago that tries to get at the root of the problem I’m trying to identify. I only had five minutes, and was still pretty hoarse from MW, but I think the talk still does a decent job of laying out the problem. Would absolutely love input from others on this–it seems to be a topic that’s resonating with a lot of us!

Video streaming by Ustream

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Hey, kids! We’re hiring over here at the Denver Art Museum. We’re looking for an experienced Web Developer to help us completely re-design and re-imagine the Denver Art Museum’s web presence from the ground up. The Web Developer will collaborate with internal staff including technology developers, designers, editors, and other stakeholders to create appealing user interfaces and experiences, integrate relational databases, and implement effective, professional Web projects with an eye towards constantly improving the museum’s Web presence.

You can find more information about the job, and how to apply, here. Let’s rock it up, people.

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Usually I refrain from talking about museums on this blog except to discuss how museum policy/tradition/approach affects (or is affected by) technology, and I generally keep my political opinions to myself, so this is sort of a new thing for me. And this is probably just an overreaction to a relatively small issue. So please forgive this digression–I’ll get back to ranting about collections management systems or whatever soon enough.

However…

The recent firestorm surrounding Wayne Clough (secretary of the Smithsonian Institution)’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s work A Fire In My Belly from the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the public response to that decision, has provoked me out of my comfortable treehouse. For those not familiar with what I’m talking about, I’ve collected a bunch of links related to the controversy here: http://bit.ly/fC7uD8. Of what I’ve read thus far, I would say that Tyler Green’s ongoing coverage at ARTINFO is the most balanced and researched.

I don’t think I need to point out that the Smithsonian’s decision was horribly wrongheaded (though I’ll do that briefly below), so I want to focus on one aspect of the response to this incident: the “Clough Must Go” movement that’s been emerging this week. This movement, which will have its coming-out party at a protest scheduled for this weekend in New York City, seeks to hold Wayne Clough personally responsible for the decision (which is good), and to then remove him from office as a result (which is bad).

This feels wrong to me. Here’s why.

The Smithsonian’s response to this issue was the wrong one.

So yeah, lemme get this out of the way first. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Smithsonian’s decision to withdraw Fire in My Belly from the show was absolutely wrong. Though this issue has undoubtedly caught the public’s consciousness, it would appear that the Smithsonian could still have kept the piece in the show with a fair minimum of public outcry. As the mysterious museumnerd put it pithily:

And the timing of this couldn’t be worse, in that it’s hard to not fit this into a much larger (and far more dispiriting) narrative in which the voices of reason and tolerance are being drowned out by a hysterical, intolerant vocal minority. Watching one of our most beloved public institutions cave to this craven minority is enough to make one resort to extreme measures for retribution. And this is exactly what’s happening with the “Dump Clough” movement.

But…

Removing Wayne Clough over this incident sets the worst kind of precedent.

It would be one thing if this were the last straw in a long line of capitulations to political pressure on Wayne Clough’s part. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The last time I recall the Twitterverse speaking his name, it was to praise him for the Smithsonian 2.0 initiative, which he sponsored. Maybe Clough has made a whole lot of terrible moves that compromise the integrity of the Smithsonian as a whole, but if so, I’m certainly not aware of them. Even while acknowledging that the decision to remove the piece was wrong, Jonathan Katz, one of the curators of the exhibition, still praised the NPG for putting the exhibition on in the first place.

So what we’re talking about here is essentially a “one strike and you’re out” policy when it comes to the leaders of our institutions. The precedent we’d be setting says, in effect, that your past performance is meaningless if you step over the line even once in a way we don’t approve of. I just can’t hang with that. While there are certain transgressions that a museum administrator (or his/her bosses) can commit that rise to the level of an Impeachable Offense (such as, oh, maybe selling artwork to pay your electric bills), I don’t believe that this is one of them.

As many of us who work in museums know, there is a painful shortage of museum directors in this world who actually “get it” (I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few). And of those, there’s an even tinier subset who are capable of guiding an institution as multi-faceted and unwieldy as the Smithsonian. If we’re going to remove someone who, generally speaking, seems to be doing a good job (as opposed to a ‘heckuva’ job), we’d better be doing it for the right reasons. Which brings me to my last point…

Dumping Clough only furthers the agenda of those who sought to remove the piece in the first place.

While I don’t doubt that a tiny minority of the visitors (emphasis on ‘tiny’) who have visited this show were truly offended by the work in question, it’s not for those people that this artificial “debate” has been created. What this is, in the end, is a political power play to establish authority over our country’s public institutions. And make no mistake, this issue IS a cynical one for a majority of the politicians, pundits, and commentators who are using it to their advantage. If it served Eric Cantor’s or John Boehner’s political ends to argue that the content of “Hide/Seek” wasn’t offensive enough for an organization supported with taxpayer money (even though this particular show was privately funded), that would be the case they’d make.

Removing Clough plays right into those people’s hands. It sends a message that if you can’t behead our precious institutions by stirring up bullshit controversy, we’re perfectly willing to finish the job ourselves. I fear the blowback that something like this would create. If the movement to dump Clough is successful, who do you think we’ll get in his place? Someone who’s willing to face debate head on, or someone who, when appointed by the Board of Regents, is willing to state for the record that there will be no more “controversial” exhibitions on his/her watch?

So, in short, let’s hold Clough accountable for this, certainly. But let’s find the right corrective action.

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I posed a quick question on Twitter this morning (or this afternoon, for those of you east of the Rocky Mountains) that I feel needs a bit more clarification than I could squeeze into 140 characters, so I thought I’d log into the ol’ blog (for the first time since July) and do some old fashioned clarifyin’.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

While it’s easy to think of all kinds of things that museums could do better (and indeed, since asking this question, I’ve received a bunch of excellent replies to this effect), what I’m really trying to get at here are identifying processes that we (perhaps grudgingly) accept as givens, but that we would never enact if we were just starting from scratch today.

A good example of this would be object (or accession) numbers. If museums didn’t already exist, each with their own unique object numbering schemas, I have a hard time imagining that we would take a similar approach to object identification. It seems far more likely that we’d do something along the lines of what Richard McCoy and I have been discussing for a while, something like an ISBN or PURL for works of art. This number would be forever permanent, and would move with the object when deaccessioned, purchased, loaned, or whatever. The reason that this is such an interesting example to me is that because unique objects don’t, in fact, have truly unique identifiers, using them in a linked data context is extraordinarily difficult. The main reason objects don’t have truly unique identifiers is because tradition dictates that objects have identifiers only within the context of an institution–once the object leaves that institution, the identifier no longer has meaning.

It’s just a small example (and a super-technical one, because that’s my thing), but the implications are huge in that we wouldn’t have to build big, complicated systems around compensating for the lack of unique IDs. I wonder what other processes there are like this in our world–how would we build museums differently, if we were just starting out now?

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Disclaimer: This is something that I’m still trying to figure out, so a lot of what follows is still kinda half-baked and rant-y (just your typical kovenjsmith.com post, I suppose). I welcome better-informed opinions than my own…

I often hear museum staff talk about museum websites being places for visitors to the buildings to “plan their visits” and/or to “follow up after their visits.” For some institutions, it seems that this is the primary purpose of their websites. I’m willing to be convinced if someone can show me hard data that proves otherwise, but my gut tells me that this kind of activity rarely, if ever, actually occurs in the way we so often discuss it.

Let me be clear here–I’m not talking about visiting a museum site to figure out what times it’s open, or how to get there. That’s pretty basic stuff, and statistics generally show that these are typically the most-visited areas of many museum websites. I’m also not talking about using a museum’s website to determine whether you’re going to visit in the first place (“They’ve got the Naboo fighter on display? I am so there.”).

No, here I’m talking about what museum staff seem to refer to when they say “plan your visit,” which seems to be something along the lines of this scenario: the visitor figures out ahead of time what he or she wants to see, and maps out the visit, either literally on a map or conceptually (“first we see the Jackson Pollack, then the Naboo fighter”). After this thoroughly-planned-out visit occurs, the visitor goes home, pulls up the museum’s website, and reviews what he/she saw there.

Maybe this scenario really does occur at museums with really large campuses (sculpture parks, for instance), where a visitor really does need to optimize travel time between stops, and advance planning is actually critical. And maybe I’m completely misunderstanding what museum people mean when they say “plan/follow up”–no one has ever been able to successfully explain this concept to me. I hear it intoned all the time, but it’s an activity that seems ill-defined at best.

I feel that often museums still see their websites as inextricably tethered to the physical buildings, as opposed to distinct entities with really only the tenuous connection of the museum brand tying them together. The two are certainly related, in that the same scholarly activities and staff make them happen, but the output and use of those activities as they are manifested inside the building and on the Web are entirely different.

My main worry here is that this continued orientation towards the physical visit in museum websites results in an only slightly more evolved version of the 90s-era “brochure-ware” websites that we so often decry. There are experiences on museum websites that are impossible to have inside the building; let’s stop limiting them arbitrarily by forcing them to be something they really aren’t good at being.

I’m Koven, and that’s one to grow on.

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