Don’t get me wrong, here–I am all for communication and understanding. I think it’s important for me as a (vaguely) technology-leaning person to understand not only the content but also the context of the people and the subject matter I am working with. Technology in museums is, at its best, an interpretive medium. It’s also important, when we as a museum are engaging with new technologies, for me to explain them. However, that explanation and that understanding must be coupled with learning. I’m unwilling to accept that anyone in a museum is allowed to continue to be ignorant of that technology over the long term. Matt Popke, as usual, put this best in a recent comment to Suse Cairn’s post about organizational digital literacy:

 This is no longer about new technology. It’s about common technology and the world it plays a vital role in. Blogging is old hat. Social media has been around for almost a decade. The web was invented twenty years ago. The commercial internet was created in the 80s (split from a network that was initially created in the 60s). Sure, there will always be something that’s even newer that really does warrant an explanation, but that’s a given, and I’m fine with explaining twitter to people for a while because it’s still relatively new. When do I get to honestly say it’s no longer my job to explain to someone how to use email properly?

I agree completely with Matt here. Removing tech from the conversation doesn’t illuminate, it paralyzes. I’m willing to educate and to explain, to a point. But past that point, I’m not willing to explain anymore–coddling those who refuse to learn from (or even to accept) the world around them puts museums at risk. The definition of “museum” can’t be, “a place to pretend that the world will always be as it was.”

Technology (or, as I’ve said before, the set of practices and materials we currently define as “technology”) is the lingua franca of the world in which we now live. Museums resist acknowledging this at their peril. Any moment in which a curator/educator/director/CFO/whomever is allowed to continue to be ignorant of how a given pervasive technology works is just pushing your institution’s adaptation further down that timeline. Any method of working in which ignorance is allowed to persist is one that is, frankly, suicidal for institutions that are trying to figure out what their place is in this new world.

The gist of my original proposal for the session was about focusing in on a key area of the “What’s The Point of A Museum Website?” Ignite Smithsonian talk and subsequent MCN panel session: online museum collections. If we’re all having trouble defining what the purpose of museums’ digital presences should be (though the Walker’s bad-ass–and award-winning!–new design is certainly helping to point the way), we’re having particular trouble trying to determine what role museum collections and objects serve in that space.

I don’t think any of us walked out of this discussion feeling that we’d solved the problem, but some interesting threads (some more immediately obvious than others) did come out. I hope that those who were at the session might chime in with some additional comments, but for now, in no particular order, here are a few of the things from the discussion that I could remember:

• The after-market for collections data may be the most important one: There was much discussion about the real value of our collections data existing largely outside of the museum’s purview. We’ve already seen some of this with outside app developers building interesting stuff on publicly available collections data (with the apps built during MW’s “hackathon” being the most recent examples).
• Attenuation to our audience(s) is key: Our current online collections typically aren’t deep enough to really serve scholars, nor are they friendly enough to serve casual visitors who don’t know what they are looking for (see Nate Solas’ older–but still relevant–presentation on collections findability strategies for more on this phenomenon). Knowing what audience we’re actually reaching would help us design an experience for that audience that might actually (gasp!) be useful.
• Make collection records actionable: It’s astonishing how few museums make objects from their online collections easily share-able and comment-able. Giving users something they can do outside of your domain makes those objects useful. I had an interesting discussion with Tim Svenonius and Suse Cairns about the idea of people going to see the Mona Lisa–it often seems less important that visitors see the Mona Lisa, than that they have seen it. Everyone goes and takes the same exact photo, but it’s the sharing of the experience that has more value than the experience itself.
• Timelines: Charlie Moad of the IMA had an interesting proposal, which is that something like a Facebook Timeline might actually be a really interesting way to present information about our objects. Being able to show an object’s entire history, including its creation, acquisition, movement, even changes in data like attribution, would give a more complete picture of what the object is about than just a simple collection record, while also giving the online user an experience that cannot be replicated in the gallery space. This is a pretty interesting idea to explore, and one I might try to write a little further about when I do my next blog post twelve months from now.

After the session, I started putting together a thought experiment that helped me to focus the issue a bit more. Imagine if we took a common dataset–the images, data, and objects in the Google Art Project would be an ideal test case–and were to have several museums each develop their own online collections around it. Working with a common dataset would remove any individual institutions’ ability to fall back on the “our objects are awesome, and therefore our online collection is also inherently awesome” approach. Everybody has the same objects, so everybody has to figure out how to make their approach to those objects unique. The second is that it would force museums to really think about what it means to interpret their online collections, rather than simply present them. In this thought experiment, every museum’s collection would be the same, but every museum’s interpretation of that collection would (hopefully) entirely different.

This may seem weird, but it’s actually not that far off from what is about to effectively happen. As more an more institutions make their collections data available via APIs, we are effectively heading towards a place in which every museum will (theoretically) have access to every other museum’s data. The obvious worry is that an approach like this would simply turn the curator (or scientist, or educator) into little more than a list-maker, but I don’t think that’s actually how this scenario would play out. Putting the emphasis squarely on interpretation (rather than on simple interestingess of collection) would simply exaggerate the impact of exceptional curators. Those who are gifted interpreters would find their work even more highly valued, and those who simply compile objects and put them in catalogs would quickly recede into the (digital) background.

So, I dunno. I can’t tell whether we’re getting closer or further away with this, but I’m liking the conversation around it. Hoping we can keep this discussion and the ideas flowing.

Digital and technology practice in museums has, like a jet plane strapped to a hand cart, been artificially grafted onto this ancient model, with checkered results. Technology has been used by museums primarily as a tool of efficiency (produce label copy out of our CMS, stat!) or of strained relevancy (participatory culture! gamification!), rather than as a foundational concept. But what if this weren’t the case? What if a museum’s overall practice were built outwards from its technology efforts, rather than the other way around? What would a museum built from the ground up for speed and agility, rather than stability and longevity, look like? This presentation will speculate on this idea by examining the possible evolution of museum practice from a number of perspectives, including (but not limited to):

• Scholarship and Content Development: What would the equivalent of GitHub look like for scholarship? How could museums leverage the work of hundreds of thousands of curators and scientists working together towards a common repository of knowledge, rather than duplicating efforts from museum to museum?
• Variable Media Conservation: Artists are inventing, implementing, and discarding means of creating works of art orders of magnitude faster than conservation practice is evolving. How can the practice of conservation change to accommodate web-speed innovation?
• Constituent Software Systems: Collections management, digital asset management, development, and other primary museum software systems are generally built on a cataloguing paradigm, with distribution, publication, and collaboration tacked on as “premium features,” when present at all. How would systems built for action and outcome, rather than simply cataloguing, change the practice of museums from the ground up?
• Staffing: Digital media teams tend to be a tiny minority on an average museum’s staff, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the museum’s  interactions with the public. What would be the effect of inverting this model?

This presentation will pose many more questions than it will answer, but in so doing, will suggest new frameworks of understanding as attendees work towards building the museum of the future.

See you there, kids!

Video streaming by Ustream

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:

@edmj Not exactly. Those people threw a snowball of inanity. It was Clough who reacted as though it was a live grenade. #CloughMustGo

December 14, 2010 11:04 pm via twidroyd (original)ReplyRetweetFavorite

@museumnerd

Museum Nerd

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.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

What things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?

December 1, 2010 12:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@5easypieces

Koven J. Smith

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?

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.

I hear this meme invoked all the time at “museum tech” conferences nowadays. Indeed, I myself have said this a bunch of times when developing (or at least contemplating) a new content-based technology project at the Museum. A big drive in my work at the Met has always been to get constituents talking about the content first and foremost, and worrying about the technology platform(s) later. (Aside: Nancy Proctor makes this point better than I do in her recent Museums and the Web paper The Museum Is Mobile.) This hasn’t always been an easy task, as often it’s excitement about the technology that has caused the constituent to contact me in the first place, but I have nevertheless always endeavored to put content first and tech second in any discussions about a possible project.

But…

This approach only goes so far, and we need to be careful about where and when we apply it, lest our thinking become too prejudiced. My concern is that thinking this way causes us to act as if content is always inherently platform agnostic, which is rarely true.

I think the issue here really is context, which is unique for each technology platform, even when the content is similar. A kiosk has the context of a museum around it, a mobile device has the context of location, the web has the context of (possibly) no context at all. Each of these situations demand different approaches to developing, filtering, and presenting content.

I don’t mean to say that the “it’s not about the technology” idea has no value–it’s still a bad idea to jump into a project with no reason for being other than exciting technology. However, we do need to be cautious about understanding the nuances of each platform, and adapting our content strategies accordingly.

Word.

Milton Glaser’s 1966 Bob Dylan poster, on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. Image from the Museum of Modern Art.

I just came back from seeing the “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation” show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design museum, and taking some time to check out its much-ballyhooed iPod Touch tour, which was designed by New York design house 2×4. I was curious to see the device in action, after first hearing about it through the #museummobile Twitter stream and then via the positive review of the tour in the New York Times. I arrived with somewhat high expectations. Would this finally be the mobile handheld implementation that I and others have been dreaming about?

Well, yes and no. I found myself somewhat frustrated by the experience–the tour does so many things right, that it makes the things it does poorly just that much more glaring.

I’ll start with the good stuff first (for a change). First, the amount of content available on the device is absolutely staggering. For each of the 78 designers with work represented in the show, there was some kind of multimedia content available. At minimum, a slide show of the designer’s work was presented, but more often than not this slide show would be accompanied by an audio interview or artist statement. Many of the profiles featured YouTube videos illustrating aspects of the designer’s work. In some cases, there were multiple videos, multiple interviews, and multiple slideshows. The devices were light on text content (there was virtually none at all, as I recall), but this didn’t feel like a critical omission, given the inherently visual nature of much of the work on display. Given that my call has always been for more, more, and more content, the amount of stuff to get into here was fantastic.

I was also excited that much of the content on the devices was not (as far as I can tell) created expressly for the exhibition. Some of the most interesting content on the devices was delivered via YouTube videos, most of which I think were not created for the exhibition or even posted by the Museum itself. I would love to see more museums start to do this–taking content that’s freely available from other sources, and incorporating it into an in-gallery interpretation strategy.

The devices also handle comments quite well. Visitors are given the ability to comment directly on a given designer’s profile, or on the exhibition generally. These comments show up on the exhibition’s Web site, on a series of iMacs on display at the end of the exhibition itself, and, apparently, on Twitter (though it’s unclear to me how this is done). Comments received from the gallery are merged with comments received from the Web site pretty seamlessly, which is a nice feature. My only real dissatisfaction with the comments feature was the inability to respond directly to previous users’ comments. I guess I’ve become so used to the idea of an @ reply that I expect a little more asynchronous conversation than was really possible here. That’s a pretty minor point, though.

And generally speaking, the interface works nicely. After a moment or two of playing with it, it was pretty clear how to get around, how to search, and how to comment. I’d be curious to test this with someone who is less familiar with the iPhone model; I wonder if to an iPhone newbie, the navigation would have been a little daunting.

And now on to the not-so-good stuff…

Something I had not really considered before is how having to pick up a device from a museum, versus bringing in your own and downloading an app, changes how much and what kind of content one might be willing to tolerate. Many of the videos linked from the device were longer than three minutes, with some clocking in at eight minutes or more. I would guess that while I was in the exhibition, I never watched any more than perhaps a minute-and-a-half of any one video, mostly because I felt a need to move on to the next designer’s display. Had this been an application on my own device, however, I could have saved any of those videos for later viewing, or shared them with friends immediately. I wouldn’t have been frustrated by not being able to watch entire videos, because the app would have essentially been leveraging the arrangement of a physical exhibition to point me to a sea of content I could explore later. Instead, I watched pieces of a few videos, most of which I’ll never get around to finding and re-watching on my own.

This problem could possibly have been mitigated by the “send my visit” feature, in which one can e-mail a summary of his or her visit to someone else. I e-mailed my visit to myself, in the hopes that maybe there would be URLs for the videos I had viewed in the e-mail. No such luck. All that appeared in the e-mail was a statistical breakdown of what I saw (number of designers’ profiles viewed, number of videos watched, number of images viewed, and number of comments added). I’ve never been a big believer in the “e-mail me this object” features that were ubiquitous on museum kiosks for a while, but here was a situation where e-mailing this information to myself actually could have been helpful.

I think my biggest beef with the iPod Touch tour, though, and the one that the reviewer touched upon in the NYT article, is that it doesn’t seem that well-integrated into the exhibition. And here I don’t mean well-integrated in a design sense; the physical exhibition design and the app design on the iPod were well-coordinated. What I mean is that it seems that the exhibition experience and the iPod experience were separate, parallel types of engagement, in which one had to stop doing one in order to experience the other.

I found myself either focusing entirely on the device, to the exclusion of all else, or focusing on the work on display, without any of the additional interpretive content from the device. Fundamentally, the experience I had on the device seemed like it would have been more fulfilling almost anywhere other than in the gallery. Both the exhibition itself (exclusive of the device) and the iPod tour each felt like complete experiences on their own–they didn’t really appear to need each other.

This issue was probably best exemplified by the thumbnail images used in the main navigation. Each designer’s profile, when shown in the primary list-style navigation, is associated with a thumbnail image of a representative work. However, this representative work was often not the work that was on display in the gallery. There was thus no visual shorthand one could use to assist with finding the appropriate profile. This seems like such an obvious integration point between the physical exhibition and the iPod tour, that its absence was striking.

Aaaaaanyway, there you go. On the whole, the handheld tour was a good effort, probably the best of its kind I’ve yet seen, but not quite ideal. I’d be really curious to hear others’ thoughts about this, particularly if you’ve seen the show and had a different reaction to the handheld tour.