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Koven Performances MCN, Museum

Koven Performances MCN, Museum

This post is Part Three of a series of posts. Part One, with a brief introduction, is here. Part Two is here.

By choosing to assume that the audience for online engagement is the same as that for traditional in-gallery engagement, museums are failing to nurture and develop new audiences. Instead, museums continue to produce new content based on (potentially) flawed assumptions of what their audiences might want. These flawed assumptions cause museums to spend a significant amount of time worrying about issues regarding content ownership and authority that are–at best–less important, or–at worst–completely irrelevant for online visitors, and ignoring issues of findability that are critical.

This is nowhere more apparent than on the typical museum Web site. The average museum site assumes a protracted engagement with the visitor in which the a deliberate choice has been made by the visitor to visit the site and look for information. This type of engagement is clearly modeled on a physical visit, in which the visitor enters through the front door of the building and is “captive” for a certain length of time. In this scenario, the visitor has already sought the specific museum Web site out, likely based on the museum’s reputation, and is willing to accept even unattributed content as all coming backed by the “full faith and credit” of that institution.

Some visitors may indeed seek this form of engagement from museum Web sites. The problem is that the average museum Web site gears most of its content entirely in the pursuit of this one type of engagement. With more effort devoted to research (“plans to learn”) than to production (“plans to execute”), museums may find that there are other niche types of engagements that individually represent smaller numbers of visitors, but collectively represent a significantly larger number. This is what author Chris Anderson refers to as “the Long Tail.” In the old days, the cost of producing print or in-gallery materials that would appeal to these niche audiences was simply too high to warrant even considering it. Digital production, however, enables museums to publish materials for as easily for these audiences as it does for traditional audiences. Adding up all of these possible niche markets makes for a larger number of total interactions than do the hits.

There is also the possibility that what was always assumed by the museum to be a niche audience in fact turns out to be an entirely new, previously untapped market. In fact, most disruptive technologies begin as niche markets and then evolve into something much larger. This is to museums’ advantage now that producing content is now a low- or no-cost proposition. Rather than spending years and thousands of dollars producing “perfect” publications that may never find an audience, museums can instead begin to put out smaller bits of content first to see what “sticks.” If that content finds an audience (that is, if the material begins to be linked to, referenced, and read), then the museum could decide to produce more content on that topic. The key here is that decisions around content production should be based on actual returned data (website hits, incoming links, etc.) rather than assumptions about what the largest audience wants. In this way, emerging and as-yet-unknown audiences can be turned into assets before they have a chance to look somewhere else.

Producing materials for niche audiences and adopting a research-driven content strategy means contravening many long-held production practices in museums. Most critically museums should forgo the concept of waiting for perfection before publication. Perfection is a standard far more suited for the print medium than today’s digital domain. By the time a museum has thoroughly perfected a resource, that potential audience may have already moved on and found the information elsewhere. Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, recently made a similar case for immediacy over perfection:

“I arrived [at the IMA] and heard, as is so often the case, the mantra that we’re only going to put stuff online when we’ve done data clean up…Actually, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put everything online now and see how much we have to clean up. And that seems to be working better…than holding back.”

In trying to avoid “holding back” while simultaneously attempting to find and exploit new audiences, museums will have to re-configure their content-production strategies to be significantly more flexible and responsive. In the main, this will involve the removal of the traditional editorial process in favor of more direct and ongoing communication. In this model, the publication of a given resource is the beginning of a process, rather than its endpoint. Some approaches that many museums are already using successfully include:

• Allow staff to speak to visitors directly. As many museums with blogs are finding, allowing staff to speak out directly about what interests them is a relatively painless way of quickly creating volumes of interesting, colorful content. These staff postings are inherently niche-based, tending to focus on tiny area of museum practice, but often build dedicated, loyal audiences. Nina K. Simon asserts that being more overt about content authorship can also have the side benefit of increasing trust, by in essence demonstrating an author’s willingness to engage in a conversation about content he or she created with his or her community.
• Use content that already exists. Not all content has to be built from scratch. Plenty of information is already available in digital format in museums, but many museums still withhold this information until it is deemed suitable for public consumption. What Wikipedia and similar resources have taught us is that the public is remarkably tolerant of mistakes when the information is copious and findable. Put information out as soon as it is created.
• Worry less about completely owning all of your content. Museums should not be afraid to reference materials not produced by them. Museums can still provide valuable context, and acquire value over time as good pointers to interesting information. A museum that is willing to own up to incomplete knowledge, and ask its own communities to fill in those gaps, is a museum that (paradoxically, when viewed in the context of earlier paradigms) is increasing trust with its community and ensuring that it will be a “first source” of information for that community.
• Digitize your archives. This is probably the least attractive option for most museums, as the process of converting archival assets from analogue to digital carries with a relatively high price tag. But because much of this information already exists, digitization can enable the creation of large amounts of “new” content without (again) having to create content from scratch. And, like all digital production, the cost of digitization is only decreasing.

Objection to pursuing any of these strategies in museums typically takes one of two forms. The first is the concern that this kind of content represents a significant decrease in quality, and the second is that creating a too-engaging online experience will cause a drop in visitorship to the physical site. Both of these arguments represent an incomplete understanding of what disruptive technologies mean in terms of creating new audiences.

For these new audiences, there is no quantifiable drop in quality with these new production methods. With more rapid and personal content deployment, museums are actually providing more value for an audience that responds to availability and findability more than perfection. For a visitor hungry for information that can be found nowhere else, any information, even incomplete information, is better than none at all. The ability to engage directly with a curator, conservator, or educator might be far more important to this audience than comprehensiveness. Museums have to ask themselves whether by fretting over being completely authoritative if they are stymieing their content-production efforts merely to satisfy the needs of a small group of scholars. As Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said about high-quality audio formats like FLAC: “…if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker stands.”

And it is highly unlikely that producing more engaging online experiences will “cannibalize” existing visitors. It is far more likely that more interesting online presences will in fact help museums to find entirely new audiences that had heretofore not had an interest in visiting at all. Sebastian Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse Museum found this to be true when the Powerhouse posted images of its Tyrell photographs collection to the Flickr Commons. Powerhouse found that the images posted to Flickr received more page views in the first four weeks of availability than they had for the entire previous year on the Museum’s own Web site, and that the museum was receiving licensing requests from entirely new entities that had never contacted them before.

This is an instructive case because the Powerhouse could have just as easily not have made these images so easily available, and instead put a few highlights on their Web site, strongly urging visitors to come to the Museum to see the collection personally. Had the Powerhouse done this, these new audiences would have been far less likely to have found this collection at all. The “cannibalization” would have been reversed–an over-emphasis on the museum’s physical presence would have prevented interesting and engaging content from being made available for new audiences to discover.

Part Four should be up later this week.

Koven Museum Chris Anderson, digital domain, flickr commons, Long Tail, maxwell anderson, Museum, nina simon, Powerhouse Museum, sebchan

This post is Part Two of a series of posts. You can read Part One, with a brief introduction, here.

The economist Herbert Simon identified the issue of how to determine value in a world of abundant and free information in 1971–he called it the “allocation of attention”:

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

-Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”

When most engagements with visitors occurred within the museum walls, a certain amount of captive attention from audiences was guaranteed. In the digital domain, there is an exponential increase in competition for that same attention. What this means is that the most critical success factor for museums in the digital domain is not the production of content, but rather the allocation of attention to that content. This doesn’t mean that content production is not critical (after all, museums must have information to direct attention to), but the presence of that content alone no longer guarantees attention from audiences. A shift in value has taken place, from the production of content to its consumption by audiences. This value shift is not an easy one for any content-producing organization to accept. The nature of this shift only begins to make more sense once one begins to think of digital production and distribution of content not as a more efficient version of the publishing schemes of old, but rather an altogether different type of beast, with its own requirements and its own rules–a disruptive rather than a sustaining technology.

“Disruptive Technology” is a term coined by Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen to refer to technologies introduced to a given industry that upset an existing value paradigm. Dominant players in industries upended by disruptive technologies often do not at first recognize the value of these technologies because they foster the creation of new markets rather than sustaining the existence of current ones. As we see with trading production value for attention value, disruptive technologies usually represent the trading of one set of values for another.

The classic disruptive technology of the Internet era is the mp3. The mp3 is a compressed digital audio format in which a degree of audio quality is sacrificed for the sake of creating a smaller, more portable file. Significantly, the mp3 was also the first widespread music delivery technology to be created outside the normal production channels of the recording industry. Because of this, as Eric Harvey states in a recent article for Pitchfork, mp3s “performed the radical task of separating music from the music industry for the first time in a century.”

The recording industry’s analysis of then-current markets concluded that the audio quality of the mp3 was simply too low to be of any real value to most consumers. What consumers were really looking for, studies showed, was high fidelity audio formats like the Compact Disc. However, as is typical with most disruptive technologies, market research could not predict the emergence of a new market, one in which the metrics of value are significantly different. As it turned out, consumers were willing to trade a previous value standard–fidelity–for a new one–portability. Wired magazine summed up this trade succinctly: “The big advance—the one that had all the impact—was the move to easier-to-manage bits. Compared with that, improved sound quality just doesn’t move the needle.” The recording industry failed to predict this market transformation, and were caught off guard when consumers’ standards of quality no longer matched the industry’s.

In a parallel to the situation with mp3s, portals like Wikipedia have enabled content about cultural heritage to be produced outside the cultural heritage sector. Wikipedia is a large (3,040,380 articles in the English version as of September 22, 2009) online encyclopedia whose articles are contributed and edited entirely by the public at large. The value proposition promised by Wikipedia is significantly different than that promised by organizations like museums. Wikipedia promises easy availability, a commonly understood presentation format, and absolutely up-to-the-second information in place of unimpeachable authority.

It is this very promise of authority (and the trust earned via that authority) upon which museums have by and large staked their reputations. However, despite studies showing that museums and libraries are still the most trusted institutions in the United States, Wikipedia repeatedly shows up at the top of search results lists for topics that should be a strength for museums, and images used in blog posts and other electronic media are fare more likely to come from Flickr than they are from museums’ own Web sites. Why is this?

It is simply that museums are now making the same mistake made by the recording industry. In making the move to the digital domain, museums have assumed that what constituted value when interactions occurred in the physical building will still constitute value when those interactions occur online. And, in an eerie parallel with the recording industry’s mp3 market research, recent studies from IMLS and AAM show that museums’ current audiences really want authority. Unfortunately, fast and cheap electronic publishing has created an entirely new audience (read: market) that both threatens to engulf the old audience and values something entirely different. As it turns out, what this new audience requires is accessibility and findability, exactly the areas in which resources like Wikipedia excel and in which museums lag far, far behind. However much museums try to promote their authority and infallibility as superior to that of Wikipedia, the new audience simply doesn’t value these qualities in the way the old audience did. “You can’t protect old business models artificially,” stated Peter Chernin (past president of News Corp) about online TV site Hulu.

What museums must learn from this new market is that they must be willing to adapt to the needs of new audiences as they emerge, and be capable of delivering content to these audiences. This implies a flexibility in technical infrastructure as well as a flexibility of mindset. Clayton Christensen refers to this as creating plans to learn, rather than plans to execute.

Continue on to Part Three….

Koven Museum aam hulu, attention economy, clayton christensen, digital domain, disruptive technology, herbert simon, imls, mp3, Museum, web, wikipedia

First, an introduction. I recently was asked to present some (half-baked) ideas at a symposium on museums and digital culture in Taipei under the somewhat meaningless title “Museums In the Digital Domain,” and I thought I’d serialize some of what I wrote for that symposium here. Some of these ideas are better fleshed-out than others, and much of this writing I still consider to be a work-in-progress; constructive commentary will be warmly welcomed.

A special shout-out to Matt Morgan, John Gordy, Nancy Proctor, and Richard McCoy, all of whom gave valuable feedback while I was writing this.

So here’s the first part of the paper:

“The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes…was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.”

–Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”

Although Clay Shirky is talking about newspapers here, this quote could just as easily apply to the various strategies museums are currently employing in an attempt to remain relevant. As museums attempt to make the transition from being places where a majority of interaction with visitors takes place within their walls to a different kind of organization in which interactions could potentially occur anywhere, it is vital that the origins of many of the practices surrounding the production and distribution of content are completely understood. Although museums have been “on the Web” for 15 or more years, their collective digital presences (with a few notable exceptions) still bear the marks of practices created and nurtured during the analogue era, with online presences amounting to little more than a “digital facelift.”

The traditional notions of what constitute value for museums are changing. If we accept that, over time, the number of visitors to to a museum’s building will be dwarfed by the number of visitors who experience that same museum via any number of possible (primarily) online avenues, we must then recognize that that physical visit is now but one of a significantly larger number of possible engagement scenarios. Museums have been slow to recognize this subtle but far-reaching shift in their own value, and continue to assume that the dynamics of the physical visit continue to hold true for all other types of engagements.

What this has led to, unfortunately, is a situation in which museums are losing the competition for attention with other types of information providers and portals that do not have the same depth of content, but are capable of reaching audiences with the content they do have. What can museums learn from these providers, and how can these lessons help museums to truly become digital organizations?

A given museum’s perception of its own value is still generally tied up in its contributions to the general knowledge via scholarly publications as much as it is in the value of its physical collection. These publications, whether they be journal articles, exhibition catalogues, or gallery label text, are laboriously produced, thoroughly vetted, and meticulously edited. Because these publications are printed on physical media, the production of every single word of text, every single image, and every single second of film costs money. That cost always has to be weighed against the hoped-for return on investment (whether that be book purchases, ticket sales, or professional standing) on any given publication, meaning that content that is unlikely to find enough of an audience to justify cost is equally unlikely to see the light of day via publication. Three primary effects have resulted from this situation:

1. Museums tailor their content for audiences already known to exist: scholars, general visitors, researchers, etc.;
2. Activities within the museum that are unlikely to speak to one of these known audiences are regarded as too specialized for mass consumption, and therefore kept “behind the curtain”;
3. Museums (and other similar cultural heritage organizations) occupy this information space virtually alone–the economic barriers to participation via print are simply too high for most potential competitors.

The dearth of content available because of this lack of competition meant that, in the past, an audience looking for that type of material was relatively likely to find materials created by museums. There was simply little competing content out there. In the electronic domain, however, this is no longer the case. The cost of displaying and distributing content electronically has fallen so low that it is now effectively zero. The inputs to the production process are now almost entirely intellectual rather than material, leading to a situation in which, as Chris Anderson states, “ideas can propagate virtually without limit and without cost.” As a result, any scarcity of museum data, information, or media, is a mostly an artificial one. The only meaningful factor restricting the publishing of museum content in the electronic domain (beyond any lingering rights issues) is a conscious decision on the part of the museum not to publish. Unfortunately, many museums are making exactly that decision, which has created a vacuum that is being filled by all sorts of other actors, from Wikipedia to the Discovery Channel. What these other organizations have come to understand is that content, being free, has less value than the attention it generates.

Continue on to Part Two…

Koven Museum Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, digital domain, Long Tail, Museum