Online collections, hey! Online collections, what?

April 16, 2012

Old-ish Content Warning!

You are viewing a post that’s more than three years old. There’s a good chance that a lot of the following is seriously out-of-date (or at least not reflective of my current thinking on this topic). Proceed with caution.

Another year, another Museums and the Web conference that has left me completely hoarse and unable to talk. Wooo! I had a lovely bunch of people show up for my “Blow Up Your Online Collection” impromptu unconference session, and I wanted to attempt to get a few of the ideas that came out of that session down here before I start forgetting things again.

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.

 

Next post: Leave tech in the conversation

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