Month: October 2007

Categories
Conferences and event reports Powerhouse Museum websites

Upcoming talks and presentations (November/December)

If you missed any of the recent conference presentations in Australia, the Powerhouse’s web technologies, strategy and expertise will be discussed/dissected/analysed at the following (public) events.

On Saturday December 1 at Focus Fest 2007 Agent Provocateurs I will be presenting under the theme ‘Provoking a shift in the dialogue:
Art audiences, galleries and the web’ which will look at the new ways in which art museums are engaging audiences online, as well as how new audiences are making new demands of cultural institutions on the web.

On Wednesday December 5 at Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World 2007, I will be presenting under the theme of ‘Web 2.0 for Government and Non-profits’ examining how Web 2.0 opens up considerable new opportunities for service delivery, marketing and citizen engagement, but brings with it significant challenges.

If you are attending either of these feel free to get in touch.

Categories
Young people & museums

A collection counting game for children

During the recent school holidays we rolled out yet another simple game for young children over at our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse.

This one is called Counting with Zoe & Cogs. Like previous games on the Play at Powerhouse site it revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots – Zoe, a girl representing the local community, and Cogs, a robot that represents the Museum’s knowledge and collection.

The game is very simple – count collection objects under a specific theme to build a display.

This is another in a series of quick turnaround, simple website interactives used to build familiarity with the Museum’s mascots and children’s brand, as well as teach basic memory and computer operation/coordination skills. They complement a range of offline craft activities that can be downloaded from the Make & Do part of the website.

Categories
Conceptual Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Social media, social networking – learning from libraries, the new OCLC report

The OCLC has released an enormous (~300 page) new report titled Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world. It is essential reading.

Drawing data from 6 countries – USA, Canada, UK, Japan, France and Germany – the report gives detailed data on how people in the countries use the net, what they look at, what online services they use, how long they spend online. They then delve deep into the motivations, interactions and choices these users make on social networking services and social media sites; as well as attitudes to privacy and security. This audience research is then compared with internal library attitudes and beliefs about users and their needs, as well as data about how libraries and librarians use these same services. It is fascinating, and illuminating – and strongly challenges the assumption that libraries should copy social media services on their own sites, and instead recommends that libraries open up for users to make use of content in their own ways on other services. Participation on library sites will be low.

Our view, after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to experts and creating our own social spaces, is quite different. Becoming engaged in the social Web is not about learning new services or mastering new technologies. To create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a “top ten” list of services to implement on the current library Web site would be shortsighted. Such lists exist. Resist the urge to use them.

The social Web is not being built by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools. And a social library will not be created by implementing a list of social software features on our current sites. The social Web is being created by opening the doors to the production of the Web, dismantling the current structures and inviting users in to create their content and establish new rules.

Open the library doors, invite mass participation by users and relax the rules of privacy. It will be messy. The rules of the new social Web are messy. The rules of the new social library will be equally messy. But mass participation and a little chaos often create the mostexciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building—and transformation. It is right on mission.

Participation in social networking services hosted on a library site (see A-12)

Categories
Digital storytelling Web 2.0

Learning from journalists and the media sector

Over the past while I’ve been talking a lot about museums becoming media organisations on the web. This is occurring at the same time as the differences between museums, libraries, galleries and archives blurring. Like media, museums are coming to terms with the need to encourage active participation and co-creation between our visitors (cf. readers/viewers), content researchers (cf. journalists), across all our delivery platforms including exhibitions (cf. tv/print) and the web.

Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian writes an article titled The pro-am approach to news gathering neatly summarises some of the issues that emerge when co-cretion is enabled discussing motivations, drivers and problems.

Third: community brings cost. Jay Rosen of New York University runs an ongoing experiment in networked journalism at NewAssignment.net. The community there has reported a story on crowdsourcing for Wired magazine and is now reporting on the Presidential race for HuffingtonPost.com. Rosen found an ongoing coordination cost: volunteers need to be assigned, enabled, moderated, managed, edited, curated.

There is also the cost to misbehaving citizens, the dyspeptic commenters who can ruin a conversation online and tarnish a brand. This, explained Robin Hamman from the BBC, is one reason why the corporation is moving away from constantly trying to bring the world to its site to contribute content and interact. Now it will also organise the conversation happening elsewhere, in blogs or in Flickr photos or YouTube videos. That’s one step toward what I think will be the next paradigm of online discussion, something more curatorial, built around quality and reputation more than quantity.

Fourth: the role of the journalist changes. Journalists need to become moderators and enablers . . .

There are obvious parallels here with the experience of museums and many of us are actively thinking about how we can train staff in the skills necessary not only in production, but most importantly, in the process of facilitating, enabling, and managing co-creation.

(hat tip to Tony at ABC Digital Futures)

Categories
Folksonomies Web 2.0

Information organisation as a video – the latest from Michael Wesch / KSU

Back in April, Michael Wesch at Kansas State University made a great video about the basic ideas behind Web 2.0. Now he has delivered another video this time looking at information organisation. It opens with a traditional ‘on paper’ view of information in the pre-digital age – library card catalogues, expert taxonomies, and scarcity – before comparing this with the current situation – and the information glut of the digital age.

Continue reading “Information organisation as a video – the latest from Michael Wesch / KSU”
Categories
Social networking Web metrics Young people & museums

Why kids are moving to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and away from email

I’ve been watching a lot of people using computers over the past few months and it struck me how many of them were using web-based email services – the more tech savvy were on Gmail, and the more casual users gravitated towards Hotmail and Yahoo Mail despite their flaws. An even smaller number used webmail interfaces from their own ISP. Like all websites and online services, they all have their own specific demographics of users.

Continue reading “Why kids are moving to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and away from email”
Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Geotagging & mapping

Brantley on digital collections and the location-awareness OPAC

Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly has put together a short post on his vision of the future of collections – specifically those held by university libraries – which should have resonance with those in collecting museums.

Continue reading “Brantley on digital collections and the location-awareness OPAC”
Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Folksonomies Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 – latest tag statistics and trends for simple comparison with Steve project

Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.

Continue reading “OPAC2.0 – latest tag statistics and trends for simple comparison with Steve project”
Categories
Interactive Media Young people & museums

A dress up game for children

We’ve rolled out another simple game for young children over at our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse.

This one is called Zoe’s Dress Up Game and revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots – Zoe, a girl representing the local community, and Cogs, a robot that represents the Museum’s knowledge and collection. The game is very simple – find the appropriate clothes for Zoe to wear for one of three different outings.

Zoe’s Dress Up Game is one in a series of simple website interactives used to build familiarity with the Museum’s mascots and children’s brand, as well as teach basic memory and computer operation/coordination skills. They complement a range of offline craft activities that can be downloaded from the Make & Do part of the website.

Categories
Digitisation

OCLC/RLG on access and digitisation

Late in August OCLC held a special event called ‘Digitization matters: breaking through the barriers, scaling up digitization of special collections‘ in Chicago. The audio of the event is now available on the OCLC site and is important listening for museums trying to come to terms with mass digitisation and the new access demands of digital users/customers.

Amongst a slew of excellent well thought out short talks, Michael Jenkins from the Met reads Susan Chun’s provocative paper in her absence. It is a great way to start things off. Susan emphasises the importance of keeping pace with users and their expectations, and not just scholarly users. As she points out, users will neither wait for us nor will they necessarily need to wait for us as in the digital realm borders are extremely porous. She argues that audiences require quantity over exacting quality and that this is now what really matters. This requires new organisational structures, internal capacity building and looking beyond project-based funding models. She uses several important examples from her time at the Met especially the Artstor/scholars license project and the lessons learned from it.

Download the lot to your media player.