Category: Web 2.0

Categories
Copyright/OCL Digitisation MW2007 Web 2.0

M&W07 – Day two: Brewster Kahle

Museums & the Web is very big this year. There must be nearly 1000 people here and there is a good buzz in between sessions.

Today opened with an entertaining and motivational opening plenary from Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Kahle talked about the Internet Archive disucssing the various types of media it is digitising and making openly accessible, for free, using open standards. The big stumbling block is rights.

Starting with books he gave some interesting figures on digitisation costs. The archive is scanning 12,000 books per month over three locations (USA, Canada and the UK). It costs about $0.10 per page to do scanning, OCR, PDFing, file transfer and permanent storage (forever). Distribution problems are being solved by print on demand which costs as little as $0.01 per page and is being rolled out through mobile digital book buses in Uganda, India and China with print on demand. Kahle handed around some samples of the print on demand titles and they were of acceptable quality and had proper covers. He also handed around one of the 300 prototype $100 laptops from MIT which was pretty cool with a great hi-res screen which makes the concept of a low-cost, developing-world-friendly e-book reader viable.

Audio recordings are costing $10 per CD or roughly $10 per hour of recording. Internet Archive will host forever, and for free. Video recordings are slightly more at $15 per hour. They have also been recording broadcast television, 20 channels worldwide, 24/7. Only one week is available online so far – that of 9/11. They have also started on software archiving but are stymied by the DMCA.

The Wayback Machine (web archive) is snapshotting every two months at 100 terrabytes of storage per snapshot. Interestingly he quoted the average webpage changes or is deleted every 100 days making regular archiving critical.

Kahle emphasised the importance of public institutions doing digitisation in open formats rather than the exclusivity of GoogleBooks deals. His catchall warning for museums was “public or perish” which is a great start to the conference.

Categories
Interactive Media Museum blogging MW2007 Web 2.0

M&W07 – Other workshops: mashups and blogging

M&W07 is already causing timetable clashes! Running simultaneously with my workshop were many other excellent workshops. Two colleagues have posted their workshop slides and notes online as well.

The team at Walker Art Center ran their Beyond blogging: is it a community yet?. They have posted some rather extensive and excellent notes for their session which give a great overview of museum blogging, all the necessary technical details to get you started if you aren’t already, tips to improve your blog, as well as rationales to sell the concept of blogging to your colleagues. All of this is accessible through their nifty wiki (the only downside of the wiki being the inability to print or read the whole thing flattened on one long page)

Jim Spadaccini and his Ideum cohorts ran a workshop outlining the processes and practises of making mashups. Ideum has done a lot of work with mashups and is a great advocate of their use within museums – especially as a way of more easily making the type of rich media, geotagged experience that impresses everyone but can nowadays be done on a shoestring with a bit of nouse. Jim has uploaded his slides for the workshop which explain and deconstruct some of the recent mashup work done by Ideum.

Categories
MW2007 Web 2.0

M&W07 – Planning for Social Media in Museums workshop

Angelina Russo, Jerry Watkins and I have just finished presenting our Planning for Social Media in Museums workshop.

The slides for those who came are packaged as a PDF for download.

The workshop was designed to get people thinking about ways of planning for and overcoming the hurdles that inevitably need to be negotiated when deploying social media technologies to meet a strategic objective within a museum.

Categories
Collection databases Web 2.0 Web metrics

OPAC2.2 – New look and new features on our collection database

Today we have also made live a slightly enhanced version of our collection database search.

You will notice a few useful cosmetic usability tweaks such as the tabbed navigation bar at the top which allows you to quickly get to the tag cloud and the top level of category browsing. We did this to make it easier for users who landed on an object to be able to get access to the tags and categories, as well as the search. We have also removed the tag cloud and category browser from the front page and prettied it up with a few selected objects which can act as entry points.

Under the hood we have done some optimising of the ‘related searches’ and also improved the ability for searching for foreign characters which we noticed weren’t previously searchable. We have also added a stack of new images (with still many more to come) and quite a few new acquisitions.

My paper (Tagging and Searching – Serendipity and museum collection databases) for Museums & the Web 2007 which gives a background to the OPAC project and presents some preliminary results from our ever growing datastore is now online.

Those who will be present for the paper in San Francisco will get an updated set of statistics as well as quite a bit of material that couldn’t be fitted into the written version.

Categories
Museum blogging MW2007 Web 2.0

Museum blogs survey results online / San Francisco blogger meet-up

Museums & The Web has published the survey conducted by Jim Spadaccini and myself earlier this year titled Radical Trust: the State of the Museum blogosphere.

As 2006 began, there were less than thirty known museum blogs; since then, that number has more than doubled. Today there are well over 100 blogs exploring museum issues, from a range of institutions and individuals across the globe. All of these blogs have embraced the concept of ‘radical trust,’ taking the big step to trust (radically) the community on-line. This paper reports the findings of the first major survey of museum blog operators and their readers. Developed by Powerhouse Museum and Ideum, this comprehensive survey of bloggers paints a picture of where the field is today, and where it is headed in the future.

How popular are they? How is popularity measured? Do these blogs operate from the inside or the outside of museums? Who is their audience? What of RSS, aggregators, and link exchanges? Are there emerging commonalities in practice and usage that can be brought together to strengthen and expand the collective worth and impact of museum blogging? This paper explores these questions and more. Several successful operational models have emerged and are outlined here, along with emerging trends for the field. It is our hope that these survey results will also provide a starting point for those museums looking to launch their own blogs.

I hope you find the results interesting and useful – thank you, too, to many of you who participated in the survey and also helped beta-test it for us.

Jim and I are running a one hour workshop presenting the results, discussing them in detail, making recommendations to organisations currently running or considering setting up blogs and, bringing the results a little more up to date with some new analytics on Friday 13 April at 10am at M&W07.

Immediately following the workshop at 11am Jim and I will be leading a merry band of museum bloggers to a local eatery for an informal meet up and get together. Many of us only know each other by our handles and avatars. Indeed, when Jim and I first considered running the survey and writing the paper, neither of us had met face to face!

Please join us if you are in San Francisco.

If you have any suggestions of somewhere close to Union Square for food that can accomodate a band of bloggers then suggest in the comments!

Categories
Collection databases Interactive Media MW2007 Web 2.0

Does your audience want Web 2.0? Lessons from SFMOMA

When ploughing through the M&W2007 papers (more are still going up), pay particular attention to Do You Know Who Your Users Are? The Role Of Research In Redesigning sfmoma.org by Dana Mitroff and Katrina Alcorn from SFMOMA looking at the evaluation and redesign process behind their forthcoming new SFMOMA website.

Of particular pertinence to discussions about implementing, encouraging, (and sometimes requiring) user interaction comes this caveat/warning –

Example 3. Web 2.0

The finding: When we talked with our users about potential Web 2.0 features we could offer on our site (blogs, wikis, etc.), they showed surprisingly little interest in them. The users we interviewed were fairly passive about the types of interactive things they would like to do on our site. Instead of asking an artist a question, they would rather read what other people asked. Instead of giving feedback about an exhibition, they would rather read what other people wrote.

The insight: We realized that if we were going to add any of these new types of Web 2.0 features, we should not invest in designing things that our visitors would not use. And if we were to incorporate any of these features in the future, they should extend the interpretation dimension and make the artwork more accessible.

The design: In addition to providing an authoritative museum perspective on an artwork, we must include features that incorporate perspectives from a variety of users, from front-line staff to visitors. On the “On View” main page, for example, we plan to include a feature called something along the lines of “Guest Take” that will present rotating works from SFMOMA’s collection selected by prominent local community members, artists, writers, museum members, etc. These guests will write about what the works mean to them and share their personal reactions, thoughts, and musings. Another feature, called something like “In Focus,” will allow museum staff members at different levels throughout the organization to select works from the collection and share their personal thoughts and reactions. This informal, multi-vocal approach will bring Web 2.0 values to the site and complement what we are already doing with SFMOMA Artcasts, our podcast audio-zine. SFMOMA Artcasts feature “Guest Take” commissions of music, poetry, and prose in response to works on view as well as “Vox Pop” pieces that capture live reflections from visitors in the galleries. We see these as methods of engaging the community in a dialogue of art and ideas; they are excellent ways to bring Web 2.0 values to the interpretative dimension of the museum experience.

Nina Simon picks up on the importance (and dominance) of lurkers in commercial 2.0 applications and reconsiders in the context of museum.

We would concur.

Of the most “2.0” aspects of the Powerhouse Museum’s collection database – the tagging – it is important to note that out of nearly 10 million object views there have been only about 4000 tags. That’s 0.04% of views resulting in a tag – at most. Some views result in multiple tagging of the same object by the same person.

However, because lurkers can gain benefit from other people’s tags (frictionlessly/effortlessly) tags represent up to 40% of search interactions – they add usability and thus access points to content.

Categories
Digital storytelling Museum blogging Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

What museums might learn from how news organisations are trying to engage communities

This week’s essential reading comes in the form of the Center for Citizen Media’s report titled Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement: News Organizations Forge New Relationships with Communities.

The report is written for those who are yet to become interested in the new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 and contains plenty of global case studies and some very practical recommendations for those heading down this path.

Replace ‘news organisations’ with ‘museums’ and there are some terrific and practical insights into new ways of engaging audiences and in so doing embedding the museum experience in the everyday life of communities (and vice versa).

If you have attended any of my talks and presentations you will know I am fond of talking about museums as potential media organisations, and as platforms for multi-directional publishing and engaging communities. From the report, here are the four reasons as to “why news organisations should bother experimenting with user communities” –

– Regaining a place at the center of the civic conversation
– Enhancing institutional memory
– Reducing bunker mentality
– New stories, new ways

Sound familiar?

Here are there recommendations for anyone looking at rebuilding their online presence along the lines of increased community engagement.

Take risks.

In the Internet Age, it’s easy — and relatively inexpensive — to try new ideas. The cost of failure is low for any individual experiment.

Don’t merely tolerate risk-taking in the newsroom and on the business side of the operation. Embrace it, and the fact that failure is part of risk-taking.

[…snip…]

Approach community building with confidence, teamwork, and appropriate expectations.

• Confidence: Building an online community requires a different tone and approach than a traditional news site: personality, humor, and authenticity are key.
• Teamwork: Community sites have a better chance of success if staffers throughout the newsroom and the organization use them rather than being the province of a small “community team” that has little or no contact with the newsroom.
• Expand your team beyond your staff, and even beyond your site. For example, reward local bloggers who link to your site just as much as you reward readers who contribute to your site directly. Consider growing the “ecosystem” of local sites that link to yours as part of your mission.
• Expectations of Contributors: Don’t expect nonjournalists to feel comfortable taking on the role of journalist. While some contributors may be eager to write a “story,” others will want to share lived experiences. Finding ways to accommodate, encourage, and learn from contributors is key to success.
• Expectations About Growth: Communities are organic. They grow through the web-equivalent of word of mouth. Expect a significant period of time – as much as six months, maybe much more – before a community gains a life of its own. (If things aren’t working a year after you start, however, it’s definitely time to reconsider your approach.)

Categories
Digital storytelling Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Gordon Luk on avatars in games and social media sites / stickiness and museums

Gordon Luk has, post-SXsW posted some well illustrated examples of avatars and the types of available customisation that can be done in various MMORPGs and social media sites.

Luk is looking at the differences between ‘explicitly controlled’ and ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. The former being those that are created by the user/player (initial picture, autobiography) and the latter being those that are generated or altered by the game engine itself. What he is interested in is how social media applications can learn from game environments,

avatars can play a large role in improving participation in games and social media, and can arguably go a long way into transforming one into the other. Building these layers into a community system can definitely result in game dynamics, and I’d bet that it would improve network engagement.

From using Last.fm a lot there it becomes apparent that part of the pleasure and stickiness of the site lies in the ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. In Last.fm these are the automatically logged track and album charts that generate as you play and ‘scrobble’ music into their system (game), and the ‘neighbours’, ‘radio stations’ and ‘recommendations’ the system generates as a result. Through pleasure and stickiness comes an investment from the user in continuing to maintain their (in this case musical) identity on the site.

One of the things I am looking forward to in San Francisco at Museums and the Web this year is hearing how museums are encouraging stickiness and user investment in their proposed and in some cases, already developed, post 2.0 era websites. I expect it isn’t always going to be a ‘build it and they will come’ situation unless museums can get the ‘stickiness’ factor right with their target audiences. This is where I can see great merit in Jim Spadaccini and others work with smaller museums and non-profits, choosing to harness already existing, and already ‘sticky’ social media rather than try to develop their own (competing) ones.

Fundamentally the question is “why does someone spend so much time in a game world customising their avatar?”. And, “how can we get them to do that on our site as well?”

Categories
Collection databases Digitisation Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Demspey on ‘getting with the flow’, Morville on ‘findability’

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey’s idea of libraries “getting with the flow” (from 2005) is something that has resonated well beyond the library world.

The importance of flow underlines recurrent themes:

– the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment

– integration of library resources should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to better integration with the user environment, with workflow.

Increasingly, the user environment will be organized around various workflows. In fact, in a growing number of cases, a workflow application may be the consumer of library services.

For libraries, as evidenced also in the discussions by Holly Witchey at Musematic who has been covering the Webwise IMLS conference with regular session reports, and Guenter Waibel from RLG’s follow-up commentary, libraries are at a far more pointy end of changes in customer/user behaviour than most museums. Waibel raises the very hefty 290 page OCLC report titled Perceptions in which the survey suggests 84% of general users begin an information search with a search engine, and only 1% with a library website (PDF page 35/1-17). If conducted again now I would expect Wikipedia to rate highly.

Libraries are seen as more trustworthy/credible and as providing more accurate information than search engines. Search engines are seen as more reliable, cost-effective, easy to use, convenient and fast. (PDF page 70/2-18)

Where are museums in this? Is your content in the “flow”? Do users need to come to your site to your onsite search to be able to find it? If so, they are probably going to look elsewhere first, if they haven’t already.

Over at the University of Minnesota they have just held the CLC Library Conference titled “Getting In The Flow” with Dempsey as one of the speakers. There are some great summaries of the presentations including slides over in their conference blog.

Other than Dempsey one of their speakers was Peter Morville who some readers may remember from his first O’Reilly book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, or the less technically oriented
Ambient Findability (which has been doing the rounds of the office for the past 9 months).

Morville’s presentation slides are an excellent introduction to his work and given their tweaking for the library/information-seeking context are very useful for those in museums too. Ellysa Cahoy has some notes taken during the presentation at the CLC blog as well for the slides that aren’t immediately self-explanatory.

Categories
Collection databases Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 – popular collection categories

In preparation for my presentation at Museums & the Web we have been busy generating a new set of user statistics from our collection database. (Which is also why the frequency of new posts has dropped!)

Objects in the collection, when ‘fully catalogued’ are assigned an object category and an object name from the Powerhouse Museum thesaurus which was first published in 1995 (ISBN 186317060X). This thesaurus is used by other museums as well.

Here are updated top 20 ‘popularity’ tables, the first by object, and the second by category. The top 20 categories indicates the broad collecting areas which receive most interest online.

Top 20 most viewed objects since launch (June 2006)

1 – (17087 views) 2005/1/1 Evening dress, beaded pink chiffon trimmed with charms, designed by Lisa Ho and made in the …
2 – (8875) 94/129/1 Evening dress, womens, `Chocolate box’, plastic / fabric, designed by Jenny Bannister for C …
3 – (7029) 95/23/1 Dress, evening, silk / polyester, designed by Jenny Bannister, Melbourne, Victoria, Australi …
4 – (6636) B1495 Aircraft, flying boat, Catalina, PB2B-2, “Frigate Bird II”, VH-ASA, metal / fabric, made by Bo …
5 – (6133) 88/4 Steam locomotive, No. 3830, iron/steel/brass, New South Wales Government Railways, Eveleigh Rai …
6 – (5504) 97/208/1 Shoes, pair, womens, ‘Super elevated gillies’, leather/ cork/ silk, Autumn/ Winter collecti …
7 – (4672) 88/5 Locomotive, full size, steam, No.1243, metal / glass, made by Davy and Company, Atlas Engineeri …
8 – (4534) 90/816 Aircraft, full-size, helicopter, Bell 206B Jetranger III, “Dick Smith Australian Explorer”, V …
9 – (4384) 2005/127/1 Clothing (9), boys, cotton / wool / metal / mother-of-pearl / plastic / paper / cardboard …
10 – (4297) 98/54/1 Bicycle, Olympic ‘Superbike’, carbon fibre / metal, Australian Institute of Sport / Royal Me …
11 – (3936) 92/405 Mantel clock, Sessions Clock Co, USA, 1905-1915 …
12 – (3557) 86/1015 Room Divider, “Carlton”, wood / plastic laminate, designed by Ettore Sottsass, made by Memph …
13 – (3481) 2006/68/1 Three piece suit, men’s, corduroy cotton, made by David Jones Ltd, Sydney, New South Wales …
14 – (3336) 2003/83/1 Chair, ‘Wiggle’, cardboard, designed by Frank Gehry, United States, 1972, made by Vitra, G …
15 – (3227) 85/1975 Armchair, `Globe’, fibreglass / aluminium / fabric / synthetic materials, designed by Eero A …
16 – (3204) 99/4/46 Model steam engine and box, donkey engine, metal / cardboard, Scorpion Superior Model / Mode …
17 – (3001) 92/305 Food safe (bush pantry), wood/ metal, unknown maker, [Queensland], Australia, c. 1925 …
18 – (2879) 7949 Locomotive, steam, No. 1, metal, hauled the first passenger train in New South Wales in 1855, m …
19 – (2798) 96/386/2 Evening dress, womens, silk, Madeleine Vionnet, Paris, France c. 1930 …
20 – (2772) L611 Aircraft, full size, Bleriot XI monoplane, wood / canvas / wire, designed by Louis Bleriot, mad …

Top 20 most popular categories* since launch (June 2006)

1 – clothing and dress (1419335 viewed objects)
2 – ceramics (1104058)
3 – numismatics (584429)
4 – pictorials (466852)
5 – textiles (394591)
6 – domestic equipment-home (320764)
7 – decorative metalwork (313593)
8 – toys (277752)
9 – arms and armour (245407)
10 – documents (235438)
11 – health and medical equipment (224492)
12 – glass (223899)
13 – jewellery (222371)
14 – models (220519)
15 – transport-land (217331)
16 – personal effects (202413)
17 – photographs (177066)
18 – musical instruments (156136)
19 – furniture (154648)
20 – juvenilia (143011)

*note – some objects belong to multiple categories