Categories
User behaviour Web metrics

Which social web platforms create the most return visitors to our website?

I’m in Europe right now doing a slew of web analytics health checks, workshops and evaluations to help various institutions are get the most out of the their digital initiatives in a rapidly constricting financial environment. Everyone is rushing to figure out which initiatives are performing better for them than others – especially as decisions need to be made as to which ‘experiments’ are worth continuing and which have been ‘learning experiences’.

In several workshops so far the ‘return visitor’ has been highlighted as a valuable key user of digital resources. Return visitors, the argument goes, are more likely to be engaged with the organisation (and the ‘brand’), and also more likely, where geographically possible, to engage with the institution offline as well as online. And, at a time where we are all tweaking our digital content strategies, design and interfaces, they are also the visitors with whom we can measure the relative effectiveness of techniques.

And so one of the questions raised more than once has been – “which, out of Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter” – is best at turning casual visitors into return visitors?

Now obviously the intentions of visitors who come in from these third-party sites is going to differ (not to mention the difficulties in accurately tracking visitors from Twitter), but we’re interested in the broad patterns.

I did some digging through six months (March to August) of Powerhouse data and this is what I found.

Unsurprisingly Organic search generates 72.34% of site visitation. 20.36% of this traffic are return visitors.

Direct traffic (browser bookmarks, typing the URL, etc) generates 13.88% of site visitation. 16.05% of this are return visitors. Interestingly this skews low because of the inclusion of several very popular educational resources in curriculum kits – students follow a very task-oriented link given by their teacher and don’t look around or come back.

Third party referring sites (people following links from other websites) as a whole generate 13.21% of site visitation. 20.36% of this are return visitors.

So let’s break down those top referring sites and look at traffic coming in from Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. None of these are generating enormous volumes of traffic but there are significant differences between them.

Site % of total visits % repeat
Wikipedia 0.63% 11.95%
Flickr 0.28% 42.64%
Facebook 0.49% 32.74%
Twitter 0.18% 34.50%
All referrers 13.21% 20.36%
Overall (100%) 20.60%

Of the four sites we are interested in, Wikipedia delivers the most traffic. However it brings the lowest percentage of return visitors at only 11.95%. This is well below the site average and also well below the average for all referring sites.

Facebook is next and 32.74% of these are return visitors performing well above the site average. Flickr brings the most return visitors at 42.64% whilst Twitter brings also performs well at bringing return visitors at 34.50%.

So ranked in order of traffic volume Wikipedia is a clear winner but in terms of those valuable return visitors the list transforms with Flickr bringing the proportionally more returning visitors.

Flickr is delivering nearly 3.5x the return visitor proportions than Wikipedia and the two social communication platforms Facebook and Twitter, almost 3x as much.

Thinking about why Wikipedia performs so poorly as a source of return traffic, it is clear that there is a difference in the user intentions. A visitor coming in from Wikipedia is likely coming for additional information on a subject or topic. But it looks like there is minimal brand association with that information retrieval goal – they get the answer and don’t explore further at a later date. This is what I’d call the ‘trivia quiz’ visitor.

I looked at which Wikipedia articles were sending the most traffic and the top five were a little unexpected. Wikipedia articles in order of volume of traffic were on Thrust bearing, Easy edges, Powerhouse Museum, Crumpler, Liberty bodice and a long tail of several hundred others. Other than ‘Powerhouse Museum’ this traffic is the equivalent of the casual visit traffic we also receive via the long tail of search – but is less likely to return to the site later.

Informational websites deal increasingly with entirely commoditised content, and this throws up the issue of where to dedicate resources.

The effort expended in the more social web platforms – social communication platforms (Facebook, Twitter) and social object platforms like Flickr – is working to create more valuable return visitors than the informational sites like Wikipedia and organic long tail search.

I was a bit surprised by this result so I narrowed it down a bit and looked at only traffic from Sydney. Here’s the results.

Site % total Sydney visits % Sydney repeat
Wikipedia 0.35% 26.87%
Flickr 0.20% 32.31%
Facebook 0.82% 46.43%
Twitter 0.16% 37.34%
All referrers 12.81% 34.09%
Overall (100%) 34.18%

Sydney-only and Wikipedia performs much better in terms of generating return visitors – but is greatly outpaced as a traffic source by Facebook. Here we find that it is clearly the social communication platforms that are generating the repeat visitation as well as the volumes.

Of course the overall volumes here are very low so there is a fair degree of statistical error creeping in but this is something I’ll be keeping an eye on – I’m certainly interested in why Wikipedia is creating proportionally more repeat visitors in Sydney than globally and whether this correlates to some notion of ‘brand awareness’.

More questions than answers.

Categories
Conferences and event reports

Upcoming digital talks & events for October/November

We’re going back into a cycle of talks with a lot of new things to talk about and announce. There’s a whole swag of previously unspoken about goodies going live in the next 8 weeks, and everyone has been head down working hard. However, it being conference season again means we’re going to be getting the word out on these projects . . .

In the next fortnight I’m in Amsterdam as part of Picnic 2010 (September 22-24). I am involved in a trio of (free) seminar sessions for Culturemondo and as a guest of Virtueel Platform – the Dutch peak body for media art. Picnic is an annual event that operates in the interzone between science, art, media and commerce. Purposely diverse it is a great mix of speculative talks, hands on demonstrations (there’s a competition to build augmented reality games to run live during Picnic this year, for example), media industries, artists and investment types. I spoke there in 2008 and it was one of the most interesting events I’ve been to. (Here’s my reports from 2008).

The three talks I’m involved with fit into a sequence teasing out issues around how digital cultural heritage can operate in the rapidly changing economic and media environment. On Wednesday (Sept 22) in a session called Cultural Criticism In The Age Of New Journalism, we look at the impact of models of new new journalism on cultural criticism and how this, in turn, impacts upon the arts. Whilst at one end of the spectrum, the broad reach of amateur criticism in blogs and across the web is very welcome, at the other the dispersal of such critique across the web makes it difficult for those who rely on such criticism as a part of their professional practice. This is impacting art, the performing arts, and film industries as well as critical practices in these in widely different ways.

On Thursday the series turns to mobile and in a session titled Beyond Tourism: Future Directions For Mobile Cultural Content, speakers question how the development and use of mobile apps in the cultural sector can move beyond (just) tourism and marketing applications. Then that night Non-Fiction takes a group of us on an underground tour of Amsterdam’s mobile incursions and experiments being deployed across the city by media artists. And on the Friday in New Business Models for Culture & Heritage, we look at a range of ‘business model experiments’ that are taking place with digital cultural heritage and collectively consider how best public value might be served.

In between all that I’m hoping to be blogging the rest of Picnic and catching some of the exciting sessions on gaming, transmedia, urban design, sensors and the internet of things, and possibly even some of the bio-engineering stuff.

If you are in or near the Netherlands then come along. Registration for the three Culturmondo seminar sessions is free and if you are coming for them there is also a discount available for the broader Picnic tickets (read to the end of this).

In mid October senior online producer Renae Mason is heading to the New Zealand National Digital Forum in Wellington this year (Oct 18-19) for the Powerhouse. She’s talking about the impact and evaluation of some of our recent social media forays and doing a no holds barred teardown of our investment in prolonged social media and content development for The 80s Are Back exhibition. No doubt she’ll also talk about our Ask A Curator experience. Don’t miss Dan Hill, Mike Edson and Nick Poole’s keynotes at NDF – they should all be fascinating and I’m quite disappointed to be missing it this year.

That same week on this side of the ditch it is Australian Web Week 2010 and Visual & Digitisation manager Paula Bray is doing a ‘big picture’ talk to the assembled throng of web geeks at Web Directions South. Web Directions South is an event we always try to send team members along to to expand their technical and conceptual knowledge of where the web is heading. Paula’s going to be covering a broad range of Powerhouse activities and initiatives and encouraging developers to consider cultural datasets when they are experimenting with new projects. Paula’s in great company with some our teams’ favourite web people are speaking there this year.

On the Saturday (October 16), the Powerhouse is the venue for Web Directions’ Amped – a free ‘hack day’ with special guests from Web Directions and lots of challenges and prizes. If you work with data, are a web designer and work on the web, or are a developer then register and come along as there’ll be lots of great things going on and some great micro-talks as well.

Then in early November, Paula is speaking at the CEBIT Government 2.0 Conference in Canberra and I’m speaking at the NAA/CAARA Residential School with what seems like most of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce!

Busy times.

Oh . . . and we’ll be announcing a bunch of new things at each of these . . . stay tuned. They deserve their own separate blog posts.

Categories
User behaviour Web 2.0

Our Ask A Curator Day 2010 experience

Last week was Ask A Curator Day and the Powerhouse was one of a bunch of Australian institutions that took part. Because of where we are in the global timezone, along with New Zealand we were one of the earliest to start Ask A Curator Day. This limited the exposure that Australian and NZ museums got from the event compared to European and American museums that received a boost from the frenzy of activity over the night – when #askacurator became the top trending topic on Twitter.

I spoke to Renae Mason last week about her preparations for the event and now the event is over I asked Renae and her curatorial champion Erika Dicker about how they event went.

F&N: How much response did we get?

Erika: We had 19 direct questions asked via our Facebook page. Many of these questions went on to become conversations as opposed to a brief Q & A..

Renae: The response was also really positive for us considering we didn’t promote our participation in the event through any mainstream media channels – it was all word of mouth and social media. We also picked up some new fans on the day who didn’t already know about our Facebook and Twitter profiles.

F&N: What were the internal outcomes of Ask A Curator Day in terms of the organisation?

E: Internally this was a great opportunity for the curatorial team to work closely with the web team, allowing curators to experience and experiment with social media in a safe environment. For the past few months curators have been participating in Facebook workshops, and developing their own ‘work’ profiles. These profiles allowed them not only to participate on the day, but will allow them to easily engage with our Facebook audience in the future.

Within the Curatorial Department we had 15 curators (out of 24) who actively participated with the project. I think this shows a high level of enthusiasm, and a definite shift in attitude towards using social media actively and productively in our everyday work.

R: This is a great outcome for us, as we work towards the goal of demonstrating the longer term benefits of social media for curatorial work. One of our curators, Min-Jung Kim was really hoping to meet some Korean speakers on the day who would ask about our extensive Asian collection here at the museum. She did end up meeting a local Art History graduate, who is not only a Korean speaker but also keen to gain curatorial experience. She may come on board as a volunteer curatorial assistant as a result of their meeting on Facebook. This experience really demonstrates the way social media can create very useful moments of synchronicity that have a direct impact on the museum research process, in this case, connecting to the right people that can help get the job done.

F&N: How did the public respond?

I was really surprised that the majority of questions we got were subjective ones. “What was your favourite exhibition to work on?”, “What is your dream exhibition?”, “What is the most difficult challenge for a curator?”. I loved that those who asked really did choose to ‘ask a curator’ on a personal level, rather than ask for valuations, identification of objects or opening times!

R: We also didn’t have any problems with spammers or trolls – no bad behaviour at all! I think that’s one thing that many people who aren’t on social media channels fear and it’s a real barrier to entry. You could tell that everyone involved was genuinely pleased with the tone of the conversations as they unfolded.

F&N: Having seen how it went overnight on Twitter, what do you feel worked better or worse on Facebook?

E: I think the project was a great way to get museums and galleries noticed and let the public know that we are here for them. However whilst I think Twitter is a great platform for curators to get involved with, and used to create professional networks, I don’t think it works very well as a platform that allows curators to engage with an audience. I also think this can’t be done well in 140 characters.

I strongly believe that deep levels of engagement come from personal connections, and to achieve this we have to make curators more accessible, approachable, and personable. I don’t think Twitter does this very well. Most of the answers I saw from other museums on Twitter came from an institutional account, with no acknowledgement of who was doing the answering. I found that quite impersonal.

Using a platform like Facebook allowed our curators to each create their own profile page, including a profile picture of themselves, and details of what areas they specialise in. When our curators answered questions on the PHM main page, our fans could then click on their profiles and see that a real person had answered their question, and begin to make a personal connection with the curator. Facebook also allowed for multiple answers to one question by different curators, and encouraged the discussion to continue past just a simple Q and A format. The results were available for all ‘fans’ to see in a clearly visible way.

R: I definitely agree with Erika on this – the Facebook profiles made it very clear which curator you were talking to at any given time. I also liked the way that more than one curator would jump in to answer a single question – providing a multitude of perspectives and insight that wasn’t limited to 140 characters. Because Facebook presents conversations as a thread, the complete conversation is still accessible to all.

What we lost by being the only institution on Facebook, and therefore being in a bit of a silo in regards to cross-promotion and marketing, we gained in usability and audience engagement outcomes.

(If you are interested in learning more about how the event went down on Twitter from the perspective of someone asking the questions, I recommend you read this post from the Museum Cultures blog.)

Also, it was exciting to see the #askacurator hashtag become a trending topic, until the inevitable happened and it became overrun by spambots. That did put a bit of a dampener on the event.

F&N: How might we do this sort of audience q&a more often? Especially given we don’t have a public Q&A facility on site.

E: I think all museums would agree that everyday is ‘Ask A Curator’ day. However traditional methods of public enquiries take the form of written letter, telephone call, or direct questions emailed through from our online collection database.

Curators spend a lot of their time responding to these sorts of enquiries, however the whole conversation is hidden from public view. Personally I would like to see us get a bit more ‘new school’ in how deal with enquiries, I think they are a hidden gem of content. Until that happens I know our curators really enjoyed using Facebook for ‘Ask a Curator’ Day and we will always be listening, and ready to answer your questions!

[Interestingly the Sydney Observatory Facebook page handles a lot of public enquiries on an ongoing basis – so maybe we will just add a link to the Powerhouse Facebook page on the Contact Us form]

R: Yes, we do already receive some questions for curators via our Facebook fan page and these are forwarded onto them. Their answers are then posted by myself or Erika on the page. Now that we have so many curators set up with Facebook profiles for work, it would be nice to have them personally answer any questions that come through, which would be a better experience for our fans, but would also share the responsibility for our Facebook fan page more evenly.

—

Erika kept up the conversation with one of the people who asked the curators questions and after the day sent her some questions to answer herself. Here’s her reply which I think more than demonstrates the value of Ask A Curator Day to institutions.

(I’ve kept this anonymous because of identification issues around Facebook)

Erika: Had you visited the Powerhouse Museum before?

A: I have been a regular visitor since I was a child, my visits might be fewer as an adult, but with big film based exhbitions, such as the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings exhibits, I was reminded of the brilliant permanent collection and came back more frequently.

E: Did you know the Museum was on Facebook before the event?

A: I did not, I was informed of the event by a friend who knew someone involved in the organising of the event and I was sent an invite.

E: Were you a ‘fan’ of the Powerhouse Museum on Facebook before the ‘Ask a Curator’ day event?

A: No I wasn’t.

E: Do you read any of the Powerhouse Museum blogs? (Photo of the Day, Object of the Week)

A: Occasionally I will look at the Object of the Week, I don’t often remember to look for it myself, but it is often sent to me if it is interesting.

E: What did you expect to happen when you posted a question?

A: I expected perhaps a single stock-standard response. I didn’t expect the genuine, enthusiastic and original answers of your curators. I received many various and interesting responses from all areas and saw some fantastic objects through their recommendations. I also did not expect the quick turn around on responses that I received.

E: How do you feel about the quality of answers you recieved to your questions?

A: As above, I was astounded by the quality of the answers I received, the answers were perfectly apt, and answered my questions without any kind of misdirection, people responded quickly and their responses were charming, informative and engaging. Not to mention interesting.

E: Are you more likely to visit us in person now, or access any of our other services eg. online collection, research library etc?

A: I am far more interested to come in more often, the online collection – while I am social media addicted is not quite my cup of tea. As soon as I see something in picture, I want to see it in person! I’d come in and ask you to pull it out. But I’m making plans to come in for the 80s exhibit in the next week with my partner.

E: How would you prefer to stay in contact in the future – email or social media channels like Twitter and Facebook? Why?

A: Facebook and Twitter work well for me, they feed into my phone and I see them regularly. Should I check my email. Which I do on average once a day for personal email. I’ll see any facebook or twitter notes I haven’t followed up on.

Categories
Conferences and event reports

Report from THATCamp Canberra

Ingrid Mason who is working on the Museum Exchange project for the Powerhouse went to THATCamp in Canberra on the weekend to talk about the project (more on that in a post shortly!), and to absorb some new thinking from Australian ‘digital humanists’ (the opposite of ‘analogue fundamentalists‘?).

I asked Ingrid a couple of questions about this gathering in wintery Canberra.

F&N: What is THATcamp?

THATCamp is The Humanities And Technology Camp. Take a look here for the idea: http://thatcamp.org/ There are camps happening all over the world – next one is in Cologne – where people are interested in how humanities study and technology is working, can work and is transforming as a result of increasing use of computing technologies. The THATCamp in Canberra for example had people from academia, from the galleries, libraries, archives, museums, PhD students, technical developers and representatives from national technology initiatives and eresearch bodies such as the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (Versi).

There is no – pitching – of – tents or bonfires but there is great exchange of information and at times debate – plenty of bonhomie. The by-product of this is catalysing of and gathering up interest to build some momentum in the digital humanities and stimulate innovation and collaboration. The THATCamp was called an “unconference” in that no-one prepared papers but people came with ideas they wanted to offer and questions to ask. If this is what an unconference is, it is great, and a lot like the “birds of a feather” sessions you get a major conferences – except more dynamic.

F&N: Can you explain what, exactly, is/are digital humanities?

Digital humanities is “in process” you could say.

Over dinner with Dr Craig Bellamy and Conal Tuohy from Versi in Melbourne I learned that the humanities has been computing since the 1940s. That came as a surprise, but then on further questioning it emerged that this early start in digital humanities was the development of concordances. We also talked about the field of linguistics which is strong in the use of computing technologies. I guess with using words as units for data mining and analysis this seems obvious and straight forward. What I see as digital humanities is much bigger and broader in its manipulation of data. However this text processing work is fundamental and foundational to other areas of the humanities (and not just the humanities btw) that also deal in text, in sound, in colour.

I’m sure there is more that I can articulate but by example if we study games as cultural artefacts, then we are going to have to figure out how to enable annotation in multi member and player gaming spaces and enable the publication of the researcher’s observations and “data” and “publication” to be in a multimedia form. Without knowing what curricula are available internationally in the “digital culture” and “digital humanities” I can’t say where digital humanities is. The comment I will make though is eventually I assume that we’ll lose the “digital” in digital humanities and the technology will be so embedded we won’t notice it, or, it will get its own specific title, e.g. nanotechnology. How about – annotechnology – the technologies used to draw together and analyse and create meaning drawing from annotations?

F&N: What were the best things you saw/heard at TC?

Formal conference presentations are good to go to and the time to sit back and reflect and explore ideas. THATCamp was alive and wildly mentally stimulating because it is group and knowledge exchange all happening at once. I’m pretty focused 80% of the time on learning quickly, exchanging ideas and getting stuck into doing something – so I was in my element surrounded by thinkers and doers and active communicators. In that heady brew of ideas and challenges to immerse myself in several bubbles of inspiration and ponderence caught my attention and snagged my thoughts and interlinked as I drove back to Sydney from Canberra.

1. The concept of “network literacy” – that a really good understanding of how the ‘net works is critical to digital humanities study. There was plenty of discussion about “how much” and I raised the question of whether it was knowing as in “familiar with” or “how to” encapsulated by the French words connaitre and savoir. Strikes me this is where digital humanities research is going and new discourses will be emerging if they aren’t already! See the software studies/cultural analytics work being done at Calit2.

There is also a general level of understanding the web and its connections that all humanists can benefit from, at the most simple, in citing complex web content in bibliographies. I think network literacy has an obvious relationship with information literacy, traditionally taught by librarians to new university students to help them with their information seeking.

2. The need for a tools and a platform to be developed to support complex use of web material, capture, citation and archiving. This can be done by those that know how to use the tools and how to archive but this process of using web material in the course of research isn’t supported within a platform with tools plugged in for ease. I’m sure the Bamboo project in the US has picked plenty of this up already.

Essentially the humanities scholar’s desk and room needs to be recreated and enabled to support sourcing, coordinating, referencing, and archiving of digital material including the data and publications that are generated.

3. The necessity for scholarly environments to change to support these changing needs of scholars undertaking eresearch. For humanities scholars, well, their relationships with collecting organisations and use of their collection material, have been long and strong. Notably there was a strong representation from both domains at the THATCamp: collectors and scholars. This is a key issue to address in the tertiary sector and that message came through clearly.

4. The opportunity for collecting organisations and scholars to collaborate and undertake joint research is ripe. The Dictionary of Sydney is a good example of this. It is a great opportunity to skill share and provide the different needs and outcomes as components of a research project together.

Categories
Mobile

The first iPad exhibition catalogues and a strategy framework

Today was an iPad filled day for a few of the team.

First, I wake up to find that the Venice Architecture Biennale has launched a ‘free’ iPad catalogue.

Clocking in at over 400MB it isn’t a small download and the user interface is more ‘artful’ than ‘functional’. Still there’s a lot to like about it. There’s far more than just a map and, in fact, the ‘free’ App is actually just a taster as you can buy the ‘full catalogue’ for AU$5.99 as downloadable content from inside the App.

I’d be really interested to hear how much the App is actually used within the Biennale and then how many of the initial downloaders go on to buy the ‘full version’. Certainly there’s the attraction of not having to lug around an enormous catalogue around Venice, but the downside is not having a coffee table book to advertise your architectural social capital when you get back home!

Later in the day several of us attended an iPad Strategy Workshop which was being run by The Insight Exchange as part of the PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association) conference.

Obviously in the newspaper space the iPad is both a source of hope and terror. When the Flipboard App was shown there was a palpable sense of ‘but they aren’t seeing the advertisements’ around the room. On the other hand there was some fascinating data from the New Zealand Herald and The Australian around the take-up rates, growing in-app subscribers, and in-app advertising engagement that all point to new opportunities for news media. Whether these opportunities can and are seized relies on significant structural and organisational change.

In the workshop and panel discussion there was a common theme that the iPad (and other tablets and mobiles) are the beginning of an inevitable structural coming together of the print and digital divisions of newspaper publishers which have been allowed to operate separately for the past 15 years. I couldn’t help thinking that for museums there is a similar point coming – except that mobile for museums necessitates a coming together of the digital/web teams and the exhibition teams. As Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Development at ABC Innovation, emphasised, the real gains of the ABC around mobile have come from the work done to reduce internal ‘channel conflict’.

Ross Dawson, who organised the workshop, distributed the following early beta of an iPad Media Strategy Framework. Take a look as from our perspective in museums, the strategic challenges aren’t all that different.

Categories
Interviews Social media Web 2.0

Ask a Curator Day – behind what the Powerhouse is doing

The InternationalAsk A Curator Day happens on September 1st this year and the Powerhouse is excited to be taking part even though we’ll be taking questions through our Facebook page rather than Twitter.

We’re hoping that by using Facebook we’ll be able to answer more detailed questions and potentially reach a wider audience.

Unlike our friends in natural history museums the Powerhouse doesn’t have publicly accessible Q&A facilities like Museum Victoria’s Discovery Centre, even though we do have a Research Library that does take private bookings. Also, unlike the Art Gallery of NSW, we don’t have public ‘appraisal’ days. Despite this, you wouldn’t believe the volume of emails we get that start with “I’ve been cleaning out the attic and found . . . can you tell me more about it?”.

This is the chance to freely ask those questions and all those ‘behind the scenes’ things you always wanted to know.

Senior online producer Renae Mason and curator Erika Dicker (who also edits the Museum’s Object of the Week blog) are behind this year’s effort and I spoke to Renae about the event –

F&N: How have you prepared curators for the day?

I’m hoping our fans already find the museum to be a special place that is audience-focused and accessible. There are a range of things that we do within the physical confines of the museum, such as curator-led ‘behind the scenes’ tours of our collection and talks with Q&A sessions, that align us with these goals. ‘Ask A Curator Day’ is, in my mind, a natural extension of these activities, it’s just taking place online instead.

So when Erika approached me with the idea to participate in ‘Ask A Curator Day’ we had a quick brainstorm about which online channel would be best to use and how we could prepare our curators for the day.

I chose Facebook, because it’s our most active ‘fan’ space to date and I know how addicted Australians are to Facebook, which was another good reason to further invest in the platform.

We then invited our 28 curators to an interactive session on social media in the museum, finishing up with the option to stick around and receive practical help with getting started on Facebook – for those who didn’t already have work-related accounts.

The response was encouraging.

Approximately half of our curators were able to make it along to the session and most of them went through the sign up process on Facebook and learned a lot more about those critical ‘privacy settings’. Those who couldn’t make it on the day requested we repeat the workshop again and we happily obliged.

After those two sessions, we now have 12 of those 28 curators signed up to Facebook with dedicated work accounts that clearly flag their roles and areas of expertise in their bios (in keeping with the Museum’s social media policy). They are now ready to volunteer their time to ‘Ask A Curator Day’ and I reckon that number may even increase a little more by next Wednesday.

F&N: What do you hope to gain from it?

Ask A Curator Day has really come along at a perfect time for us. By targeting participation directly at curators, the event has helped me to demonstrate the relevance of social media tools in their daily working lives.

People who work in the digital areas of museums are always going to be early adopters of technology and experiment with new tools as they become available. But as platforms like Facebook and Twitter have matured, attracting a wider range of audiences and uses, our internal challenge is around how to ‘mainstream’ social media activity across the entire organisation.

A sustainable, healthy social media presence should represent the diversity of people who work here and their contribution to the museum – and not just through the ‘official’ channels of the Museum’s blogs and website.

Through the workshops, we’ve already increased understanding of social media, encouraged more productive cross-departmental work and introduced a good number of curators to Facebook, including the Principal Curators. All fine ‘wins’.

Now to make it ‘epic’!

Think up some great questions and then, come September 1 . . . ask them!

Find out about all the other Australian institutions participating.

Categories
Collection databases open content

Crossing the ditch – integrating our New Zealand objects with Digital NZ

If you use to regularly read this blog then it probably seems like it has been quiet here but in fact we’re still in one of the busiest periods ever. Today, though, some light through the clouds.

Our friends at Digital NZ (run by the National Library of New Zealand) switched on New Zealand-related Powerhouse objects in their federated meta-search. Now our wool samples and a stack of other objects can be found through any of the many institutions that have embedded the Digital NZ search in their own sites, as well as in mashups built on Digital NZ.

Here’s our wool samples appearing in the sidebar of Te Papa’s collection search, or in one of the nice mashups using the Digital NZ search called NZ Picture Show.

The integration with Digital NZ offers far greater (and more sensible) exposure to our New Zealand objects than expecting New Zealanders to find them initially through our own site. After all it is probably New Zealanders who will be best able to help us document them better. See Rule 1 – findable (was ‘discoverable’) content.

There’s a couple of things I’d like to point out about this.

Firstly, we (still) haven’t made a public API to feed our collection to Digital NZ. Instead they took our updating collection zips and parsed them and ingested the relevant records, pruning them as needed. Whilst it probably would have been nice if we had had an API for them I get the feeling that being able to suck the whole data file down and play with it first made the process for the ingestion easier – even if it comes at the expense of immediate update-ability. Of course this will be addressed once our API goes live.

Second, I love how feeding this data to Digital NZ has immediately had a public benefit in that it is available through all the existing Digital NZ partners and mashups. The work that Digital NZ has done since launch is really remarkable and everyone who now contributes content to them builds upon all their work to date. Contrast this with the innumerable projects with whom data is shared and then sits idle waiting for others to build things with it.

Third, there’s so much additional possibility now with our NZ-related data. Digital NZ users – you even – can go and suggest geo-locations for photos of our like this one with a nice UI. And then we can, in the future, harvest that data back “across the ditch“. Effectively this data hasn’t just gone to an aggregation and presentation service, it has gone to an ‘enhancement’ service.

Fourth, you’ll probably notice that we’re using Google Analytics’ campaign tracking capabilities to have some rudimentary URL-based tracking of federated usage. This gives us the ability to segment out traffic to our collection records that comes via those records that are now visible through Digital NZ. Such use data is critical to building the ongoing business case to federate and release our collection metadata.

Huge thanks to Fiona Rigby, Andy Neale, Elliott Young and the rest of the team at Digital NZ for making this happen, and to Virginia Gow (now at Auckland Museum) and Courtney Johnson (now gone commercial) who kicked this idea off with us way back in September 2009. They more than deserve their Chocolate Fish now.

(Declaration of interest – I and several others of the digital teams at the Powerhouse are Kiwis!)

Categories
Collection databases Imaging

Full screen zooms and image tweaks in our collection

If you are a regular user of our collection database you might have noticed some very minor tweaks recently. One of the most obvious is a change to how we show object images.

For objects with small and low-quality images we’ve turned off zooming (example). Instead these images now explain why they are not available at higher resolution (because they haven’t been moved and rephotographed in recent times).

For those that do zoom, we’ve popped them up in a larger overlay allowing for bigger views, partially in response to the ever increasing trend we are noticing in our analytics for bigger screen sizes.

We’ve also moved away from using Zoomify. As a result we now can support full screen zooms – just click the full screen icon once you’re in the zoomer. (Shortly we will have 3D objects views too!). The full screen is a lovely effect and is going to, eventually, force us to up the resolution of a lot of the images in the collection!


(full screen zoom of H4052, Ship model, HMS Sirius)

We’re working with some new options, too, for bigger images on the mobile web version of our collection too – which may even zoom on touch interface devices . . . stay tuned.

Categories
Mobile User behaviour User experience

Sydney Design has an iPhone app

Everyone is doing apps.

It might not be the decision of choice for us ‘web people’ – our friends at the Brooklyn have recently agonised over similar decisions – but in the end actual user behaviour wins out in the short term over what we might consider best practice. (Of course, modelling on actual user behaviour is best practice!)

So here’s the Powerhouse Museum’s free iPhone app for Sydney Design 2010.

The festival starts on Friday and the App is basically a pocket what’s on calendar and map with the ability to favourite events for your own calendar as well as quick aggregated access to the Sydney Design Twitter and Flickr feeds.

We agonised over whether to just build a mobile version of the website – that would have been the easy choice, especially as the festival site has, for the last 4 years, been built entirely on WordPress (with this year’s theme developed by Boccalatte) and adding a mobile theme would have been comparatively trivial. But in the end we went with the bulk of target users – whose mobile device of choice was overwhelming an iPhone – and whose preferred behaviour was an app over a mobile website for ease of access. There’s also now a sense of ‘expectation’ that these kinds of events ‘should have’ their own app – perhaps grounded in aspirational hype, but an expectation none the less.

MOB Labs built the app which uses the dataset directly from the WordPress backend. This means it can be periodically updated over the air without requiring a full app versioning process – essential given the approval process. This core bit of functionality wasn’t without its own problems and MOB worked hard to make sure that the way that the website uses tags and categories to provide the key navigational elements on the website were sufficiently able to translate to the app without requiring app-specific data.

First releases are never without their bugs and we’re using this time-limited trial as a means to gather the necessary learnings for some exciting upcoming things . . .

Categories
Collection databases open content

Malcolm Tredinnick on some problems with working with our collection dataset

Down at the recent Pycon we were excited to hear that Malcolm Tredinnick had taken the downloadable collection dataset from the Powerhouse and was using it to demonstrate some of the issues with working with (semi-)open datasets.

His presentation reveals what every museum knows – the datasets that exist in our collection databases are inherently messy. But we’re always working to improve the quality and structure of these datasets. Without them being publicly available to be worked on in new ways by non-museum people we’d never discover many of the flaws in them.

Here’s his presentation which is well worth watching if you are a developer or museum technologist and thinking of making your raw data available.

There’s some modifications and improvements coming to our downloadable data very soon – data release projects can’t just be a ‘set and forget’ arrangement.

Malcolm’s code for cleaning up our data is up on Github.