Rebecca Krause-Hardie

Brooklyn Museum launches iphone app

 

 

Brooklyn Museum launched their new iphone app over the weekend. It allows you to search through items in their collection.  I just downloaded it and about to check it out

Victoria & Albert Museum - Insights from Gail Durbin - Part 2

This is part 2 of a conversation I had with Gail Durbin from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

arkh:  Do you have a particular strategy for approaching Web 2.0?

gd:  "I’m not sure we have a great strategy, but we certainly have a philosophy.  We want to make our stuff as accessible as possible and build a relationship with our users that draws in their expertise. The web is a wonderful tool for doing this.  So we have for example asked people to send in their memories of buying fashion in the 1960s and their contributions have brought a sense of excitement and enthusiasm to the website.

We are always looking for opportunities to add web.2 to the website and its important to do it in an experiential way.  We just have to try it and see what happens. 

Museum staff have variable levels of web awareness. The Director is enthusiastic and supportive. Age is not always the key divider and interestingly, we sometimes have expectations of younger people that prove inaccurate.  For example, the V&A runs a joint MA course with the Royal College of Art and I was surprised to find only one of the 30 or so students had any interest in blogging.   While many younger people use some aspects of social media, it’s a false assumption that they use all of them."

A few of the many V&A projects:

The World Beach Project

What it is:  Artist-in-residence Sue Lawty, who weaves tapestry and draws in stone was invited to put on an exhibition and asked to blog about it.  Though at first very hostile to digital technology, she quickly became a very good and enthusiastic blogger.  In the course of talking about her practice and the design process, she discovered a new audience, and new possibilities for doing things she’d never thought of. 

She came up with the idea to invite people to go to their local beach and do their own drawings in stone.  An interactive map was created where people could locate their beach, upload their pictures, and describe their experiences.  Over 400 people have participated from all over the world and it is the ideal activity because it can be done by a young child or a sophisticated designer, each at their own level.

Learnings:  

• Demonstrates the high quality of user generated content.
• Visual Moderation: -  With visual content, it can be moderated quite quickly. (Everything the V&A does is moderated.)
• Continued interest and engagement of the artist even 18 months after the residency is over.

Knitting site  

What it is: Users are invited to upload their non-garment knitting.  The range of stuff is amazing.  Things like “Sushi -   hi fiber snack”

Learnings:

• User content enlivens the site enormously.
• While the V&A collects knitting and the history of knitting, they don’t necessarily delve deeply into what’s going on in knitting now.
• Extending perspective: Sometimes there are things that might not seem appropriate for curators to express, so you get a different perspective by inviting people from outside.

Kaleidoscope Toy

What it is: A template is designed with elements from the exhibits.  You can create your custom version of it.

Learnings:

• The very best activities are the ones that can be done at any level, from the 5 year old to the graphic designer. Some people assume these are only for kids, but really it appeals to everyone.

My Che:

What it is:  Invites users to send in their pictures of where they’ve seen this ubiquitous photo.

Learnings:  By asking people to make records of things they have developed a database that didn’t previously exist

Thomas Hope  Room:

What it is:  Develop your own Thomas Hope style room.

Learnings:  Can’t judge the success of an experiment by the volume of responses.  Just a few can enliven the site, and sometimes a lot doesn’t add more.

arkh: How do you measure success?

Volume and quality

Liveliness

gd: “Sometimes it’s appropriate to measure success through volume. We have one activity where people can design their own tiles which has drawn over 25,000 responses. But the activity can also be judged by the quality of designs. We have had some brilliant creative submissions including a portrait of Martin Luther King using only motifs from a William de Morgan design!”

“Liveliness is very important.  How much does it add to the site? If we get interesting responses, I regard that as very satisfactory. If we ask people to tell us about their recollections of fashion and we get people who are very enthusiastic and articulate and can express their experience I would say that was successful.“

rkh:  Other lessons learned?

gd:  “Start slowly and small.  Keep moderation as minimal as you can -  one way is with visual responses. Take risks. Just do it. Observe what happens and build on it next time.

“I find lots of people talking about web2 but not doing it.  They are losing out on a wonderful, interesting and exciting opportunity that can further the mission of their museum.“

Thanks Gail!

What are your lessons learned?

Victoria & Albert Museum - Insights from Gail Durbin - Part 1

I met Gail Durbin, at the Museums & the Web Conference last year in Montreal.   Gail directs the online activities of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. 

Recently we had a conversation about the kinds of web programs the Museum is exploring.

Opening Up All Our Content on-line

The V & A wishes to establish its brand as a global source of information about art and design and the website is a very important part of that strategy. 

“What we need to think about very seriously is opening up all our content to other people who want to take it away and use it for their purposes.  We have a management group – The Digital Futureplan - that is enthusiastic about an API so I hope this is something we can pull off and watch how the experiment works.”

Aren’t there a lot of obstacles to do this?

Copyright

Durbin notes that while there are plenty of copyright issues with artists whose works they hold, their Director, Mark Jones feels that it is essential to make the collections as accessible as possible.  Everything that furthers that he sees as an entirely good thing.

Commercial Models – Letting go in one area to open up other possibilities

Last year, the museum set up a system to allow people to download hi-res images for non-commercial purposes.  This also extends to publishers that want to do print runs of under 4,000 copies. 

Says Durbin, 

“ We need to be prepared to take risks. I think he [Jones] thinks that the commercial model has changed these days.  The cost of supplying hi-res images to people individually is actually quite high and we can supply this at no charge or at no considerable cost to ourselves on the web.   There will be other benefits that would come out of this - more people coming to the website and the online shop will do better.” 

Durbin goes on to say that while there are certainly concerns on the part of the commercial arm, and their concerns need to be taken into account, museums need to look at new models.  Maybe they will lose money in an area where they  previously made money, but they could open up new potentials in other areas.

Online Collection Information System  (CIS)

Another project the V&A has in its plans is to put the collection information system (CIS) online. 

The V&A holds over a million objects in its collection, and currently about 30,000 of them appear in the online search.  The plan is to make the entire content of the CIS system available. 

I imagine that this is no easy task, and I’m right....   Gail Durbin says:

“We’ll start with the 100,000 that have a complete set of basic information within the records. Our records are very variable, but if we wait for them all to be perfected we could wait many decades. We need to tell the public that this is a work in progress, that improving our records is a continuous task and it is better to have access to what is currently available than to wait for a definitive version.”

What is the CIS system exactly?

It is catalog of information about every object.  In a complete record there are over potential 200 fields and the V&A can now link the digital image system with the CIS system.  Not every object has a digital photographic record to go with it.  So if we open the whole lot to the public, some records may only have the name of the object, its museum number and its location. 

Challenges: 

User Interfaces, Categorization of Objects

A critical part of the design will be to determine who the users are, and how to arrange the objects in ways that they can easily find.  In addition since many records are incomplete, how does one communicate to the public about the variations? 

A Place for Crowd Curation?

Naturally the question arises in my mind, how about asking people to help with the V&A records.  Is that something that is even possible?

Durbin raises a good point: 

“How do we find ways to distinguish between information from expert curators, and information supplied by visitors?  How do we welcome them in to help? Doing this has risks.  So we need to start with a small project and demonstrate the value. We are currently planning to submit a collection of theatrical photographs to Flickr Commons as an experiment.”

Examples of crowd curation:

Gail and I talked a bit about the various online projects that have engaged the general public to assist in various ways:

Galaxyzoo:   Helping astronomers classify photos of objects in space
Each photo is analyzed by many amateurs helping to speed up the process of scientific research.

 

They Work For You:
Gail mentioned that in Britain people were asked to help match up and index the transcripts and the videos of debates in Parliament.  Says Gail

“Many people find this quite riveting and spend a lot of time doing it.”

Mechanical Turk -
When Steve Focett went missing several years ago, Amazon opened up Mechanical Turk to the public to help analysis satellite photos of Nevada to help find his missing plane.   While this search didn’t find him, they did find a number of other missing planes.

Steve Tag Project: 
I’ve already written about this previously. Nice examples at Powerhouse Museum, Steve.com,  Indianapolis Museum of Art, etc.

Brooklyn Museum:  I can't say too much about these folks.  They Rock!

Question!

I'm really curious about how museums and others can sort out this question of curatorial expertise vs the general visitor. Do you think it's important to distinguish?  How would you go about it? How are you going about it?  What other questions are important to ask?

Cool Art Career Resources Page

Here's an interesting link for those looking for resources  related to art from artcareer.net.  Its a list of online resources covering every aspect of art.  Seems amazingly comprehensive.  Here are the subject areas:

• Introductory Courses   (e.g. from MIT and Open University)
• Images and Online Exhibits   (e.g. Smithsonian, Getty, British Museum)
• Studio Arts   (e.g. again MIT mostly)
• Lectures and Semiars  (Harvard, Princeton,   but not ITunesU!)
• Theory & Advanced Study
• Technology Training
• Photography & Film
• Graphic Design & New Media
• Art History

So its interesting because it raises 2 questions in my mind. 
First one is:  How did they build this list.  How do we build a list?  Is it SEO rankings in Google?  Is it word of mouth?  Our experience, someone telling us about it.  Noodling around?   Why is your museum listed here, or NOT listed here?   (Okay that's more than one question.)

Second question is:  WHere is ITunes U?   Seems like it would be a natural collecting spot for people to find things.  Just my 2 cents. 

hat tip @Kanter for the link...

Leveraging Social Media

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of doing a presentation with Erin West at the Technology and Arts Conference in Pittsburgh on leveraging Social Media.  We'd never worked together before and weren't quite sure how we were going to merge together all our ideas and content into one presentation.  Amazingly everything seemed to dovetail together with great ease.  Maybe because Erin did that part and her gift for organizing, and getting to the core ideas is fantastic.

I also just wanted to say that Conference organizer, David Dombrosky had the great wisdom to move the conference out of the CMU campus and down to the Hilton hotel.  That move transformed a really bad thing into a really good thing.  Lots of room and space and time for networking, and learning.  As David says, lots of things he'll do differently next year, but he's really on the right track!

So here is our presentation.  Feel to use with attribution.

Leveraging Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Come Participate in "We Are The Media!"

I am a religious reader of Beth's Blog.  And there is rarely a day that I don't learn something interesting there.  And Beth is one of those amazing people that shares everything she knows with you. 

But this post isn't exactly about Beth, its about the sharing part. I learn something and share it here and with clients. All over the web people are doing amazing things.  Just look at Brooklyn Museum, or the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the Boston Symphony, or the New York Philharmonic  (shameless plug here).   Can we help Beth and NTEN and all our friends in the non-profit community? 

Here's how:

NTEN and the Non-profit community, spear-headed by Beth Kanter are creating:

We Are Media Project:

The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits

There is a hugh amount of expertise in the non-profit community and the goal of the We Are The Media project is to harness that great collective of knowledge and experience and share the love.  This month is focusing on the social media tool box.

As the site header says...

Starting October 6th, WeAreMedia participants are going to unabashedly focus on the tools and collectively build the nonprofit social media tool box. Now that we've laid the strategic framework in the other modules, we can have some fun. So come join us ... it will be easy and quick. And, we'll be awarding special prizes for participation.

Have you experimented with any of these things?

• RSS Feeds
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting
• Blogs
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing
• Crowd Sourcing
• Lifestreams
• Social Networks
• Fundraising Apps
• Fundraising Widgets

Please go over to We Are The Media, join the group and join the conversation.  Your 2 cents makes a difference!

Being an interesting Blogger

Blogging for Community Building
One of the key tools that people use for online community building is blogging. We have this idea that if we build a blog that people will come flocking to our doors to buy tickets and attend performances.  If only it were that simple.

Being an Interested Blogger
I was reading a post today from Problogger about how to be an interesting blogger. The key take away for me in that post was about being interested in what you writing about and what your readers are interested in.  Being interested in your readers.  Are we writing because we love it, or because we are really intrigued with something?

Who is Your Blog Audience?

Audience in the KKL
Originally uploaded by Archangeli

Chris Brogan talks about this in his post today, with the really good point that we need to be clear about who our audience is and stay focused on writing about what they want to hear about.

Who is My Audience?
Well that really got me thinking.  Who am I writing for?  I'm really interested in knowing about how people in the arts are using social media tools.  What works, what doesn't. What can we learn from others using social media? I've mostly been interviewing people in this process.  But I think I need to branch out and try other things as well. I think my audience is people interested in the same things.

What are you looking for?  What interests you?

Social Media Plans

I was thinking about what some of the elements of an effective social media plan were. At its core social media is about the place where technology, content and social interactions meet. And conversations and relationships that were once invisible are now in plain sight. So what does that mean?

Here's four things that came to mind.

1. Community Building -   time consuming but essential -  reaching out to others as much as expressing oneself, and adding to the conversation
   
2. Getting Personal - People connect with people, allowing and encouraging personal voices to be heard rather than just 'institutional' ones
3. Engaging and Authentic Voices -  People are smart -  Its important to be real and authentic
4. Having Conversations -  Communities of people want to be part of a conversation, a two way deal

Now I have 2 questions.

1. What other things are important to the plan?
2. What are some specific examples of how Arts Organizations are using social media plans?

Openess, Trust, Value, Give : 4 Secrets of Community

More from MW2008 - 

Shelley Bernstein, from the Brooklyn Museum gave a really super talk last week about the learnings and changes in approach at the museum in the last year.

The biggest take away for me was the idea of changing from an institution voice to a personal one, and how that change has manifested.  While this is not a new idea to me, the elegance with which Shelley presented the case for personal voice, really came home to me.

Her talk weaved 4 concepts together:

1. Openness
2. Trust
3. Value
4. Give

Opening the door to community participation allows unanticipated things to happen.  Trusting that the community won’t steal your art, or whatever your worst fear is, allows them to bring unique and valuable perspectives.  By valuing their perspective and insights, you get help in finding ways to be accessible and interesting to your community. By giving back, you can connect with and understand your community better.  And around it goes. 

A great example Shelley talked about began with a blog post about the Schenk House.  The post inspired a comment by someone who once lived there, and opened this whole door of discovery and connection for everyone involved. The openness in the blog drives home the idea of community. A kind of conversation that is so rewarding and would never have happened in the past.

And speaking of GIVING, 
Shelley asks all of us to help with their Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

Says Shelley:

Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

So....now we need a diverse crowd. If you know everything about art or nothing at all, we really need you to help us out. Create an account, log in and evaluate some of the works that have been submitted during our open call. Your participation will shape the exhibition, opening at the Museum on June 27, 2008. Evaluation can take a while, but you can do as little or as much as you want *and* you can log in anytime throughout the eval period which ends May 23.

Register and get started here:
www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

It would also be super helpful if you'd pass the word along to others. We really need a diverse crowd and that means we need evaluators with range of knowledge (including none!) and varied geographic locations (including outside of Brooklyn!)

Now Go Curate!

Thanks Shelley! 

The Geisha and the Call Girl

I was sitting at lunch today talking with new friends from the Museum World about why I, an "Orchestra" person was at a conference for Museums and the Web.   

Well the first thing that popped into my mind was that there isn't an Orchestra and the Web Conference, nor has there ever been one, unlike the MW which has been going on for 12 years.  Thats Twelve Years...Were YOU even on the web 12 years ago???   Well I was, but barely.  There are over 600 amazing people here, from 32 countries from around the world.  Hello.

This got me thinking, about why is it the Museum world is doing all this amazing and hip stuff on the web, while I observe only a fraction of it on the Orchestra side.  Why is it that Museums are coming together in this way - discoursing on "The Semantic Web" and "Mash-Ups" and "The meaning of Open Content", Tagging Consortium, and what is really 'community" and "the place of openness, value, trust, give" and and and....   Inquiring minds want to know.

Well a provocative friend of mine said...  "Well its like Geisha's and high priced Call Girls.  The Museums, are a more passive experience, and so it takes more to make a connection, so circumstances require them to be like these  wonderful Geisha's that spend the entire evening and night with you listening and entertaining and discovering you.,  whereas orchestra's are like expensive call girls who just give you a quick hour or so experience without paying a whole lot of deep attention."   

Is that it?  Is there more to it then that?   I think so, but what do you think?