Technology can be a powerful source for democratisation of art.  In this post we invite you to explore how one collector is using technology to turn his collection into an on-line museum and resource.

88-Mocca is an online museum that exhibits Fritz Kaiser’s collection of Chinese contemporary art, including prominent works by Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan, Zeng Fanzhi, and Wang Guangyi.

It is not a novel concept but has the art world fully understood the lack of limits offered by an online museum. Admittedly works cannot be viewed physically which is a self-evident drawback. But against this art on-line enables viewers who would never have access to physical art works to access art. 

 On this site for example many major works of Chinese contemporary art can all be accessed in one place. And unlike a brick-and-mortar museum, it is possible to access 88-Mocca at all times, day and night. There are no limits to the number of exhibitions and content which can be put up creating easily accessed exhibition space that can also be changed at little extra cost. With no limits to the number of visitors, viewing times, number of exhibitions it is exciting to consider what effect this will have on bringing art to a new wider audience.

Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: M&M's

The power of the Internet has truly manifested itself here: aside from accessibility, users of sites such as 88 mocca are able to interact with art in ways they could not in traditional museums. You might find audioguides in traditional museums  but this site offers the ability to comment on works (allowing a conversation between viewers separated by time and space) and send e-cards.

Special exhibitions have been introduced: currently there is one by Yu Youhan in collaboration with ShangART gallery. There are videos that showcase specific pieces by artists and interviews with them.

Yu Youhan, Thermos

Museums and the Web conference

If you are interested in learning more about museums and how the potential of the web can be harnessed, a international conference called Museums and the Web is held annually. Then next edition will be on April 13-17 2010 in Denver Colorado but papers from this and past conferences are all available to view on-line.

AL/KCE

Related Posts:

• China to use “soft power” of arts for international influence – Jan 2010
• The Power 100: curators up on ArtReview’s annual list – Dec 2009
• Which museums are collecting Chinese art – new database released – Nov 2009
• Collector Ciclitira makes big plans for Korean art - July 2009
• Is there a new way to sell art? Vitamin Creative Space China experiments – New York Times – May 2009

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Digital Britain is all around us, right now. We already sit within a real-time web of data. We expect our interactions and cultural output to be geared together and to make new meanings and connections as we go.

As producers and creatives our best channel to audiences in this cloud of online culture comes through managing our core information. That perhaps sounds boring and blank but actually it just means, in the first instance, having simple policies in the museum or gallery to ensure core name and location info about our venue is consistently described then indexed correctly in Google.

That’s right. In the midst of all the perplexing and ever-changing technology we use today, the first step to cultural discovery online is just to use words intelligently to describe your stuff. When you master that, you can allow participatory pathways into collections, exhibitions and more.

If you do it right, someone else may want to share your content or info, or re-use it in another form.  When this happens, your data takes on new value; something we might call knowledge or information equity.  Equity? Does information have value? You bet.  Mobile computers – like iPhones or Android phones – are taking over as the first point of digital contact for many people these days, and they need data.

In his fascinating recent pamphlet about Cloud Culture, written for the British Council, Charles Leadbeater starts to explore the meanings, politics and moral challenges of putting this culture in the digital cloud.

To my eyes, Leadbeater sees too much danger and negativity in these geared and connected data spaces; it’s a chance for those who already watch us too much to watch us even more, he warns.  In reality, we’re already rigidly connected to countless databases that don’t operate in any sinister way at all.  When we book an airline ticket or tax our car we use the cloud of data.  It’s been making connections for us for the last ten years at least.

Forget the more pervasive big brother, the real-time web brings major gains for us as cultural producers: we can now develop data-led ways to put art into a relational landscape where it can begin to be judged and re-contextualised in a wider social space.

We can use real-time web info to market and promote arts and culture in regions where art and tourism are part of the regeneration agenda.  We can offer community arts projects online access and digital partnering opportunities with other groups situated more remotely.  We can tag items in collections so that stories can be woven between objects, places, eras and languages.

If we’re up to the challenge, we could make the new web work for us, not against us, as Leadbeater seems to imply it might.  Cloud culture may allow new kinds of creativity and digital innovation.  Is it possible for us to develop a new, more culturally-inspired or connected YouTube or Flickr? Perhaps; but let’s not forget sites like those morphed out of the very close relationship between academia and Silicon Valley in the States:  I’d question whether we have developed such fertile collaborations here yet.

Sergey Page and Larry Brin developed an idea for a search engine with a difference while at Stanford University, and they got Silicon Valley to invest in Google. The proximity of high-end tech companies, the culture space and universities in the US drive a lot of innovation in our web today.

Arts Council England’s ‘Achieving Great Art for Everyone’ consultation proposes the arts drive our creative industries; I’m assuming this phrase refers to conventional culture industries.  In the US, the creative industries are very closely aligned to new media and tech labs. There’s massive convergence between funders, galleries and tech companies.

TechSoup is a prominent stateside funding agency that blurs boundaries between sectors, funding types and agendas. In the UK, the only dedicated charity or trust that funds digital is the Nominet Trust. Seen side-by-side with Nominet recently at the National Digital Inclusion conference [NDI10] in London, TechSoup shone out as a beacon of developmental excellence, with partnerships linking the commercial web developer, culture venues and social development agencies.

Now shine the torch around us on this side of the Atlantic.  How many arts projects unite objectives/outcomes/ideologies from multiple sectors? Technologies like the real-time web, accessed by easy-to-use mobile platforms like the iPhone, give us a fascinating opportunity to converge the interests and agendas of many from within and outside of the culture sector.

To make good developmental connections now, I think we should closely look at the way ‘Stateside agencies like TechSoup have woven strong connections between commercial developers, culture agencies, universities and mass media organisations.  At a recent Arts Council-sector gathering I was struck by the almost total absence of professional experience from outside the public culture sector.

I think we need to look outwards more.  It’d be great to have a tech director at a National museum who comes from a retail, manufacturing or FMCG digital environment; but that will take a leap of imagination from current museum trustees.  No time like the present though!

Museums and the Web: An International Conference Los Angeles, CA, March 16 - 19, 1997

1997 Dal 16 al 19 marzo prende il via a Los Angeles la conferenza “Museums and the web” (MW 97), creata da Archives & Museum Informatics che già organizzava fin dal 1991 l’ International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM), nata dalla constatazione che nel giro di tre anni moltissimi musei erano sbarcati in Internet, aveva come obiettivo quello di fare interagire tra loro le realtà culturali presentando ognuno la propria esperienza.

We believe museums have much to learn from each other and from developers who have been using the Web for other applications. To provide an opportunity for information exchange, Archives & Museum Informatics hosted an international conference devoted exclusively to Museums and the Web. WebMasters, educators, exhibits staff, curators and managers from museums, science centers, archives and special collections libraries attended. Because these institutions hold the vast majority of the cultural resources of our society and have proven track records in its interpretation, publishers, software developers and service providers came to the meeting to explore the potential museums offer as a source of content and the challenge they present to providers of Web-based multimedia. (MW 97)

Papers, Workshop, dimostrazioni sono pubblicati in Rete e messi a disposizione di tutti.

In questa prima edizione ci sono 50 interventi da parte di addetti ai lavori provenienti da 11 paesi diversi e circa 400 partecipanti. I papers riguardano non solo musei ma anche gallerie e altri tipi di organizzazioni culturali.

Uno sguardo ad alcuni workshop presenti ci permette di vedere a quali livelli di sviluppo fosse nel 1997 l’intesa tra istituto culturale e web:

• Building a Web Site (Jonathan Bowen, University of Reading, UK)

• The Anatomy of a Web Raising: Building Communities in the Digital Frontier (David Jensen, Getty Information Institute, USA)

• Making Money on the Web: Museums and Electronic Commerce (Richard Rinehart, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

• Copyright and Licensing: Protecting and Exploiting Museum Property (Jeremy Rees and Christine Steiner International Visual Arts Information Network, UK and J. Paul Getty Trust, USA)

• Making Your Site Interactive: Video – Conferencing and Other Visitor/Artist Interaction Over the Web (Susan Hazan, Israel Museum, Israel)

Il primo workshop spiega come costruire un sito Web (cosa che forse nel 1997 era ancora fatta all’interno delle realtà culturali stesse, almeno per quanto riguardava realtà piccole),  mentre negli altri quattro workshop citati si fa un passo avanti parlando già di costruire comunità digitali

What is a digital community? What is its cultural potential? For more than a year, the Getty Information Institute has been exploring questions likethese in a project called Los Angeles Culture Net (David Jensen)

del commercio elettronico e delle strategie di marketing come opportunità di guadagno dei musei, le problematiche relative al copyright di testi ed immagini nel web, lo sviluppo di una maggiore interazione con artisti e visitatori.

Proprio lo sviluppo dell’interazione tra gli utenti, unito all’idea di comunità online, trovano una definizione precisa nelle parole di Suzan Hazan di Israel Museum:

Alla prossima..

Museums and the Web 2010

Fornire un’evoluzione temporale della comunicazione web da parte delle istituzioni culturali è materia complessa: sui siti web attuali di musei o altre istituzioni non vi è traccia della loro storia evolutiva su Internet, e soprattutto non sembrano esistere copie delle prime homepage pubblicate.

Tuttavia ci sono due risorse interessanti a disposizione: la lista di discussione sui musei dell’ICOM e l’evoluzione negli anni della conferenza “Museums and the web”.

MUSEUM-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM

La prima risorsa riguarda i contatti, le discussioni, i confronti tra operatori culturali e fornisce una mole di dati davvero impressionante, impossibile da consultare interamente: sono conservati tutti i post dal gennaio 1994 ad oggi! Molti link a website e risorse non funzionano ma leggere i vari messaggi rende l’idea di come è evoluto Internet e conseguentemente l’utilizzo di questo da parte delle istituzioni culturali. Purtroppo, dal momento che ci sono semplici post e pochi link funzionanti, ci aiuta poco a capire su come concretamente le singole realtà culturali sviluppavano l’approccio al web.

La seconda risorsa che abbiamo a disposizione è rappresentata dai paper che a partire dal 1997 vengono presentati alla conferenza Museums and the Web, organizzata da Archives and Museums Informatic: è un congresso con cadenza annuale, nel quale, grazie ai lavori provenienti da tutto il mondo, si fa il punto sul rapporto tra istituzioni culturali e Internet. Ci sono workshop, dimostrazioni, papers: il materiale è interamente consultabile online.

La lista di discussione dell’ICOM offre una maggiore quantità di dati a partire dal 1994 ma i papers di “Museums and the web”, pur partendo dal 1997 offrono indicazioni più specifiche sulle singole realtà.

All’interno della sidebar a destra ho aggiunto una categoria apposita (Storia evolutiva), nella quale farò rientrare i post che settimanalmente dedicherò all’argomento: questi sono presi direttamente dal mio ebook (download free), dove c’è un capitolo appositamente dedicato all’evoluzione del rapporto tra museo e web.

Alla prossima puntata!

Slideshare > Museums and the Web

Se siete interessati all’argomento e ai diversi fili che legano il Web, e più in generale i nuovi media, all’attività museale vi consiglio di leggere le slide presenti all’interno del profilo Slideshare della conferenza Museums and the Web.

Le presentazioni sono ben 42 e trattano temi come l’utilizzo di Youtube, la costruzione del website istituzionale, i casi di successo 2.0, il tutto realizzato dal top mondiale dei professionisti del settore.

Queste slide rappresentano un patrimonio importantissimo dal momento che sono consultabili gratuitamente, e offrono spunti interessanti ai professionisti museali interessati agli strumenti digitali.

In poche parole, un mare di idee a costo zero.

Museums and the Web 2009

Durante l’ultima edizione di Museums and the Web 2009 si è tenuto un interessante workshop sulla pianificazione delle attività 2.0 da parte dei musei.

Potete trovare alcuni appunti dell’incontro, qui.

Sotto una breve presentazione del lavoro.

The war memorial in Indianapolis

I was in town for the Museums and the Web conference 2009 for the best part of four days so I wasn’t expecting to have much time to get out and take many photos. Luckily I manged to get a few pictures in between sessions.

Anti-Obama demonstration

I stayed at the Canterbury hotel which is very central and it was only a short walk round most of the downtown ‘attractions’. On the afternoon I arrived there was an anti-Obama demonstration outside the Indiana State House. There was a band playing music, the signs and placards were great but otherwise it seemed a bit muted and generally the mood was ‘quietly angry’.

Early morning Indianapolis

I woke up very early each morning which gave me the opportunity to go for a walk around the city centre. The light was really low and bright and I enjoyed experimenting with some back lighting. For a city centre and a state capitol I did find Indianapolis relatively empty of people and it never seemed particularly busy.

My top cultural experience of the trip was an encounter with a genuine biker – ‘Bird Dawg’. My colleague and I went for a beer and discovered that there were no tables free and ended up sharing with a couple. The guy looked a bit scary at first, shaven headed and decked out in leather and sun-glasses. He noticed our English accents and started up a bit of conversation and the more things went on the nicer he and his partner seemed. It turns out that when he’s not biking, he was a professional trucker, owning his own rig which was quite interesting to hear about.

Bird Dawg

Bird Dawg was the very proud owner of a fabulous Harley Davidson motorcycle, which he very generously let us have a sit on. He insisted that I borrow his leather vest so that I at least looked the part for the photo. I declined the offer of the chaps even though he said there was no ‘butt smell’ as they had no butt which I guess made sense.

Before going I had really considered going to a a baseball game and in a way I slightly regret it as ‘Victory field’ was right in the downtown area and looked really homely. I think I may have missed my chance.

'Love' at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

We did visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art which turned out to be very good indeed. They hold a very wide selection of art from Turner and Reynolds to Chuck Close and many others. A small criticism would be that the art is crowded very closely on the walls and I would have preferred less but more spread out. Well worth a visit.

Art in White River Park, indianapolis

On my visit here I was in the closing stages of my marathon training and I had been worrying about where I was going to go for a run. I shouldn’t have worried too much as the quiet and art filled White river park was very close to the city centre. Considering that I’d worried about running around a city, the river path was a welcome surprise.

The conference itself was pretty good and I got quite a lot out of it. I do slightly wish it had been in a slightly more popular city, but on reflection it could have been a whole lot worse.

Don’t go out of your way to come to Indianapolis, but if you find yourself here then there are a few things to do.

This demonstration by a research team from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content Interface looks particularly interesting. Patchwork Prototyping a Collection Dashboard explores some of the problems of context, displacement, and too much/too little information that researchers, students, educators and the interested public face when searching for objects:

What if we could provide users of the system a quick, easy way to get a 10,000 foot view of a collection? From this vantage point, individual items fall back to reveal the larger contours of a collection landscape. What are the high points? Where are there gaps? Does this look like a promising place to dig deeper for the kinds of items that will answer my research questions? What kind of landscape does this item come from? Will this collection lead me to find other things like it?

This type of system is extremely exciting because it might allow museums to maximize the accessibility their online presence without completely sacrificing the benefit of physically visiting the collection. Effectively translating the important didactic elements of the physical gallery to an digital environment is already one of the most challenging tasks to curators and their collaborative teams today. Are we ready for Curatorship 2.0?

“Hi everyone,  I’m hoping someone can advise me on an issue we’re experiencing with Google Earth.  I’ve been asked to check that our Museums (and Country Parks etc.) appear on Google Earth and noticed that,  for example, Bosworth Battlefield has about 8 different entries – only one of which is in the correct geographical place and only one of which has the correct name  “Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and Country Park”.

I think the problem stems from the Google Earth entries being fed from various different websites, each using User Generated Content (UGC),  so perhaps mistakes are inevitable? Has anyone else noticed this problem and how have they dealt with it? Thanks in advance!”
Adele Beeby

What a fascinating and topical enquiry! Sadly there’s no immediate remedy, but it raises lots of questions about how we in the museum/culture sector best interact effectively with major information providers like Google. And it’s currently something MCG members have been posting about, in threads about the Digital Britain report, and also Dan Zambonini’s challenge to nominate functions and scope for museum API’s. Dan asked - “if you could have an API in your museum, what would it do, or be for?”

I see these strands as closely related. Google Maps, and more recently Google Earth, have not been using any sort of ‘official’ data source for museum, library, archive and gallery venue info and location data. Most people can see it would be good for Google to be able to deal with one trusted, checked source of info for these useful types of information. I typed ‘Malvern Museum’ into Google Earth and got five different answers about where my local museum is, all info from different sources. Plainly useless. Agreed, one or two ‘reviews’ popped up too, and they were useful in a sense, but the reports were old, uncheckable, and ephemeral in a publishing sense. At the moment, I don’t think web users find this sort of info in any way useable.

So wouldn’t it be great if the Digital Britain report began to sketch out ways that centralised knowledge management could be delegated to one or national museum body, so it could take responsibility for co-ordinating collection of basic data about museums – things like venue info and location. Then Google just talks to one agency and gets the data in one live channel. [Of course - we already have the possible technical means to do this in the form of Culture24 - and that's no accident, it's been something the team in Brighton have been keen on for a long, long time...]

Why is centralised knowledge management (in some form or another) important? Everything needs to be paid for, infrastructure needs putting in place and it needs to be comprehensive. The place where info ‘pivots’ is the place to gather it. There’s not a lot of point in the data being generated regionally, one area at a time; a big player like Google wants national coverage, straight away, and it needs to be up-to-date, live and covered by some sort of service level agreement.

I know we all are keen on museums being participative and socially responsive, but the Google Earth example clearly shows why, when factual, unshakeable, reliable location data and core venue info is concerned, a more systematic approach would work best. So I’d suggest the best placed core aggregators of culture venue data should be funders or govt agencies (or their partners like MLA or agencies like Collections Trust). How do we get people to play ball and use the system? I think it should be a rock solid funding requirement for projects and venues that payment only comes after core info is entered into the publicy availalble, free-for-use, uber-database.

A large culture agency that I have worked with in the past still has no central database of projects, or funded venues, or collection objects aquired; I think a Digital Britain strategy needs to get to grips with such information deficits urgently and make cultural data acquisition a strong organisational priority. Just imagine 25,000 journalists turning up in London in 2012 and there being no trustworthy info on hand about our culture and [sporting] heritage…

Writing as a committee member of the MCG, I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we’ve had for a long time. Yes, it’s been passionate, and that does indeed get people thinking, and firing up laptops in reply.

I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself via Twitter, and others) did so because we’re already engaged in working with museum people all over the regions, not always in the most glamorous places; we’re all working for peanuts, doing about ten million things at once, including managing that puzzling interface between museum directors and the onward march of digital technology…

To me, that’s one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way we review each other’s projects; if you’d been behind the scenes of projects like NMOLP you’ll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I also saw people (like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel and Rowena L) working like absolute stink to get the project done, and ploughing through all sort of effluent to manage relationships across and through the project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.

I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the project – big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and that too, leads to comment that doesn’t always please. One gets a picture sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring around a smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it’s own flanks, carefully manning the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging, or someone jumps ship.

Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?

A) The emerging discussion about ‘the plumbing’ (nice metaphor from Paul Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex cross collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top of the database well down the line of projects like this. How you get the data, on what (copyright)terms it’s given, and how the data is related and relational is the first key task.

B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike E, Kate Fernie and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you might want, or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff needs to be explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made abortive attempts at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed ’cause they didn’t spot that sites get massive visits when they get the bigger publishing picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and massive human resources and tech support. That insight mainly comes from expertise that’s mostly, at the moment, outside the museum sector.

C) We’re starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale, evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren’t any more big pots of money (like ISB)now for this kind of work. We’ve got to be coming up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the scope and depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are still at the back of an envelope stage.

My interests in this?

I’ve long evangelised (and written about, in 2005)’the inside out web museum.’ At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more’datacentric’ publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some sort of breakthrough. We’re wrong to expect a ‘killer app,’ but continuous development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis) Mashed Museum sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of nirvana.

Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the neccesary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content we might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live data exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested old hat. The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that through our day to day fun with Twitter and FB.

To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as Richard Light, Mia and Mike all say. API’s need standards, and Collection Trust work with DACS and towards the new BSI data standards is excellent.

Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets us towards a more commercially-geared culture web.

And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check #fakeanimalfacts) proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu syntax that bind humour, culture, conferences and news together using simple XML. My research interest now is to see how we can map some simple #-like tagging and vocab structures (and maybe the National Curriculum) so we can have cultural fun without needing to build big and expensive portalised web projects…

JP

Charles Darwin goes on Twitter - is he more Web 2.0 than you?

Just when you think the world of information science and the web has gone to sleep, bored to tears with endless discussions about when the semantic web will pop up, along comes something fabulous.

Hard on the heels of last week’s fascinating #uksnow Twittering and the lovely animation of tweets across Britain as the snow rolled us over, this week we’re being over-run by Darwin200 tweets using a #darwin tag.

Naturally the great man himself is Tweeting from beyond the grave – if you’d like to follow him he’s @cdarwin, not surprisingly. I wonder if he’s got a netbook with dongle, an N96 or an iPhone? I don’t suppose there are many powersockets on The Beagle. Have a look at his homepage on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cdarwin

Please can someone now do a #darwin mashup map so we can find out where everything is? Over the next weeks and months a string of events are being held all over Britain.  Check out http://www.darwin200.org/ .  Disappointingly, while a few months ago there was a rudimentary RSS feed of D200 events, it doesn’t seem to be around any more. The D200 site seems really flat and web 1.0.

Thinking about Twitter tags, these user-tagged info clouds could be great low-tech, high-flexibility models for socially-driven information creation. I think it’s fascinating that within just a few weeks, people are making up their own tag taxonomies, placing them in a networked environment, and letting nature take it’s course. Kind of like Darwin, really.

What’s next? A simple, standardised list of artist names, eras, types? It’s not that complex, because what seems to be happening is that users quickly twig which is the most powerful or sticky #tag to use and then the memetic effect that seems to energise Twitter takes over, and the #tag goes everywhere.

Meanwhile, check out the latest #darwin tweets in my RSS feed box up there on the right of the Machine Culture homepage.

JP/Feb 10

Twitter: @jon_pratty

It’s quite unsettling how I assume the world spins the same way as me; and for a journalist and culture sector consultant, not actually that good either. I’d assumed that other people in museums and galleries also used Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. We all use eBay, Amazon and stuff like online banking don’t we? We all muck about with RSS feeds and know our way round Google maps and things that help extend our horizons.

Well, actually, no we don’t, of course. In a user-centric world (which means, in plain English, real life) there’s lots of people who don’t know about newsfeeds, web 3.0 and Creative Commons.  And in fact, if you go round the corner to your local (regional English) museum and ask them if they have an online collection that is commentable by members of the public they’d look at you like you’re an alien.

The reality is that in our local backyard, many museums are run by volunteers. The venues themselves are often only just joining the web revolution, with perhaps, at most, a simple brochure website and an email account that’s checked less frequently than it could be. And one pc in the corner of the room.

In spite of ten + years of lottery-funded largesse that has successfully grown IT for the library sector and built the People’s Network Discovery Service, there’s not been much digital development in small local museums. As the editor (until August 2008 ) of the 24 Hour Museum since 2001, I had lots of contact with some smashing people all over the uk doing a great job running tiny museums, telling us their stories about great discoveries, plucky tales of resourcefulness and occasionally, funding battles for survival.

Clearly – there were, and still are, some splendid tales to tell about UK history and heritage. And yet, there seems to be an increasing gap between those who have digital tools to tell their stories, and those who don’t. Ironically, while post-1997 Labour cultural policy has been all about meeting the needs of users and politically-inspired audience targets for cultural creators, a major group of disenfranchised and under-represented people has emerged.

This group is us – people who make the exhibitions, curate collections, accession the objects, paint the pictures, run the loan box schemes. Curriculum Online passed us by. Culture Online flew over our heads. Lottery money from nof-Digi did come our way to a certain degree. But by and large, right now, there’s an underclass of cultural workers in museums and galleries, libraries and archives, across the whole country, who don’t have access to the means to make online content about our own work, our collections, our lectures or our events.

The recent debacle of the Cultural Olympiad, which saw major promises being made on the behalf of the museum and gallery sector, with no funding stream whatever, only re-inforces this thesis.

While it might seem negative to make these points, I’m merely setting the scene. There are now many, many, well tried and simple means to get presence online. As 2008 closed WordPress, the most popular, free and simple blogging software out there, is gradually morphing from a calendar-based blog tool into a versatile and customisable platform for all sort of publishing tasks.

And, while some in museums find a website of any sort unattainable, others are using free and well connected social networking systems like Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. They are doing this because sites like these are free, vastly popular, and easy to maintain.

So are there lessons we can learn from culture sector users of digital platforms like Facebook and Flickr? Are they the answer to the current lack of infrastructure, support and mentoring, resources and know-how that we are confronted with? What challenges to our traditional ways of working and values do social networks bring?

To begin examining some of the issues at ground level, Renaissance West Midlands commissioned me to carry out a programme of research centred on an event pulling together people from museums in the Midlands.  The event, held at The Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry on February 4th, 2009,  explored some of the issues that we were aware of, and opened out some more that need further enquiry.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sketching in issues discovered, resources contributed by participants at the event, and new directions for further work. A set of pages, links and other resources will be put together on the Renaissance West Midlands website as a record of what come out in our work. In the meantime, I’ll be pulling it out and posting it up on this site to keep the pot boiling.

Further outputs are likely, and may include suggested templates for Facebook use, ideas for advocacy within your museum to help win over unbelievers, and a systematic approach to local government network difficulties.

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far – and welcome ot anyone who wants to join in and help! There’s a Google Group (museums_midlands_network) to house our conversations and ideas, but of course, feel free to comment right down there – below these words.

Next report – the event itself at The Herbert Art Gallery

I am not sure how much Londoners themselves visit these museums. I would venture a guess that most of the visitors are tourists and kids on school trips or with their parents. I love museums myself but I tend to target what I want to see rather than try to take in the whole thing.

Anyway, Berta was impressed not just by the architecture, culture and sights but by the helpfulness of a  fellow traveller. She told me that on their way back to Stansted, they took the wrong train and somebody who saw them with their luggage took the trouble to inform them that they were on the wrong track and pointed them to the right train to take. She said she had not even asked for directions  and she was grateful because they would have missed their plane if that kind person hasn’t bothered to help them.

And on the subject back to museums, I am really excited by following Nancy Proctor and her tweets on Smithsonian 2.0. It reminds me to the time when we used to be at conferences for ICHIM and Museums and the Web. I think I do not have an excuse to go to those any more now that Xavier Perot is dead. I so missed him, I have not realised how much of a mentor he was. And it was he that got me travelling down to Paris and help with ICHIM conferences. And that was for the first time, we had accessible buses – it was a truly inclusive conference, the last conference in Paris, ICHIM 05,(photos) where it was between Cité Internationale de Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). I think that was due to Marianne Serra who  organised all those logistics for delegates.  I gained my confidence about using Parisian public transport from going to that conference.

However Nancy also gave a presentation there. And now shes the head of the New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And shes relaying the proceedings there about the conference in progress using twitter. I love some of the messages shes sending :

• Nancy Reggie Henry: It’s not about the technology; innovation comes from the organization’s culture,
• People understand that repurposing is not the same as purposing; we should not fear misappropriation of our digital assets
• Nancy Colleen Macklin: Success is an iterative process so requires failure by definition. The technology will follow where our ideas lead

I think my takeaway from all this is the lesson of repurposing – this is the term used for recycling digital data – I think it is important to share our knowledge about accessibility and not precious about our knowledge.

I will have to do more content for the real site instead of twittering away!

En anden af de tilbagevendende konferencer om digital kulturarv er Museums and the Web, hvor det foreløbige program nu kan ses på http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/sessions/index.html

Of course we had to visit the Cook County Historical Society, headquartered in an old lighthousekeeper’s house in downtown Grand Marais.  The society and the museum are all-volunteer run, and the museum encompasses the history of the whole country, 70% of which is federal forest/lake/parkland, and which extends up to the Canadian border, though it focuses on the county’s towns:  Grand Marais, Schroder, Tofte, Lutsen.

When I walk into a small local historical society, my conservator’s brain usually starts to scream:  are those original photos on display?  what are those lace dresses doing in front of the window?  there’s condensation on the basement walls!   The CCHS was no exception, but they win points for judicious use of plexiglass and other barriers to visitors handling all their items.

Their local collections are wide ranging, from a spinning wheel brought over from Norway to a dogsled used by a rural mailman.  Interpretative labels are scarce, but exhibits on land surveying, lumber camps, the CCC, geology and shipping in the county were informative and interesting.  Native American history in the county is sadly also scarce, though the mail service exhibit includes information on John Beargrease, who delivered mail by dogsled and after whom an annual dogsled race is named.

The CCHS’s web presence is worth discussing.  They don’t have their own website (hence the lack of linkage), but they do participate in the community portal pages at boreal.org, the fab local nonprofit community ISP.  Boreal’s county history page (note that the whole site is built in drupal) links to a number of articles on county history, and also features a photo identification page, where community residents can identify people in the CCHS’s photo archives.  With these pieces around, it would be very short work to write a homepage for the museum, with hours and location and collections overview.  Lots of potential here.

I spent the afternoon at a workshop on managing redesigns with web teams, run by Howard Rosenbaum from Indiana’s SLIS, and it was very interesting and thorough–his presentation won’t be on the web till next week, so I’ll post a link then. I’m volunteering tomorrow at a session on user-contributed content, and one on open architecture, so I’ll get to talk 2.0 more then. This is all very exciting and energizing, and I’ll hopefully have more resources to share with you all by the end of the week.

*And going to the farmers market! You certainly can’t buy local grapefruits in Minnesota.

Brett started with a huge laugh from the crowd saying that he didn’t want to steal IMLS’ thunder but that NEH Program Officers would be waiting in the lobby after the conference, with checkbooks in hand, making immediate grants.

Holly Witchey has all the details over at Musematic.

Update:  Gunter Weibel has more at Hanging Together, and notes that podcasts will be up sometime in the future.

I’m further tweaking the meme, in a very literal-minded way. I work in and think about history museums, particularly small local history orgs with collections but no money. At the small museum I work for we’re in the middle of a small digitzation project right now, as well as a web project, and I feel like I’m losing sight of our collections and what they mean amid the scanning and research and everything else. So here are 5 things from our and others’ collections, and what they bring up about digitizing history collections. Through writing this I’ve learned that context, especially, and the metadata around the objects make digitized items more tangible.

1. Watermelon. It’s not in the collections, it’s in my fridge, waiting to be pickled, to join the rows of pickles and preserves I made last summer and entered in the State Fair. But despite the long popular tradition of home canning, you just can’t keep that stuff in a museum. General wisdom is to pour it out and keep the container. The contents might draw pests or pose danger from leakage or decay to other items. A major problem here is with the limited sensorium we can capture digitally. Until someone develops smellovision, we’re stuck with visual and audio documentation only.

2. Diary.The diary of a first-year nursing student at Minneapolis General Hospital in 1929, in her handwriting, with a dedication in the front and photos pasted in. We can transcribe its contents and mark them up, making them searchable by names, departments, locations; but we lose the aesthetic power of the diary, the handwriting, notes, stains. We can scan the diary, page by page, but we lose the flexibility and interoperability of data that we get from markup. If a local historical society is doing a digitization project, which will they do? Which is more valuable? How can we make the resources available to digitize both the informational and tactile content of the obect?

3. Mysteriously-appearing boxes. Since the museum I work at is infrequently open but is located in the hospital, we often receive mysterious donations. We’ve tried to institute a more rigorous tracking procedure, putting donor forms outside our door, but we still get items without any sort of provenance. How can we accession them? What do they signify? Here, it’s extremely useful to take a picture and post it on the web or circulate it. Someone knows someone who knows what the object is and recognizes it from one of the old wards. Some aspects of digitization can help solve collection management problems.

4. Typewriter. Local historical societies usually have excellent documentation on one subject: their own history. The medical history museum I work for was founded by two retired nurses who began collecting when the old General was torn down in 1976. They gathered an amazing collection of equipment, textiles, photographs, documents, on the history of the hospital and of medicine in Minneapolis and Hennepin County. This typewriter was the one Audrey used to type the labels for all the collections storage, all the exhibits, all the transcribed oral histories. We haven’t accessioned it yet, and we haven’t decided what to do with it.

Things like this typewriter take their meaning from context. It’s a pretty unremarkable early 80s electric typewriter, but it has value for our museum’s history. When we digitize our collections, we need to evaluate these items of metahistory. (As a zinester, I’m moderately obsessed with typewriters, but that’s not the reason we’ve kept it.)

5. Styrofoam Box. Not a particularly interesting box, heavy white styrofoam, like something you might use to chill food or wine. I found it in a cardboard box in our storage space. But this is no ordinary piece of foam! It was used to transport kidneys, here at the hospital that in 1963 perform the first kidney transplant in the Midwest. Like the typewriter, collecting it fufills our mission only when you know the context. That’s why those metadata standards need to be so exacting, and need to be followed so closely. Otherwise, all you’ve got is a box.

Having talked about things, let’s talk people. I’d like to tag Thomas of Biomedicine on Display, Mary from the Morrison County Historical Society in Little Falls (birthplace of Lucky Lindy), Sheila from the CHNM, my bootcamp colleague Chris, and Lila the digital construct (once I track her address down). I hope they continue to perform iterations on the meme.

*Now that I type that whole thing out, I’m starting to think it needs a neat before-the-colon title, ex: L’etoile du nord: MN Local History Professionals Blog. It’s undeniably descriptive, though.

The first is the Timeline tool, which I’m planning to use in an upcoming project. It’s basically an API for visualizing historic events, but there’s nothing to download. All you need is to mark up your data in XML. It doesn’t need to be fancy XML either–you don’t need to have a super sophisticated DTD–or you can mark up the data as a JSON file. They even have a tool (Babel) for switching data formats, so you could dump data from a spreadsheet and turn it into a JSON file, and then feed that into the Timeline tool. And the timeline is pretty and it scrolls in a nice ajaxy fashion, quick and smooth. The developers compare it to google maps, and it seems similarly useful, except you don’t have to know any javascript or download a key. Why isn’t everyone using this? The other open-source timeline tools are a bit clunkier and not so user-friendly.*

The other tool is Exhibit:

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

This is terrific. Not only can you show your data as a timeline, you can organize and display it in any number of other ways, all helpfully discussed for you on the exhibit wiki and tutorials. And you don’t have to know anything about databases! This is a big hurdle for public historians with little resources in the way of money and time for web stuff, who probably know a bit of HTML but have no interest at all in learning mySQL or ASP or anything else.

I’m thinking that Exhibit would be a great and easy way for local historical societies to make their basic regional history data interactive. If they have nothing else in the way of data, local history museums and societies usually have a page on “History of ____ County,” usually a long, unformatted block of text (sometimes with paragraphs). With a little bit of data mining but no new research or writing, this could be turned into a neat web exhibit that will keep people on your page longer and inspire folks to learn more about local history! Good work, folks. I’d love to talk to local historical organizations that have been using these tools already.

Just a note: A Companion to Digital Humanities, an edited volume from 2004, is now online. Check it out. (via UIUC GSLIS)

*I’d also love to hear about other timeline tools!
**Update: Thanks to Sheila for telling me that the CHNM has a Flash timeline tool in beta.

Currently we’re using PastPerfect 3.0 to manage our collections. PP3 is okay, but PP4 has much more useful functionalities, and we actually own PP4. I even went to a training on PP4. So, why are we still using PP3? Because all of the IT folks are working on the Electronic Health Records projects. We have had a work order in for more than a year. My colleagues have said, and I’ve agreed, that our data is too important to risk losing by switching over to PP4 inappropriately. Is this something I could do myself? Any ideas? Maybe I’ll call up PastPerfect and ask them.

Besides cataloguing our object collections, I’ve been scanning and describing our photo collection, which is terrific, photos of nurses and doctors and patients and procedures from 1900 to the present. Pending our board’s approval, I’m putting in a proposal for us to work with the Minnesota Digital Library. They will digitize up to 500 images for us, including slides and lantern slides, or up to 1250 pages of documents, and share them on Minnesota Reflections, which “brings you over 10,000 images and documents shared by over sixty cultural heritage organizations across the state. This site offers a broad view of Minnesota’s history for researchers, educators, students, and the public.”

It’s a fabulous resource, and an amazing opportunity for a small historical society. Among the benefits: they scan the photos for us so I can spend my staff time on other projects; our photos are accessible for the first time to folks outside the hospital; we get a higher profile, with links to our website and collection; and everyone can learn more about the history of medicine in Minneapolis. The only downside is that we need to provide the metadata for the scanned items, which we would be doing anyway when we catalogued them on PP (and by ‘we’ I mean me.) This seems like a fabulous project in other ways, especially in connecting the collections of cultural resource organizations of all types–museums, archives, historical societies, universities, libraries. One thing I think museums and historical societies can take from libraries is the enormous benefits of consortiums and networking. In a small museum with no promotional budget, digital networking projects can not only make collections accessible to the public, but also make your small museum part of a larger project that might attract new visitors. I’m excited to hook our museum into the network.