If you think about it, fashion may actually be THE industry that started the curation trend – we just didn’t know it at the time. How could we? “Curation” is a relatively new term, but it’s finding its way into other realms; you hear about content curation, music curation – all meaning that in some way, these industries are personalizing their offer according to your individual wants, needs and likes.

–Carrie Whitehead, Zappos Labs: The Frontier of Online Retail Is Curation 

Um…huh. So I guess that “curation” is a trend now? That the fashion industry started? Interesting. I can think of a few people I know who might have an issue with one or more of those statements.

This article (written by the Product and UX Manager at Zappos) was actually a pretty interesting read, particularly coming on the heels of seeing Suse Cairnsand Danny Birchall’s “Curating the Digital World” session at MW2013. In that session (and the subsequent Salon session on the same topic), we appeared to be looking to expand the definition of “curator” and “curating” to include all sorts of possible definitions and use cases, but in this article, the definition is narrowed waaaay down. It would appear that in the retail sector, curating is really starting to just mean, “helping people find things that are relevant to them.” (A further refinement might be, “things that are relevant that they’re likely to purchase.”)

Which is cool. But…I dunno. This is where I start to feel like a term is being stolen from its rightful owners. And I inherently feel that trying to hold on to a previous century’s definition of an activity, a job, what have you, is inherently wrong, but this is a rare case where I feel that curators in the museum world maybe should have some ownership over this term. I’m tempted to just say that there’s no harm in it, and that we shouldn’t worry that there are people out there now who call themselves curators but who don’t fit our traditional definition of that term.

But…

At a moment where museums are just starting to expose their practices and make transparent their processes, the association of retail-based curating like that described in this article and traditional museum-based curating is an unfortunate one. It’s hard enough getting the public to understand the value of museums, but now we’ll have to also get over the public’s preconception that curating is no more than picking out stuff people will like.

Guh. I’m obviously all over the place here, but something about this article triggered something for me that really has me worried. I dunno. Maybe I’m over-reacting (it wouldn’t be the first time).

Oh, and also—get off my lawn.

Don’t get me wrong, here–I am all for communication and understanding. I think it’s important for me as a (vaguely) technology-leaning person to understand not only the content but also the context of the people and the subject matter I am working with. Technology in museums is, at its best, an interpretive medium. It’s also important, when we as a museum are engaging with new technologies, for me to explain them. However, that explanation and that understanding must be coupled with learning. I’m unwilling to accept that anyone in a museum is allowed to continue to be ignorant of that technology over the long term. Matt Popke, as usual, put this best in a recent comment to Suse Cairn’s post about organizational digital literacy:

 This is no longer about new technology. It’s about common technology and the world it plays a vital role in. Blogging is old hat. Social media has been around for almost a decade. The web was invented twenty years ago. The commercial internet was created in the 80s (split from a network that was initially created in the 60s). Sure, there will always be something that’s even newer that really does warrant an explanation, but that’s a given, and I’m fine with explaining twitter to people for a while because it’s still relatively new. When do I get to honestly say it’s no longer my job to explain to someone how to use email properly?

I agree completely with Matt here. Removing tech from the conversation doesn’t illuminate, it paralyzes. I’m willing to educate and to explain, to a point. But past that point, I’m not willing to explain anymore–coddling those who refuse to learn from (or even to accept) the world around them puts museums at risk. The definition of “museum” can’t be, “a place to pretend that the world will always be as it was.”

Technology (or, as I’ve said before, the set of practices and materials we currently define as “technology”) is the lingua franca of the world in which we now live. Museums resist acknowledging this at their peril. Any moment in which a curator/educator/director/CFO/whomever is allowed to continue to be ignorant of how a given pervasive technology works is just pushing your institution’s adaptation further down that timeline. Any method of working in which ignorance is allowed to persist is one that is, frankly, suicidal for institutions that are trying to figure out what their place is in this new world.

The gist of my original proposal for the session was about focusing in on a key area of the “What’s The Point of A Museum Website?” Ignite Smithsonian talk and subsequent MCN panel session: online museum collections. If we’re all having trouble defining what the purpose of museums’ digital presences should be (though the Walker’s bad-ass–and award-winning!–new design is certainly helping to point the way), we’re having particular trouble trying to determine what role museum collections and objects serve in that space.

I don’t think any of us walked out of this discussion feeling that we’d solved the problem, but some interesting threads (some more immediately obvious than others) did come out. I hope that those who were at the session might chime in with some additional comments, but for now, in no particular order, here are a few of the things from the discussion that I could remember:

• The after-market for collections data may be the most important one: There was much discussion about the real value of our collections data existing largely outside of the museum’s purview. We’ve already seen some of this with outside app developers building interesting stuff on publicly available collections data (with the apps built during MW’s “hackathon” being the most recent examples).
• Attenuation to our audience(s) is key: Our current online collections typically aren’t deep enough to really serve scholars, nor are they friendly enough to serve casual visitors who don’t know what they are looking for (see Nate Solas’ older–but still relevant–presentation on collections findability strategies for more on this phenomenon). Knowing what audience we’re actually reaching would help us design an experience for that audience that might actually (gasp!) be useful.
• Make collection records actionable: It’s astonishing how few museums make objects from their online collections easily share-able and comment-able. Giving users something they can do outside of your domain makes those objects useful. I had an interesting discussion with Tim Svenonius and Suse Cairns about the idea of people going to see the Mona Lisa–it often seems less important that visitors see the Mona Lisa, than that they have seen it. Everyone goes and takes the same exact photo, but it’s the sharing of the experience that has more value than the experience itself.
• Timelines: Charlie Moad of the IMA had an interesting proposal, which is that something like a Facebook Timeline might actually be a really interesting way to present information about our objects. Being able to show an object’s entire history, including its creation, acquisition, movement, even changes in data like attribution, would give a more complete picture of what the object is about than just a simple collection record, while also giving the online user an experience that cannot be replicated in the gallery space. This is a pretty interesting idea to explore, and one I might try to write a little further about when I do my next blog post twelve months from now.

After the session, I started putting together a thought experiment that helped me to focus the issue a bit more. Imagine if we took a common dataset–the images, data, and objects in the Google Art Project would be an ideal test case–and were to have several museums each develop their own online collections around it. Working with a common dataset would remove any individual institutions’ ability to fall back on the “our objects are awesome, and therefore our online collection is also inherently awesome” approach. Everybody has the same objects, so everybody has to figure out how to make their approach to those objects unique. The second is that it would force museums to really think about what it means to interpret their online collections, rather than simply present them. In this thought experiment, every museum’s collection would be the same, but every museum’s interpretation of that collection would (hopefully) entirely different.

This may seem weird, but it’s actually not that far off from what is about to effectively happen. As more an more institutions make their collections data available via APIs, we are effectively heading towards a place in which every museum will (theoretically) have access to every other museum’s data. The obvious worry is that an approach like this would simply turn the curator (or scientist, or educator) into little more than a list-maker, but I don’t think that’s actually how this scenario would play out. Putting the emphasis squarely on interpretation (rather than on simple interestingess of collection) would simply exaggerate the impact of exceptional curators. Those who are gifted interpreters would find their work even more highly valued, and those who simply compile objects and put them in catalogs would quickly recede into the (digital) background.

So, I dunno. I can’t tell whether we’re getting closer or further away with this, but I’m liking the conversation around it. Hoping we can keep this discussion and the ideas flowing.

Digital and technology practice in museums has, like a jet plane strapped to a hand cart, been artificially grafted onto this ancient model, with checkered results. Technology has been used by museums primarily as a tool of efficiency (produce label copy out of our CMS, stat!) or of strained relevancy (participatory culture! gamification!), rather than as a foundational concept. But what if this weren’t the case? What if a museum’s overall practice were built outwards from its technology efforts, rather than the other way around? What would a museum built from the ground up for speed and agility, rather than stability and longevity, look like? This presentation will speculate on this idea by examining the possible evolution of museum practice from a number of perspectives, including (but not limited to):

• Scholarship and Content Development: What would the equivalent of GitHub look like for scholarship? How could museums leverage the work of hundreds of thousands of curators and scientists working together towards a common repository of knowledge, rather than duplicating efforts from museum to museum?
• Variable Media Conservation: Artists are inventing, implementing, and discarding means of creating works of art orders of magnitude faster than conservation practice is evolving. How can the practice of conservation change to accommodate web-speed innovation?
• Constituent Software Systems: Collections management, digital asset management, development, and other primary museum software systems are generally built on a cataloguing paradigm, with distribution, publication, and collaboration tacked on as “premium features,” when present at all. How would systems built for action and outcome, rather than simply cataloguing, change the practice of museums from the ground up?
• Staffing: Digital media teams tend to be a tiny minority on an average museum’s staff, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the museum’s  interactions with the public. What would be the effect of inverting this model?

This presentation will pose many more questions than it will answer, but in so doing, will suggest new frameworks of understanding as attendees work towards building the museum of the future.

See you there, kids!

Video streaming by Ustream

• Most important conversation I had in 2010: At Museums and the Web in Denver in April this year, Bruce Wyman had a long conversation that began with him saying, “you should really consider applying for the Director of Technology job at the Denver Art Museum.” And here we are!
  • Honorable Mention: The conversation I had with Madelyn five minutes after that, in which she said, somewhat tentatively, “yeah, I might consider moving to Colorado.”
• Best Concert: Tune-Yards at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Holy crap! She blew us all away with just a uke, a floor tom, her voice, and a bad-ass bass player.
  • Honorable Mention: Pearl and the Beard at Union Pool for the Farm to Folks fest. If you haven’t seen these peeps yet, you need to do that right now.
  • Honorable Mention Runner Up: The True Love Always reunion show at the Rock Shop. Seeing John Lindaman on stage always makes me smile.
• Best Moment With Madelyn: After driving three days (in separate vehicles stuffed with luggage and cats) out to Colorado, we stopped at the overlook on the Denver/Boulder Turnpike at Mile 42 to see Boulder Valley all lit up, just before driving to our new house for the first time. Yeah, that was the shit.
• Best Catfish Po-Boy Purchased From a Truck: This would be the catfish po-boy purchased while Nate Solas and I were on our way to see the bats fly out from under the Congress Bridge in Austin. The bats were somewhat underwhelming, but the po-boy was effing amazing.
• Favorite New Record of 2010: Riposte, by Buke and Gass. Goddamn. I just started laughing the first time I listened to this; I can’t remember just straight-up enjoying a record this much in quite some time.
• Favorite Record from 1969 that wasn’t released until 2010: That would be U.F.O., by Jim Sullivan. One of those rare re-discoveries latently touted as a “masterpiece” that might actually be just that. I love, love, love this record. There’s a fascinating backstory to this album as well (involving U.F.O.s and Jim Sullivan’s sudden unexplained disappearance); there’s a great interview with Light In the Attic’s Matt Sullivan on NPR about it here.
• Most Improbable Concert of 2010 that I actually saw in 2009: The inexplicable Jawbox reunion on the Jimmy Fallon show. My old bandmates and friends Mason and Megan somehow were able to swing tickets to the morning rehearsal, in which Jawbox rocked “Savory,” FF=66,”"Chinese Fork Tie,” and my all-time-favorite Jawbox song, “68.” Victor Samra ditched his duties at MoMA for the morning and walked a few blocks over to the studio to see the show with us. Trust me, you’ve never seen DC post-punk properly until you’ve seen it seated in a freezing-cold television studio.
• Strangest concert experience also involving Victor Samra: This would be the Iron Maiden/Dream Theater show at Madison Square Garden. Victor called me early the day of the concert offering an extra ticket. I am not, nor have I ever been, an Iron Maiden fan (though I admit a certain begrudging respect for the technical facilities of my fellow Berklee alums Dream Theater), but when Victor Samra calls, you’ve gotta accept the charges. We ended up in MSG’s own private box, drinking Heinekens and eating risotto with people we didn’t know while watching the show. I have officially now eaten risotto at an Iron Maiden show. How many of you fools out there can say that?
  • Honorable Mention: The Medications show in Brooklyn that ended with the sound guy attempting to turn off power to the stage mid-set, and Devin Ocampo almost killing said sound guy with his guitar. Punk rock! Sorta!
• Best Birthday Present: Madelyn gave me a bike for my birthday; it’s the first one I’ve owned (or ridden) since I was 12 years old. Now it is a vital component of my morning commute. Vroom.
• Best Quote I Totally Agree With While Recognizing That Doing So Makes Me Realize That I’m Officially Old(er): That would be this quote from former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey, on the “Hide/Seek” controversy at the Smithsonian: “A sense of proportion is required as it is not a good idea to convert every small offense into a fight over principles.” Ivey summed up in just a few words what it took me an entire post to express. These are words to live by in 2011, kids.
• Best Book I Read in 2010: Philip Jenkins’ Decade of Nightmares. Jenkins examines the decade 1975-1985 and looks at trends leading up to and following that decade, and manages to show how so much of what’s happening currently in America had its genesis in that decade. An excellent read.
  • Honorable Mention: Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, for much the same reasons as above.
• Best Technology That Changed My Damn Life: Rdio, hands down! I got tired of waiting for Spotify to make its way to our shores, and opted for the music-streaming service Rdio instead. Jeffrey Inscho has a great post about Rdio that expresses why it works. I’ve discovered so much amazing music thanks to this service, particularly since Rdio has made big strides to license all sorts of independent music and make it available. The entire Now Again, Light In the Attic, Warp, Teenbeat, and Merge catalogs available for one low monthly price? Yes! Rdio has also caused me to stop purchasing CDs entirely, and to start purchasing LPs again–the record-as-physical-artifact has real meaning thanks to Rdio.
• Best Moment In Which I Almost Peed In My Pants: That would be my best friend Don Undeen’s sudden emergence, complete with Mexican wrestling mask, as “El Museo” the day before Halloween at MCN 2010 in Austin. I wish that I had taken a picture of the force of nature that was El Museo; I haven’t laughed that hard in a loooong time.

Awright, I guess about wraps it up, y’all. Happy New Year–see you in 2011!

]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/392/feed 3 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/392 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/izShiAvm8j0/359 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:33:25 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=359 Usually I refrain from talking about museums on this blog except to discuss how museum policy/tradition/approach affects (or is affected by) technology, and I generally keep my political opinions to myself, so this is sort of a new thing for me. And this is probably just an overreaction to a relatively small issue. So please forgive this digression–I’ll get back to ranting about collections management systems or whatever soon enough.

However…

The recent firestorm surrounding Wayne Clough (secretary of the Smithsonian Institution)’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s work A Fire In My Belly from the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the public response to that decision, has provoked me out of my comfortable treehouse. For those not familiar with what I’m talking about, I’ve collected a bunch of links related to the controversy here: http://bit.ly/fC7uD8. Of what I’ve read thus far, I would say that Tyler Green’s ongoing coverage at ARTINFO is the most balanced and researched.

I don’t think I need to point out that the Smithsonian’s decision was horribly wrongheaded (though I’ll do that briefly below), so I want to focus on one aspect of the response to this incident: the “Clough Must Go” movement that’s been emerging this week. This movement, which will have its coming-out party at a protest scheduled for this weekend in New York City, seeks to hold Wayne Clough personally responsible for the decision (which is good), and to then remove him from office as a result (which is bad).

This feels wrong to me. Here’s why.

The Smithsonian’s response to this issue was the wrong one.

So yeah, lemme get this out of the way first. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Smithsonian’s decision to withdraw Fire in My Belly from the show was absolutely wrong. Though this issue has undoubtedly caught the public’s consciousness, it would appear that the Smithsonian could still have kept the piece in the show with a fair minimum of public outcry. As the mysterious museumnerd put it pithily:

[blackbirdpie url=http://twitter.com/#!/museumnerd/status/14893499711229952]

And the timing of this couldn’t be worse, in that it’s hard to not fit this into a much larger (and far more dispiriting) narrative in which the voices of reason and tolerance are being drowned out by a hysterical, intolerant vocal minority. Watching one of our most beloved public institutions cave to this craven minority is enough to make one resort to extreme measures for retribution. And this is exactly what’s happening with the “Dump Clough” movement.

But…

Removing Wayne Clough over this incident sets the worst kind of precedent.

It would be one thing if this were the last straw in a long line of capitulations to political pressure on Wayne Clough’s part. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The last time I recall the Twitterverse speaking his name, it was to praise him for the Smithsonian 2.0 initiative, which he sponsored. Maybe Clough has made a whole lot of terrible moves that compromise the integrity of the Smithsonian as a whole, but if so, I’m certainly not aware of them. Even while acknowledging that the decision to remove the piece was wrong, Jonathan Katz, one of the curators of the exhibition, still praised the NPG for putting the exhibition on in the first place.

So what we’re talking about here is essentially a “one strike and you’re out” policy when it comes to the leaders of our institutions. The precedent we’d be setting says, in effect, that your past performance is meaningless if you step over the line even once in a way we don’t approve of. I just can’t hang with that. While there are certain transgressions that a museum administrator (or his/her bosses) can commit that rise to the level of an Impeachable Offense (such as, oh, maybe selling artwork to pay your electric bills), I don’t believe that this is one of them.

As many of us who work in museums know, there is a painful shortage of museum directors in this world who actually “get it” (I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few). And of those, there’s an even tinier subset who are capable of guiding an institution as multi-faceted and unwieldy as the Smithsonian. If we’re going to remove someone who, generally speaking, seems to be doing a good job (as opposed to a ‘heckuva’ job), we’d better be doing it for the right reasons. Which brings me to my last point…

Dumping Clough only furthers the agenda of those who sought to remove the piece in the first place.

While I don’t doubt that a tiny minority of the visitors (emphasis on ‘tiny’) who have visited this show were truly offended by the work in question, it’s not for those people that this artificial “debate” has been created. What this is, in the end, is a political power play to establish authority over our country’s public institutions. And make no mistake, this issue IS a cynical one for a majority of the politicians, pundits, and commentators who are using it to their advantage. If it served Eric Cantor’s or John Boehner’s political ends to argue that the content of “Hide/Seek” wasn’t offensive enough for an organization supported with taxpayer money (even though this particular show was privately funded), that would be the case they’d make.

Removing Clough plays right into those people’s hands. It sends a message that if you can’t behead our precious institutions by stirring up bullshit controversy, we’re perfectly willing to finish the job ourselves. I fear the blowback that something like this would create. If the movement to dump Clough is successful, who do you think we’ll get in his place? Someone who’s willing to face debate head on, or someone who, when appointed by the Board of Regents, is willing to state for the record that there will be no more “controversial” exhibitions on his/her watch?

So, in short, let’s hold Clough accountable for this, certainly. But let’s find the right corrective action.

]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359/feed 8 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/TH-v_p-o-rM/348 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:47:05 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=348 I posed a quick question on Twitter this morning (or this afternoon, for those of you east of the Rocky Mountains) that I feel needs a bit more clarification than I could squeeze into 140 characters, so I thought I’d log into the ol’ blog (for the first time since July) and do some old fashioned clarifyin’.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

[blackbirdpie url=http://twitter.com/#!/5easypieces/status/10024300815851520]

While it’s easy to think of all kinds of things that museums could do better (and indeed, since asking this question, I’ve received a bunch of excellent replies to this effect), what I’m really trying to get at here are identifying processes that we (perhaps grudgingly) accept as givens, but that we would never enact if we were just starting from scratch today.

A good example of this would be object (or accession) numbers. If museums didn’t already exist, each with their own unique object numbering schemas, I have a hard time imagining that we would take a similar approach to object identification. It seems far more likely that we’d do something along the lines of what Richard McCoy and I have been discussing for a while, something like an ISBN or PURL for works of art. This number would be forever permanent, and would move with the object when deaccessioned, purchased, loaned, or whatever. The reason that this is such an interesting example to me is that because unique objects don’t, in fact, have truly unique identifiers, using them in a linked data context is extraordinarily difficult. The main reason objects don’t have truly unique identifiers is because tradition dictates that objects have identifiers only within the context of an institution–once the object leaves that institution, the identifier no longer has meaning.

It’s just a small example (and a super-technical one, because that’s my thing), but the implications are huge in that we wouldn’t have to build big, complicated systems around compensating for the lack of unique IDs. I wonder what other processes there are like this in our world–how would we build museums differently, if we were just starting out now?

]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348/feed 3 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/CpI2PNtPbn4/339 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/339#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:55:11 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=339 Disclaimer: This is something that I’m still trying to figure out, so a lot of what follows is still kinda half-baked and rant-y (just your typical kovenjsmith.com post, I suppose). I welcome better-informed opinions than my own…

I often hear museum staff talk about museum websites being places for visitors to the buildings to “plan their visits” and/or to “follow up after their visits.” For some institutions, it seems that this is the primary purpose of their websites. I’m willing to be convinced if someone can show me hard data that proves otherwise, but my gut tells me that this kind of activity rarely, if ever, actually occurs in the way we so often discuss it.

Let me be clear here–I’m not talking about visiting a museum site to figure out what times it’s open, or how to get there. That’s pretty basic stuff, and statistics generally show that these are typically the most-visited areas of many museum websites. I’m also not talking about using a museum’s website to determine whether you’re going to visit in the first place (“They’ve got the Naboo fighter on display? I am so there.”).

No, here I’m talking about what museum staff seem to refer to when they say “plan your visit,” which seems to be something along the lines of this scenario: the visitor figures out ahead of time what he or she wants to see, and maps out the visit, either literally on a map or conceptually (“first we see the Jackson Pollack, then the Naboo fighter”). After this thoroughly-planned-out visit occurs, the visitor goes home, pulls up the museum’s website, and reviews what he/she saw there.

Maybe this scenario really does occur at museums with really large campuses (sculpture parks, for instance), where a visitor really does need to optimize travel time between stops, and advance planning is actually critical. And maybe I’m completely misunderstanding what museum people mean when they say “plan/follow up”–no one has ever been able to successfully explain this concept to me. I hear it intoned all the time, but it’s an activity that seems ill-defined at best.

I feel that often museums still see their websites as inextricably tethered to the physical buildings, as opposed to distinct entities with really only the tenuous connection of the museum brand tying them together. The two are certainly related, in that the same scholarly activities and staff make them happen, but the output and use of those activities as they are manifested inside the building and on the Web are entirely different.

My main worry here is that this continued orientation towards the physical visit in museum websites results in an only slightly more evolved version of the 90s-era “brochure-ware” websites that we so often decry. There are experiences on museum websites that are impossible to have inside the building; let’s stop limiting them arbitrarily by forcing them to be something they really aren’t good at being.

I’m Koven, and that’s one to grow on.

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