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.

I hear this meme invoked all the time at “museum tech” conferences nowadays. Indeed, I myself have said this a bunch of times when developing (or at least contemplating) a new content-based technology project at the Museum. A big drive in my work at the Met has always been to get constituents talking about the content first and foremost, and worrying about the technology platform(s) later. (Aside: Nancy Proctor makes this point better than I do in her recent Museums and the Web paper The Museum Is Mobile.) This hasn’t always been an easy task, as often it’s excitement about the technology that has caused the constituent to contact me in the first place, but I have nevertheless always endeavored to put content first and tech second in any discussions about a possible project.

But…

This approach only goes so far, and we need to be careful about where and when we apply it, lest our thinking become too prejudiced. My concern is that thinking this way causes us to act as if content is always inherently platform agnostic, which is rarely true.

I think the issue here really is context, which is unique for each technology platform, even when the content is similar. A kiosk has the context of a museum around it, a mobile device has the context of location, the web has the context of (possibly) no context at all. Each of these situations demand different approaches to developing, filtering, and presenting content.

I don’t mean to say that the “it’s not about the technology” idea has no value–it’s still a bad idea to jump into a project with no reason for being other than exciting technology. However, we do need to be cautious about understanding the nuances of each platform, and adapting our content strategies accordingly.

Word.

As much as I’m excited about these ideas, they are essentially using location-based services to expand the traditional museum tour model (albeit over a larger geographic area) rather than upend it. These experiences assume that the user has made a deliberate decision to interact with a museum and/or its content, and there’s an assumption that the user will follow through with that decision. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but what excites me about location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla is that they enable us to pursue an entirely different kind of interaction model, one that substitutes serendipitous and disposable experiences for the more immersive, intentional ones that museums are accustomed to.

What might this kind of experience look like? A relatively straightforward example is from the History Channel’s Foursquare profile. If you follow The History Channel, and check into a location for which it has supplied a “tip,” an interesting historical factoid will be displayed to you. So, for instance, if you check in at the Met Life building in Manhattan and you follow the History Channel, you will learn that the building was “originally called the Pan Am Building & was the largest commercial office building in the world when it opened on March 7, 1963.”

It’s a short leap to imagine museum content being presented this way. A user who follows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, could check in at the Black Canyon in Colorado and be presented with this photograph and accompanying data from the Museum’s Timeline of Art History:

Black Canyon, From Camp 8, Looking Above, 1871 Timothy O'Sullivan (American, 1840–1882) Albumen silver print from glass negative Source: Timothy O'Sullivan: Black Canyon, From Camp 8, Looking Above (1986.1054.19) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In essence, this approach takes content that was originally designed to be experienced as part of a museum visit (whether physical or online), and re-purposed it as a contextual/interpretive layer on a user’s experience out in the world.

This approach is interesting to me for a few reasons:

• The decision to interact and actually interacting are disconnected events. In a traditional museum experience, the visit itself follows directly from the decision to visit. Not anymore. The decision to visit (read: “follow”) a museum is now separate from the experience of interacting with that museum’s content. The interaction now only occurs when it’s most relevant.
• The object itself is used primarily as a means of delivering information. Most online collections essentially attempt to replicate the experience of viewing an object, with a digital image as a stand-in for the real thing. In this experience, however, the experience of viewing the object is downplayed in favor of its relevance as a means of connecting one information node (location) with another (whatever information you wish to provide to the user).
• The user has not made a deliberate choice to access museum content. This is the critical difference between this approach and a more tour-based model. The user isn’t going on a museum-curated tour of “famous painted landscape vistas” or whatever, but is instead only encountering that content serendipitously. (ed note: I might have made that word up.)
• The actual interaction with museum content is short-lived. Once the content is viewed, the user moves on with his or her life.

All of these factors contribute significantly to a completely different type of “visit,” and an entirely different value proposition for museums (or at least art museums, in any case). In this scenario, the museum is now less an enabler of visits and more of a provider of information. The centerpiece of the museum experience–interaction with objects–is almost nonexistent, and factors that barely warrant mention on an object’s label–the location in which it was produced–are critically important.
—————–
And P.S., to the five of you who read this blog regularly (hi, mom!), sorry for the long gap in not posting. A lot going on these days that has prevented me from posting as (ir)regularly as I might like. Hopefully I’ll be back on a more regular schedule from here on out. As always, thanks so much for stopping by and reading!

Milton Glaser’s 1966 Bob Dylan poster, on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. Image from the Museum of Modern Art.

I just came back from seeing the “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation” show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design museum, and taking some time to check out its much-ballyhooed iPod Touch tour, which was designed by New York design house 2×4. I was curious to see the device in action, after first hearing about it through the #museummobile Twitter stream and then via the positive review of the tour in the New York Times. I arrived with somewhat high expectations. Would this finally be the mobile handheld implementation that I and others have been dreaming about?

Well, yes and no. I found myself somewhat frustrated by the experience–the tour does so many things right, that it makes the things it does poorly just that much more glaring.

I’ll start with the good stuff first (for a change). First, the amount of content available on the device is absolutely staggering. For each of the 78 designers with work represented in the show, there was some kind of multimedia content available. At minimum, a slide show of the designer’s work was presented, but more often than not this slide show would be accompanied by an audio interview or artist statement. Many of the profiles featured YouTube videos illustrating aspects of the designer’s work. In some cases, there were multiple videos, multiple interviews, and multiple slideshows. The devices were light on text content (there was virtually none at all, as I recall), but this didn’t feel like a critical omission, given the inherently visual nature of much of the work on display. Given that my call has always been for more, more, and more content, the amount of stuff to get into here was fantastic.

I was also excited that much of the content on the devices was not (as far as I can tell) created expressly for the exhibition. Some of the most interesting content on the devices was delivered via YouTube videos, most of which I think were not created for the exhibition or even posted by the Museum itself. I would love to see more museums start to do this–taking content that’s freely available from other sources, and incorporating it into an in-gallery interpretation strategy.

The devices also handle comments quite well. Visitors are given the ability to comment directly on a given designer’s profile, or on the exhibition generally. These comments show up on the exhibition’s Web site, on a series of iMacs on display at the end of the exhibition itself, and, apparently, on Twitter (though it’s unclear to me how this is done). Comments received from the gallery are merged with comments received from the Web site pretty seamlessly, which is a nice feature. My only real dissatisfaction with the comments feature was the inability to respond directly to previous users’ comments. I guess I’ve become so used to the idea of an @ reply that I expect a little more asynchronous conversation than was really possible here. That’s a pretty minor point, though.

And generally speaking, the interface works nicely. After a moment or two of playing with it, it was pretty clear how to get around, how to search, and how to comment. I’d be curious to test this with someone who is less familiar with the iPhone model; I wonder if to an iPhone newbie, the navigation would have been a little daunting.

And now on to the not-so-good stuff…

Something I had not really considered before is how having to pick up a device from a museum, versus bringing in your own and downloading an app, changes how much and what kind of content one might be willing to tolerate. Many of the videos linked from the device were longer than three minutes, with some clocking in at eight minutes or more. I would guess that while I was in the exhibition, I never watched any more than perhaps a minute-and-a-half of any one video, mostly because I felt a need to move on to the next designer’s display. Had this been an application on my own device, however, I could have saved any of those videos for later viewing, or shared them with friends immediately. I wouldn’t have been frustrated by not being able to watch entire videos, because the app would have essentially been leveraging the arrangement of a physical exhibition to point me to a sea of content I could explore later. Instead, I watched pieces of a few videos, most of which I’ll never get around to finding and re-watching on my own.

This problem could possibly have been mitigated by the “send my visit” feature, in which one can e-mail a summary of his or her visit to someone else. I e-mailed my visit to myself, in the hopes that maybe there would be URLs for the videos I had viewed in the e-mail. No such luck. All that appeared in the e-mail was a statistical breakdown of what I saw (number of designers’ profiles viewed, number of videos watched, number of images viewed, and number of comments added). I’ve never been a big believer in the “e-mail me this object” features that were ubiquitous on museum kiosks for a while, but here was a situation where e-mailing this information to myself actually could have been helpful.

I think my biggest beef with the iPod Touch tour, though, and the one that the reviewer touched upon in the NYT article, is that it doesn’t seem that well-integrated into the exhibition. And here I don’t mean well-integrated in a design sense; the physical exhibition design and the app design on the iPod were well-coordinated. What I mean is that it seems that the exhibition experience and the iPod experience were separate, parallel types of engagement, in which one had to stop doing one in order to experience the other.

I found myself either focusing entirely on the device, to the exclusion of all else, or focusing on the work on display, without any of the additional interpretive content from the device. Fundamentally, the experience I had on the device seemed like it would have been more fulfilling almost anywhere other than in the gallery. Both the exhibition itself (exclusive of the device) and the iPod tour each felt like complete experiences on their own–they didn’t really appear to need each other.

This issue was probably best exemplified by the thumbnail images used in the main navigation. Each designer’s profile, when shown in the primary list-style navigation, is associated with a thumbnail image of a representative work. However, this representative work was often not the work that was on display in the gallery. There was thus no visual shorthand one could use to assist with finding the appropriate profile. This seems like such an obvious integration point between the physical exhibition and the iPod tour, that its absence was striking.

Aaaaaanyway, there you go. On the whole, the handheld tour was a good effort, probably the best of its kind I’ve yet seen, but not quite ideal. I’d be really curious to hear others’ thoughts about this, particularly if you’ve seen the show and had a different reaction to the handheld tour.

“If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.”

-Seth Godin, Tribes

So first, a confession. I’ve done pilot projects before. As recently as April of this year, I said that museums should be doing “better pilot projects.” It’s an idea with powerful appeal—you’re having trouble getting a technology project off the ground, so you propose a fact-finding pilot project as a way to convince the powers that be of the merits of your proposed idea. But after seeing more and more museums stumbling through their own pilot projects, I realize now that I should never do another pilot project again, ever. And neither should you.

First off, the whole concept of the “pilot project” itself is a fantasy. It’s rarely a project in the conventional sense; it’s a hedge. More often than not, a pilot project is undertaken as a way for technologists to slide a potentially controversial (and yet often technologically mundane) idea past museum administration. It’s a way to fail without actually incurring the costs or benefits of actual failure.

But of course, real failure is built into most pilot projects from the beginning, for one or both of the following reasons:

• Pilots usually take place in rarefied “test” environments that bear so little resemblance to actual use as to make the “findings” of the pilot project virtually useless.
• Because the pilot project usually has a short engagement period, museums typically will not commit enough resources to the project to sustain it should it turn out to be successful (as described—heartbreakingly—in this recent post by Nina K. Simon about a successful crowdsourced library cataloguing project in the Netherlands).

So this is the problem in a nutshell. Because pilots are rarely given the resources necessary to succeed, they are doomed to failure (or at least some sort of permanent beta status) from the beginning.

And what are these pilot programs designed to prove, anyway? At least as far as museums go, technology is one of the few areas in which pilot projects are ever undertaken. We rarely, if ever, see pilot publications, pilot exhibitions, or pilot educational programs. That alone tells me that we do pilot projects not because we truly need to prove out the technology, but rather because our institutions aren’t as comfortable with technology as they are with exhibitions, publications, etc.

This just seems like bad practice to me. I’m sure there are plenty of successful projects that have arisen from pilot projects, but looking at the evidence from my own experience, I tend to think that this is despite their previous status as pilots, rather than because of that.

We need to stop this hedging, and own up to our failures when they occur. If you’re pushing a technology project at your museum, make the case for it at the beginning, rather than hoping that a successful pilot will make the case for you. If you’re proposing the project in the first place, it’s probably because you already have some faith that it will be successful. Don’t ensure that project’s death by committing it to the pilot project graveyard.

—————-
Listening to: Pharoah Sanders – Love Is Everywhere
via FoxyTunes

Homunculus from HUMBLE TV on Vimeo.

…aaaand just for fun, here’s the score alone, for those of you who want to check to see if the math works out (it doesn’t):

Download audio file (01%20Homunculus.mp3)

There’s a little bit more about the thought process behind some of what you’re hearing in my original post from March. From the more overtly 12-tone approach described in that post, I added in some chopped-up found-sound recordings of music boxes, and some hot blaxploitation-style drums for the “chase” parts of the film. All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out. There’s more about the making of the film on Humble’s Vimeo page.

New means of producing content are only part of the equation; to claim attention from audiences both new and traditional, museums will need to experiment with different kinds of engagement in both the online and physical spaces. Because content-plus-reputation is no longer a compelling enough reason for garnering attention, museums will need to focus on types of engagements that are not easily copied. Tech writer Kevin Kelly refers to these as “generative assets,” which he breaks down into eight categories, four of which are critical for museums at this juncture in their history: immediacy, personalization, accessibility, and findability.

Immediacy

Museums need to demonstrate value by providing up-to-the-minute content and information. Immediacy here could take a number of different forms, depending on the medium and the situation. Immediacy for many users might resemble something like what TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington termed “process journalism,” in which a story is chronicled in near real-time as it unfolds, before all the facts are completely known (which, by its very nature, necessitates corrections and clarifications later on). A great recent example of this in the museum world would be Brooklyn Museum’s real-time chronicling of the CT scanning of four of their Egyptian mummies–between regular posts on the Brooklyn Museum blog and literally up-to-the-minute Twitter updates, users were made to feel that they were witnessing a story unfold right before their very eyes. The fact that the museum was willing to admit that it didn’t (yet) have all the facts was somewhat arresting, and meant that readers of the Museum’s blog felt that they were part of something developing. A simple summary of this process, delivered via a few paragraphs after all the facts were in, would not have been nearly as fascinating.

Another interesting example of immediacy would be NPRbackstory, which was created by Public Interactive, a division of National Public Radio. NPRbackstory is a service that combs Google’s “Hot Trends” data for trending search topics, searches for those topics in NPR’s own news archive. If a story in the archive matches the trending topic, a link to the story is posted in NPRbackstory’s Twitter feed. What is interesting about NPRbackstory is that the process is completely automatic; the service runs without any intervention from human beings at all, and yet it provides an immediate value by providing context and background to an emerging topic. With their vast content reserves, this is the kind of approach that museums could very easily take.

Personalization

Personalization involves tailoring content and content delivery methods based on user characteristics or selections. Personalization will continue to be the most difficult generative asset for museums to work with until their content repositories are finally deep and diverse enough to truly account for user preference.

A good example of personalization comes (again) from NPR. NPR introduced, at the end of 2008, a means by which listeners could create their own podcast streams based on preferences they select. Because NPR’s podcast archives are both deep and well-catalogued, it is possible for users to create not only personalized podcasts based on categories, but even on keywords. So, for instance, a user create a podcast feed that is updated any time an NPR-affiliated program runs an episode in which the term “MoMA” is featured. The ability to tailor this content specifically to a user’s preferences gives that user a powerful incentive to return to NPR’s archives for more content.

Accessibility

Accessibility refers to the ability to access a resource when and where it is needed. Because much digital content is free, there becomes less and less reason to physically house this material on one’s own desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Instead, many content creators and aggregators are pursuing a strategy in which all content is stored remotely “in the cloud” such that a user can access that content from any device. The most exciting recent development in this area is Spotify, a music player that is similar to iTunes, except that no content is housed on the local device–it is accessed entirely via an Internet connection. What this means is that a user’s mp3 library is always available anywhere with an Internet connection, regardless of the device.

Museums have already begun to make tentative steps in this direction with “my virtual gallery” features (a good example being the Met’s “My Met Gallery“), in which users are able to create a personal account to which they may save collection objects of interest for later perusal. The content in these personal accounts is stored entirely on the museum’s own servers, so theoretically, at least, the content is available wherever the user is able to access the museum’s Web site. This is an excellent start, and this idea should be expanded to include content outside collections such that a user, whether engaging with the museum’s information online or via a mobile device, is able to access contextual content “just in time.”

Findability

Findability is key to asserting value in the attention economy. Resources that are not easily findable may as well not exist, no matter how interesting or vital they may be. It is interesting to note in the last several years that although museums have continued to publish new information resources as they always have, albeit now digitally, the real response from the community only appears when museums actually create new means of accessing those resources that the community takes notice.

Increasing the findability of resources on the Web at least partially rests on simply having more content available, and ensuring that that content is identified such that it can be properly indexed by search engines. But this alone is not enough. Any findability strategy should be aimed at not only making resources easily obtainable, but also at ensuring that those resources are available when they are needed. Delivering information “just in time” has the net effect of increasing what Peter Samis refers to as “Visual Velcro,” or the likelihood that a user will spend more time with a given content resource.

Improving findability may also mean accepting that many of the most interesting experiments with museums’ information may happen downstream, outside their control. A good example of this recently would be with the Brooklyn Museum’s release of their collections API. Being one of the first institutions to make its collections available in this manner, there were no use cases out there demonstrating what value doing this might provide. But the Museum’s community itself provided that when a developer in Brooklyn (unasked, I might add), used Brooklyn’s collections API to build an iPhone application that would allow users to browse its collections.

But findability could have significant meaning in the gallery space as well. If we still seek to deliver information “just in time,” it is important that this information be available in the physical space as well. Lightweight finding protocols, like the QR (Quick Response) codes recently printed on wall labels at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, could theoretically be resolved to any Web-available resource. A museum without the resources to put its own content on a device could easily seek out high-quality content on the Web and use QR codes to make that content available in the gallery via a visitor’s mobile device. Doing this helps to foster the increased “stickiness” between visitors and objects that Peter Samis refers to (because information is being provided when it is needed), while also emphasizing a museum’s role as a “distributor of attention.”

Conclusion

It is time for museums to finally begin transforming themselves from “buildings with Web sites” into different types of institutions altogether, in which the physical visit is but one of many possible engagements. This transformation will not be easy, as it will involve recognizing the truly disruptive impact that the Web has on museums’ traditional modes of information delivery. Competing in this environment means going beyond simply finding new ways of presenting content digitally, but also learning how to properly distribute attention to that content. By focusing on the “generative assets” of findability, personalization, accessibility, and immediacy, museums have a way forward, if they choose to follow this path.