Futures of Learning

Museum. A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. – International Council of Museums, 2007 Statute, article 3, section 1

This blog posting will discuss how (art) museums started digitizing their collections for the purposes of internal collections management and preservation during the last ten to fifteen years, and are now disseminating these digital images to the general public to freely access on their Web sites, and furthermore, they are encouraging audiences to actively engage with the content through dialogue, creation, and even appropriation using Web 2.0 tools. Some of the key issues will be raised, as well as theoretical implications and a few noteworthy examples that present unique opportunities as well as challenges.

Technology today allows museums to explore their goals of “education, study and enjoyment” in previously unimaginable ways, reaching out to a much larger and wider community than their physical museums could ever support. The words, “in the service of society and its development” are critical to the modern museum, which has redefined it mission as a populist one, embracing both the educated and uneducated, locals and foreigners, young and old. The primary goal for museums today is to provide all visitors with the greatest amount of opportunities with which to access their information through as many channels as possible, largely dependent on individual preferences for learning and enjoying. For this reason, the focus has been on quantity; reaching the largest number of visitors, offering the largest number of interpretive and educational tools (analog and digital), and presenting the largest amount of information that targets as many different audiences as possible. Museums realize that the Internet offers the ideal medium with which to do all this, and consequently they have begun transforming their Web sites to become more accessible. But the critical questions one must ask now are access to what kind of information, how is this information being accessed, and what happens after it is accessed? While many museums have been successful at widely disseminating their collections (at least partially digitized and online), they are now shifting their focus to audience participation through the creation and sharing of information. The particular ways in which museums engage audiences on the Web will determine if these new “networks of creativity” (Manuel Castells) reinforce a culture of individualism or communalism, and to what extent they generate creative activity and new knowledge.

THE BBC
On January 28, 2009, the British Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) announced that it had partnered with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to place all 200,000 of the United Kingdom’s (UK) oil paintings in public ownership on the BBC Web site by 2012. A new section will be created on the site entitled Your Paintings, described by BBC News as “a one-stop shop for the public to view and find information on every oil painting in public ownership.” The partnership agreement states that the BBC will build, host, and completely fund the website, and the PCF will build and completely fund the painting database, supplying digital images and data from this database to Your Paintings Web site. Judith Nichol, head of BBC Partnerships, stated that the partnership arose from an approach made to the BBC by the PCF, describing the BBC’s primary aim as:

…to publish a resource with which the BBC can integrate its arts programming and extensive archive of arts material. We also wish to bring a wider range of the public than would normally attend an exhibition to a resource that they own through the medium of online…The opportunity is for the BBC to bring its skills in engaging and entertaining a wide audience to this subject.

With the BBC Web site enjoying a weekly viewership of 40 million people, 87,954 sites linking in, and ranked #44 in all of cyberspace (all statistics from Alexa Internet, retrieved April 15, 2009), it is rather surprising that the BBC is concerned about access. As a national media source and a “public sector broadcaster,” the BBC receives its fair share of criticism from the public, particularly those in the UK (38.7% of its Web site users) that believe the BBC should be presenting more socially relevant and edifying content.

From the perspective of the PCF, director Andrew Ellis states that, “The BBC is national. That was key. It also has the third most popular website in the UK and has great experience in the area of interactive public engagement. It is the perfect partner.” At first glance, however, one would suppose a more suitable partner to be an arts institution, perhaps at a national level like the National Gallery in London that houses one of the greatest collections of Western European paintings in the world (and that also started the National Inventory Research Project). But there are a few problems with this idea, the first being it’s Web site. The National Gallery’s Web site is ranked #94,897 compared to #45 for the BBC, it has 2,351 sites linking in compared to 87,954 for the BBC, and users spend an average of 2.5 minute a day on the site compared to 6.7 minutes a day for the BBC. The BBC Web site clearly provides greater opportunities for access, especially given the fact that 65% of the UK, including Northern Ireland, has Internet access (UK Office for National Statistics, 2008 Omnibus Survey).

A second concern is that because the 200,000 paintings come from public institutions around the UK, to choose one over all others – even a large, established one – would have incited much protest and controversy. The BBC, therefore, was a neutral choice, a perfect partnership for both parties. There is only one hitch; the images will not be public domain, as confirmed by Ms. Nichol. The BBC’s preliminary plans are to make the Web site as interactive as possible, with opportunities to rate paintings, add comments, and link to galleries where the paintings are being exhibited or stored, to other “reputable sources of information,” and to places where prints can be purchased online. But the perfect plan somehow seems slightly less perfect if publicly owned paintings in a publicly accessible medium will not be public domain. Ms. Nichol does clarify that, “the final agreement on what can and cannot be done with the images on the site is yet to be finlaised [sic],” so one can only hope that the communal spirit of access and sharing will be extended to this matter as well.

It should be noted that many countries have created national archives of their cultural patrimony, but the UK is unique in its partnership with a broadcasting Web site for these ends (although the PCF is not a public initiative, it was charged by the government with photographing and recording all publicly owned paintings). Other examples include Artefacts Canada that includes over 3 million object records and 580,000 images of works housed in Canadian museums, as well as the Virtual Museum of Canada that has an Image Gallery with over 750,000 images. In 1975 the French government created Joconde that includes images of all paintings drawings, and sculptures in French museums. It went online in 1995, in 2004 it was combined with separate databases for archaeology and ethnology objects, and today it contains over 400,000 listings and 220,000 images.

THE ARTS AND MASS MEDIA
It is not uncommon for museums, cultural institutions, and even national archives to seek sponsorship from mass media that offer global distribution channels driving increased traffic to their online collections, exhibitions, and activities. The virtual art museum of Uruguay (Museo Virtual de Artes - MUVA) has been sponsored by the national newspaper El País since it went online in 1997, forming a merger now called Museo Virtual de Artes El País. Mass media partners include not only corporations that can provide critical financial support and sponsorship, most notably media partners, but also social networking sites (SNS) that can tap into previously established relationships and communities to rapidly spread information throughout the Internet by peer-to-peer connections (p2p) with mostly younger users. Many of these SNS are themselves owned by global media corporations that ensure their global reach. Flickr is owned by Yahoo, as is the new social bookmarking site del.iciou.us, YouTube is owned by Google, iTunes is owned by Apple, and MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Mass media Web sites like BBC or Google normally have community discussion forums and blog postings that are very active with rapid responses from people communicating around the world. By utilizing these third-party spaces, museums provide not only greater access to their collections (targeting a younger audience), but more importantly, they encourage participation and dialogue by creating a sense of community and a new, hipper image contrasted to the stereotypical rigid institution of faceless names, static veneration of the past, and scholarly pursuits (Berwick, 2007).

More than just distribution channels and chat forums, these third-party sites also serve museums as digital image repositories. Some of the most well-known are Google Images, a separate search tool for images within Google started in 2001, currently with over 245 million images in its database, and ARTshare, an application within Facebook started by the Brooklyn Museum of Art to share works of art. ARTshare currently has 200 million images with 100,000 images being added daily by the 34 participating museums around the world.

The Commons on Flickr was launched in January 2008 together with the US Library of Congress to “increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.” The home page asks users to help describe photographs by adding tags or leaving comments.

It is important to note that the partners and digital image repositories used by museums are not only commercial and/or corporate in nature; there are also successful non-profit models. The most well-known is ARTstor founded in the 1990s by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the purposes of “education and scholarship” (they also created JSTOR, an online repository for scholarly journals). Their digital library currently has almost one million images, with 995 partners in the US and another 161 internationally (partners include museums, colleges/universities, K-12 schools, public libraries, and independent art schools). While ARTstor utilizes SNS like Facebook and YouTube, access to the image databank is limited to affiliation with participating non-profit institutions. Another more recent addition is artCloud, founded by Steven Henry Madoff, a former ARTnews editor and Time Inc. consultant. It functions as more of a social networking site for artists, arts professionals and institutions, allowing users to upload images, share them publicly, and create their own profiles with My artCloud. Currently there are 23 museums participating from around the world.

Another model for museums is to collaborate with other arts institutions to create online image repositories. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have created ImageBase with over 82,000 images, and the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) was created in 1997 as a partnership between art museums internationally for the educational use of their images (it ended in 2005). The ArtsConnectEd database is a joint project of the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Certainly larger museums with substantial resources host their own archives and databases with search engines on their own Web sites, but collaboration in any manner is always helpful to facilitate access.

These non-profit models are particularly useful with digital, new media, or net art. Three examples are Rhizome that is housed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY and has an ArtBase with almost 2,500 works, the Whitney ARTPORT has related resources as well as archives and current commissions and exhibitions, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online gallery e.space started in 2002 as the first museum collection of Web sites displayed on the Internet.

THE GETTY ONLINE SCHOLARLY CATALOGUING INITIATIVE
In 1997, the Getty Foundation launched its Electronic Cataloguing Initiative, awarding $4.9 million in grants to 21 arts organizations in the Los Angeles-area. By the end of the 6-year grant period, the organizations had created more than 250,000 digital images and began providing online access to 185,000 objects. This was a time when museums were just beginning to develop Web sites, states foundation director Deborah Marrow in the report released ten years later that discussed lessons learned (Schneider, 2007).

The Getty’s Electronic Cataloguing Initiative was designed to help Los Angeles museums and visual arts organizations make information on their collections available online….Today, a Web-savvy public expects immediate user-friendly access to visual arts collections. Although many museums have at least a part of their collections available online, organizations still struggle with how to fund, develop, and justify these programs. What, after all, is the relationship between collections access and a museum’s core responsibilities? Can online access have a meaningful impact on an institution’s broader mission and programs? How will online access affect an organization’s budget and operations?
The report also lists six reasons for a museum to pursue online cataloguing of its collection: increase access, expand audiences, support teaching and learning, improve documentation, preserve collections, and streamline workflow.

The Getty Foundation’s current initiative – the Online Scholarly Cataloguing Initiative (OSCI) – began a few years ago. In 2008, the foundation decided to invite eight art museums from around the world to participate, based largely on their substantial resources and experience with new media. All proposals have now been approved by the foundation, and the museums will begin their initial research phase of one to two years. Joan Weinstein, Associate Director of the foundation and project manager, talks about the project goals and vision:

In transforming the catalogue to an online environment, they won’t be just scholarly. The premise is that you can include all kinds of information online that you can’t in a print volume, information for everyone from the general public to students to scholars. You don’t have to wait until everything’s complete to put it online. You can have multiple voices in single entries: For more recent work, you can have both artists and curators speaking. Same thing for older collections. You can have conservators speaking and you can put the conservation documentation online. You could even super-impose an x-ray onto the image of a work of art itself (Green, 2009).

The foundation envisions creating greater access to scholarly catalogue content to scholars, the general public, and students. An online catalogue could provide a wider array of information that is constantly updated with changes in conservation, scholarship, exhibition history or ownership, linking to related sources around the world and facilitating greater collaboration between scholars and museum professionals for purposes of curating, research, and conservation. It could also remedy the problem of out-of-print catalogues and might even reduce expenses by museums offering print-on-demand services. For a good example of an online catalogue, the Sir John Sloane’s Museum in London currently has three on its Web site “to make the collections available as freely and widely as possible.”

Erin Coburn, head of Collection Information and Access for the J. Paul Getty Museum, already has experience creating online catalogues for the museum starting in 2005. She is excited about the possibility of reaching a wider audience on the Web, stating in a recent interview that,

One of the things that I’m really interested in is, when you put it out there on the Web you have no idea who your audience is anymore. We get probably as high as 40-50% of our traffic into our collection right now directly from Google. And so I’m really fascinated by this notion that by liberating such wonderful, incredible scholarship that is academic and scholarly, by liberating it from the print form, I think we’re going to be pleasantly surprised by how many people that are not academics are interested in this material.

Ms. Coburn confirms that their entire painting collection falls into the public domain, and so consequently the online images are public domain images. It will be interesting to see how each participating museum facilitates access to the general public, how they address issues of fair use, and how much they embrace the ideas of user-generated content and shared knowledge within the context of a scholarly publication. As Ms. Coburn describes the museum perspective, “I think that part of our mission is a responsibility to educate our public and create access to what’s in our collection, but also to provide them with the most accurate and up-to-date information.” Many of the issues in the future will be around data reliability and trustworthiness. As greater and greater amount of information can be accessed on the Internet (including content generated by both amateurs and professionals), procedural transparency, clear metadata, and accurate cataloging become critical matters for museums to address and even to coordinate throughout the global museum network. It is an exciting proposition for museums to build such networks, but the general public as well as fellow scholars and institutions must all be incorporated. The Getty Foundation foresees this democratization of access and knowledge creation as the future that museums will need to contend with. Hopefully this planning phase will help these pilot museums prepare for the challenges and help other museums through their experience. 

COMMUNITIES AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
These latest trends in seeking greater dissemination and sharing of information could lead to museum audiences working together to form new on-line (and even off-line) communities and social networks for the greater good. But they could also lead to audiences becoming increasingly fragmented and individualized as they appropriate content to suit their personal interests through solitary activities in front of one’s computer, and as museums continue to target specific groups on their Web sites. Academics have blamed the mass media and corporate marketing for exacerbating this latter socio-cultural condition, pointing to practices such as data mining, narrowcasting, direct mailing, and receiver-sensitive websites that can be described as the one-step flow of communication (Bennett and Manheim, 2006).

Digital technology has also received its fair share of blame for facilitating these transformative practices, including the hypertext, tagging, email, and text messaging/SMS that are based upon individual profiles. Technology becomes appropriated by its users, resulting in the notion of “MY hypertext” (Castells) or in “baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism” (Bar, 2008), often producing innovative and creative solutions, but at the same time reinforcing the performance of personalization. Castells has stated that “the dominant culture of the Internet is a culture of networked individualism, a self-selected network.” Museums encourage users to appropriate their online images by offering the ability to create My Collection (Smithsonian American Art Museum), My Art Gallery (Seattle Art Museum), My Scrapbooks (Institute of Chicago), Art Collector (Walker Art Center/ Minneapolis Institute of Arts), and Bookmarks (The J. Paul Getty Museum).

Many museums are now using these tools that more deeply engage audiences with the thousands of images they are posting online from their collections. Once audiences have created their own collections, they can share them with friends (often sent as postcards), “publish” them online for the public to view, comment on and rate, learn more detailed information about them, tag them as a collective activity, and in general, make these images personally relevant to their individual interests and proclivities.

The Steve Project for social tagging is important to mention here as an on-line collections-based activity, dependent on user participation to categorize images. Many people also consider the SNS Flickr and Del.icio.us to be examples of such folksonomy tagging. Funded heavily by the US Institute of Museums and Library Sciences since it started in 2005, Steve is “a collaboration of museum professionals and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access cultural heritage collections and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects.” Users can share their favorite images and tags with others, invite friends to participate, display their tagged works on their Facebook profile pages and see the most popular tagged artworks. Their website asks the question, Why tag art? And their answer is,

See art you haven’t seen before. Look in a new way. Describe works of art in your own words. Exchange your ideas with the community of art lovers. Lead others to artworks they wouldn’t normally see. Create a personal relationship to works. Let museums know what you see. The more you tag, the richer the experience for all.

In a 2009 report on the results of the Steve Project, Jennifer Trant states that,

Tagging is shown to provide a significantly different vocabulary than museum documentation: 86% of tags were not found in museum documentation. Tagging by the public is shown to address works of art from a perspective different than that of museum documentation. User tags provide additional points of view to those in existing museums records. Within the context of art museums, user contributed tags could help reflect the breadth of approaches to works of art, and improve searching by offering access to alternative points of view.

For a good example of tagging in museums, see The Indianapolis Museum of Art. A list of papers and presentations about the Steve project since 2005 can be accessed at: http://steve.museum/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=5&Itemid=14.

Along with these trends, museum practices could continue to become even more populist and open, embracing non-expert participation and the concept of collective intelligence, or rather more controlling and hierarchical in response to the unpredictability of increased public information on their Web sites. So far, museums retain a large amount of control over user-generated content that is publicly displayed, whether on their Web sites for kids and teens, on their SNS accounts, their discussion forums, or even how their on-line content can be publicly used. Trust and credibility are essential for motivating individuals to engage in collaborative activities on-line, such as tagging and sharing personal collections, and museums must determine the delicate balance between community and authority. [We are not including a discussion of remix, although it is an important and controversial creative activity by professional and amateur artists utilizing on-line images to create their own images, and one which is driving many museums to revisit their policies on rights and reproductions. For information on the value of remix and Creative Commons, read Larry Lessig’s newest book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.]

CONCLUSION
Jeremy Rifkin (The Age of Access, 2000) states that direction, control, and goals are vital to navigate this online age of access, and museums are no exception. As we recall the ICOM’s definition of museums that operate “in the service of society and its development,” it becomes clear that museums must prepare their visitors to develop Jenkins’ “cultural competencies and social skills” for the 21st century age of access and excess of information. Museums have a special responsibility to help youth manage the extraordinary amounts of information they continue to place on the Web, with more information being added constantly from the collective intelligence and participation they seek from their expanding global audience. We know what kind of information is being accessed on-line and we know how it is being accessed technically, but what is done with it after depends on how it is being accessed in terms of intuitive capabilities. Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s Good Work projects focus on ethics and judgment, the latter of which he states is the most relevant skill needed to navigate new digital media and evaluate the reliability or credibility of information sources. Rifkin also states that the development of social trust and social exchange are necessary for communities to engage in commerce and trade. Castells best explains this civic responsibility of museums in The Internet Galaxy (2001),

…the study of sociability in/on/with the Internet has to be situated within the context of the transformation of patterns of sociability in our society. This is not to neglect the importance of the technological medium, but to insert its specific effects into the overall evolution of patterns of social interaction: space, organizations, and communication technologies (125).

The Internet’s capacity to store an extraordinary amount of data and images, combined with the rapid dissemination and transfer of information on a global scale, can often cause what is commonly called “information overload;” too much information all the time and a growing reluctance to turn off devices because one fears missing out on something.

Web sites are extremely popular with museums today because they can present much more information to the public than ever possible with a simple printed brochure or wall text (even printed catalogues have space limitations, and are not freely accessible like the Internet). Museum Web sites have incorporated search engines for their on-line collections databases, where by typing in a few words, users can access thousands of images and descriptive information (metadata), categorized in a number of ways as we have seen such as tagging. New Web 2.0 technologies give audiences more authority and control by empowering them with calls for participation and tools to catalogue works of art based on personal preferences.

The more museums engage with the larger global public (both experts and non-experts) through the Internet, the more they become aware of their public nature. Yet despite this public nature being based on legal or financial stipulations, museums still remain elite institutions that value their priceless objects, their highly educated staff, and their scholarly research and curatorial programming; they value control and authority (not necessarily a bad thing). How well audiences are able to navigate the diverse array of interpretive tools within the physical museum, and how well they are able to access museum content on-line will determine not only the extent to which one participates, shares and creates, but fundamentally it will determine the quality of the museum experience (virtual or physical). Museums strive to be popular and reliable sources of education, study, and enjoyment for their communities, and as such, they must not only provide public access (virtual and physical), but they must also consider the implications of this potential excess of information, choices, and opportunities as facilitated by new digital technologies within our knowledge cultures, and the role that they all play in this ongoing societal transformation.

It may seem an overworked matter, but the relation of the physical object to the virtual image remains critical for many reasons, touching on issues of preservation, stewardship, image quality, revenue, and legal policies. As long-time repositories of objects, museums have shifted to being repositories of knowledge in this information age today (Marty, Rayward & Twidale, 2003; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). Objects are static, but information is constantly changing, a reflection of not just the past but of the dynamic present and future. Our next posting will discuss further examples of on-line museum experiences, and how they also raise many of these poignant issues and more.

REFERENCES
Baca, M. (Ed.). (2002). Introduction to art image access: Issues, tools, standards, strategies[Electronic version]. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust. http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intro_aia/
Berwick, C. (2007, October). Nonsmoking capricorn museum seeks networking, dating, serious relationships, friends. ARTnews, 194-197.
Castells, M. (2001). The Internet galaxy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Castells, M. (n.d.). Creatividad, arte y comunicación en la cultura de la virtualidad real [Creativity, art and communication in the culture of the real virtuality]. Unpublished personal notes for a conference.
Chun, S., Cherry, R., Hiwiller, D., Trant, J., & Wyman, B. (2006). Steve museum: An ongoing experiment in social tagging, folksonomy, and museums. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (Eds.). Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/wyman/wyman.html
Dunn, H. (2000, September). Collection level description – the museum perspective. D-Lib Magazine, 6. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september00/dunn/09dunn.html
Filippini-Fantoni, S., Antenna Audio Ltd., & Bowen, J. (2007). Bookmarking in museums: Extending the museum experience beyond the visit? In J. Trant and D. Bearman (Eds.). Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/filippini-fantoni/filippini-fantoni.html
Galloway, P. (2004). Preservation of digital objects. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 549-590.
Green, T. (2009, February 4). The collection catalogue is dead, long live the catalogue. Message posted to http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2009/02/the_collex_catalogue_is_dead_l.html
Guy, M., & Tonkin, E. (2006, January). Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? D-Lib Magazine, 12. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html#1
Hamma, K. (2005, November). Public domain art in an age of easier mechanical reproducibility. D-Lib Magazine, 11. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html
Hammond, T., Hannay, T. Lund, B., & Scott, J. (2005, April). Social bookmarking tools: A general review. D-Lib Magazine, 11. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Puroshotma, R., Robison, A., & Weigel, M. (2007). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Chicago: The MacArthur Foundation.
Kellogg Smith, M. (2006). Viewer tagging in art museums: Comparisons to concepts and vocabularies of art museum visitors. In J. Furner & J. T. Tennis (Eds.), Advances in classification research, 17. Austin, TX: Proceedings of the 17th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification research workshop.
Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: The Penguin Group.
LiCalzi O’Connell, P. (2007, March 28). One picture, 1000 tags [Electronic version]. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/arts/artsspecial/28social.html
Mannoni, B. (1996). Bringing museums online. Communications of the ACM, 39, 100-106.
Marty, P., Rayward, W.B., & Twidale M.B. (2003). Museum informatics. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 37 (pp. 259-294). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc..
Parry, R., Ortiz-Williams, M., & Sawyer, A. (2007, March). How shall we label our exhibit today? Applying the principles of on-line publishing to an on-site exhibition. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2003: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/parry/parry.html
Rainie, L. (2007). 28% of online Americans have used the Internet to tag content. Forget Dewey and his decimals, Internet users are revolutionizing the way we classify information – and make sense of it [Electronic version]. Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2007/PIP_Tagging.pdf.pdf
Rifkin, J. (2000). The age of access. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.
Schneider, A. (2007). L. A. art online: Learning from the Getty’s electronic cataloguing initiative [Electronic version]. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust. http://www.getty.edu/grants/pdfs/LA_Art_Online_Report.pdf.
Trant, J. (2009). Tagging, folksonomy and art museums: Results of steve.museum’s research. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://verne.steve.museum/SteveResearchReport2008.pdf
Trant, J., Bearman, D., & Chun, S. (2007) The eye of the beholder: steve.museum and social tagging of museum collections. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/trant/trant.html
Trant, J., & Wyman, B. (2006). Investigating social tagging and folksonomy in art museums with steve.museum. Paper presented at the World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, UK. http://www.archimuse.com/research/www2006-tagging-steve.pdf

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Conference of the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums - http://cidoc.icom.org/
Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) - http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cimi.org (archived pages from its original Web site)
Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online (AAT) - http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_researach/vocabularies/aat/
Museum Computer Network (MCN) - http://www.mcn.edu/
Museum Documentation Association (MDA), Cambridge, England
Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) - http://musedoma.museum
Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) - http://www.oit.umd.edu/as/MESL/ (1995-1997 archives)
NMC Pachyderm Conference, Dallas, TX - http://pachyderm.nmc.org/ (Susan Chun, Opening Plenary Speech, 2007 - http://www.nmc.org/podcast/tagging-art)
WebWise Conference on Stewardship in the Digital Age (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The 2009 conference can be reviewed at: http://webwise2009.fcla.edu/index.html

Museums today seek a balance between the one-way transmission of curatorial expertise and the pluralistic modes of interpretation by visitors. New multimedia tours with their diverse voices and interactive functions are one way that museums are literally passing control into the visitors’ hands, providing a greater array of potential connections that require the visitor to select, categorize, and create. A result of emerging technologies in the mobile industry, mobile experiences in museums today encompass the traditional handheld audio guide, the cell phone tour, iPhone/MP3 players, and the newer multimedia handheld tour as well as a variety of mobile applications that go behind the tour model. This posting will first briefly discuss the current state of mobile tours and review noteworthy studies on the subject conducted by major US art museums and presented at conferences and in publications. It will then explore future possibilities for mobile tours as well as other uses of mobile devices in museums, including GPS for geotagging, QR codes, and downloadable content specifically suited to handheld wireless devices.

Some of the questions we can ask as we review these mobile tools are, do they provide visitors with more information, and if so, what kind of information? Is there any knowledge or skill required to use them, and do they teach specific learning tools and goals? Do they reinforce a curatorial narrative and order? Do they empower the visitor with more choices to create personal meaning, and if so, in what ways do they affect the traditional museum experience? Peter Samis from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) talks about an Interpretive Goals questionnaire that their institution adapted from the Getty that helped them to integrate multimedia into programs and exhibitions across all departments (Samis, Museums and the Web, 2009). The form included the following questions:

• Please list one to three main ideas visitors will take away from viewing the exhibition. What objects or didactic components of the exhibition will help them learn this?
• Describe the rationale and originality of the project. Is the exhibition bringing new scholarship to the field, exposing an under-recognized subject, etc.? Why is this exhibition important now at SFMOMA?
• Please note other interpretive, multi-media components that should be considered (audio-tour, in-gallery videos, interactive features, blogs, etc.). Are you aware of existing media created by other organizations on this topic? 

All these questions reflect the high priority that museums now place on visitor reception and interpretation of information, rather than on the process of curatorial transmission or on the object-centered content itself. Increasingly, museums are seeking to augment the visitor experience through the use of mobile media.

Current State of Mobile Tours
Museum audio guides today can be placed into four different categories: 1) museum devices with number pads with manual or automatic activation, 2) personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphones with operating systems and Internet connectivity, visual imagery, and manual or automatic activation, 3) mobile phones that are manually activated, and 4) audio files/podcasts that are downloaded onto MP3 players and other devices such as the iPod/ Touch. While most museums rely on manual activation by the user (pushing device buttons), some of the newer tours utilize automatic activation by infrared hotspots that are triggered when visitors enter the area of the object with the device; however, the play button still needs to be activated manually. Both the PDAs and the mobile phones are generally brought into the museum by the visitor; however, museums often have some for short-term loan.

SJMA (Chris Alexander)

One of the newest developments in handheld devices is the iPhone by Apple, featuring a telephone, iPod and iTunes, text messaging, a hybrid map, and Internet connectivity. Two museums in the US are currently experimenting with specific iPhone audio tours, the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) in California and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. The SJMA has been working on this new tour (they call it a “gallery experience/tour”) since September 2007, which can be accessed at http://www.sjmusart.org/iphone. The iPhone and/or iPod Touch make it easy for the museum to update content and allow the museum more options for features, interactivity, and accessibility, according to producer Chris Alexander. The museum introduced the tour in conjunction with its exhibition, Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon (April 12 – October 19, 2008). The Denver Art Museum converted their existing audio tours to “an iPhone-based experience,” says project director Bruce Wyman. “This will let us push the idea of developing web-based audio content to gallery devices, see how our wireless coverage is working, and also see what sort of traffic we experience over the existing infrastructure so we can think about scalability” (message posted by Wyman at Muse Tech Central: Museum Computer Network Project Registry. One advantage to the iPhone (and other devices with Internet connectivity) is it’s ability to provide a mobile access point to the museum’s collection management system that controls the entire permanent collection, rather than just a few highlights or a temporary exhibition. A disadvantage, however, is that downloading podcasts and other information on these devices (including MP3 players) requires visitors to plan ahead before visiting the museum, which can be unreliable with the younger visitors that favor these devices.

There are both advantages and disadvantages in using mobile phones for museum audio tours in the US. The advantages include visitors’ familiarity with their own personal device as opposed to learning a new device that they would need to borrow from the museum while leaving a form of identification. The use of mobile phones saves money for museums as they don’t have to purchase and maintain the audio devices or staff their distribution points, and it is easier for museums to update content. Various mobile phone features today support pictures, text, and video, and provide an opportunity for visitors to leave comments on a centralized message center. Mobile phones also offer greater flexibility of movement with exhibitions that continue outside the gallery spaces onto the exterior spaces of the museum and beyond, and they can be used anytime (Proctor & Tellis, 2003; Tellis, 2004; Proctor, 2007).

Disadvantages, however, are just as notable. The first obstacle to visitors using their mobile phones is a general discomfort and uncertainty at using these devices in museums, as Lee (2008) found in a recent study. Though these finding pertain to use in a science center, it is safe to assume that the same holds true for art museums as well, as many museums still prohibit mobile phone use within gallery spaces. There is a danger to museums that encouraging visitors to use their mobile phones for tours inside the gallery may encourage them to use the phones for other functions as well, such as making telephone calls or taking photos of works in violation of museum photography policies, both of which could be undetected by security guards. It is also tiring for visitors to physically hold the phone to their ear unless they have an earpiece, and reception may not be adequate in all spaces, particularly in basement galleries that would not offer a high quality audio experience. If visitors don’t have mobile phones, the museum would have to accommodate by providing them for loan, and for objects outside the galleries, visitors would need to carry around a paper guide listing the phone numbers to call. As large exhibitions travel around the country, the phone numbers to call may be long-distance, requiring extra charges that visitors might not want to pay, particularly with foreign visitors who pay higher charges.

Tate Modern (Nancy Proctor, 2007)

One example of a successful mobile phone audio tour is at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Art on Call. Upon dialing a central number (612-374-8200), multiple voices can be heard interpreting artwork in the museum’s collection and temporary exhibitions, including the curator, artist, visitors that leave comments, and even the voice of history from interviews in museum archives. As the Walker manages not only indoor gallery spaces but also an outdoor sculpture garden and public cultural programming within the city, the audio tour offers updated information related to all of these diverse activities with interviews from film directors and performing artists, as well as dining tips in the city and jobs and volunteer opportunities at the museum. Two important features of the program are TalkBack, which allows visitors to record comments or “audio notes” on their mobile phone, and Breadcrumbing, which keeps track of artwork that visitors access on their mobile phone tour inside the museum, and then makes this personalized playlist available on the museum’s website that offers further information on the works. The museum has a few iPods on loan for free at the Visitors Services desk. Some museums also offer interactive games as part of their mobile phone tours, both inside the galleries and online, such as Ear for Art: Chihuly Glass CellPhone Walking Tour at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington (888-411-4220).

With the handheld multimedia tours using device owned by the museum, visitors can bookmark objects of interest during their physical visit, similar to breadcrumbing. After giving their emails to a museum staff, content in the devices is transferred electronically to visitors via an email with a link to the museum website, where they can then create what is now commonly referred to as “my collection” or “my gallery.” The attractive feature for museums is that not only do they acquire visitors’ emails, but they are also able to track if visitors go to their website, how often, and what are the more popular objects being bookmarked.

Walker Art Center (Robin Dowden, 2007)

SFMOMA commissioned a study (conducted by Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.) during its 2006 exhibition of Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint. The study determined that visitors under 40 rated the podcast and cell phone tour higher than the traditional audio tour with the same content because of “the ability to access information on demand, familiarity and comfort with the device and low or free cost” (Samis, 2007, p. 23). Using a 7-point scale to chart visitor satisfaction from “Did not help me appreciate Barney’s art” to “Helped me appreciate Barney’s art,” the highest mean ratings for visitors was the podcast tour (6.2) and the cell phone tour (6.0), followed by the headset audio tour with a mean rating of 5.6.

In 2008 (Samis & Pau, 2009), SFMOMA conducted a study by Corporate Intelligence Group at Discovery Communications, Inc. (the parent company of AntennaAudio that created the audio guide), contradicting these previous results. The study covered three distinct exhibitions at the museum, showing a diminishing interest on the part of viewers to use their mobile phones as museum tours in favor of MP3 devices and handheld museum devices, for many of the disadvantageous reasons cited above. Surveying visitors about their preferred sources of information when visiting a museum, visitors were divided into two categories; audio guide user and non-audio guide user. The choices of sources were both analog and digital: audio guide, wall text, exhibition brochure, multimedia tour, tour guide (docent), catalogue, in-gallery video, tour downloaded to personal iPod/MP3 player, mobile phone tour. The results showed that the last option for both sets of viewers was the mobile phone tour. Audio guide users preferred the audio guide first, followed by the wall text and the exhibition brochure. Non-audio guide users preferred the wall text first, followed by the exhibition brochure. The study also determined that 62% of guide users (41% of non-guide users) strongly prefer to use a museum device rather than their personal mobile phone, and there was a strong preference to use personal iPod/MP3 player devices over personal mobile phones (49% guide users, 36% non-guide users).

The Future of Mobile Devices in Art Museums
The future of museum mobile tours is based on the promise of increased multimedia features, greater bandwidth capabilities, and a global network, all offering more choices and flexibility for visitors and greater opportunities for interactivity and user-generated content. For example, one trend that Peter Samis has discussed is the “Universal Access Policy” for museums. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum have all started offering audio tours free of charge to every visitor, resulting in increased usage from 3-4% to 20-61%. However, it must be noted that this change corresponds with an increase in admission fees of up to $20 a person (Museums and the Web, 2009).

In discussing ”The Future of Mobile Interpretation,” Kovin J. Smith, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Content at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, proposes the importance for museums to know their audience to best create interpretive platforms. Smith also suggests that inside the museum, visitors expect many of the same experiences and tools as on the website, particularly with the ability to access the museum’s entire collection at the touch of a button. Smith states, “With the ability to search, group, and filter every object, the device becomes a digital surrogate, an assistant, rather than a tour guide” (Museums and the Web, 2009).

In addition to tours, the mobile future also promises museums more opportunities to track visitors and their actions and to offer visitors a more participatory experience. For example, geospatial technology already exists but has not been widely applied to museums. It incorporates GPS (global positioning systems) or cell tower triangulation and is based on geotagging, which places coordinates onto works of art or locations on the earth. The coordinates can then be accessed from Flickr, which offers free links to geotagged “things” on a world map. New mobile phone technology allows users to put location tabs on video or still images, or to declare a specific location on a map and pull up images related to where one is physically located. Museums could geotag objects for visitors to access at locations external to the physical space of the museum, especially useful at archaeological sites, parks, and public art installations. These technologies represent a development of the current infrared technology applied to handheld devices that uses visitor location to trigger data from the tours.

QR codes (discussed in the in the previous post “Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 1”) are also being explored for use in museums to encourage a more participatory visitor experience. While QR codes could have a variety of uses, in one pilot application called artsonomy, museum visitors use their camera phones to take a picture of a QR code accompanying a piece of art. They then type words that express their attitude toward the artwork and send these tags to a database that forms a visible tag cloud around the piece, which they can also view (Perrone, 2009). Thus far, artsonomy has been installed at the Norsk Telemuseum in Oslo, Norway, at the Museo dei Mercati di Traiano in Rome, and will soon be installed at Ara Pacis Museum, also in Rome (Perrone, personal correspondence). In the US, the use of QR codes in museums has not taken off (yet). As of May 2009, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburg was the first American museum to incorporate QR codes in the exhibition experience. In order to reduce the amount of printed material and engage visitors, the gallery has put QR codes on exhibition title cards, with each code containing different data, such as video, still images, and background information. QR codes obviously take a lot of planning and technical support. They are also not without their challenges, including inconsistent size (depending on how much data is encoded) and the necessity of designing content that is mobile friendly (Chan, 2009). It is interesting that the Museum of Modern Art in New York included the newer Microsoft Tags using HCCB (high capacity color barcodes) in their 2008 exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, but as an aesthetic physical object in the physical museum, not yet as a participatory tool. Microsoft released its new tag in January 2009, offering higher density storage for easier mobile phone camera use. Many believe both of these technologies hold much promise for user interactivity and engagement in museums.

Gavin Jancke, director of engineering for Microsoft Research Redmond

Other mobile applications in museums include content tailored for mobile devices, text alerts, RSS feeds, and Twitter feeds. The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston has designed a program that (for a cost) lets users wirelessly download objects from the museum’s collection to be used as mobile wallpaper. Such personalization of mobile phones is more commonly achieved through photos of family or celebrities, but the MFA clearly hopes that such a service will not only enhance its own revenue stream but also expand the visitor experience beyond the doors of the museum. Museum on the Go started in April 2007 as the first mobile phone museum portal, currently hosting downloadable images, Realtunes, and videos from 10 international museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London. They charge a comparable fee. The MFA, as well as other museums, also sends text alerts (for free) so subscribers can receive current information on events and discounts. Most museums today have RSS feeds with updated information on calendar events, staff blogs, podcasts, and news. Visitors can subscribe by going to the museum’s website or social media sites (such as Facebook) and can receive these on a mobile phone with Internet connectivity. Several museums are also sending Twitter “tweets” via subscribers’ mobile phones, but with mixed reactions as to their purpose. Museum consultant and blogger Nina Simon has suggested a range of Twitter uses for museums that go beyond one-way spam-like communication, such as providing “behind-the-scenes insight” and sharing visitor photos and comments. See the Brooklyn Museum of Art for an example of using Twitter and other RSS feeds.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts

When contemplating all of these possibilities, it is important to recall Peter Samis’ words of advice, “If the institution is going to delegate significant aspects of the interpretative load to new technology devices, then it becomes imperative that those devices be made as effortlessly available to users as the wall texts and artworks” (Museums and the Web, 2009). A recent study on mobile phone tours and audio guides at the Centre Pompidou (Traces du sacré, May 7 – August 11, 2008) in Paris by Vincent Puig et al. (Museums and the Web, 2009) also reveals lessons learned not only about audio tours but also the use of mobile media in general. Aside from suggesting the introduction of GPS to alleviate visitor difficulty with entering stop numbers, the article proposed the need for “innovative multimedia search and navigation tools” to cross-reference objects, information, and keywords.

Conferences
There are two very important conferences regarding handheld devices in museums that need to be mentioned. The first is the Tate Handheld Conference (September 4 and 5, 2008), co-organized by Jane Burton from the Tate Museum in London, and Nancy Proctor from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. The full audio from the conference is available to download from the Tate Events podcast. The Conference wiki is a wealth of information on the subject, listing conference topics, case studies, resources, an online course, people, and general conference information. The MuseumMobile wiki mentioned in Anne’s last blog grew out of the Tate Handheld Conference wiki, and is an important resource as well.

The second conference is the Handheld Online Conference “from audio tours to iPhones” organized by Learning Times, held online on June 3, 2009. The website presents recordings and discussion forums from conference sessions and biographical information on the speakers. A description of the conference from the website aptly describes the current and future state of mobile tours in museums, and is a fitting end to this post:

So are the new technologies doomed simply to replace the traditional audio tour with an even more sophisticated and bewildering, but no less marginal, array of solutions for providing museum interpretation? There is no specific technology or platform that will revolutionize our visitors’ museum experiences, but rather our visitors are transforming the museum visit themselves through new informational practices that they are importing to the museum from their Web 2.0 lives. WWW has come to mean ‘whatever, whenever, wherever’ and the question of the future of museum interpretation has become not one of what technology our visitors will prefer, but rather of where, when, and how they want to engage with the museum, both on-site and beyond http://www.handheldconference.org/about/.

Mobile tour creators:
Antenna Audio - http://www.antennaaudio.com
Learning Times - http://www.learningtimes.com
NousGuide - http://www.NousGuide.com
Heritage 365 - http://www.heritage365.com
Guide By Cell - http://www.guidebycell.com
Spatial Adventures, Inc. - http://www.spatialadventures.com
Museum 411 - http://www.museum411.com

References
Bressler, D. (2006, March). Mobile phones: A new way to engage teenagers in informal science learning. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Archives and Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/bressler/bressler.html

Chan, S. (2009, March 5). QR codes in the museum – problems and opportunities with extended object labels. Blog posting to fresh + new(er). http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/03/05/qr-codes-in-the-museum-problems-and-opportunities-with-extended-object-labels/

Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (2000). Learning from museums: Visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield.

Föckler, P., Zeidler, T., Brombach, B., Bruns, E., & Bimber, O. (2005). PhoneGuide: Museum guidance supported by on-device object recognition on mobile phones. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series: Vol. 154. 4th International conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (pp. 3-10). Christchurch, New Zealand.

Haley Goldman, K. (2007, March). Cell phones and exhibitions 2.O: Moving beyond the pilot stage. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Archives and Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/haleyGoldman/haleyGoldman.html

Lee, S. K. (2008, September). Mobile phone use in a science museum: Toward a possibility of informal science learning. Paper presented at the Mobile Communication and the Ethics of Social Networking conference. Budapest, Hungary.

Low, L. (2006). Connections: Social and mobile tools for enhancing learning. The Knowledge Tree, 12. Retrieved April 13, 2008, from http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/

Mulholland, P., Collins, T. & Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Bletchley park text: Using mobile and semantic web technologies to support the post-visit use of online museum resources. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 24.

Perrone, A. (2008, September). Artsonomy. Paper presented at the mSociety Conference. Antalya, Turkey.

Proctor, N. (2007, March). When in roam: Visitor response to phone tour pilots in the U.S. and Europe. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/proctor/proctor.html

Proctor, N. & Tellis, C. (2003, March). The State of the Art in Museum Handhelds in 2003. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2003: Proceedings. Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2003/papers/proctor/proctor.html

Puig, V., L’Hour, Y., Haussone, Y., Jauniau, C. (2009, March). Collaborative annotation system using vocal comments recorded on mobile phones and audio guides: The Centre Pompidou Exhibition Traces du Sacré. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. CD-ROM. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/puig/puig.html

Rayward, W. B., & Twidale, M. B. (1999). From docent to cyberdocent: Education and guidance in the virtual museum. Archives and Museum Informatics, 13, 23-53.

Samis, P. (2007). New Technologies as part of a comprehensive interpretive plan. In H. Din & P. Hecht (Eds.). The digital museum: A think guide (pp. 19-34). Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.

Samis, P. (2007). Gaining traction in the vaseline: Visitor response to a multi-track interpretation design for Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. CD-ROM. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/samis/samis.html

Samis, P. & Pau, S. (2009, March). After the heroism, collaboration: Organizational learning and the mobile space. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. CD-ROM. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/samis/samis.html

Schroyen, J., Luyten, K., Gabriëls, K., Robert, K., Teunkens, D., Coninx, K., Flerackers, E. & Manshoven, E. (2009, March). The design of context-specific educational mobile games. In J.
Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. CD-ROM. Toronto, Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/schroyen/schroyen.html

Smith, K. J. (2009, March). The future of mobile interpretation. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. CD-ROM. Toronto, Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/smith/smith.html

Tellis, C. (2004, March). Multimedia handhelds: One device, many audiences. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2003: Proceedings. Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/papers/tellis/tellis.html

Walker Art Center. (March 2007). Final report to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Art on Call Grant LG-20-04-0194-04. Minneapolis, MN: Robin Dowden, Director of New Media.

Woodruff, A., Aoki, P. M., Hurst, A. & Szymanski, M. H. (n.d.). Electronic guidebooks and visitor attention. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA.

THIS POSTING WAS WRITTEN BY SUSANA BAUTISTA AND CARA WALLIS

The previous posts discussed how libraries are responding to the opportunities presented by digital media. As noted, these opportunities also bring new responsibilities and dilemmas.  For example, consider the different purposes of an archive.  Is the purpose of the archive to serve as a repository of valuable materials?  To create a persistent collection that is accessible to a wide range of users?  To curate a collection that reflects and manifests a set of values about quality of content?  OR to preserve important cultural material for posterity?  Once an archive or collection is digitized, it still remains the business of the institution to define its philosophy in terms of its the purpose of its archive. What we learned is that the initial creation of digital collections and archives have prompted library professionals to engage in new discussions to clarify the core mission of their institutions in light of a changing information landscape. As a consequence, all libraries, from the largest national collecting institutions to the smallest community branch now find themselves having to address issues pertaining to digital content management, rights of information ownership, and the balance between privacy and access.  As these discussions unfold, they yield new visions for libraries in the future:  as portal, as repository, as a knowledge-making enterprise, and as a critical public service. 

Just as community libraries are reconsidering how to best address the opportunities and responsibilities made possible by the widespread availability of digital media, so too are museums grappling with the possibilities promised by new technologies.  Libraries and museums face similar questions in how to incorporate digital technologies in the service of the institution’s core mission.  The Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) has as it’s core mission to “create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.” The IMLS provides guidance and funding to several U.S. libraries (122,000) and museums (17,500) in support of programs and activities that encourage lifelong learning.  Digital technologies are crucial to these efforts:

Libraries and museums help create vibrant, energized learning communities. Our achievement as individuals and our success as a democratic society depend on learning continually, adapting to change readily, and evaluating information critically.  As stewards of cultural heritage, information and ideas, museums and libraries have traditionally played a vital role in helping us experience, explore, discover and make sense of the world. That role is now more essential than ever. Through building technological infrastructure and strengthening community relationships, libraries and museums can offer the public unprecedented access and expertise in transforming information overload into knowledge.  (Quoted from website)

The IMLS has developed several initiatives to realize this mission.

• The Connection to Collections effort is a “national initiative to raise public awareness of the importance of caring for our treasures, and to underscore the fact that these collections are essential the American Story.”
  

• The Engaging America’s Youth initiative has been developed to create and sustain a Nation of Learners.
  

• The International Strategic Partnership initiative is designed to strengthen cross-cultural connections between U.S. museums and libraries and their global counterparts.

IMLS also sponsors an annual event called the WebWise Conference that brings together representatives from museums, libraries, archives, systems science, and education interested in the creation of high quality online content for inquiry and learning.  The first WebWise conference held in 2004 focused on the the notion of “sharing” online content.  Key issues addressed during that first conference included discussions about technical interoperability, the formation of collaborative partnerships to foster greater access to shared information collections, and funding and sustainability of technology-intensive services.  Subsequent conferences continued these discussions and branched into other areas of consideration such as: how to create digital resources for effective teaching and learning, how to engage learners of all ages, the meaning of metadata, the changing nature of stewardship and the preservation of digital collections, and the implication of Web 2.0 social networking applications.  Every conference has included presentations on the legal and policy implications of new digital media for the purposes of information sharing, information ownership, rights of privacy, and changing models of copyright and licensing.

The 2009 WebWise Conference was structured around the theme “digital debates” and included several talks on the need to nurture more robust collaborations among institutions and between an institution and members of its public. The talk by Nancy Proctor (from the Smithsonian America Art Museum) focused on how museums could foster creative collaborations using new technologies.

Nancy Proctor, “The Museum as Agora: What is Collaboration in Museums 2.0.”
WebWise 2009, Washington D.C.

Proctor begins her talk with the question: what is the museum in the web 2.0 world of information on demand?  In her talk she reviewed several projects that represent innovative attempts to create novel forms of collaboration among museums and members of the public.  She notes that these efforts did not begin with the development of Web 2.0 applications, but had been going on over the past decade.  Noteworthy projects that she discussed included:

Save Outdoor Sculpture:
This project took shape before the advent of social networking applications.  The aim was to collaborate with individuals to gather user-created content about outdoor sculptures.  The collaboration involved the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Heritage Preservation Organization who worked with 7000 individuals to catalog condition reports on outdoor sculpture across the U.S.  The project data was recorded on paper, through email and photographs.  The result was the creation of an extensive database on outdoor sculpture that is now being imported into Google maps.

Fill the Gap: Sponsored by the Luce Center at the American Art Museum, this project enlists the collaboration of photographers to “fill the gap” in empty art display cases.  When an art object goes out for restoration or on-loan for an exhibition, there is a gap in the museum display cases.  This project asks photographers to upload images artwork to Flicker that might “fill the gap” in a particular display case.  The aim is to engage the members of the public in dialogue about the nature of the collection and to demonstrate the kinds of discussions that go on among curators about the presentation of art within the museum context.

The Wikipedia Loves Art Project: Led by the Brooklyn Museum, in collaboration with twenty other international museums, this project is structured like a scavenger hunt in that it invites people to visit museums and take photographs of artworks on certain themes. The photographs are uploaded to a Flickr site, and are then evaluated in terms of quality and thematic appropriateness.  The winning images are used to provide illustrations for Wikipedia articles.  Photographers (or teams) get full credit for any image used.

The Handheld Wiki: This project allows museum professionals to share expertise and experience on the use of handheld devices and mobile media.

In reflecting on these efforts, Proctor identifies the key elements of collaboration: 1) The creation of community and sharing practices, 2) the development of dialogue and storytelling, 3) integration efforts and the creation of relevance, 4) the development of trust and interdependencies, and 5) (most of all) the creation of fun experiences.  She notes that these project also highlight the significant challenges to fostering collaboration—including the fact that people are sometimes stingy with their contributions, that tasks must be prioritized, that intellectual property and brands must be respected and managed, and that quantity does not guarantee quality.  In her conclusion, she returns to her original question: what is the museum in a 2.0 world of information on demand?  To this she responds that the museum might best be considered as a distributed network of networks.  The Web 2.0 Museum is staged on different kinds of platforms:  onsite (at physical brick and mortar locations), online (at digital environments and sites created by the museum), online elsewhere (at digital environments and sites created and governed by others such as Flickr and Wikipedia) and on mobile devices.  As she reminds us, audience members and visitors might access the museum through any (or all) of these sites.  In reflecting on this phenomenon, Proctor asserts that the museum is transforming from the Acropolis (the remote shrine that keeps cultural treasures safe) to an Agora—a space for community, encounter and exchange.  For this reason, she argues that the museum is preeminently a collaborative space in digital age.

Indeed, the postings in this next section will consider a range of practices that museums are using to create new collaborative experiences for and among their visitors.  We focus on the use of digital media in two general types of museums:  the art museum and the science/technology center.  Art museums with large collections are strongly aligned with libraries in providing archival services and face issues similar to those of libraries relating to the digitization of collections, providing access, and protecting ownership rights.  While other museums such as science centers and technology museums are less focused on the collection of artifacts as they are on the staging of particular experiences with new technologies or the demonstration of basic scientific principles.  We consider the efforts going on in art museums as separate from those that are happening within the context of the science/technology museums only for the purposes of organization of the background research.  The postings will discuss how museums have moved from a focus on digital collections to the project of creating a web presence for visitors.  One posting will look at a variety of on-line museums experiences including museums in Second Life and teen web sites.  A later post will examine new practices of media making, playing, and tinkering that are now offered by various museums as a way to connect the physical and the virtual for the purposes enhancing visitor learning experiences.  The final posting in this section will consider specific edge projects that are designed to explore new learning opportunities in a digital age.  The trajectory of these postings track the changes going on in museums from providing access to information to staging new forms of participation.