Museums In The 21st Century
“Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age”
This is the first of several postings that will report on the literature review conducted as part of the project: “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: the Future of Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age.” Funded by the MacArthur Foundation this project addresses one of the four key questions that defines the Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative: How might institutions change to take advantage of the learning opportunities provided by new digital media? The work discussed here seeks to contribute to the development of a field in new media and learning by focusing on museums and libraries as important learning institutions.
Getting Started: Blogging Scholarship
In discussing the organization of this literature review—as it serves as one of the deliverables of the MacArthur grant—the research team investigated the conventions of “blogging” as a mode of scholarly communication. Inspired by the efforts of Mimi Ito and her research team in creating the Futures of Learning blog, we came to appreciate the emerging conventions of scholarly blogging, such when to use web links, embed dynamic media, and add typographic flourishes. One of our greatest challenges was designing the organization of the series of blog posts such that each post could be read individually and make sense as a “dispatch,” but would also contribute to the overall report on the year-long investigation. The initial scope of our research activity—to review the literature that describes the digital media practices currently used in libraries and museums—was extremely broad. Although these institutions share many common interests in serving their various “publics” through the use of digital media, they also have significant differences in terms of their cultural mission, of modes of public access, and levels of resources (for example). While we want to encourage the cross posting of insights and experiences with digital media among institutional contexts, we decided for the purpose of this blog series to separate our discussion of the literature and practices of libraries from those of museums. (For an informative discussion of the history and futures of collaborations among libraries and museums see: Dilevko and Gottlieb, The Evolution of library and Museum Partnerships, 2004)
We address multiple audiences with these postings: we are keenly interested in communicating with museum professionals and library professionals, but also with digital media and learning researchers, design researchers, technologists, humanists, and other cultural workers who are interested the role of museums and libraries as learning sites in a digital age. We recognize that some of these audience members are extremely knowledgeable about the use of new digital media practices, not only in libraries and museums, but in other learning contexts as well. This is one of the exciting developments of the use of blogs for the communication of scholarly research: every posting creates the opportunity to expand the research effort through the feedback of readers. This truly makes the scholarly blog an example of what John Seely Brown famously described as a “living document.”
Not surprisingly, what we discovered during the literature review effort is a range of documentation of these discussions: there are books of course that address relevant issues, but because of the emergent nature of digital media and learning efforts in the context of the development of Web 2.0 applications, recent discussions are not often documented in print form. So, unlike a traditional literature review, this series of blog posts will also discuss practices and activities that are not published in traditional print formats. In some posts we include references and links to particular institutional activities—such as the development of websites—to illustrate specific ways in which museums and libraries are creatively engaging digital media. In this case, references to the online activities of specific institutions are not offered as case studies or even best practices; they are described as noteworthy illustrations of new efforts that we “read” as part of our cultural review of the development of digital media practices for learning. Blogs then not only offer the opportunity to reconfigure conventions for the circulation of scholarship, but also offer the opportunity for reconfiguring the genre of the literature review to include reference to and discussion of other modes of expression.
Indeed, finding an appropriate and “comfortable voice” for this form of scholarly communication was a significant part of the authoring/designing work involved in creating these blog postings. Individual research team members will author or co-author each posting, and when possible will make reference to earlier postings. Although the entire research team collaborated on the overall outline and trajectory of each posting, the individual author(s) will determine the tone and voice employed within a specific post.
This initial post offers an overview of the general context for the project including an introduction to some of the key theoretical notions that were explored in the course of the year long research effort. I begin with a brief elaboration of the title of the project: “Inspiring the Technological Imagination” before launching into a discussion about the framework that guided specific research efforts to find relevant literature and practices. Because the initial scope of the project was deeply informed by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning (DML) initiative, I provide a brief review of some of the defining claims of that initiative. The end of this posting includes a table of contents for the other blog postings that will appear over the next several weeks.
The Technological Imagination Defined
The MacArthur sponsored project, “Inspiring the Technological Imagination,” grew out of a recently completed (but not yet published) transmedia book project called: Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke UP, forthcoming). (An early excerpt was published in 2005 as “Taking Culture Seriously: Educating and Inspiring the Technological Imagination.”) In this project, I define the technological imagination in the following way:
A character of mind and creative practice of those who use, analyze, design and develop technologies. It is a quality of mind that grasps the doubled-nature of technology: as determining and determined, as both autonomous of and subservient to human intentions. This imagination embraces the fact that all technologies have multiple and contradictory effects. This is the quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into a set of possibilities, and to evaluate the consequences of possibilities from multiple perspectives. (Balsamo, forthcoming)
It is not appropriate here to elaborate the details of this transmedia book project. Suffice to say that the MacArthur grant was designed to explore the notion of the development of the technological imagination within the context of libraries and museums. The broader argument is that the technological imagination is a key sensibility of lifelong learners who reside in the 21st century. As such, this imagination needs to be explicitly cultivated and, more importantly inspired. The transmedia book project, Designing Culture explores (and presents) a range of digital projects that were designed to address and inspire this imagination. Several of these projects involved the development of new museum exhibits and public interactive experiences. Thus the title of the grant “Inspiring the Technological Imagination” reveals the more specific focus of our investigation into the use of digital media in museums and libraries: to study how these cultural institutions might utilize digital media for the purposes of cultivating and inspiring a particular mode of imaginative engagement with technology that is simultaneously critical and creative, informed by the histories of technology as it also is engaged in the practice of imagining technological futures. Investigating how this imagination is cultivated in the context of museums, especially science and technology museums/centers, was a key point of connection between the transmedia book project and the MacArthur DML initiative.
Stakes in the Ground: New Spaces, Identities, and Learning Practices
For many young people learning no longer happens within a specific physical location—the formal school classroom or the after-school program. While this may have always been true to some extent, learning places now include domestic (home) environments and various school locations, and also recreational facilities, religious centers, and cultural institutions (to name a few). Moreover, through the use of digital media, homes and schools provide digital access points to websites created by cultural institutions and entertainment companies that sponsor on-line learning activities. Since the advent of the WWW, the physical “place of school” has given way to a proliferation of online “educational places” that create entirely new “spaces for learning.”
French sociologist Michel deCerteau (1984) makes a poetic distinction between “space” and “place” when he writes: “a space is a practiced place.” A place has stable boundaries and a fixed location; a space is created in time through actions and practices. In this sense, school is a place; and learning is a spatial practice. This insight is not merely theoretical. It captures something important about the nature of learning in a digital age. Through the use of the Internet, educational places are now part of broadly distributed digital learning spaces. When learning design researcher Katie Salens provocatively asks “where is school in a digital age?” she invites us to shift our thinking about education from a focus on the “physical place of school,” to a consideration of the “nature of learning spaces” that emerge from the digital connections among physical places, virtual environments, and mobile practices of access and interaction.
In keeping with this insight, one of the key “stakes in the ground” established by the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning projects describes the space of learning (in a digital age) as a networked distributed learning environment (space) that is comprised of several elements: 1) physical places; 2) virtual places; 3) designed learning activities; 4) opportunities for social interactions; 5) information resources; and 6) access entry points. The diagram below represents this space as a network that is created through the connections among different physical locations (home, recreation, school, after-school, museums and libraries). These physical locations are represented as nodes within the learning network. They are distributed geographically as well as temporally. Temporal distribution means that although they are always part of the network by virtue of their web availability, the nodes are accessed and experienced by learners at different times as part of their travels through the mesh of digital sites.
Several projects in the DML initiative focused explicitly on specific nodes within (this model) of a networked distributed learning environment. The following is a partial list of DML projects that investigate the use of digital media in schools, after-school programs, in the home, and as part of youth leisure and recreational activities. Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies Project identified the core skills that comprise literacy in the 21st century. This work guided the development of curriculum for schools and after-school programs. Katie Salens is working on the creation of Quest to Learn, a fully accredited public school (6-8th grades) in New York City that incorporates game-based pedagogies. Nichole Pinkard, the Director of Technology at the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago, is PI on a multi-year project to develop an after-school curriculum and program to foster new media literacy. Mimi Ito, now a research scientist at the University of California at Irvine, designed and directed an extensive longitudinal (3-year) ethnographic investigation of how youth participate in digital media in the home, through mobile devices, and as part of online recreational (game-based) communities. These projects were instrumental in establishing a set of understandings not only about how young people engage digital media, but also about the way in which digital media can enhance learning. These projects also suggested new research questions: 1) how must institutions change to address the changing nature of knowledge creation in a digital age ; 2) how should learning environments be designed to address new forms of digital engagement; 3) what kinds of sensibilities emerge in the young people who grow up in digital environments?
This diagram provides an abstract approximation of the structure of a networked distributed learning environment; it is less useful in communicating the dynamic nature of the environment and identifying those who travel through it. The network is never static; it is animated through the practices of access, use, retrieval, storage, and creation. People activate the network through their communication practices with other people (with peers, with adults, with geographically dispersed community members), with applications, and with digital agents. They engage in these practices not only from fixed places that provide access (such as homes and schools), but also increasingly while they are on the move through the use of mobile communication devices. So even as this diagram calls out the important physical nodes within a networked distributed learning environment, it must also be understood that the environment is constituted by dynamic flows of interaction among people, between people and computers, and among digital devices.
The people who participate in a networked distributed learning environment manifest a host of new identities. They are simultaneously users of computer systems and creators of a learning experience. In Henry Jenkins’ (2006) words, they are productive consumers, prosumers who simultaneously produce digital experiences as they engage in the consumption of digital applications, services, and environments. The formation of a singular identity, gives way to the notion of shifting multiple identities. Teachers have to become learners so that they can better understand how to facilitate learning in these new digital environments. As students participate in peer-to-peer networks, they become teachers, not only for their peers for often for adults as well. The old distinctions between online and offline are blurred; the very notion of “identity” is under revision.
Although there is no age limit on those who participate in networked learning environments, most of the MacArthur Foundation DML projects focus on the learning experiences of a category of young people who have been variously named “digital natives,” the “born digital generation,” and “digital youth.” Faculty researchers from the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (2008) offer this snapshot profile of the digital native:
They were all born after 1980, when social digital technologies such as Usenet and bulletin board systems came online. The all have access to networked digital technologies. And they all have the skills to use those technologies (p. 1).
“Digital natives,” as Palfrey and Gasser assert, “live much of their lives online” and in so doing challenge traditional notions of identity as “singular,” “fixed,” or tied to an embodied persona. There is little separation between the creation of an online identity (that might happen through the design of an avatar or game character) and the embodiment of an offline identity. For digital natives, identities are fluid moments of experience that are expressed as they participate in online spaces; this participation is often part of a practice of rapid attention shifting. Online is a ubiquitous quality of embodied life. This observation about the changing “nature of identity” of digital natives leads Palfrey and Gasser (among others) to rethink notions of the “self,” “sociality,” and of “learning” more broadly. Identity, for digital natives, is multiple and mutable. Palfrey and Gasser speculate about how this changing notion of identity influences our understanding of the process of cognitive development in young people. Digital natives process information differently, which in turn, influences the dynamics of concept and knowledge formation. In another context, “the born digital generation” have been described as “just-in-time learners” who have learned first and foremost that when they need to know something they can always “Google it” (Anderson and Balsamo, 2008). Knowledge for digital natives is not as much “learned” as it is “harvested” and “synthesized” from the information flows they visit and travel through on a daily basis. Palfrey and Gasser describe their practices of knowledge construction as an iterative multi-step process that involves: 1) “grazing,” 2) a “deep dive,” and 3) a “feedback loop” (p. 241). Of particular interest for the purposes of the libraries and museums project is the nature of the “feedback loop” activity. This is Palfrey’s and Gasser’s term for the activity whereby a digital native engages with the information in a creative way by (for example) posting critique on a website, contributing to a wiki page, creating a podcast or a YouTube video, or disseminating the information to friends and network companions. The key dynamic captured by the notion of the “feedback loop” is the sense of participation: the learner actively engages with the information to do something else with it. It is not merely “memorized,” although it may indeed be “remembered,” rather it is actively woven into a set of meaning making practices that (might) involve the use of digital media (podcasts), authoring environments (wikis), and/or networks (e-blasts and blog posts). Participation is the foundation of learning within the context of a networked distributed learning environment. This is the key building block in the use of digital media in libraries and museums as they invent new ways to contribute to learning in a digital age.
Libraries and Museums as Specialized Learning Nodes: The Focus of this Blog Series
The projects mentioned in the previous section provided a general context for the design of the “Inspiring the Technological Imagination” research effort. Our more specific focus was to contribute to discussions about how libraries and museums might incorporate new digital media for the purposes of enhancing informal learning in a digital age. These cultural institutions have important educational missions, and through the use of digital media they are already making significant contributions to the learning experiences of digital youth. Our goal in this literature review was to delve into the context and the key issues under discussion by library and museum professionals about the use of digital media in their respective institutions and to make the connections between these conversations and the insights from the MacArthur DML initiative. Thus our blog postings will summarize key reports, resources and discussions that address two guiding themes: 1) the relationship between the use of digital media within libraries for the purposes of broadening participation in digital culture; and 2) the use of digital media in museums for the purposes of informal education. As mentioned earlier, we separate the discussion of these topics to focus first on the use of digital media in community libraries, and then on the use of digital media in museums. We know that there is much to be learned from the practices going on in each setting that would be valuable for professionals in other settings. The discussions are separate only for the purposes of organizing insights and archiving the literature review.
The last blog postings look to the “edges” of digital culture for insights about the future contribution of libraries and museums to the inspiration of the technological imagination. A third theme of the literature review thus focuses on the notion of tinkering as a mode of knowledge production, specifically to investigate the role of tinkering in the creation of cross-generational community relationships and as a context for the development of lifelong (informal) learning habits. This part of the research was informed by the theoretical assertion that “tinkering” is an important mode of knowledge production in a digital age because these practices 1) enable important cognitive developments, 2) engender social and cross-generational face-to-face community-creating relationships, and 3) cultivate the technological imagination. Following this, the research team also investigated a range of tinkering practices, from those that involve the use of physical materials to those that involve digital tools and applications. As part of this literature review, we discuss specific examples of practices within community libraries and museums (specifically science/technology centers) that facilitate tinkering-based learning activities. The focus on tinkering was to suggest new horizons for practices and activities that might be adopted by libraries and museums in the future.
In brief, my argument is that the technological imagination needs to be actively cultivated. Too often, we leave the tending of this imagination to serendipity or superstition. We believe, erroneously I argue, that simply by providing access to technology (computers, mobile devices, games) young people will develop a robust technological imagination. And yet, as I elaborate elsewhere (Balsamo, forthcoming), a cultivated technological imagination requires more than just understanding how to use technology. It requires an appreciation for historical precedents and an ethical investment in the creation of our futures. The exercise of the technological imagination is always a work of time-travel: between the many pasts that create the conditions of the (technocultural) present, and between the present and the many (technocultural) futures we are in the process of enacting. This connects the work of the literature review with the broader aims of my ongoing project to consider how museums and libraries as important cultural institutions contribute to the cultivation of the technological imagination as the foundation for the creation of humane, responsible, and ethical futures.
While this project was only one year in duration, it has yielded several outcomes (in addition to this literature review) that will serve the basis for future research, design, and practice: 1) an article on the notion of tinkering as a mode of knowledge production, 2) an interactive map on DIY culture, 3) a prototype of an evocative learning object that melds the physical and the digital to serve as a creative platform for informal learning experiences within museums and libraries. These efforts will be described more fully in the final grant report that will be disseminated on Anne Balsamo’s website: www.designingculture.net. The blog posts that will follow will be authored by members of the “Inspiring The Technological Imagination” project research team: Anne Balsamo, Cara Wallis, Maura Klosterman, and Susana Bautista. The following is a list of postings and a tentative schedule for publication.
Posting Topic Outline
Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age
Anne Balsamo
“Libraries: Setting the Context. From National Efforts to Create Digital Archives to Local Efforts at Access Equality.”
Maura Klosterman
Digital Media in Communities Libraries, Part 1: From Information Access to Creative Participation.
Cara Wallis
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 2: Teen Websites
Susana Bautista
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 3: Games and Gaming
Anne Balsamo and Stacy Ingber
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 4: The Case for Virtual Libraries
Anne Balsamo
Digital Media in Community of Libraries, Part 5: Media Workshops
Maura Klosterman
Museums: Setting the Context
Anne Balsamo
Mobile Eperiences in Art Museums
Susana Bautista
Museums Collections: Digitization-Dissemination-Dialogue
Susana Bautista
Virtual Museums: Where to Begin?
Anne Balsamo
Online (art) museum Experiences
Susana Bautista
Learning from the Edges, Part 1: The Importance of Play.
Cara Wallis and Maura Klosterman
Learning from the Edges, Part 2: Tinkering in a Digital Age.
Anne Balsamo
Libraries and Museums in a Digital Age: Resources and Web links.”
Anne Balsamo
References for Blog Post #1:
Literature Review: “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age”
Anderson, Steve, and Anne Balsamo. (2007). “A Pedagogy for Original Synners.” Ed. Tara McPherson. Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 241-259.
Balsamo, Anne. (2005). “Taking Culture Seriously: Educating and Inspiring the Technological Imagination.” Academic Commons. http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/balsamo-taking-culture-seriously
Balsamo, Anne. (Forthcoming). Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. (Duke University Press).
Brown, John Seely. “New Learning Environments for the 21st Century.” http://www.johnseelybrown.com/newlearning.pdf
deCerteau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press.
Dilevko, Juris and Lisa Gottlieb. (2004). The Evolution of Library and Museum Partnerships: Historical antecedents, Contemporary Manifestations and Future Directions. Westport, CN: Libraries Unlimited.
Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press.
Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. (2008). Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books.
Author Bio:
Anne Balsamo directs the Interactive Media Division’s Co-Design Lab in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses in design across the curriculum, public interactives, and culture and technology for the Interactive Media Arts and Practice program, the Interactive Media Division, and The Annenberg School of Communication at USC. She is also a freelance museum exhibit developer and curator who has created interactive exhibits for the International Museum of Women, the San Jose Tech Museum, the Papalote Children’s Museum in Mexico City, Liberty Science Center, and the Singapore Science Center. Her new research effort called “The Tangible Culture Research Project” investigates the design of evocative (mixed reality) knowledge objects and the role of tinkering in a digital age. For more information about her current work and new transmedia book project, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work visit http://www.designingculture.net (to be launched July, 2009).
Mobile Experiences in Art Museums
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
Museum Collections: Digitization → Dissemination → Dialogue
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.
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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
Online (art) Museum Experiences
The topic of online museum experiences (focusing again on art museums) is an expansive and complex one, growing ever wider with the creation of new digital technologies and applications. A previous posting described some of the experiences that are occurring around online collections, databases, and archives of images. It raised key issues such as how museums are partnering with broadcast media, corporations, and third-party sites such as social networking sites (SNS), how museums are navigating control (and expertise) in the midst of user-generated content and information access/excess, and also the ubiquitous debate surrounding the relationship of the virtual and the physical. This latter topic (virtual experiences) was dealt with in more detail in our last posting by Anne. Museums create online experiences based largely on three factors: 1) the emergence of new technologies; 2) their institutional priorities and goals; 3) external influences from funders, governmental entities, academia, the media, or the general public. Certainly all of these factors often overlap, such as with museums’ interest in cultivating online participation (this is dependent on new Web 2.0 technologies, museums identify this as a goal that they believe will lead to more meaningful experiences, and there are numerous studies on the importance of participatory learning both in academia and in foundations). These three factors will be woven into a discussion of many significant online art museum experiences, with noteworthy examples and their accompanying theoretical debates.
GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY
The Museo Nacional del Prado (Prado Museum) in Spain and Google Earth Spain announced their partnership in January 2009. Google Earth uses geospatial technology (also called spatial information technology) that maps features or phenomena on the surface of the earth. By downloading Google’s software for free, viewers can view 14 of the museum’s masterpieces in high definition of 14 gigapixels, along with a three-dimensional tour of the museum. This resolution is 1,400 times more detailed than any image that a common 10 megapixel digital camera could take. For all those except the privileged few scholars, these enhanced images are the closest they will ever see such masterpieces.
The 14 works featured correspond to the museum’s proposed itinerary of 15 works on their Web site as the “essential” recommended visit, highlights of their collection. The Prado’s entire collection consists of 17,300 works of art, of which only 1,300 are currently on display at the museum (an additional 3,100 are on institutional loan around the world). The museum’s Web site currently has around 2,000 images of its collection in the On-Line Gallery database, with a section called In Depth that includes detailed photographs and technical information for one highlighted work at a time. However, this project is not intended to bring together an entire collection, rather it is about specificity. Many of the original paintings are so large that, “you would need a three-meter high step-ladder” to see them up close, states Claudia Rivera of Google Spain. And that is only if you could get past the crowds and the security guards. In a Press Release (March 13, 2009), Prado director Javier Rodríguez Zapatero states that, “with the technology of Google Earth it is possible to enjoy these magnificent works as never before, allowing for details impossible to appreciate with direct contemplation.” Mr. Rodríguez even says he has used the technology to check on restoration work of the paintings. The images can be appreciated equally by scholars, students, and the general arts-interested public anywhere in the world, including those familiar with the Prado’s masterpieces and those attracted mainly by the novelty of Google Earth technology who are perhaps less familiar with the art.
It is worth mentioning that the Prado Web site has no mention of the Google Earth project on its homepage; in fact, the only place mentioned is in the Press News archive. It appears that the museum’s intent is for audiences to link to the Prado’s Web site from other popular sources such as Google, and not the other way around. This project was initiated by Google Earth Spain, and subsequently proposed to the Prado, which enthusiastically embraced it. A terrific video of the three-month process required to take 8,200 photographs of the 14 masterpieces is on YouTube.
GAMES
Games have long been offered by museums inside the galleries, usually targeting youth with old-fashioned scavenger hunts or even interactive digital games on computer kiosks. In our posting on mobile experiences, we mentioned that games are now being incorporated into cell phone audio tours as well. But with the popularization of the Internet and the development of Web 2.0 technologies that facilitate participation and collaboration, museums began to incorporate games into their Web sites, again targeting youth (also through parents and educators). Another reason for museums to engage online games is to compete with the torrent of highly visual entertainment activities now readily available such as console games, reality television, anime, virtual reality, and interactive computer games such as MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). Museums utilize games in the service of education. These entertainment-based learning tools – infotainment or edutainment – offer an important opportunity for learning that is social and fun, both integral to how youth experience art.
As part of the American Association of Museum’s (AAM) new Center for the Future of Museums, Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, CA) gave a talk last year entitled Gaming the Future of Museums (the event in Washington, DC was later presented as a free webcast by the AAM). Her basic premise is that games make people happy, which is why they are so successful (as well as the fact that they provide clear instructions, feedback, and goals). She believes that museums should incorporate games because they should strive to make people happy, calling on museums to “create sustainable world-changing happiness as its primary mission.” McGonigal believes that games do all the things we need to be happy: satisfying work, the experience of being good a t something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger. She states, “We have all this pent-up knowledge in museums, all this pent-up expertise, and all these collections designed to inspire and bring people together. I think the museum community has a kind of ethical responsibility to unleash it.” Elizabeth Merritt, head of the center, believes that in the future, the best museums will be as interactive and fun as alternate reality games, both for kids and adults.
While scavenger hunts continue to be utilized for kids inside the galleries, they are also popular with adults, especially the new multimedia version that utilizes third-party sites and mobile technologies. The best example of this is the well-known Ghost of a Chance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (July 8 – October 25, 2008), the first alternate reality game (ARG) hosted by a museum. Over 6,000 players participated online and 244 people came for the final onsite event at the museum. Multimedia platforms included Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, the museum’s blog Eye Level, text messaging on mobile phones, as well as exploration of the physical museum. In the museum’s final report and a subsequent presentation at this year’s Museum and the Web conference, Georgina Bath Goodlander (Interpretive Programs manager for the Smithsonian’s Luce Foundation Center) states that the museum was successful in achieving two of its goals: “to get people talking about our museum, to get our name out there” and “to encourage discovery.” The third goal, “to bring a new audience into the museum,” was only partially achieved. The museum did not experience many new visitors to their physical museum, but interestingly it did occur online, with increased traffic driven to their Web sites.
McGonigal states that 91% of youth under the age of 18 play games on the Internet today. Some examples of online games aimed at younger audiences include Getty Games at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Match Madness, Detail Detective, Switch, Jigsaw Puzzles), Matisse for Kids at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Waltee’s Quest: The Case of the Lost Art at the Walters Art Museum, Schoolhouse at the Yale University Art Gallery (Match Game, Art Detective), and Meet Me at Midnight at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The educational value of many of these games is not always clear, but what is clear is that kids are becoming more familiar with works of art, they are learning to look and think critically about art, and they are associating museums and art with fun.
Incorporating games – and much more – is Whyville.net, an educational virtual world for teens and pre-teens. It was launched in 1999 by Numedeon Inc. (neuroscientist Dr. James Bower while at Caltech), and now has a player base of over five million worldwide. Its Web site states that, “Whyville has its own newspaper, its own Senators, its own beach, museum, City Hall and town square, its own suburbia, and even its own economy - citizens earn “clams” by playing educational games.” In 2005, the Getty Museum became the first cultural organization to partner with Whyville, adding their arts content to the site (other museums have since joined, including the Field Museum of Chicago). In a 2005 Getty press release, Peggy Fogelman, assistant director and head of education and interpretive programs at the museum stated, “At the virtual Getty Museum, kids can explore our collections on their own terms. By making art fun and familiar, we hope that Whyvillians will venture beyond their computer monitors into art galleries and museums in their hometowns, and to the Getty Center when they visit Los Angeles. We want them to make art a part of their virtual as well as real lives.” The Getty Museum in Whyville, located in the town square, offers games such as Art Treasure Hunt, and ArtSets Gallery, and Art Hour conversations which is like a chat room for Whyvilleans. A 2006 assessment conducted by the Getty’s Susan Edwards showed some interesting results. The majority of “citizens” interviewed (ages 8 to 15) said the experience made them like art more, and they like games that challenge them. However, most said that the experience didn’t necessarily make them want to visit the physical museum more, but it did generate visits to the Getty Web site (links provided on Whyville). In general, the report stated that Whyville is a “cost-effective word-of-mouth marketing to the youth audience.”
TARGETING YOUTH
In the past fifteen or so years, teenagers (and increasingly “tweens” as well, ages 8-12) have become the center of empirical study in the US regarding learning, socializing, and digital media (as was discussed in our previous posting on library teen Web sites). A few examples include the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, the Digital Youth Project headed by Mimi Ito at UC Irvine, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner and his GoodPlay Project, the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Adolescent Development, the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, the Milken Family Foundation’s Education Technology Project, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ Engaging America’s Youth initiative. Teenagers are now highly valued as representing the “pulse of contemporary culture.” Outside the academic world, teens are also the focus of market researchers and trend forecasters that depend on teenagers’ constant search for the latest product, on their free spirit of experimentation, and on their strong social networks to rapidly (virally) spread information. If the topic of teenagers, learning, and digital media has become a “fundable” one, according to the government, foundations, and influential individuals, then it will also become a priority for museums. Educational initiatives in museums have been fundable for a while, but the digital age has now shifted them onto a different plane, demanding their institutional integration.
Most museums focus on youth for their educational programming and interpretive technologies, creating social groupings (Jeremy Rifkin’s “communities of interest”) that advise the museum, produce content, and even donate money (Brooklyn Museum of Art’s 1stfans). These youth are the future generation of visitors, artists, scholars, even funders, and museums are keen to cultivate their interest and loyalty from an early age, much like brand communities in the corporate sector that foster early habits of consumption. Many museums have separate Web sites producing radio shows, zines, and podcasts managed by teen groups, and even younger kids from six years of age. In 2005, Deborah Schwartz, head of Education for the Museum of Modern Art, stated that “despite the fact that 73 percent of American youth ages 12 to 17 reportedly use the Internet, museums conduct surprisingly few media-based programs for youth.” Much has changed in four years, but these examples – extraordinary for the rich ways in which they engage youth online – are still the exception and not yet the norm.
Many museum Web sites have pages or sections dedicated to youth activities, with some museums even having their own teen councils, but this posting will focus on those that are not merely a repetition of onsite activities. The Web sites mentioned here include features that promote participation and creativity, provide options, invite the public to at least view the content (and at most to participate), and have links both back to and external to the museum. Each Web site is distinct, as are their parent museums equally distinct in their on-site teen programming, their relationship to the Web sites, and in their own histories, priorities, and organization.
The Walker Art Center is one of the most technologically experimental art museums in the country and a leader in teen programming since 1994. The Walker was the first art museum in the country to devote full-time staff to working with and building teen audiences. The teen Web site WACTAC is based on the museum’s Walker Art Center Teen Art Council (WACTAC), a group of 12 or 14 teenagers that meet weekly to design, organize, and market events and programs for other teenagers and young adults at the museum such as artist talks, exhibitions, teen art showcases, and hands-on workshops. The site is divided into four categories: Blogs, Links, Events (museum and external), and Art, although the bulk of the content and the homepage is centered on the blogs. Heideman and Siasoco (2008) note that the Walker’s first goal was to provide WACTAC with a sense of ownership of the site, with direct involvement in the process in order to ensure success. WACTAC members have a username and password that lets them post a blog and add a link, event, or artwork. They can also choose colors, set the background image and header text similar to customization options of MySpace, but they are restricted “from doing things that would severely harm the usability of the site.” It is interesting to note that this is the only site that does not allow outsiders to contribute content or participate in any online creative activities; however the public is free to read the members’ blogs and notices.
The Whitney Museum of American Art’s teen website is called youth2youth, and is designed by teens in the museum’s Youth Insights (YI) program for New York City teens. The site provides links to external resources and programs related to art, and announces YI programs at the museum that are open to other teens such as Artist and Youth: A Dialogue series, What’s Up? At the Whitney, and Teen Night Out. The Web site also features Cast a Vote, an on-line poll about art issues, The Gallery is an online exhibition space for high school age youth to submit their own artwork, and speakART is a space to share opinions and respond to other opinions on artwork in the museum. The Discussion section poses a provocative issue related to society and culture in general, and then asks a number of questions that users can respond to and view other responses. These features are all available to the public, which is an important aspect of the site, as it states that it is “a place where teens can share their insights on American art and culture with other teens around the globe.” While also open for public viewing, the section Youth Insights Reviews presents commentary on specific art-related projects, but only from program participants, and the Bulletin Board offers a space for current and past participants to post and retrieve messages (access is free and open to the public, but only with prior registration). The teens also have their own blog, which is part of the Whitney’s general blog.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s teen website is called Red Studio. Regarding creation and participation, Red Studio is the most interactive for all site visitors. Three activities on the homepage are “inspired by current Red Studio features and guest artists;” Remix is an interactive collage activity based on images, Fauxtogram lets you make your own virtual photographs inspired by artist Man Ray, and Chance Words allows users to create a Dadaist poem.. Unfortunately, these activities are individual ones that do not get shared with others on the site but are more like online games. Red Studio also features artist interviews by teens (currently Vito Acconci and Shahzia Sikander), along with the interactive features youDesign and Character Sketch Contest for users to participate in online activities related to creative design. The site also includes an audio program with podcasts developed by the museum’s Youth Advisory Committee (an internship for New York public school students) to “offer different perspectives on works in MoMA’s Painting and Sculpture galleries. Other features include the Talk Back bulletin board, Quick Polls, and links to museum departments as well as to external sources on artists, museums, and teen art.
WRTE RadioArte 90.5FM can be accessed through the Web site of the National Museum of Mexican Art and as a separate URL. As described on the Web site,“As the only Latino-owned, youth-driven, urban community radio station in the country, we want to encourage listeners to become involved in social justice issues and engage in dialogue through community journalism and first voice forums.” The museum acquired the license to own and operate the radio station in 1996 from the Boys and Girls Club in Chicago and they wanted to keep it a community station. As an initiative of the museum, RadioArte trains Latino youth in radio journalism and production, offering them internships and first-hand experience. The station (and the Web site) is bilingual, offering news (local, national, international), Latino music, and a community events calendar. Many of the radio shows are available on the site as podcasts, video, and “radio novelas.”
Although we are focusing on examples in the US, it is important to mention what is happening at the Tate Museum in England (encompassing Tate Britain, Modern, Liverpool, and St. Ives). Previously, the museum had incorporated a Tate Kids section within the Tate Learning page of their Web site, mostly with a few online games. In July 2008, the new Tate Kids Web site was relaunched. Tate Kids editor Sharna Jackson states, “It was hoped that the redesigned Web site would meet Tate’s mission ‘to increase public knowledge, understanding and appreciation of art’ by the creation of a colorful, relevant interactive Web site with engaging content that would both entertain and educate the intended audience of six to 12 year olds (Museums and the Web 2009). Tate Kids features a blog by kids, films, online games, Tate Create (offline activities), E-cards from the museum’s collection to send to friends, an option to change the background, My Gallery (as has been discussed in the previous post where kids can view other galleries, rate them, share theirs, and comment), and an Adult Zone for parents and educators.
Just this year, the Tate Museum launched Young Tate, “a community website by young people for young people.” Targeted at ages 13-25, Young Tate offers Exam Help, Art School (resources, links, advice), Careers at the Tate, Artists Online (blogs), RSS feed of in-gallery events, a Colour Saturation Game, and Project Gallery (podcasts, videos, and on-line projects). There is also a link to the Manifesto for a Creative Britain that was established at the Tate’s 2008 conference with a call for participation (“join the creative debate and add your own videos and images”).On-line membership is available for free, and other members can be viewed (an important consideration among this target group). Completion of a peer leadership training course at any of the Tate museums is required to be involved in the site production.
The many concrete values of these sites include instilling a sense of community and responsibility to a larger public, both the museum institution and the largely anonymous public of the Internet. This is achieved through collaboration, dialogue, and social networking both in-person and virtually, which provide the valuable skills needed for a deliberative democracy (Robert Asen, 2004). Both Asen and Robert Putnam (2000), in his well-known book Bowling Alone, talk about how citizenship engagement is necessary for democratic societies, formed through the acts of “generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability.” Pluralism is prized within a democracy, and respect for pluralist ideas, opinions, and backgrounds is generated by these sites that present various examples of “amateur” artwork, and also diverse opinions and creative choices by teenagers. Empowering youth (whom Putnam identifies as being less civic-minded) with the production of these sites, with a certain amount of control over some decisions, and with the creation of interviews, podcasts, and curating exhibitions, teaches them to become more active and involved in public acts, helping to produce a more engaged citizenry with strongly developed leadership skills. Museums also benefit by encouraging online participation that supports retention of visitors, members and funders, and attracts new ones that can sustain the organization in the long-run. The public can also provide valuable user-generated content such as personal photos and videos, scholarly assistance with online catalogs, and the creation of creative material to be publicly shared online as we have seen with the teen and kids Web sites. Online participants help museums to know their audience better, which subsequently helps better serve their community. More issues surrounding teen/youth Web sites was discussed in our earlier post focusing on libraries (Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 2: Teen Websites).
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
The social responsibility of museums is most pertinent to their desire to serve the public and foster a sense of community. Putnam urges us to think about social capital as a public good that can be nurtured and used for the greater benefit of society. By utilizing new digital technologies with their Web sites, museums can play their part in fostering a greater sense of community with their online audiences. These new technologies allow museums to go beyond just offering information and images, and to deeply engage with their visitors, to access new ones, and to create and sustain online communities. An online community, much like any physical community, requires that individuals feels they belong to a group and understand the norms or rules of that group, that they share not only interests, but also goals, traditions and activities, that there is direct interaction and communication between individuals in the community, and that individuals contribute to the community. It is important to note that despite the creative nature of art museums, individual contribution need not be creative in nature; contributions could include sending a comment, tagging, rating an object or a tag, or blogging. Museums are creating many programs on-line that enforce a sense of collaboration and community (aside from the afore-mentioned teen/kids Web sites).
1. Wikis
The first example is based on the concept of collective intelligence or crowdsourcing: the use of wikis. According to Wikipedia, a wiki is “a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.” Museums are using wikis to seek user-generated content, both from experts and the general public, depending on institutional goals. A few examples are the Newark Museum’s wiki, and the more active Minnesota Historical Society that has two wikis (Placeography and MN150). The Michigan State University Museum has a Quilt Index, currently with 12 contributing organizations and 721 individual contributions. The challenge with these wikis, however, is that most are accessible mainly from their museum Web sites, which often have the links deeply embedded into specific sections and not as great a reach as larger SNS, media, or aggregate sites. The MuseumsWiki was started by Jonathan Bowen of London South Bank University in 2006, as a central source of information on museums, and in particular as they relate to the Internet. The Web site states that, “It is intended for museum personnel to participate in populating this wiki with museum-related material, typically in a form that is more detailed than suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. It concentrates on technological aspects, especially museum-related wikis.” You can read more about MuseumsWiki in a paper presented by Bowen et al at Museums and the Web 2007.
2. User-generated content
A successful example of museums integrating user-generated content is the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Museum visitors are encouraged to upload photos they have taken at the museum to their Flickr group, the museum’s Web site will link to visitor-created videos posted on YouTube, the museum posts Visitor Video Competitions on YouTube, offers space for visitor reviews on Yelp.com, has a RSS feed on Twitter, posts podcasts on iTunesU, participates in Flickr Commons, and has an account on both Flickr and Facebook. Even more impressive is the museum’s exhibition Click! A Crowd Curated Exhibition (June 27 – August 10, 2008), organized by the museum’s manager of Information Systems, Shelley Berstein. The goal with this exhibition was to determine if James Surowiecki’s premise in his acclaimed book, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), applied to the visual arts as well. “Is a diverse crowd just as ‘wise’ at evaluating art as the trained experts?” they ask on their Web site? The exhibition began with an open call online and onsite for artists to electronically submit photographs corresponding to the theme of “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” The museum then opened an online forum for audience evaluation of all 389 anonymous submissions. The top 20% of the 389 images were displayed in the physical gallery, based on their relative ranking from the juried process. In total, 3,344 people participated as evaluators, providing demographic information so as to determine levels of education and art expertise. The results and statistics are fascinating and too long to list here, but are worthy of a click on their Web site to learn more. Even more fascinating is Surowiecki’s final reflections, which observe a surprising overlap between the judgment of the crowds and the experts.
3. Meetups
Museums have started to organize meetups, where online groups of people with similar interests from around the world meet offline in physical spaces. The Ontario Science Centre in Canada organized the first YouTube meetup in a museum (888torontomeetu), August 8-9, 2008, which was presented by Kevin vonAppen and colleagues at Museum and the Web 2009. The Brooklyn Museum of Art also created a new membership group called 1stfans, which is a socially networked museum group whose members are invited to exclusive social events at the museum called “1stfans meetup.” Museum Meetup is a community Web site for meetups in museums, with 51,705 members, another 38,753 interested, and 155 groups in 9 different countries.
ONLINE AND ONSITE
At this year’s Museums and the Web conference, Koven Smith from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stated that “Right now there is much more information on the Web site than inside the galleries. Our goal is to have an information-rich experience inside the gallery also.” This statement represents the concerns of many museum professionals today, that after years of trying to create an online presence reflecting the physical museum, they are now trying to take their online successes and replicate them offline. Museum consultant Nina Simon (2009, 21) concurs,
No matter how innovative your museum is on the Web, the core service of most museums is still based in the physical building. The more the online functions of a museum deviate from the onsite experience, the more your work will be seen as tangential to the mission of the institution. Now is the time to align your experiments and innovations to the core mission of your museum, and to demonstrate that your successes can be translated to the physical galleries, exhibitions, and programs.
This trend in thinking can be dangerous to the core value of museums, and in particular to art museums. Visitors at the physical museum are presented with an increasingly wide range of multimedia tools (interactive kiosks, computers, cell phone tours, audio guides, podcasts, in-gallery videos, docent tours, wall text, printed brochures and catalogues) that could potentially compete with the visual, direct art experience, especially with new media works that involve audio, video, or interactive components. In attempting to become more populist, museums provide space for alternative interpretations that are incorporated into their interpretive materials, including public figures, celebrities, and other visitors. Museums are doing great jobs of providing different channels for different visitors to explore their content, but often this causes confusion and “information overload,” especially with older visitors not accustomed to a high-tech, open-ended museum experience. In the SFMOMA study mentioned in our previous blog posting, Samis and Pau reveal that “visitors most highly value listening to the artist’s voice, followed by curators and critics, then public figures and celebrities, and lastly the voice of other visitors” (2009, 83).
Henry Jenkins talks about “transmedia storytelling” that flows across different media, and refers to the term “multiplatform entertainment” (he credits Danny Bilson), which both apply to the ways in which museums are incorporating new technologies. Steven Peltzman, MoMA’s Chief Information Officer describes this strategy. “What we want to do first is sit back and see what works and what doesn’t. Things are changing so rapidly in this world that we can’t afford to get ourselves pigeonholed into one approach” (Kennedy, 2009). Museums strive to bring their online audiences into the physical museum, using the same system of visitor categorization and replicating Web 2.0 practices and tools. But perhaps museums should also consider the alternative: that online museum experiences are entirely different than physical ones; that their online audiences are different than their physical ones; and that visitor expectations are different for the virtual and physical museum. Online experiences provide much greater benefit than just promotion and marketing of the physical museum with the goal of attracting walk-in visitors. Now with most Web hosting services offering user statistics, museums can boast impressive numbers of online audiences in addition to their physical ones. They can also generate substantial revenue online through print-on-demand services, online stores, and online payment of membership and sponsorship that could compensate for revenue earned through ticket sales.
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At the physical space, museums can easily address crossover audiences that are accustomed to maneuvering multiple platforms by discretely placing interactive informational kiosks throughout the museum (such as the MoMA.Guide) or even a separate space within the museum (such as The Davis LAB at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a “mix of gallery space with cyberspace”). But otherwise, there is a danger of over-stimulation, “information overload,” and uncertainty within an environment that strives to provide everyone with comfortable, uncomplicated opportunities for “education, study, and enjoyment.”
As if to preempt controversy on the subject, Prado Museum director Javier Rodríguez Zapatero stated that, “With the digital image, we’re seeing the body of the paintings with almost scientific detail. What we don’t see is the soul. The soul will always only be seen by contemplating the original.” The challenge for museums is not in choosing the best platform with which to disseminate information, or even how to make the physical museum experience more complete, but rather how to recognize the diverse types of museum experiences now available and how to best offer them to their diverse audiences.
CONCLUSION
Numerous scholars have written about the deleterious effects of anonymity and deindividuation on the Internet (Zimbardo, 1969), but newer research stresses its positive effects. The Social Identity model of Deindividuation Effects (Lea & Spears, 1991) is the basis for a focus on depersonalization, which alternatively seeks to explain under which conditions individuals identify more with the group than with themselves. This line of study is critical today with so many online activities that offer protection of anonymity, ostensibly encouraging participation, but potentially inhibiting collective action and the growth of online communities. Museums do not encourage anonymity on their Web sites, but rather encourage virtual and physical interactions of their audiences and members – not for the end purpose of achieving a physical museum experience, but rather to encourage participation, creation, and sharing that they believe will lead to a richer museum experience for all. Social theorist Michael Warner (2002) states that, “Reaching strangers is public discourse’s primary orientation, but to make those unknown strangers into a public it must locate them as a social entity.” Museum strangers must first be identified so they can be categorized into initial groups of interest that can then be best integrated into the larger community. The critical and challenging step to make these “unknown strangers into a public” is interactivity and discourse, primarily coming from the public, but facilitated and strategically directed by the museum through its use of new technologies.
REFERENCES
Asen, R. (2004). A discourse theory of citizenship. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90, 189-211.
Bowen, J., et al. (2007, March). A Museums Wikii. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/bowen/bowen.html
Cardiff, R. (2007, March). Designing a web site for young people: The challenges of appealing to a diverse and fickle audience. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/cardiff/cardiff.html
Donath, J. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual community. In P. Kollock & M. Smith (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge.
Goodlander, G. (2009, March). Fictional press releases and fake artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is letting game players redefine the rules. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/goodlander/goodlander.html
Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P. G., Pascoe, C.J., & Robinson, L. (2008). Living and learning with new media: Summary of findings from the digital youth project. Chicago: The MacArthur Foundation.
Jackson, S. & Adamson, R., Doing it for the kids: Tate online on engaging, entertaining and (stealthily) educating six to 12-year-olds. (2009, March). In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/jackson/jackson.html
Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.
Kennedy, R. (2009, March 4). To ramp up its web site, MoMA loosens up [Electronic version]. The New York Times. Retrieved March 11, 2009, fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/arts/design/05moma.html
Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2008, April). Writing, technology and teens. Washington, DC: Author. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/808/writing-technology-and-teens
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Simon, N. (2009). Going analog: Translating virtual learnings into real institutional change. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Selected Papers from an International Conference (pp. 13-21). Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/simon/simon.html
Von Appen, K., Nicholaichuk, K., & Hager, K. (2009). WeTube: Getting physical with a virtual community at the Ontario science centre. In J. Trant & D. Bearman (Eds.), Museums and the Web 2009: Selected Papers from an International Conference (pp. 57-62). Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/vonappen/vonappen.html
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Cambridge: Zone Books.
Learning from the Edges, Part 1: The Importance of Play
In the previous posts, we reviewed innovative uses of digital media within community libraries and museums that are designed specifically to provide visitors and patrons access to digital archives, virtual tours, and vast collections of cultural heritage materials. We also reviewed efforts to use digital media to involve visitors and patrons in the creation of new knowledge through the development of tagging activities, collaborative curating, and games for learning. The following posts consider another set of activities going on at the edges of these institutions that suggest other efforts to transform informal learning experiences for library and museum participants. As John Seely Brown (Hagel and Brown, 2005) famously asserts: “to transform the core, start at the edge.” We’re interested in these edge projects because they offer another set of ideas about how community libraries and museums could function as part of 21st century distributed learning networks. These efforts foster learning by providing opportunities for physical engagement with a range of objects and environments (from the material to the virtual). In this post, we discuss the examples of (1) toy lending libraries and (2) the user-friendly authoring/designing environment called Scratch. These efforts emphasize the importance of play and creative expression in learning and cognitive development.
TOY LENDING LIBRARIES
Unlike in Canada and parts of Europe, toy lending libraries in the United States did not really take off until the 1960s and 1970s. Wales, for example, has a national play policy that is integrated into the mission of the nation’s toy lending libraries (Powell & Seaton, 2007). Although toy lending libraries have existed in the U.S. since 1935, the notion of a such a library is unfamiliar to many people. The U.S. toy lending libraries take a variety of forms: they can be based within a community library, be attached to a main library as a supplemental set of offerings, get organized as a cooperative neighborhood venture, or circulate as a mobile lending collection (Moore, 1995). Though these libraries have diverse structures and lending philosophies, they share an emphasis on the value of play and the importance of providing support to a wide range of children. Most cater to young children, usually newborn through kindergarten, though some have toys and other learning objects available for kids as old as 10.
One of the guiding principles of toy lending libraries is the importance of play for developing a range of skills in children. According to the USA Toy Library Association, through offering “high-grade” toys to all, toy lending libraries foster children’s development and thus serve an important educational purpose. In many toy lending libraries, toys including stuffed animals, musical instruments, puzzles, and crafts are available to be borrowed or used within the library space. Some of these libraries also offer books. Through interacting with a particular toy in the library space, children also learn values of sharing, community, and honesty. Many toy lending libraries also provide forums for parents, teachers, and others to discuss the educational value of play in general and certain types of toys in particular. In addition to providing opportunities for fun and educational play, toy lending libraries can be an important source of support for both parents and children. For parents, toy libraries can provide information about child development; they can also help parents to be more informed consumers. Some toy libraries also serve as informal childcare sites. The Cuyahoga County Public Library system in Ohio has a dedicated Toy Lending Library website that offers an online guide to assist parents in choosing the right toy for their child.
Other toy libraries are designed especially to offer a safe and nurturing space for disabled children to learn and play. The most well-known example of this type of toy library is the Lekotek movement, originally begun in Sweden. Roughly translated as “play library,” (Moore, 1995), Lekotek is a network of toy libraries (mostly concentrated in the Midwest and eastern U.S.), computer centers, and support services for families with children with special needs. The Lekotek mission is to use “interactive play experiences, and the learning that results, to promote the inclusion of children with special needs into family and community life”
While many toy libraries focus on promoting the value of play and provide support for parents and guardians, others have as part of their mission a desire to reduce waste and consumption. When a toy can be checked out of a library rather than purchased, there are clear ecological benefits in that the same toy can be used by numerous children. This allows families to save money and children learn the value of saving and sharing. The Mission Statement of the Heights Parent Center in Cleveland Ohio clearly articulates this philosophy:
TLL helps families resist the urge to buy, buy, buy every toy on the market.
Use TLL to try different toys out before running out and buying them.
Rotate the toys in your home affordably.
Teach your children the value of borrowing rather than buying.
Another example of toy libraries emphasizing conservation is found in Fiona’s Toy Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Brandt, 2008). This library shares some of the philosophy of the Heights Parent Center above (reducing waste, helping people save money) but is totally free, has no lending time limits, and does not charge for toys that are returned broken.
SCRATCH: Design for Learning, Design for Tinkering
Toy lending libraries typically emphasize the importance of material objects (toys) in developing important learning objectives: sharing, exploration, creativity. One of the most innovative efforts to integrate the digital with the physical is the virtual authoring environment called Scratch. Created by Mitch Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a ”graphical programming language designed to support the development of technological fluency” in young people. Although anyone can use Scratch, the target audience is 8- to 16-year-olds. Scratch is currently used in libraries, schools, museums, community centers, as well as homes. Key attributes of Scratch include promoting technological fluency, creativity, and “tinkerability” as well as building online communities of creative participation.
Scratch Home Page
Technological Fluency
The phrase “technological fluency” can have a range of meanings, but Resnick and his colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab compare it to language fluency. (See the handout titled: “Technological Fluency: The Clubhouse Learning Approach” produced by Resnick and others at the MIT Media Lab (no date). Memorizing phrases and grammatical structures does not necessarily make one fluent in a language; rather, it is the ability to use the language creatively in complex situations. In the same way, technological fluency comes not from merely knowing how to use a technological tool, but instead through having the ability to creatively make things with it. With a tool such as a computer, technological fluency includes using and learning new ways to use the computer, creating based on one’s own ideas, and “understanding concepts related to technological activities.
Scratch encourages technological fluency in a number of ways. First, it teaches programming language through using graphics that look like building blocks. The user snaps the blocks together (like Legos) in order to combine animation, photos, music, sound, etc. to create interactive projects (Resnick, 2007; Peppler & Kafai, n.d.). The blocks can only fit together in a certain way, which eliminates the frustration caused by inadvertent syntax errors. This type of intuitive programming language also allows users to “‘play with [their] code’ testing out new ideas incrementally and iteratively” (Resnick, 2007). Through interacting with Scratch, users learn computational concepts, mathematical ideas, and design processes. The Scratch website also facilitates technological fluency through providing numerous resources, including cards that show users how to do everything from make their animated objects “move to a beat,” to “change color,” to “keep score.”
Creativity and Tinkerability
Scratch was created in line with what Resnick (2007) calls a “‘kindergarten approach to learning or the “creative thinking spiral.” This approach begins with imagining, and then progresses through creating, playing, sharing, reflecting, and then back to imagining. While these steps do not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion, the key point is that all of these elements are involved in the type of learning that is necessary for the digital age or what Resnick calls the “Creative Society.” Scratch promotes creativity by offering opportunities for users to learn the steps of dynamic and interactive design. One of the key goals, according to Resnick, is that Scratch encourages “tinkerability”: the environment/application makes it easy to put together fragments of computer programs, try them out, and take them apart again. The emphasis on tinkerability is hinted at in the Scratch name, which was appropriated from the technique of hip-hop deejays, who use vinyl albums and a turntable to create an array of sounds. Like deejays, users can make a wide range of creations, including animations, games, birthday cards, and reports.
Resnick and his Lifelong Kindergarten research team have deep expertise in the creation and design of mix-reality learning objects. The Lifelong Kindergarten researchers, along with the LEGO company created LEGO MINDSTORMS: “the first programmable brings and robotic kits.” More recently Lifelong Kindergarten research has inspired the development of a new invention kit called The PicoCricket Kit that integrates art and technology to spark creative thinking. The basic component of PicoCrickets (called a “PicoBoard") works with the Scratch programming language such that users can connect material (real-world) sensors to on-line (digital) Scratch projects.
PicoCricket Kit Components
Collaborative Community
One of the most appealing aspects of Scratch is the user community that has developed around the authoring environment. The creation of community was an explicit objective for the development of Scratch. As the original designer of Scratch, Resnick believed that technological fluency is based in learning from, and sharing with others. This is in contrast to many other Web 2.0 sites, which support uploading on the part of producers and commenting on the part of viewers, but not necessarily meaningful interaction between the two. The Scratch website is designed to facilitate connection among users, such as through commenting on projects, joining forums, and participating in galleries (formed around common topics). Another noteworthy aspect of the community is how it emphasizes the positive, again to encourage learning, sharing, and community. For example, users can “love” projects but they cannot give them only one or two stars, as is the case with other websites such as YouTube. Again, this design feature is intentional in order to promote a supportive community (Resnick, personal communication). As of July 10, 2009, “There are 473,487 projects with a total of 11,948,669 scripts and 3,702,846 sprites created by 72,121 contributors of our 320,690 registered members. Another key to the opportunities for creative thinking and designing that are built into Scratch is that projects are remixable. This means that any member of the Scratch community can download the source code of a project to create a new project. Creative appropriation is in fact encouraged. As of August 2007, 15% of the approximately 24,000 shared projects were remixes (Monroy-Hernandez and Resnick, 2008). When a new remix project is posted, a link to the original project appears in order to credit the creator. This practice has led to discussions regarding originality, creativity, and copyright.
Learning From Remix Culture
Scratch was developed in accordance with a long tradition at the Media Lab of a philosophy which focuses on the value of teaching students to design learning environments rather than simply use them. This philosophy of teaching young people to make music (or visual art, etc) rather than simply consume it informs many after-school and community-based informal education programs that make use of digital audio software to encourage young people to recognize their creative potential. See for example:
- Digital Youth Network provides students tools and faciliates their ability to become creators who can and innovators.
http://iremix.org/ - Berklee City Music Program is a national network of institutions offering the Berklee PULSE music method to under-served teens.
http://berkleecitymusicnetwork.org/ - Youth Radio was founded in 1990 to train young people from under-resouced public schools, community-based organizations, group homes and juvenile detention centers in broadcast journalism, media production and cutting-edge technology.
http://www.youthradio.org/about/youth-programs - The Hiphop Archive Project is dedicated to increasing youth representation and participation in artistic creation and collaborations.
http://www.hiphoparchive.org/university - Rock the Classroom restores music education in under served public elementary schools by using music and songwriting to complement literacy curricula.
http://www.rocktheclassroom.org/whatwedo.html - A Place Called Home provides cultural arts program to at-risk youth in the form of music, dance, and fine arts.
http://www.apch.org/creativeexpression.php
Brandt, D. (2008, October). Toy lending service may keep Ann Arbor area kids stimulated. Ann Arbor News [Online]. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from
http://www.mlive.com/annarbornews/news/index.ssf/2008/10/toy_lending_service_may_keep_a.html
Hagel, J. and J. S. Brown. 2005. The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Monroy-Hernandez, A. and Resnick, M. (2008, March + April). Empowering kids to create and share programmable media. Interactions. Retrieved August 30, 2008, from http://mags.acm.org/interactions/20080304/?pg=52
Moore, J. E. (1995). A history of toy lending libraries in the United States since 1935. Unpublished master’s thesis. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://eric.ed.gov:80/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/14/4f/ef.pdf
Peppler, K. A. and Kafai, Y. B. (n.d.). Creative coding: Programming for personal expression. Retrieved September 1, 2008, from http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/llk/scratch/archives/CreativeCoding-PepperKafai.pdf
Powell, R., and Seaton, N. (2007). “A treasure chest of service”: The role of toy libraries within play policy in Wales. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://eric.ed.gov:80/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/3e/ab/4b.pdf
Resnick, M. (2007). All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, Washington, D.C. Retrieved July 20, 2008, from http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Emres/papers/kindergarten-learning-approach.pdf
Resnick, M. (2007-08). Sewing the seeds for a more creative society. Learning & Leading with Technology.
Scratch Research Wiki: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Research
Authors Bio:
This posting was authored by Cara Wallis, Maura Klosterman, and Anne Balsamo.
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