Online Communities
Book Review: Internet and Asian Cultural Studies
Cho-Han Hae-Joang et al, Seoul, Korea: Yonsei University Press, 2007
I visited Korea recently. Since it was a short stay, I did not have much chance to update myself with busy observations on ever-changing technosphere in Korea as I would usually do. Yet I managed to meet a young cultural studies researcher, Kim Hee-Won who has been keeping a sharp eye on the Internet world and its young inhabitants, thanks to Larissa Hjorth’s kind introduction. Chatting with/interviewing Hee-Won in the midst of my jet lag stupor was more than refreshing, and we simply could not agree more about the dearth (and urgency) of serious research on new media practices and cultures in Korea in the shadow of the hyped image of wired Korea.
One of interesting points from our conversation that grabbed me was Hee-Won’s view on the generational identity of young Koreans in their 20s with regards to their new media practices. Hee-Won reads their intensive attachment to such new media services as Minihompy, messenger, and SMS and their often obsessive attempt to be constantly connected as a form of performing a reciprocal “check-up of (their) survival for another day.” It is generally true that these new social media intensify the sense of ‘constant on’ for users across generations. Yet as Hee-Won suggests, this practice may reflect the desire for the emotional comfort from assuring one’s presence within the network. In particular, this interpretation makes quite appealing sense when it comes to Korean youth in 20s whose insecure social status, resulted from increasing unemployment rate since 1997 economic crisis, has become a widely acknowledged social issue. In other words, Internet has provided the major playground and outlet for this frustrated generation.
Our speculation on this specific group of youth got me rethinking and reassured about the simple principle of our study on digital media and youth: the importance of considering historical and cultural specificity of diverse groups of young people under the umbrella of the term ‘youth’ as well as recording the transformative and transient nature of media practices. Certainly, Internet would not be the same space for Korean teenager who is born into it with many other available options of digital media and the twenty something whose primal new media experience began with the burgeoning Internet.
Moreover, I am glad to find my question is not wasted yet more profoundly addressed in Internet and Asian Cultural Studies, an anthology Hee-Won kindly gave me. Written in Korean by renowned as well as young cultural studies researchers who are mostly rooted in Yonsei University’s Graduate Program in Culture and Gender Studies, this book provides a great historical standpoint to what they call, “holding back” moment of Internet culture in Korea. Declaring the end of the first stage of Internet fever, it attempts to surmise the legacy of wired Korea in early 2000s and record the transition of the Internet from the wild new space for various voluntary and civil experiments to the striated space for tired/accustomed patterns overrun by the commercial logic, at the threshold of institutionalized “networked era.”
Each article based primarily on ethnographical field research presents so many interesting findings and rich details of what have constructed newly emerging alternative space for Korean and Korean youth. Yet, an anthology format always makes it hard to dwell on each argument. To briefly introduce the gamut of researches, the book includes Cho-Han Hye-Joang’s thought-provoking review of the history of Korean Internet culture with focus on specific ‘agencies’ and ‘sites’; Kim-Cheong Hee-Won’s comprehensive analysis on Cyworld community; Hwang Sang-Min’s, an author of the Dehanminkook Cyber Sinillyu (Korean Cyber New Generation), qualitative study on online community, Gaming(Maple Story), and the role of play for learning and identity formation in cyberspace; Park Geon-Ha on Progamers’ world; Yun Te-Jin on the transnational consumption of popular cultural products, especially reception of foreign television drama content across Asia; Kim Hak-Sil and Lee Chung-Han on active consumption and re-appropriation of Japanese entertainment content by young Korean fans; Kim Hyun-Mi on the lagged establishment of accompanying laws and policies and shifting cultural values in Internet space.
In spite of limited space here, I would like to highlight Cho-Han Hye-Joang’s works as her article presents overarching themes of the book. Cho-Han is a renowned cultural anthropologist who has been delving into the issues of gender and youth culture in modern Korea for the last 30 years. She is one of few anthropologists who not only keep critical eyes but also act out pronouncedly on the emerging cultures and changes of Korean society along with Internet and new media technologies. For example, Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture (Haja Center), where Cho-Han is the founding director, is one of exemplary institutional projects that run alternative and innovative learning programs for young people.
In her article, she raises two questions: how has Korea established the infrastructure of the Internet network so fast and where are the Internet venture companies and online netizens who built and grew out of this environment now? While there have been various academic and journalistic attempts to unearth the secret behind the success of IT-power house Korea, Cho-Hans’s answer to the first question resonates to those views that pinpoint the operating discourse of techno-nationalism underlying rapid technological developments, which I also see as the central drive behind the development of mobile technology in Korea. It is no doubt that the nationalistic and collective (state-leading yet with active engagement of market and citizens) model, which had once worked well for the rapid industrialization of Korea, did the same trick for the informatization during the 1990s. What Cho-Han adds, based on her rich experience as an educator and early adopter of the Internet at every stage, is her reflective examination of the role of the ‘civil’ sector - the vigorous civil and voluntary experiments in online space of early days (1998-2002)- which she characterizes as the process of establishing “condensed modernization,” “cyber democracy,” temporary self-regulated space,” and “alternative public space.”
In spite of many strong points, however, this book bears one noticeable weakness: the limited attention to the ‘Asian’ aspect of given issue. Betraying what the title promises, it mostly focuses on Korean phenomena. When the Asian and transnational perspective comes into play, it only tackles Japan-Korea cultural exchange. Nevertheless, this anthology expresses its commitment to connecting Korea with other Asian contexts by providing the substantial analysis of Korean case that could potentially illuminate similar social changes undergoing in other Asian countries. Yes, it is true that what we learn from early examples could light up the following discussions yet it would only be the beginning step of what we expect from future comparative researches.
New Media Practices in Korea: Part 1. The Internet
In 1997, the first major portal Daum began its free email service and subsequently opened Internet cafes (public forums) two years later. Since its early days, online space in Korea was rarely considered as purely cyber or virtual space occupied by techno-geek. Instead, the strong connectivity between online and offline reality defines Internet as an inextricable part of techno-culture in Korea. While the excessive commercialism of internet culture often becomes the target of cultural critique, its potential as an alternative public space that can harbor diverse voices free from the regulations of authorities and can nourish new ways of civil democracy attracts the attention of both Korean and foreign scholars. The early buzz about Ohmynews is a typical example of celebrating the new form of ‘citizen journalism’ (Rheingold, 2002). Cho (2007) assesses that these vigorous civil and voluntary experiments characterize early days of Internet in Korea (1998-2002) as “temporary self-regulated space,” until it was eventually governed by commercial networks.
In this context, it is not surprising that ‘online community’ is at the center of the discussion. Since early 2000s, online community, housed in several major portals such as Daum and Naver, has become the main site for online activities. These domestic portal sites yield the enormous power of structuring Korean Internet culture in unique ways. For example, among general Korean Internet users, Naver is the most popular search engine with its famous Jishiin, one of the early crowd sourcing search system if not the first to incorporate the ‘collective wisdom.’ Although Naver’s search engine mostly provides information within its own network, Korean users prefer its easy and quick access to useful information garnered from its huge database of individual blogs, public forums, news and multimedia content. Naver and Daum occupy 88.3 percent of domestic search engine market while Google falls short with 2.1 percent share (NIA, 2008). At the same time, numerous online communities and public forms in these sites, spread across diverse categories such as tastes, ages, and vocations, tend to be more influential than individual power bloggers in shaping public opinion (i.e. Daum Agora Café). When the controversial social issues arise, they easily turn into the sites for public debate that often accompanies new forms of political actions such as online petition, cyber protest, and the relay of banners. In 2008, Daum alone had around 7.3 million cafes running and the average of 3000 – 4000 new cafes opened daily (www.daum.net).
Young people are main residents of this online space. Their activities in various online communities have become the central focus of the discourse on cyber youth culture. In conversation with the overall changes of Korean society in political and cultural sphere since the 1990s, Bae (2003) and Yoon (2001) define the ‘Net’ generation as a new social group growing out of online community. In the same vein, Choi (2005) argues Net generation embodies a new form of identity that blends newly emerged individualistic lifestyle and anonymous networking in online space, which is distinguished from the existing social behaviors of older generations. This socio-psychological approach constructs the image of Korean youth who easily accept the cyber space as an extension of the real world and enjoy exploring diverse new media tools for self-expression (Hwang, 2000; Soh, 2002).
In particular, interest-driven online communities are major playgrounds for Korean youth. They are the center for active knowledge building and informal learning that is motivated by diverse leisure activities. According to Cho (2006), in 2003, 99.1 percent of Korean adolescents who used computers daily, logged in to the Internet and 89.1 percent of them has a membership in more than one online community: Each person had an average of 13.7 communities. The overpowering presence of the youth in online community is increasing each year. In 2003, 77.7 percent of the Daum café user is in their teens and twenties and they also make the majority of the café managers (Kang, 2003). Young people join online community activities primarily “to share with same interest and taste” (62.9%) and continue engaging with them “in order to attain information or knowledge”(39.9%) (Hwang, 2003). Fan communities are full of these shared learning activities, often about other cultures. For example, it is common for young people to teach each other basic level Japanese in a typical portable game fan community (Cho, 2006). The popularity of online community-based activities is often attributed to its function as the emotional outlet for youth in Korea, where alternative play culture and the democratic communication structure across generations tend to be repressed in real life. In that sense, youth targeted online communities such as Sayclub (Kang, 2003) and Damoim (Kim, 2003) meet their desire to hang out and carve out their own space outside of adult supervision and social pressures.
On the other side, blogging is another prevalent online practice. In fact, Korea “boasts the second largest number of bloggers in the world, surpassed only by the Unites States of America” (Choi, 2006). However, it is interesting that blogging in Korea is closely linked with the adoption of social network sites (SNS). While blogs are considered to be the private space compared to the more public-oriented online communities, young people use blog primarily “to build and maintain social relationship” rather than to engage “journalistic or participatory activities” (Kim, 2006; Choi, 2006). Cyworld, one of the first SNS service in the world that was introduced in 1999, represents this culturally specific tendency in Korean blogsphere. Over 90 percent of Korean Internet users in their twenties are members of Cyworld (http://times.hankooki.com). Its phenomenal popularity and social impact generated cultural syndrome across generations, ages, and genders as its membership equates approximately to one quarter of the nation’s entire population. Referring to the obsessive use of Cyworld, new jargons such as Cying (doing Cyworld)’ and Cy-pein (Cy fanatic/geeks) have become popular additions to everyday conversation. In this context, it is not surprising that most Korean/English studies of SNS and blogsphere in Korea focus on Cyworld.
Most of all, it is the unique formal aspects of Cyworld that distinguish it from common blog applications and thus show how technology is culturally shaped and appropriated into a specific emotional technology. Cyworld provides a personal space called Mini-hompy, which MySpace adopted in a similar way, and Il-chon (literally, the first degree kinship) system, a tool to network with other Cyworld users (an equivalent to ‘neighbors’ in MySpace). In essence, by providing cute layouts, avatars, images, virtual goods, and hip multimedia content, Cyworld represents the cute aesthetics - the unique operating principle of popular culture in Korea as well as in Japan. This culturally friendly system (cute aesthetics, Il-chon) and easy application tools allow the user to express his/her identity through the customization of Mini-hompy and encourage migratory practice across interconnected digital media sphere (Hjorth & Kim, 2005).
Cultural factors are often accredited for the success of Cyworld since long-term human network maintenance is regarded as highly important in the collectivistic and interdependent Korean society. The adoption of blogging as a tool to reaffirm offline social relation is a pervasive phenomenon that is not limited to Cyworld: Relation-oriented blogs are generally more popular in Korea (Na et al, 2007). Korean youth also primarily engage with Cyworld to micromanage their social relationship (Kim & Yun, 2008). In fact, according to Jang & Nam (2006), the most frequented type of sites for Korean youth is Mini-hompy/blog. Café board ranks the second and Internet game site follows. Na et al (2007)’s comparative ethnographic study of blog-type young Internet users and game-type users reveal that blog-type interest users tend to valorize relation-oriented activity. However, young people adopt the careful ‘social’ filtering system by utilizing screening tools embedded in Cyworld (Choi, 2006). In this sense, Mini-hompy functions as a closed or controlled open space. Recently, the closed usage of Cyworld for securing personal space is increasing significantly as 30 percent of Cyworld users identify themselves as solely diary recorders (Hwang et al, 2008).
Overall, as in many other national contexts, youth Internet culture in Korea has met with ambivalent responses in public and academic discourse. Blogging is generally received as a positive activity since it motivates young Koreans to blog to build ‘self-respect’ and ‘self-identity’ (Kim, 2006). On the contrary, young people’s fun-oriented consumption/reappropriation of multimedia content in online space is more vulnerable to securitizing eyes. In fact, Internet has already replaced old media as the preferred mode of media consumption: Creating and sharing multimedia content has become common practice among Korean youth. Before Youtube grabbed the heart of global viewers, Korean online space was already flooded with busy file transmissions as soon as domestic media production softwares and commercial P2P sites and UCC sites (notably, Pandora TV and GomTV) opened their channels. In a broader context, this play culture that messes around with media content forms part of young people’s widespread practice of new media production, which I will dwell on in a following blog post.
Lastly, what is particularly interesting about Korean youth Internet culture is the increasing mobilization of young people for civic engagement through the use of diverse new media technologies. Recent ‘Candlelight Protests’ organized against American beef import in 2008 was a watershed moment because teenagers emerged as the new political agents (especially, teenage girls). Active and organized teenagers’ participation set off and sustained the event. On the first day of candlelight protest in May 2nd 2008, teenagers comprised 60-70 percent of attendees and the image of ‘Candlelight Girls’ immediately became the icon of this civil movement (Lee & Jung, 2008). Although the main cause for the protest was the resumed import of American beef with insufficient measures to screen mad cow disease that might affect their well-beings in the future, many argues that it was Korean teenagers’ ongoing dissatisfaction with the repressive educational system and fear for intensifying competition driven by new government’s educational policies (such as ‘Immersive English Teaching Program’) that triggered teenagers’ voluntary collective action.
However, ‘e-politics’ of Korean youth is not a sudden phenomenon. Candlelight girls have their predecessors. Social issues that mobilized Korean youth to participate in real action are diverse in their scope and scale, from more direct political events such as the 2002 presidential election (Kim, 2004) and the anti-American protest around the middle school girls accidental death by GI (Bhuiyan, 2004) to micro-level problems of educational systems. In particular, Lee et al (2007) traces preceding incidents that “digital natives” have collectively voiced out through online communities: ‘No Cut’ campaign (against rigid hairstyle controls in the secondary schools) in 2000, the protest against reformed university entrance selection system (2004), and the campaign of the ‘National Network for the Protection of Student Human Rights’ in 2005. Significantly, No-cut campaign is recorded as one of the first successful e-political movements of Korean youth that led to the revision of official policy.
Youth also brought new mode of political communication. Korean youth demonstrated savvy use of diverse communication channels in delivering their voices, which is clearly distinguished from the monolithic and centralized mode of dominant media. While online space provides the main channel to obtain and share information as well as to form the public opinion, mobile phone plays a key role in mobilizing and coordinating actions on the spot as well as recording/live broadcasting the progress of the event. These multiple forms of news get spread across diverse media channels including their own Mini-hompy/blog, SMS, and portal sites. At the same time, Lee (2007) highlights young people’s changed attitude toward political engagement, which has become more ‘fun’ oriented. In other words, young people tend to combine participation in social and political affairs with play, parody, humor, wit and caricature to express their feelings and opinions rather than direct criticism. Memorable scenes from the candlelight protest are inundated with creative picket signs of diverse causes and witty performances in a free speech podium. (i.e. skit, dancing, and singing). These displays of playful demonstration resonate with the comparatively unrestrained participatory culture of young people in Internet space. However, the significance and implication of these recent incidents and the e-politics of Korean youth are still under discussion and require more thorough analysis. As Park (2002) criticizes, while Internet provides the alternative public forum for young people to voice out easily, it does not automatically guarantee the actual attendance of young voters.
References
English Sources
Bae, I. (2003). Cyber Influences on the Youth and Related Policies in South Korea: Focused on Internet. Journal of Youth Studies-Hong Kong, 6(1), 144-157.
Bhuiyan, S. I. (2004). Use of Internet in Political Participation in South Korea. Asia Pacific Media Educator, (15), 115-130.
Choi, J. (2006). Living in Cyworld: Contextualizing Cy-ties in South Korea. In Uses of Blogs (pp. 173-186). New York: Peter Lang.
Hjorth, L., & Kim, H. (2005). Being There and Being Here: Gendered Customizing of 3G Mobile Practices – Through a Case Study in Seoul. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 11, 49-55.
Kim, H. H. (2004). Broadband Penetration and Participatory Politics: South Korea Case. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii, USA. Retrieved July 30, 2008, from http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/proceedings/&toc=comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/05/2056toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/HICSS.2004.1265301.
Kim, K., & Yun, H. (2007). Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved July 31, 2008, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.yun.html.
Kim, K. (2006). Internet addiction in Korean Adolescents and Its relation to Depression and Suicidal Ideation: A questionnaire Survey. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 43(2), 185-192.
Lee, H., Han, G., Oh, S., & Phillips, R. (2007). Participation, Young people and the Internet: Digital Natives in Korea. In Generational Change and New Policy Changes: Australia and South Korea, Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2084.
Park, L. (2002). Artisanship, Political Interest and Voting Behavior Influenced by Information Technology: Cyber-Life versus Real-Life of Young Generation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Boston, USA.
Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Yoon, S. (2001). Internet Discourse and the Habitus of Korea’s New Generation. In Culture, Technology, Communication. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Korean literature
Cho, H. (2006). Jisikjeongbosahweowa Cheongsonyeunmunhwa Jegochal: Cheongsonyeuneui Online Community Chamyeowa Jisik, Jeongbo Seupdeukleul Jungsimeuro (Rethinking Youth Culture in Information Society: Youth Participation in On-line Community and Acquisition of Knowledge and Information). Educational Anthropology Study, 9(2), 141-166.
Cho, H. J. (2007). Internetsideui Munhwayeongu: Juche, Hyeonjang, georigo Seroun “Sahyoi”e dehayeo (Cultural Studies in Internet Age: Subject, Sites, and New “Society”). In H. J. Cho et al, (Eds.), Internet and Asian Cultural Studies. Seoul, Korea: Yonsei University Press.
Choi, W. (2005). Cheongsonyeungwa Cybermunhwa (Youth and Cyberculture). In Cheongsonyeun Munhwaron (Youth Culture Studies). Seoul, Korea: National Youth Policy Institute.
Hwang, J. (2003). Cheonsonyeunui Cybercommunity Chamyei mit Yiyongsilte Yeongu (A Study of Adolescents’ Participation in Cyber community). Seoul, Korea: National Youth Policy Institute.
Hwang, S. (2000). Sinsedae(N sede)ui Jagipyohyeungwa Cyber gongganeseoui Sanghojakyong: Sagowa Hengdong Yangsikui Byeunhwareul Jungsimeoro (Adolescents` Self - Expression and Their Interaction Patterns in Cyberspace ; Exploration of Behavior patterns and Thoughts). Korean Journal of Psychology, 13(3), 9-19.
Hwang, S., Kim, J., & Cho, H. (2008). Cybergonggansokeui Gwangye Mecgi: Cyworld Yiyonghendonge Natanan Social Network Hwaldong Yangsande Dehan Tamsek (Self and Community Experience in Cyberspace: Social Networking in Cyworld). Korean Journal of Consumer and Advertising Psychology, 9(2), 285-303.
Jang, K., & Nam, J. (2006). Cheongsonyeon Jeongbohwa Hyeunhwanggwa Deeungbangan II ( Adolescents’ Informatization and Measures) . Seoul, Korea: National Youth Policy Institute.
Kang, M. (2003). Sayclubeui Cheongsonyeun Community ( Youth Community in Sayclub). In A Study of Youth Participation and Use of Cyber Community (pp. 175-183). Seoul, Korea: Korea Institute for Youth Development.
Kim, J. (2003). Damoimeui Cheongsonyeun Community (Youth Community in Damoim). In A Study of Youth Participation and Use of Cyber Community (pp. 184-197). Seoul, Korea: Korea Institute for Youth Development.
Kim, Y. (2001). Cheongsonyeon Deangongganeuroseoui Cyberspace Hwalyong Siltewa Uimi (Adolescents’ Use of Cyberspace as Alternative Space). Korean Youth Studies, 33, 157-180.
Kim, Y. (2006). Blogui Mediajeok Gineunggwa Hange: Blog Yiyongjaui Blog Yiyong Hengtewa Pyeonggareul Jungsimeuro (A Study on the Blog as a Media: Focused on Media Functions and the Problems of the Blog). Korea Journalism & Communication Studies, 50(3), 59-91.
Lee, C., & Jung, E. (2008). Chotbulmunhwajee natanan Cheongsonyeuneui Sahyeuichamyeo Teukseounge dehan Yeongu (A Study of the Characteristics of Youth Participation through the Candle Culture Festivals against the Import of U.S. Beef). Communication Science Studies, 8(3), 457-491.
Na, E., Park, S., & Kim, E. (2007). Cheongsonyeuneui Internet Yiyong Yuhyeongbyeul Media Yiyong Yangsikgwa Jeokeung: Bloghyeonggwa Gamehyeongeul Jungsimeuro (Media Use and Adjustment of Adolescents according to the Types of Internet Use: Focusing on blog-Type and Game-Type). Korea Journalism Studies, 51(2), 392-524.
National Information Society Agency. (2008). Kukga Jeongbo Sahwoehwa Bekseo (National Informatization Whitepaper). Seoul, Korea.
Park, J. (2003). Hyudejeonhwa, Internet, Televisionui Media Sokseong Chaiwa Yiyong Donggi Yoin Yeongu (The Media Characteristics and Use Motives of Cellular Phone, Internet and Television In Korea). Korean Journalism Studies, 47(2), 221-251.
Soh, Y. (2002). Internet Communitywa Hanguksahoi (Internet Community and Korean Society. Seoul, Korea: Hanul Academy.
“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).
Libraries: Setting the Context
From National Efforts to Create Digital Archives to Local Efforts at Access Equality
Libraries and museums have a common core characteristic as stewards of collections that can be made available to others. There is a drive toward preservation informing the mission of both kinds of institutions, what Derrida (1995) has called “the archontic principle.” As digital technology made impacts on the modes of preservation available to libraries, several efforts were made at the national level to bring together research and practices for digital preservation, along with the means for institutions to share access to their collections. As digital technologies and personal computing grew more ubiquitous among the general public, community libraries were recognized for their potential to serve as an internet resource for people who did not otherwise have access to the web. These two strands within the literature on digital media and libraries inform this post. The focus here is on the United States, in part due to the US based nodes the MacArthur Foundation plans to support in its efforts at establishing distributed learning networks mentioned in the previous post.
Digital Archives and Distributed Networks of Preservation
Efforts to digitize library holdings go back to the 1970s, with Project Gutenberg as an early example (Maidenberg, 2008). In 1995, a group of organizations working to digitize their holdings formed the Digital Library Federation as a way to pool resources for infrastructure research and best practices based in collective experience (Kresh, 2007). Funding and institutional support from the US government came around the same time as millennial panics about the loss of digital data and increased circulation of the terms information society and knowledge economy (Ross & Hedstrom, 2005). Smith (2006) writes “in December 2000, recognizing that born-digital content of value to the nation is at risk of being lost to current and future generations, Congress created the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIPP." The Library of Congress was charged with oversight of the program, which funded research for digital infrastructures that would support a distributed network of multiple kinds of digital objects (LeFurgy, 2005). Over time, Congress has approved the extension of this network to include state, regional, and international organizations and an increasing number of private sector partners with stakes in preservation technology (Smith, 2006). Funding for the technical architecture was meant to address four critical areas of investment:
1. building a distributed storage platform to help preserving institutions attain redundant and geographically disbursed storage of digital materials at low cost;
2. establishing protocols for preservation-quality data transfer;
3. developing and testing tools and services for ingest, storage, metadata, and formats and
4. developing practices and standards for assessing the quality of preservation systems (Smith, 2006).
The National Science Foundation also sought to support a distributed network of specialized digital holdings in the form of the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Educational Digital Library (NSDL). The NSDL “comprises a set of projects engaged in a collective effort to build a national digital library of high quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational materials for students and teachers at all levels, in both formal and informal settings” (Zia, 2001). As a repository for learning environments and educational materials, the NSDL faced distinct challenges from the NDIIPP or other projects that have focused on knowledge stored in print form.
References to the library at Alexandra come up repeatedly in reflections upon the possibility of interconnected digital libraries that would together serve as a repository for all the knowledge produced by humankind (Kresh, 2007). Since its announcement in 2004, Google’s Google Books project has received the most attention for its attempt to digitize every book that has been published and create such a repository (Coyle, 2006; Jeanneney, 2005; Maidenberg, 2008; Toobin, 2007). The company began working towards this goal through partnerships with university-based libraries and publishing companies and are currently working with US courts to create a settlement agreement from (Pickler, 2009) a class-action suit by the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The embedded nature of Google’s profit structures and the search tools that serve as access points for users has caused concern among many in the publishing, preservation, and copyright trades since 2004. Responses include the creation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), which is simultaneously undertaking the mass digitization of books with the goal of creating a digital repository for shared digital media, including its metadata (Maidenberg, 2005) and international outcry against Google’s cultural politics and economic structure ("German Authors,” 2009; Jeanneney, 2005; Picker, 2009)
On one of Google’s self-published blogs, the company emphasizes the ways their project will create access for larger populations to works that can be difficult to find (Smith, 2009). Leetaru (2008) describes Google’s project and those of its competitors as one of access digitization rather than preservation digitization. The difference mostly comes down to the digital formats used to create a digitized version of an analog form. Coyle (2006) creates a similar distinction between “mass digitization” and “non-mass digitization.” The expense and technical support required for digital preservation contributes to the willingness of preservation institutions to collaborate with other institutions or digitization projects as part of their mission to sustain the relevance of their collections for digital publics.
Access and Digital Inequality
The emphasis on access in the mission statements of both Google Books and the OCA fits with discourses surrounding the term the digital divide, which emerged in the mid 1990s as more households and business connected individuals with the web (Estabrook et al., 2007; Gates Foundation, 2004; Hargittai, 2003; Jenkins et al., 2006; Kafai et al., 2007; Warschauer, 2003). Beginning in 1995, the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) produced a series of reports titled Falling Through the Net that provided empirical grounds for recognizing stratification “in the use of information technology, attributable largely to socioeconomic factors of race, income, education, and geography” (Gates Foundation, 2004, p. 6). Over time, the term itself has been criticized for oversimplifying how inclusion and participation in digital economies and publics works in relation to the socioeconomic factors mentioned above (Hargittai, 2003; Jenkins et al., 2006; Kafai et al., 2007; Warschauer, 2003). The NTIA has changed the title of its reports to A Nation Online. Hargittai (2003) proposed the term digital inequality: “a refined understanding of the ‘digital divide’ that emphasizes a spectrum of inequality across segments of the population depending on differences along several dimensions of technology access and use.”
The MacArthur Foundation’s DML Initiative is part of the shift away from what Warschauer (2003) and others have characterized as a device based model for understanding the benefits of access to ICT. Research reports from Jenkins (2006) and Ito (2008) are rooted in a literacy based model of ICT access (Warschauer, p.46). This shift came about in part from the disappointing results of early efforts to put computers in the hands of people who were considered to be on the wrong side of the gap (Kafai et al., 2007; Warschauer, 2003). Hargittai (2003) and others have advocated for public policy that supports “affordable access to the telecommunications network” in the form of universal service and promotes autonomy of use or “the freedom to use technologies when, where and how one wishes.” The series of posts on this blog that provide information on new media practices in globalized regional contexts point to specific manifestations of digital inequality as well as ingenuity in efforts at autonomy of use.
Two key reports (Estabrook, 2007; Gates Foundation, 2004) that address US public libraries as sites where people make use of the Internet’s resources mirror an increasing emphasis among library professionals to serve their communities in ways that incorporate digital technologies (Kresh, 2007). University libraries are focusing on comprehensive digital resources for their students through subscriptions to digital archives of scholarly publications like JSTOR, while public libraries are developing strategies for utilizing their physical spaces to connect patrons to digital resources and learning opportunities (Kresh, 2007).
In the 2004 Gates Foundation report Toward Equality of Access: The Role of Public Libraries in Addressing the Digital Divide provided statistical data supporting libraries as a site of Internet use for groups that categorically lacked other means of access. The report also acknowledged libraries as a site that facilitated the learning of computer-related skills through its staff and computer training classes. The 2007 report Information Searches that Solve Problems sponsored by the Pew Internet & American Life project and the University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science presents results from a national survey of how Americans across socioeconomic factors utilized various resources to deal with specific types of problems. The study found that the Internet was the top source of information for problem-solving and that
65% of adults who went to a library for problem-solving help said that access to computers, particularly the internet, was key reason they go to the library for help. And 62% of adults who went to the library for help actually used the computers at the library (Estabrook, 2007).
Conclusion
Although the Library of Congress initiated its NDIIPP program with the aim of creating a shared infrastructure and policies for the preservation of national heritage, it is also currently focused upon access and participation, with the launch of a collaboration with Flickr.com as a key example (Springer et al., 2008). This collaboration leverages existing commercial social media networks to facilitate forms of user contributions such as comments and tags. A report on the success of the pilot program mentions that the collaboration between the Library and Flickr led the website to establish The Commons and serve as a link between digital image archives and various publics. On its website, Flickr claims its twin goals with the project are
While the Library of Congress seeks to make its collections available to more visitors than could reach its physical location, as will be discussed in our next posting, local libraries are working to create physical settings that promote learning in the digital age.1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.
References
Coyle, K. (2006). Mass digitization of books. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(6), 641-645.
Derrida, J. (1996). Archive Fever. (E. Prenowitz, Trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 1995)
Estabrook, L., Witt, E., Rainie, L. (2007, December 30). Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help. Pew Internet & American Life Project: Washington, DC. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Pew_UI_LibrariesReport.pdf
Gates Foundation. (2004). Toward equality of access: The role of public libraries in addressing the digital divide. Retrieved June 1, 2007, from http://www.gatesfoundation.org.
German authors outraged at Google Book Search. (2009, April 27). Der Spiegel. Retrieved from: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,621385,00.html
Hargittai, E. (2003) The digital divide and what to do about it. In D. C. Jones (Ed), New economy handbook. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Herr-Stephenson, B. Lange, P.B. et al. (2008, November). Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Retrieved from: http://digitallearning.macfound.org
Jeanneney, J.-N. (2007). Google and the myth of universal knowledge: A view from Europe (T.L. Fagan, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 2005)
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A.J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st
century. The MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.
Kafai, Y. B., Peppler, K. A., & Chiu, G. M. (2007) High tech programmers in low-income communities: Creating a computer culture in a community technology center. In Steinfield, Pentland, Ackerman, and Contractor (eds.), Communities and technologies: Proceedings of the Third Communities and Technologies Conference, Michigan State University, 2007, London: Springer, 544-563.
Kresh, D. (Ed.). (2007). The whole digital library handbook. Chicago: American Library Association.
Lagoze, C., Arms, W., Gan, S. Hiiman, D., Hoehn, W., Millman, D. et al. Core services in the architecture of the national science digital library (NSDL). Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, July 14-18, 2002, Portland, OR, USA. doi: 10.1145/544220.544264
Leetaru, K. (2008, October 6). Mass book digitization: The deeper story of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance. First Monday 13(10). Retrieved from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2101/2037.
LeFurgy. W. (2005). Building preservation partnerships: The Library of Congress National Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Library Trends, 54(1), 163-172.
Maidenberg, K. (2008). The race to create a digital library: Google Books vs. the Open Content Alliance. Scroll, 1(1). Retrieved from http://jps.library.utoronto.ca.
Picker, R. (2009, April 29). Antitrust updates: Google Book Search; Section 2 Ssymposium; The mediated book. The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. Retrieved from: http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2009/04/antitrust-updates-google-book-search-section-2-symposium-the-mediated-book.html
Ross, S. & Hedstrom, M. (2005). Preservation research and sustainable digital libraries. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 5(4), 317-324. doi: 10.1007/s00799-004-0099-3
Smith, A. (2006, June). Distributed preservation in a national context: NDIIPP at mid-point. D-Lib Magazine, 12(6). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june06/smith/06smith.html.
Smith, Adam (2009, April 29). Google Book Search settlement will expand access. Google Public Policy Blog. Retrieved from: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-book-search-settlement-will.html
Springer, M., Dulabahn, B., Michel, P., Natanson, B., Reser, D., Woodward, D. et al. (2008, October 30). For the common good: The Library of Congress Flickr pilot project. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html.
Toobin, J. (2007, February 5). Google’s moon shot. The New Yorker, 82(48), 30‐35.
Warschauer, M. (2003). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zia, L. (2001, Novemeber). The NSF National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program: New Projects and a Progress Report. D-Lib Magazine, 7(11). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november01/zia/11zia.html.
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 1: Mobile Media
Over time we have seen how public libraries have expanded their services to provide a wider range of informational and entertainment media, such as music cds, videos and dvds, and books-on-tape. With the widescale distribution of books and multimedia available via the Web, community libraries are once again reconsidering not only the range of services they provide, but also their mode of outreach and incorporation of new digital technologies. This post reviews noteworthy efforts by community libraries to adapt to and make use of new mobile media.
Mobile phone use in the U.S. has shown tremendous growth in recent years. As of 2008, there were over 260 million mobile phone subscribers, representing about 85 percent of the population (Singh, 2008). 88 percent of college students own mobile phones and 27 percent have a Blackberry or PDA (Rainie, 2008). According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, 20 percent of U.S. households had only mobile phones (i.e. no landline) as of the end of 2008, and about one third of those aged 18 – 24 and one fourth of those aged 25 – 29 live in mobile phone-only households (Fram, 2009). While young people are more likely to have no landline, about one third of people who live in poverty also only have mobile phones. According to a report by comScore, as of January 2009 some 22.4 million mobile phone users were accessing the mobile web on a daily basis, and this usage had doubled since one year prior (Burns, 2009).
This shifting landscape of mobile communication use intersects with the evolving role of the library discussed in the previous post. There are three main reasons that libraries have embraced the use of mobile technologies: (1) to expand the range of content available to patrons, (2) to offer a fuller menu of services, and (3) as a new mode of public outreach. In terms of content, the question posed is, how do wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs allow libraries either to distribute content in different forms or to expand the field of information about a library item? For services and outreach, how do mobile devices enhance customer service and expand the patron base? And yet, to argue that the use of mobile media is a NEW manifestation of the desire to expand outreach efforts (or provide a wider range of information and services) would be to ignore an important element of the history of community library efforts.
Consider the humble bookmobile. Yes, the bookmobile, the traveling RV bibliothéque that many of us remember (with delight in my case) gracing our elementary schools once a month with its glorious presence. At the bookmobile one could conveniently have access (service) to books (content) unavailable at one’s own school library, and even the kids with the most lackadaisical attitude toward reading were drawn to the bookmobile because its monthly appearance in and of itself made it special and because it was a chance to be dismissed from class for 30 minutes to go and look at books with groovy titles and fun images (outreach). Of course, the mission of many bookmobiles today aligns more closely with the vision set forth by Mary Titcomb when she came up with the idea of the traveling wagon full of books in 1905 – to provide books to those without any access to a library in their local community (http://www.whilbr.org/bookmobile/index.aspx). Bookmobiles also make available books and services to seniors and others with limited physical mobility. More recently, with his Internet Bookmobile (http://www.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php), Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, traveled around the U.S. printing and binding books in the public domain (such as Alice in Wonderland), raising awareness of the Internet as a free digital library for all, and challenging copyright extension legislation that continues to be passed in Congress (Cisler, 2002; Koman, 2002).
Taking the bookmobile as a starting point, in what ways are community libraries engaging with mobile communication technologies to enhance content, services, and outreach for the purposes of learning? How is mobility a part of both the physical and the virtual library? It should be noted that the following discussion is by no means exhaustive and is meant to point to interesting applications and projects that are in the works. For additional links to important “mobiles and libraries” interfaces, applications, and resources (not limited to public libraries) see “M-Libraries – Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki” (http://libsuccess.org/index.php?title=M-Libraries).
Content
Mobile technologies clearly allow libraries to expand the range of forms for distributing content. For decades, libraries have offered books on tape and CD in order to provide content for those unable to read a physical book, such as the sight impaired, and for people who desire content that they could enjoy on the go (driving, walking, etc.). More recently many libraries have begun offering e-books and digital audio books for download. For example, since 2005 cardholders of the New York Public Library have been able to download audio books from the Internet any time of the day or night simply by going to the library’s website and entering their card number and a PIN (http://www.gizmag.com/go/4157/). They can check out as many as ten audio books at a time for up to three weeks and play them on their computer, CD player, portable digital music player, or cell phone. The New York Public Library and thousands of others use OverDrive’s technology, and OverDrive’s website allows users to search for libraries offering free digital downloads (http://www.overdrive.com/). Libraries have also begun offering not only digital content, but also the means by which to use it. As Ellyssa Kroski (2008) discusses in her recent report, On the Move with the Mobile Web, institutions such as the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, Illinois (http://www.fordlibrary.org/) allow patrons to check out iPod Nanos with audio books loaded on them.
In addition to storing digital books, mobile devices are also being used to expand the field of information around books. One way is through the use of QR (quick response) codes, which are a type of two-dimensional barcode that can store a lot of information that can then be downloaded via a mobile phone. They are already quite popular in Japan and parts of Europe where they are used mostly for promotional/marketing reasons. However, QR codes could have multiple uses in libraries. As librarian Lex Rigby explains, currently in libraries while conventional barcodes are used to link an item to its catalog record, the information is limited and it can only be accessed by scanning the barcode at the check-out desk. On the other hand, QR codes could be used to store descriptions, images, useful links, etc. for all types of library materials. A library patron could use their mobile phone to scan the QR code to access this information (http://www.lexrigby.com/2009/03/26/qr-codes-in-libraries-and-higher-education/). The library at the University of Bath is at the forefront of using QR codes to link to their catalog (http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/qrcode/2009/03/23/uni-of-bath-library-including-qr-codes-in-catalogue/). This expanded range of information available at the click of a (camera phone) button is obviously time-saving and efficient. Thus far, however, the use of QR codes in public libraries in the U.S. does not seem to be widespread although such two dimensional barcodes have been generated for the web spaces of each branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (http://natehill.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/the-physical-internet-10-at-not-your-library/).
Services
In addition to providing a new mode of content provision, mobile devices are also being used to enhance library services. In this regard, text messaging (or SMS – short message service) is an obvious means of inexpensive and efficient communication, and several public libraries have implemented message options for their cardholders. Orlando, Florida’s Orange County Library System (http://www.ocls.info) allows patrons the choice of receiving text message reminders about upcoming due dates for materials and start dates for courses (Kroski, 2008). The Skokie Public Library in Skokie, Illinois offers such alerts as well as updates on holds placed and the option of renewing items via SMS (http://www.skokie.lib.il.us/s_about/mobile_services.asp). For similar purposes, some libraries are also using Twitter (http://twitter.com/about#about), a micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (tweets) to their “followers” and receive tweets from those they signed up to follow. Posts can be viewed on a computer or an Internet-enabled mobile phone.
In addition to using mobile-enabled messaging, many libraries are designing their websites to be mobile friendly, which involves making the information concise, limiting the number of links, using descriptive icons, and including “home” and “parent-link” icons (West, Hafner, & Faust, 2006). At the current moment, however, there are still issues with display quality across different devices (Liston, 2009). Again, among community libraries the Skokie Public Library emerges as an exemplar as the library has designed a version of its website specifically for viewing on the small screen of a mobile device. The library catalog can also be browsed using a phone or PDA (with AirPAC, a mobile version of OPAC). In a recent presentation, Megan Fox (2009) has outlined numerous types of library friendly applications designed for the iPhone and other smartphones. Such applications enable users to find public libraries, organize notes, and conduct mobile searches. For example, the Washington D.C. Public Library has an iPhone application specifically designed to navigate its services. Some libraries also provide audio tours via mobile phones (http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=2383). A final mobile service deserving mention is the WorldCat Mobile pilot project (http://www.worldcat.org/mobile/default.jsp), which enables users to search for library materials as well as libraries, maps, and directions.
Outreach
In 2008, 62 percent of those aged 18 – 30 years old visited a public library for a range of purposes, including checking out books, using computers, seeking reference materials and the like (Rainie, 2008). Despite this figure, public libraries feel it is imperative to continue to reach new users and to maintain the users they have. The mobile content and services mentioned above are offered as opt-in choices for patrons. However, outreach generally means reaching out to those not already enjoying the library. Mobile phones may not be the most ideal devices for this purpose because of their extremely personal nature and people’s profound disdain for mobile spam (due to cost and irritation factors). However, some libraries are finding success using Twitter via mobile phones to make more connections in their communities and to promote their services and programs
(http://lis5313.ci.fsu.edu/wiki/index.php/Twittering_Libraries#Libraries_Using_Twitter). Such tweets might concern everything from pointers to the library website, to information on upcoming events, to research about the library’s role in society (Milstein, 2009).
Many libraries have also created Facebook and MySpace pages, such as the West Palm Beach Florida Public Library (http://www.facebook.com/pages/West-Palm-Beach-FL/West-Palm-Beach-Public-Library/27487304991). While many users view such pages on desktop or laptop computers, accessing social networking sites via mobile phones is becoming a popular activity and one that is growing rapidly (Burns, 2009). For this reason, Rainie (2009) recommends that libraries try to become “a news node for information and interaction” in the lives of young people. As Rainie adds, “The internet is ‘personified’ in some people’s lives and [libraries] can provide information and social support in the same ways that social networks can.” Since people often build their social networks via social networking sites such as Facebook through “friending” their friends’ friends, libraries could tap into this networking function as a form of outreach. Dempsey (2009), however, questions whether users will be motivated to participate in such networks.
Conclusion
There are clearly several interesting projects and applications joining together libraries and mobiles at this current moment. As library professionals participate in Google groups (http://groups.google.com/group/mobilelibraries), blogs (Gerry McKiernan’s http://mobile-libraries.blogspot.com/), and conferences (http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/) dedicated to exploring mobile libraries, the future promises to bring more ways that mobile phones and PDAs can be used to serve the library’s mission in terms of expanding content, services, and outreach. However, one word of caution should be added in this conclusion. Aside from text messaging services, most of the initiatives highlighted above necessitate a mobile phone with Internet access. Considering that most data plans are only compatible on more high-end phones and cost upwards of an additional $20 per month, clearly not everyone can participate in such mobile-enabled initiatives. As Horrigan (2009) discusses in his recent report, The Mobile Difference, only 39 percent of the U.S. adult population are “motivated by mobility” and have “largely positive and improving attitudes about how mobile devices make them more available to others” as well as high levels of usage for “non-voice data applications such as text messaging and internet browsing” (25). However, 61 percent are defined as “stationery media will do,” meaning they do “not feel the pull of mobility – or anything else – drawing them further into the digital world” (4). As Horrigan emphasizes that “the bar that qualifies as high-tech among users has risen” (p. 16), we must continuously ask whether such mobile services and applications will broaden participation in libraries or perpetuate an insurmountable knowledge gap.
References
Cisler, S. (2002). Letter from San Francisco: The Internet bookmobile. First Monday [Online] 7(10). Retrieved May 2, 2009, from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/999/920
Dempsey, L. (2009). Always on: Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity. First Monday [Online] 14(1-5). Retrieved March 2, 2009, from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291/2070
Fox, M. (2009, April 1). Mobile practices and search: What’s hot! Paper presented at the Computers in Libraries Annual Conference. Arlington, VA. Retrieved May 8, 2009, from http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile
Fram, A. (2009). More cell phone users dropping landlines. The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved May 8, 2009, from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/06/national/w090056D59.DTL&type=tech
Horrigan, J. (2009, March). The mobile difference: Wireless connectivity has drawn many users more deeply into digital life. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved April 10, 2009, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/5/-The-Mobile-Difference-Typology.aspx
Koman, R. (2002). Riding along with the Internet bookmobile. Retrieved April 10, 2009, from http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/10/09/bookmobile/index.html
Kroski, E. (2008). On the move with the mobile web: Libraries and mobile technologies. Library and Technology Reports 44(5). Retrieved January 11, 2009, from http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/on-the-move-with-the-mobile-web-libraries-and-mobile-technologies.html
Liston, S. (2009). OPACs and the mobile revolution. Computers in Libraries 29(5), 6-16.
Milstein, S. (2009). Twitter FOR libraries. Computers in Libraries 29(5), 17-18.
Raine, L. (2008, April 17). The role of libraries in a networked world. Paper presented at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference. Dallas, TX. Retrieved March 8, 2009, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2008/The-role-of-libraries-in-the-digital-age.aspx
Raine, L. (2009, January 14). How libraries can survive in the new media ecosystem. Paper presented at the HELIN Library Consortium. Bryant University, Smithfield, RI. Retrieved March 8, 2009, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2009/How-libraries-can-survive-in-the-new-media-ecosystem.aspx
Singh, S. (2008). U.S. raises $19b in spectrum sale. The Times of India (March 25). Retrieved March 8, 2009, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/US_raises_19b_in_spectrum_sale/articleshow/2896443.cms
West, M. A., Hafner, A. W., & Faust, B. D. (2006). Expanding access to library collections and services using small-screen devices. Information Technology and Libraries 25(2), 103-107.
Author Bio
Cara Wallis recently completed her Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, particularly as these relate to issues of identity, power, and social change.
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 2: Teen Websites
Teen websites are separate (cyber)spaces within the library environment (or places as Anne Balsamo cited Michel deCerteau’s distinction between the two). Contrasted to the offline, “brick and mortar” libraries typified by quiet and decorum, these websites represent spaces only for teens, and appropriated by teens. Just as libraries are now embracing mobile technologies, evidenced in Cara’s last post, so too are they embracing Web 2.0 technologies. As long as libraries have had websites, they have had pages dedicated to kids and teens (as well as other patron groups like teachers and adults). This recent iteration of teen websites represents a marked progression from merely providing information to opportunities for participation, creation, and social connection. We are calling these web sites and not web pages because of the extent to which they go beyond the one-way transmission of information and utilize new digital technologies, offering numerous links that truly contribute to a “networked distributed learning environment.”
The Pew Internet and American Life Project study cited by Maura Klosterman in a previous post (Estabrook et al, 2007) found that “more people turned to the Internet than any other source of information and support, including experts, family members, government agencies, or libraries” (p. v). Libraries have websites for the same reasons they embrace mobile technologies. Cara stated the following reasons; 1) to expand the range of content available, 2) to offer a fuller menu of services, and 3) as a new mode of public outreach. Teen websites, however, are targeted to a more specific group defined solely by its age, but possessing features such as informal, sociable, with a propensity for play and experimentation. Teens are more eager for participatory experiences, more receptive to visual and aural stimuli, and more comfortable using new technologies. This is also a group marked by personal struggles and peer pressures as teens pass through this transformative life stage. As community libraries, these modern institutions surpass their historic charge to preserve their collections by providing a public service and fostering a sense of community (in the all-embracing modern sense of a public, not the Habermasian elite public). It is this social responsibility – directed partly, but significantly to youth – that drives libraries to provide greater access to their collections online, to have strong educational programs and offer opportunities to participate, share, and contribute, both onsite and online. Teenagers are future library patrons, writers, and even funders and public officials, and libraries are keen to cultivate their interest, involvement, and loyalty from an early age, much like the corporate sector that fosters early habits of consumption with their brand communities.
New Efforts
First let us look at a few noteworthy library teen websites in the US, and then we can discuss what is meant by these online communities, as well as some of their benefits and repercussions.
In Colorado, the Denver Public Library named their teen website eVolver, because evolving minds want to know… The sidebar has the following sections: Homework Help, Ask a Librarian, Look it Up, Find a Good Book, Get Involved, Entertainment/Media, and Life. The site features staff and teen picks for books, teens’ top ten nominees, a tag cloud for their new catalog, sign up for e-newsletters, my library card (personal account), teen events and classes, and a link to their MySpace page with a teen blog. eVolver also has an account on Flickr for teens to post their photography and art, and on Twitter. Teens can post original writings in the Writer’s Realm and write book reviews, there is help on how to start a blog, links to an external teen chat forum, and podcasts created by teens during the Teen Tech Week podcast workshop. An online scavenger hunt encourage teens to get a book from the library and read it to win prizes, and there is live chat 24/7 with a librarian, as well as contact email and telephone information. There are numerous external links for writers’ resources, online games, comics/anime, online magazines, and information related to many personal topics in the Life section (money, sexuality, spirituality, safety, body, future, world, relationships, etc.). The Get Involved section also provides information and links regarding activism and volunteering.
The New York Public Library’s teen website is called Teenlink. Much like Denver, there is Homework Help, Events @ the Library, Library Services, and lists of recommended books by the library. Wordsmiths is “a Web anthology of writings by teenagers” including poems and short stories that can be submitted online. Link-o-Rama has links to authors, books and ‘zines, and NYC Teen info; also Weird & Wacky has other fun links, and a link to eNYPL provides free video/audio/eBook downloads. Teenlink’s account on Facebook currently has 6,539 fans, and they present MP3s created by teens at the library called Turn it Up! @ the Library (NYC Teens Talk out LOUD). Also like Denver, there is a section called Teen Life with information and external links on issues including consumer education, spirituality, family, health and well-being, relationships and sexuality, activism, and links to jobs and hotlines.
The Chicago Public Library’s website is called For Teens (Teen Volume), and includes Library Programs and Partnerships, Popular Topics, How to…, Book Reviews by teens, Homework Help, Teen Volume Reads (author interviews by library staff), and Internet Safety. There is also an online events calendar for teens, Ask a Librarian (by telephone, email, or physical visit), and a section called Brain Candy listing books related to personal topics such as money, dating, sex, teen rights, parents splitting, and getting fit.
It is important to note that public libraries in smaller communities are just as successfully incorporating digital technologies on their websites. The teen website of the Jacksonville Public Library in Florida (JPL for teens!) contains a chart on its homepage labeled library 2.0 with links to its pages on Flickr, MySpace (featuring a teen drawing contest), YouTube, their teen department blog (institutional), feeds, and teen book review podcasts. The Sonoma County Library in California is called teenspace, and has a blog with book reviews by teens, a list of teen events, tags, RSS feed, sign-up for email subscription and Next Reads (monthly book recommendations by email).
Online Communities
A community is comprised of individuals connected to other individuals, which are then connected to a larger entity that brings these individuals and groups together through a common bond based on shared interests, goals, or activities. An online community, much like any physical community, requires that individuals feel 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 within the community, and that individuals contribute to the community. This last aspect is especially critical to knowledge-sharing communities of practice such as businesses, academia, open-source software, online publishing, as well as the modern community library.
Robert Putnam (2000) urges us to think about social capital as a public good that can be nurtured and used for the greater benefit of society, but today he cites a decline in civic involvement and a “breakdown of community.” By using their websites to facilitate social interaction, bonding already existing relationships and bridging new relationships, libraries can play their part in fostering a greater sense of community with their online patrons. Social capital can be accrued through social interaction and networking, both offline and online, based on reciprocity and trust, mutual obligations, and norms of conduct. While individual networking and communication is important, the larger social network is more important to provide the infrastructure for strong connections (links) within society. The well-connected library provides for well-connected individuals to achieve social capital that can then be used to benefit the community.
Communal action and a sense of community (to both the library institution and the general public) provide teens with valuable skills needed for a deliberative democracy. Robert Asen (2004) talks about how citizenship engagement is necessary for democratic societies, formed through the acts of “generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability” (1). Pluralism is prized within a democracy, and respect for pluralist ideas, opinions, and backgrounds is generated by these websites that present diverse examples of writing and artwork, and also diverse opinions and reactions by teens. By empowering teens with some decisions about the website design, book reviews, author interviews and podcasts, teens are learning to become more active and involved in public acts, thereby helping to produce a more engaged citizenry with strong leadership skills. The US Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) final report of their youth programs from 1998 to 2003 (Koke & Dierking, 2007), as well as their companion publication, Nine to Nineteen: Youth in Museums and Libraries, discuss how to best include youth in the design and implementation of programs and provide valuable suggestions for practitioners (57).
In his recent MacArthur Foundation white paper (2007), Henry Jenkins presents a list of what he considers to be the literacies that youth need for the 21st century (play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, judgment, networking, negotiation, transmedia navigation, collective intelligence). Jenkins describes these literacies as “cultural competencies and social skills” for a participatory culture where the focus has shifted to community involvement, collaboration, and networking. Furthermore, he calls for “policy and pedagogical interventions” in order to foster these literacies, specifically mentioning schools, afterschool programs, and parents. We can add libraries to this list as a place of informal learning, and one already engaging youth in a comprehensive manner. Jenkins states, “Everyone involved in preparing young people to go out into the world has contributions to make in helping students acquire the skills they need to become full participants in our society.”
Analysis
Teen websites have the potential to actively engage teens for the purpose of encouraging reading, writing, and other creative and scholastic pursuits that are at the core of library goals. To accomplish this great feat, libraries must provide an online experience that is fun, relative to their lives, and allows for social interaction (both online and onsite). Teens must be given ample opportunities for discourse and self-expression (verbal, visual, and written), and also space for opposition to normative values that are often embodied by the very institution of libraries. In writing about online motivational factors for Wikipedia, Rafaeli and Ariel (2008) cite a study by Joyce and Kraut (2006) that determined “users who contribute more content to an online community were more likely to repeat their participation in that community” (249). Also a study by Ling et al. (2005) found that users contribute more “if they believe that their contributions are important to the group’s performance, if they believe that their contributions will be identifiable, and if they like the group they are working with” (250).
The following nine categories comprise a contextual framework for analyzing individual elements of teen websites to determine if they constitute online communities: 1) generates feeling of belonging to a group, 2) promotes shared activities, 3) promotes shared goals and interests, 4) dissemination of museum information, 5) provides an understanding of museum norms/goals, 6) provides for peer-to-peer connection, 7) community contributions, 8) connection to a physical community/museum group, and 9) provides for interaction/dialogue. It is important for teens to receive information about the overall library community, but it is equally important for them to be able to participate and share their opinions and creations with peers and the general public. Providing links to external organizations and institutions is also vital to creating a networked environment; the IMLS states that “many funding agencies consider partnerships an effective strategy for reaching audiences, leveraging resources, and building organizational capacity” (51, 2007).
Yet teen websites also might have unforeseen consequences to their success. In creating their own content, teens contribute to a displacement of hierarchical knowledge within the library as a pedagogical institution. Do libraries maintain their authority by controlling content from teen websites, and does this explain the marginalization of “teen” content that is labeled as such? Is the Internet an appropriate space for this struggle; is the library an appropriate place? Specific points for further study on the matter could focus on how online teen spaces differ from their physical programs (teen advisory councils), how the production value of these websites are incorporated back into the library, how much the websites are open to public participation, and what is the motivation to view and/or contribute. Also of interest is, if the segregation of the physical and online spaces is a factor of their success, what is the nature of such relationship, and how is success measured. The website participants may start as library visitors (and repeatedly return as members of library-based teen programs), but new visitors may have no knowledge of or even interest in the physical library. Does that even matter, and to whom?
Conclusion
Teens are now highly valued as representing the “pulse of contemporary culture.” Teens are studied extensively throughout the academic world, and they are the focus of market researchers and trend forecasters that depend on their constant search for the latest product, on their free spirit of experimentation, and on their strong social networks to spread information virally.
Feminist theorist Nancy Fraser states that public spheres are “arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities” (1992, 125). The teen websites are such a public sphere, critical for individual development because they reflect societal norms; they are spaces where public opinions are formed, and where participation and discourse are encouraged. Teens determine not only their individual proclivities through action, but also how they fit into society and negotiate their own identities. This is probably the best argument to maintain basic institutional control.
During times of change in our society, it is important to identify the spaces where change is taking place, where “public opinion” is being created, and where future leaders are being formed. Teen websites not only benefit teens with an alternative space for expression and sharing, but they also benefit the libraries that depend on teens as their future patrons and to fulfill their social obligation. The great challenge for museums will be to encourage the formation of individual teen creativity and identity within a larger communal (institutional) space that also has its own identity and history.
References
Asen, R. (2004). A discourse theory of citizenship. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90, 189-211.
Estabrook, L., Witt, E., Rainie, L. (2007, December 30). Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help. Pew Internet & American Life Project: Washington, DC. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Pew_UI_LibrariesReport.pdf
Fraser, N. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Craig Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the public sphere (Studies in contemporary German social thought). Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992.
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A. J. & Weigel, M. (2007). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago, The MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf
Koke, J. & Dierking, L. Museums and libraries engaging America’s youth: Final report of a study of IMLS youth programs, 1998-2003. Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2007. Retrieved from: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/3c/18/f2.pdf
Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008). Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia. In A. Barak (Ed.), Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 243-267.
Author’s Bio
Susana Smith Bautista is a Ph.D. student and Provost Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, where she also received her Masters degree in Art History/ Museum Studies. Her Bachelors degree is in Government from Pomona College. Susana has many years of experience in the art world in Los Angeles, New York, and Greece working with museums, commercial galleries and non-profit art spaces, curating exhibitions, lecturing, and writing art criticism. She was Executive Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, Editorial Director of http://www.LatinArt.com, and Associate with the Daniel Saxon Gallery. Susana also served the city of Pasadena, California, as Arts and Culture Commissioner for six years. At USC, Susana is researching the role of museums in the digital age, how new technologies are affecting traditional museum practices, and the global network of museums, arts institutions, and governmental bodies.
Digital Media in Community Libaries, Part 3: Games and Gaming
On November 15, 2008, libraries across the United States participated in a simultaneous nation-wide video game tournament. It was part of the American Library Association’s (ALA) National Gaming Day @ your library.
The playful objective of the day was to set the record for the most number of people to play the same board game on the same day. The more serious objective was to raise awareness about the use of games as a library program. On that day in 2008, more than 14,000 people participated in National Gaming Day at 597 libraries. The level of participation demonstrated a way for libraries to reach beyond their traditional patron base to reach new participants. ALA organized the National Gaming Day to suggest that games may be a way for libraries to creatively fulfill the part of their mission to “provide cultural, recreational, and entertaining materials” as they continue to also provide academic curriculum support and resources for industries and professions. As Jim Rettig ( ALA President, 2008-2009) writes: “Games of every type play an important role in developing fundamental competencies for life. They require players to learn and follow complex sets of rules, make strategic and tactical decisions, and increasingly, collaborate with teammates and others: all things they will have to do in colleen and in the workforce.”
Beth Gallaway: “The Librarian’s Guide to Gaming!”
To assist libraries in their efforts to develop meaningful game-related activities, the ALA has developed a toolkit for libraries to use that includes resources, guidelines, and best practices.
The ALA asserts that the development of gaming services and events demonstrates how the community library functions as a “third place” for people to inhabit BETWEEN school and home. The library as “third place” offers not only information access for the purposes of learning, but also recreational and social experiences. The value of games is clear, according to the ALA website: “Board games, card games, and videogames are, in essence, information, and the human act of telling stories, presented in new formats that involve the player.” Over the past two years, several resources have been developed to guide libraries in creating appropriate game-based events and policies.
The Games in Libraries podcast began in April 2008 as a transmedia site that included links to relevant blog discussions, ALA press releases, articles on games, mainstream press articles, a flickr site for game photos, interviews with librarians on gaming, and an announcement of the National Gaming @ your library day. The Games in Libraries podcast is produced by Scott Nicholson and created by a slate of regular contributors including Beth Gallaway who created the YouTube video (above) on the “Librarian’s Guide to Gaming.” Gallaway also maintains her own blog called “Game On: Games in Libraries.”
Other Blogs that address topics of Library and Gaming include:
Jenny Levine’s blog called “the Shifted Librarian” often reports on games and libraries. Her blog is active and frequently cited among those interested in games and libraires. On March 18, 2009 she reported on the “Library Mini Golf” event held at the Downers Grove Library in Illinois that she will use as a case study in her forthcoming article in Library Technology Reports.
The blog by Scott Rice and Amy Harris called Library Games. http://librarygames.blogspot.com/
Although it appears that this hasn’t been updated since 2007, there are useful links on it. Several other blogs refer to Rice and Harris’ “information literacy game” that is discussed in several posts on the site.
Bibliographic Gaming ia a blog for librarians interested in using video games to teach.
Brian Mayer’s blog, Library Gamer chronicles his thoughts on libraries and literacy. See also his creative “comic book” piece called “Libraries Got Game” that makes connections between modern board games and the new American Association of School Library standards for the 21st Century Learner.”
Key Issues: The Public Value of Games
In the November 2008 GamesinLibraries podcast, the issue of game violence came up--particularly in the case of first person shooter games (for example, Halo3). This points out one of the key issues discussed among librarians about the role of gaming within libraries in terms of the characteristics of “appropriate game playing” experiences. Game events and services use library resources, spaces and people. As librarians investigate the range of games and game playing that is available for collection, circulation, and staging, they are finding that not everyone agrees that games belong in libraries. For example, one community library in Nebraska was rebuffed by the state Auditor of Public Accounts who responded that “the purchase of gaming equipment is a questionable use of public funds.” The audit and the auditor’s evaluation prompted a joint conference of the Nebraska Library Association and the Nebraska Educational Media Association where participants discussed how libraries might appropriately integrate games into their programming. (See the ALA report of the exchange:
http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2009/february2009/nebrgamingaudit.cfm
Nebraskan librarians who supported the use of public funds to purchase library game resources reported that they did so because library patrons were requesting game demonstrations. Before the purchase, librarians brought their personal systems to the library to share and show to library patrons. The auditor’s report also took issue with the use of “state equipment” for the purposes of playing games and accessing virtual websites (sic)” by library employees. What is revealed in the occasion of the auditor’s evaluation, and the resulting discussion is that there are debates about the value of game collecting, circulating, and playing as part of library programming.
In the Nebraska case, the games in question included Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band. It is unclear at this point the extent to which libraries are making distinctions between types of games for the purposes of restricting the use of some, in favor of others. The games that allow users to create content and to modify game environments might be less contentious acquisitions than those that include simulated violence.
An Annual Survey of Games in Libraries
In his forthcoming book, Go Back to Start: Gathering Baseline Data about Games in Libraries, Scott Nicholson presents the results of surveys conducted in 2007 that asked a random sample of 400 public libraries about their use (or non-use) of games as part of their services. (An early article on the 2006 survey is available online at: http://boardhameswithscott.com/pulse2007.pdf)
Nicholson reminds readers that public libraries have a long history in allowing game playing (such as chess and Go) in their spaces. What’s new, he argues, is not the presence of games within libraries, but the type of games and game-based activities that libraries are now exploring as part of their programming efforts. Some of the key findings from his 2007 surveys:
77% of those surveyed stated that they had some sort of gaming program. These games range from chess sets to Web-based games.
38% support a formal gaming program.
13% said they offered console games like Nintendo and Xbox.
20% had game circulation.
82% allowed library patrons to play games on the library computers.
In discussing the results, he notes that the size of the library matters in terms of the inclusion of gaming activities. Larger libraries (those that serve more than 50,000 patrons) are more likely to include gaming activities than smaller libraries (those that serve less than 3000 patrons). Common types of games most frequently circulated and supported in libraries include board games and traditional games, fewer libraries report circulating video console games. One of the most surprising finding is that more than 80% of the libraries (regardless of size) allow patrons to play PC/Web games on library equipment.
Some of the reasons that libraries report as objectives for their gaming initiatives include: to provide a source of entertainment for members of the community; to provide an additional service to active library users; to attract an under-served group of users to the library, and to increase the library’s role as a community hub. The single most cited reason (when asked to pick one main objective): to attract an underserved group of users to the library.
Nicholson reports that the survey documented two negative outcomes that libraries encounter in the context of game programming: 1) 15% of librarians report that patrons who participate in gaming events did not return for other events, and 2) 10% of respondents indicated that other patrons were annoyed with the gaming activity. While Nicholson admits that it is difficult to draw broad conclusions from survey data, he does assert that gaming services do serve the public community library’s mission in serving community members. He argues for the development of additional surveys a more systematic investigation of the incorporation of gaming in library programming.
Citations and References
Braun, L. W. (2004). “What’s in a Game?” VOYA, August: 89.
Gallaway, B. (2006). “Get Your Game On: What Makes a Good Game, Anyway? VOYA. http://pdfs.voya.com/VO/YA2/VOYA200608GetYourGame.pdf
Levine, J. (2006). “Gaming & Libraries: Intersection of Services.” Library Technology Reports 42 (5).
Mayer, B. “Libraries Got Game.” http://slsgvboces.org/gaming
National Center for Education Statistics. (2007). ‘’Public Library (Public Use) Data Files’’
Neiburger, E.. (2007). “Gamers ... in the library?” American Libraries Association 38 (5), 58-60.
Nicholson, S.. (2007) “The Role of Gaming in Libraries: Taking the Pulse.”
White paper available from http://librarygamelab.org/pulse2007.pdf
Nicholson, S.. (Forthcoming). Go Back to Start: Gathering Baseline Data about Gaming in Libraries.”
(Preprint available at http://librarygamelab.orgbactostart.pdf
Scalzo, J.. (2009). “Video Game Librarian.” http://www.videogamelibrarian.com. January 5, 2009.
Schmidt, A. (2006). “Are you Game?” School Library Journal 52 (6), 52-54.
Submitted by Anne Balsamo with research assistance from Cara Wallis.
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).
Digital Media in Community Libraries, Part 4: The Case for Virtual Libraries
The Public Library in a Google Age
In February 2008, Witold Rybczynski wrote an image essay called “Borrowed Time” for Slate magazine that focused on the question, “How do you build a public library in the age of Google?” As the architecture critic for Slate, he was interested in the fate of the physical library building in a digital age: will the brick and mortar (or in some cases steel and glass) buildings that house the library as an institution continue to serve useful cultural objectives in the age of Google, Wikipedia and Kindle? Or should the institutions be “retired” and the buildings repurposed to serve other needs?
“Borrowed Time” by Witold Rybczynski, 2008.
In the essay, Rybczynski reports on the findings of a Washington D.C. task force that concluded that the District of Columbia’s central public library was “an outmoded structure erected long before the advent of the digital world.” In addition to noting that the library was missing revenue streams (by not sending out overdue notices), the Task Force concluded that the Washington D.C. library needed a “dramatic overhaul that would combine new high-tech buildings with virtual branches in cyberspace.”
The idea of a “library” that exists only in computer space (cyberspace) is not entirely new. Perhaps the earliest practical example of a “virtual library” was the on-line catalogs that were available to French Minitel users starting in 1982. As a technological antecedent to the development of the Internet and the WWW, the French Minitel system offered a range of on-line services ranging from telephone numbers, computer dating announcements, home banking, local shopping, government documents, and library catalogs (Kessler, 1995). Not surprisingly perhaps, the national library of France (The Bibliothèque nationale de France) was one of the “first wave” of institutions to experiment with the creation of a digital library (Dalbella, 2008). But the DREAM of a virtual library was evident much earlier. It shows up in the science fiction of H.G. Wells ("The Time Machine,” 1895) as well as the hypertext system originally called Xanadu by Ted Nelson (Dream Machines, 1974) (Pennavaria, 2002). Several technological visionaries--who are noteworthy because they always seriously considered culture in their technological projections--believed that technology could serve culture in the form of lbiraries that would make materials available “just-in-time” to any and all cultural participants. For example, Internet pioneer J.C.R. Licklider (1965) wrote one of the first books on the technological promise of networked computer systems to serve as the foundation for Libraries of the Future (1965). In the 1945 article that essentially lays out the foundation for contemporary network computing as a “information processing system,” engineering scientist Vannevar Bush argued that one of the most pressing issues of the day was the need to find a way to enable people to make sense of the prodigious “human record.” He noted that the expansion of research and scholarly documents made it difficult for scientists to keep up on (what he referred to as) the “summation of human experience” (“How We May Think,” Bush, 1945). It was in this article that he proposed the term “memex” as the name of the device “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications” as well as his (sic) traces through the network of materials. According to Bush’s vision, the personal memex would be (kn turn) connected to “books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers.” Building on the creation of a personal memex and an individual’s traces of travels through that memex, collections would accumulate such that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear.” As Bush elaborates:
The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents…. The physician…runs rapidly through analogous case histories…. The chemist has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory…. The historian can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing successful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores and consults the record of the race (p. 8).
We return to Bush’s vision of a networked human record as a reminder that the notion of the digital library has been an abiding goal and guiding objective for the development of computer communication systems from early on. As we review (in this post) research on the development of digital and virtual libraries, we assert that the notion of the digital library is in some respects the enabling foundation of learning in a digital age. This post reviews some of the research on the development of digital libraries before examining some of the emergent efforts to connect brick/mortar libraries and digital spaces.
To begin to map the discussions about digital libraries and the relationship with brick and mortar institutions, consider the following distinctions between “electronic,” “digital” and “virtual” as types of libraries: (From the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE)
An electronic library is a library consisting of electronic materials and services. (As the article notes, this term is not used any longer).
A digital library is a library consisting of digital materials and services. Digital materials are items that are stored, processed and transferred via digital devices and networks.
A virtual library is a library that ONLY exists virtually. It can consist of materials from a variety of separate libraries that are organized in a virtual space.
The U.S. Library of Congress American Memory Project is offered as an example of a “digital library.” This project provides free and open access through the WWW to digitized materials from the Library of Congress collections that document the American experience. In its early years (1990-1994) during the pilot stage of the project, copies of the digitized materials were distributed on cd-rom to several dozen libraries. By the mid-1990s, the WWW enabled the wider distribution and circulation of digitized materials. As a consequence, in 1996 the American Memory Project became part of the National Digital Library Program (NDLP). The current vision for the sees it as: “a set of distributed repositories of managed content and a set of interfaces (some of which will resemble traditional catalogs) to that content.”
The challenges in building the NDLP as a true network of digital libraries are significant. The issues that have to be explored and have not yet been fully addressed include technical concerns such as the 1) development of improved technologies for digitizing analog materials, 2) the design of search and retrieval tools that compensate for abbreviated or incomplete catalog information, and 3) development of standards for interoperability. Beyond the technical challenges are legal issues such as concerns about access, copying, intellectual property, and dissemination of materials, as well as several social issues such as developing protocols for user generated tagging and meta data creation and developing modes of access that are meaningful for different communities of users.
On April 21, 2009 the World Digital Library, in preparation by the Library of Congress, was officially inaugurated at UNESCO in Paris. Currently there are more than 1,170 items archived from 26 partner institutions. Primarily established as a browsing site, the main page offers a geographic depiction of the world, with item counts by region. An impressive aspect of the site is that it is completely usable in seven different languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. All information is translated including the descriptive metadata for each item. This effort represents the latest and most ambitious attempt to realize the dream of a network of digital libraries.
Review of Work in the Creation of Digital Libraries
In 2005, Clifford Lynch. the executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (and professor of at University of California Berkeley’s School of Information) edited a special volume of D-Lib Magazine that reviewed efforts from the previous 10 years to create digital libraries. In his introduction to that volume, he offers the following overview:
“One way to characterize the period from about 1994-2004 is that it represents the first time that digital library research could really get substantial programmatic funding from the major research funding agencies in the United States through The Digital Library Initiative and DLI-2…. Through [these efforts] researchers in higher education systematically engaged in the construction and analysis of digital library prototypes and research in both the underlying technologies and social implications surrounding these systems. This funding legitimized digital libraries as a field of research.”
Lynch points out that the funding coming from NSF and its collaborator institutions (in the early 1990s) successfully contributed to the formation of a multidisciplinary community of researchers, technologists, librarians, and professionals from industry, government, and higher education that could share ideas, technologies, and prototypes that advanced everyone’s thinking about digital libraries. The community-building effort, he argues, was absolutely critical to the creation of full-scale digital libraries. His point in reviewing these early efforts to pose the question: where does this community (and its concepts, technologies and engineering know-how) go next? To this end, he identifies several horizons of research and development:
1) Research on cyberinfrastructure is critical to the creation of a network of digital libraries.
2) E-research requires new production systems to support research in various scholarly, scientific and engineering fields. These production systems will need to focus on the management of large data sets and networked digital information resources. (This, according to Lynch, will require advance technology development in areas such as high-performance computing.)
3) This will entail the development of systems and services for digital asset management, digital collection creation, and institutional repositories. To this end, he argues that previous digital libraries efforts can offer “a relatively mature set of tools, engineering approaches, and technologies” to the creation of new information management projects.
Beyond that though, he points out that the information management issues on the near horizon are broader than those that deal with questions of digital preservation and stewardship of cultural heritage materials. As Lynch concludes his editorial overview, the most compelling emergent issues that address the interests of the digital library community (as it is incorporates issues of technology, social science, and culture) include:
1) Personal information management;
2) Long term relationship between humans and information collections and systems;
3) Role of digital libraries in supporting teaching, learning and human development;
4) Environments for computer supported collaborative work.
For Lynch, these issues define the next wave of projects that will draw on the expertise and experience of digital library researchers, technologists, and librarians. Some of these issues are on-going obviously. The question about the long-term relationship between humans and information collections is less a technical problem to be “solved” as it is a process of cultural reproduction. How will people interact with (and indeed learn to value) the record of human experience in the form of digital documents, archives, and repositories? In this sense, the challenges to building an extended digital library (as a national effort such as the NDLP, or a pan-national project such as the World Digital Library) include technological issues, the development of new social practices, as well as the confrontation with competing cultural values (pertaining to issues such as language use, copyright, and literacy standards). As a project to build a new kind of official “institution” the effort is burdened by a host of official requirements: the creation of cataloging standards, protocols of interoperability, and access and privacy filters (to name just a few). Not surprisingly, progress is slow. In the meantime, some of the most creative efforts to expand the role of libraries into new digital realms are going on at the grass roots level as community libraries develop innovative ways to incorporate new information sharing applications into their menu of services that they provide community patrons.
Connecting Real and Virtual Libraries
Brick-and-mortar libraries are now experimenting with social networking sites as a method to connect with new groups of patrons. These libraries are using the sites to augment their basic web presence—where they include such information as hours, catalog information, and special event notices. Some libraries are now offering links to downloadable e-books, blog sites, teen blogs, local community information, and live chatting with a librarian. Indeed, recent applications such as Rollyo, Swiki, and Google-Co-op have provided local libraries with tools to customize their digital offerings by allowing for easy creation of search engines relevant to the library’s community. In these cases, the library website serves as portal to a range of services and other information sites. For example, the New Haven Free Public Library allows patrons to renew books, ask a librarian questions, use specialized search engines, access issues of the New Haven Bulletin and the New Haven Register, download audio books, search the World Book online, and peruse book award lists (with links to award winning books). In a similar vein, the Champaign Public Library portal provides links to answers and facts; books; downloadables; a TeenSpace; Event Calendar; Community News; and a Parent site.
Several libraries provide local content on social networking sites to enhance the community’s cultural and historical identity through their website, email newsletters, or even RSS feeds. The Louisiana Digital Library offers an online library of digital materials about Louisana’s history, culture, places and people. The Bethlehem Pennsylvania Digital History Project offers digitized primary sources, transcriptions, translatios and contextual information about the early history of Bethlehem (1741-1844). This site has been singled out by the National Endowment for the Humanities as “one of the best online resources for education in the humanities.”
Traditional librarians and associations are actively discussing how to expand the role librarians in a digital mediated world. While the American Librarian Association has a specific set of standards that guide library policies and librarian practices relating to media collections, it is now also considering how to address the skills required to interact with patrons within social networking sites. In this case, librarians have to assume responsibility for understanding and articulating the nature of these sites and their contribution to other library services; librarians not only need to know how to evaluate and apply information available through this sites, but they also need to learn the pedagogical skills to help patrons gain familiarity and proficiency in using these sites. For a discussion about the kinds of networking compentencies required of librarians, see the paper by Joe Murphy and Heather Moulaison, “Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians: Exploring Considerations and Engaging Participation” presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 14th National Conference, 2009.
It is interesting to note the rapid transformation in the notion of “virtual library” that occurred in the space of decade. In the mid-to late 1990s several sites were developed such as Infomine to provide public access to large collections of scholarly resources. This was only one noteworthy effort to create places and portals that offered access to an increasing collection of internet-available scholarly materials. In 1995, a noteworthy consortium of colleges and universities with program in information science developed the Internet Public Library. Founded by the University of Michigan and hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology, the IPL began in a graduate seminar in the School of Information and Library Studies at the U of Michigan. The idea for the library was to 1) ask interesting questions about the interconnections of libraries, librarians, and librarianship within a distributed networked environment, and 2) to learn about these issues by actually designing and creating an online library. The IPL officially went live on March 17, 1995. Now in its 14th year, the IPL is poised to merge with the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) to create a new web presence. The winning name for the new merger has yet (as of June 8, 2009) been announced.
That same year, 1995, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program was initiated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education. It held its first formal funding cycle in 2000; since then more than 200 projects have been funded to create collections, services, and tools for teachers and learners in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The idea was to create a web-based resource for the dissemination of STEM instructional materials, assessment instruments, and high-quality digital learning activities. In 2008, the NSDL entered a new phase of development and will transform into a Resource Center and Technical Network Services.
Throughout the previous decade (1999-2009) there have been several more specialized attempts to created virtual libraries. These include local “home grown” virtual libraries created by helpful information providers (see for example the one by Andy Hold called the “Andy Hold Virtual Library.” In 2002, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) collaborated with the IPL to create a virtual library of resources by, for, and about Native Americans. More recently, we’ve seen the development of state-wide extended digital library networks. For example, the state of Maine supports MARVEL: Maine’s Virtual Library that makes thousantds of magazines, newspapers and reference books available to patrons anywhere in the state through the Maine InfoNet system.
Virtual Libraries in Third Spaces
The notion of a digital library (which according to the definition offered above is a digital repository of holdings within a physical library) differs from the concept of a virtual library as a “third space” of information archive, access and retrieval.
The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest virtual library on the web. Started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, its catalog of holdings is organized by expert volunteers who compile pages of key links in particular topic areas. Individual indices live on hundreds of different servers around the world. Topics include: the arts (art history, classical music, theater, and drama); business and economics (finance, marketing, transportation); commercial media, education, computing and computer science, education, engineering, architecture, history, languages, museums, information and libraries, international affairs, law, mathematics, biosciences, anthropology, sociology and many others.
In the past four years several “third space” libraries have been created to take advantage of the community presence of participants in virtual worlds. Probably the best known and most frequented are the library initiatives in the virtual world, Second Life. As many readers of this blog understand, Second Life is a virtual world developed by the software company, Linden Lab. First launched in 2003, Second Life “residents” interact with each through through avatars—digitally created and manipulated characters that represent the user in the virtual world. Currently there are more than 200,000 residents in Second Life. Over time, communities of avatars coalesce around specific issues such as health, education, business, and special interests (music, art, activism).
In 2006, Lori Bell (Second Life avatar, Loreli Junot) created the Second Life Alliance Library System in collaboration with librarians all over the country. Dedicated to creating a new library experience for the residents of Second Life (SL), the Alliance Virtual Library organizes public programs such as lectures, discussions, and presentations. The Alliance also includes an in-world genealogy research center, library gallery, mystery manor, performance center, science center, and si-fi/fantasy center. The growing popularity of the Second Life library has led to two conferences on libraries, education, and museums in Second Life. This purpose of these conferences was to provide a place for librarians, information professionals, educators, museologists, and others to learn about and discuss the educational, informational and cultural opportunities of virtual worlds. In 2009, presentation topics included:
• Educators and librarians as information providers in a virtual world;
• Designing for emotion in a virtual world;
• Collaboration among virtual world librarians;
• Virtual libraries in the immersive education initiative.
There are actually several virtual libraries in Second Life. For example, in the companion virtual world called Teen Second Life (created for teens between the ages of 13 and 17) there is a library called Eye4YouAlliance that focuses on age appropriate materials and services.. Other Second Life library sites include: Pieta Revolutiei (Virtual Bucharest)—the first Romanian city accurately represented in Second Life; Law Librarians in Virtual Worlds—a site for law librarians, law students and library students.
One of the most active virtual libraries within Second life is the Caledon Branch Library located in the capitol city of the fictional Caledon on the Caledon Victoria City sim. This Branch includes a Reading Room just off the Victoria City Telehub. The Caledon Branch maintains an outdoor reading room, the Vannevar Bush Memorial Reading Garden. Here visitors may browse a display of recent acquisitions, find a comfortable tree under which to read, or treat themselves to refreshments while they peruse their findings. The Caledon Branch hosts monthly book discussions, art exhibits, and other cultural activities. With the Clan of Seafarers and Storytellers, it co-sponsors story-telling sessions at a local pub. It also publishes, on its own and with the Caledon Tesla Society, works of scientific and technical interest. The collection policy of the Caledon Library focuses on two main topics: (1) the 19th century and (2) Caledon’s defining literary genres. Within these areas, Caledon librarians collect primary source material (including 19th c. novels, periodicals, etc, or materials from earlier ages considered important in the 19th century) and research materials concerning the world of the 19th century and its imagination. This virtual library is tied to a fictional place in Second Life and has been a popular site for many residents.
Cybrary City in Second Life provides a virtual home to many public and academic real life (RL) libraries. Several universities and colleges have built sites in Second Life to expand their RL services: Saint Leo University Virtual Campus (Florida Education University); San Jose State University Library and Information Sciences; Orange County Library System (Central Florida); Texas State University San Marcos Educational Virtual Campus; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Stanford University.
In May 2009, the Second Life Alliance Virtual Library sponsored the first “Library Career Fair & Library Fair in Second Life.” This in-world conference provided Second Life residents with the opportunity to promote and discuss various SL library projects and activities. There was also a job fair for RL job seekers. The Career Fair events included: orientations for new avatars (librarians, students, and staff), a Library and Information Science Career Resource Center with links to global job postings, speakers on survival skills for getting a job in a bad economy, resume tune-up, and what employers are looking for in today’s media-rich Web 2.0 information environments.
Other social networking sites are also supporting library networking activities. For example both Facebook and Myspace support public and university library connections. Libraries with Facebook pages include:
•Cophenhagen University Library: Network for users and employees of Copenhagen University Library (at The Royal Library), Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Hamner Public Library (VA): A virtual portal for the patrons of the James L. Hamner Public Library in Amelia, VA.
• Palestinian Holocaust Virtual Library: This virtual library’s goal is to be a depository for all information that is out there regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• VIVA, The Virtual Library of Virginia: The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) is the consortium of the nonprofit academic libraries within the Commonwealth of Virginia.
• Virtual Jewish Library on German-Jewish Intellectual History: Supports the college in setting up a virtual library on German-Jewish literature and intellectual history.
• Scottish Poetry Library: Discussions, photos, poetry news: virtual membership of the Scottish Poetry Library.
• The Jones School of Law Library Java Lounge: A virtual library hangout designed to keep ones School of Law students informed.
Libraries with innovative MySpace pages include:
• The Jefferson County Library
• Wilmington (DE) Stroop Branch Library
• University of California Santa Barbara library
• Contra Costa (CA) library
References and Citations
Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly 176 91): 101-108 (July).
http://ww.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush/4
Kessler, Jack. (1995). “The French Minitel: Is there Digital Life Outside of the US ASCII Internet? A Challenge or a Convergence?” D-Lib Magazine, December 1995. Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december95/12kessler.html.
Licklider, L.C.R. (1965). Libraries of the Future. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynch, Clifford. (2005) “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries.” D-Lib Magazine 11.7/8 (July/August). Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/lynch/07lynch.html
Murphy, Joe and Heather Moulaison. 2009. Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians: Exploring Considerations and Engaging Participation. Paper presented at Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 14th National Conference, 2009.
Pennavaria, Katherine. (2002). “Representations of Books and Libraries in Depictions of the Future.” Libraries and Culture 37.3 (Summer, 2002): 229-248.
Rybczynski, Witold. 2008. “Borrowed Time: How do you Build a Public Library in the Age of Google?” Slate Feb 27, 2008. http://www.slate.com
For an extended list of resources on Digital Libraries see the EDUCAUSE website that includes publications, presenations, podcasts and blogs. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/DigitalLibraries/17142
Research by Anne Balsamo and Stacy Ingber, 2009.
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).
Museums: Setting the Context
The previous posts discussed how libraries are responding to the opportunities presented by digital media. As noted, these opportunities also bring new responsibilities and dilemmas. For example, consider the different purposes of an archive. Is the purpose of the archive to serve as a repository of valuable materials? To create a persistent collection that is accessible to a wide range of users? To curate a collection that reflects and manifests a set of values about quality of content? OR to preserve important cultural material for posterity? Once an archive or collection is digitized, it still remains the business of the institution to define its philosophy in terms of its the purpose of its archive. What we learned is that the initial creation of digital collections and archives have prompted library professionals to engage in new discussions to clarify the core mission of their institutions in light of a changing information landscape. As a consequence, all libraries, from the largest national collecting institutions to the smallest community branch now find themselves having to address issues pertaining to digital content management, rights of information ownership, and the balance between privacy and access. As these discussions unfold, they yield new visions for libraries in the future: as portal, as repository, as a knowledge-making enterprise, and as a critical public service.
Just as community libraries are reconsidering how to best address the opportunities and responsibilities made possible by the widespread availability of digital media, so too are museums grappling with the possibilities promised by new technologies. Libraries and museums face similar questions in how to incorporate digital technologies in the service of the institution’s core mission. The Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) has as it’s core mission to “create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.” The IMLS provides guidance and funding to several U.S. libraries (122,000) and museums (17,500) in support of programs and activities that encourage lifelong learning. Digital technologies are crucial to these efforts:
Libraries and museums help create vibrant, energized learning communities. Our achievement as individuals and our success as a democratic society depend on learning continually, adapting to change readily, and evaluating information critically. As stewards of cultural heritage, information and ideas, museums and libraries have traditionally played a vital role in helping us experience, explore, discover and make sense of the world. That role is now more essential than ever. Through building technological infrastructure and strengthening community relationships, libraries and museums can offer the public unprecedented access and expertise in transforming information overload into knowledge. (Quoted from website)
The IMLS has developed several initiatives to realize this mission.
- The Connection to Collections effort is a “national initiative to raise public awareness of the importance of caring for our treasures, and to underscore the fact that these collections are essential the American Story.”
- The Engaging America’s Youth initiative has been developed to create and sustain a Nation of Learners.
- The International Strategic Partnership initiative is designed to strengthen cross-cultural connections between U.S. museums and libraries and their global counterparts.
IMLS also sponsors an annual event called the WebWise Conference that brings together representatives from museums, libraries, archives, systems science, and education interested in the creation of high quality online content for inquiry and learning. The first WebWise conference held in 2004 focused on the the notion of “sharing” online content. Key issues addressed during that first conference included discussions about technical interoperability, the formation of collaborative partnerships to foster greater access to shared information collections, and funding and sustainability of technology-intensive services. Subsequent conferences continued these discussions and branched into other areas of consideration such as: how to create digital resources for effective teaching and learning, how to engage learners of all ages, the meaning of metadata, the changing nature of stewardship and the preservation of digital collections, and the implication of Web 2.0 social networking applications. Every conference has included presentations on the legal and policy implications of new digital media for the purposes of information sharing, information ownership, rights of privacy, and changing models of copyright and licensing.
The 2009 WebWise Conference was structured around the theme “digital debates” and included several talks on the need to nurture more robust collaborations among institutions and between an institution and members of its public. The talk by Nancy Proctor (from the Smithsonian America Art Museum) focused on how museums could foster creative collaborations using new technologies.
Nancy Proctor, “The Museum as Agora: What is Collaboration in Museums 2.0.”
WebWise 2009, Washington D.C.
Proctor begins her talk with the question: what is the museum in the web 2.0 world of information on demand? In her talk she reviewed several projects that represent innovative attempts to create novel forms of collaboration among museums and members of the public. She notes that these efforts did not begin with the development of Web 2.0 applications, but had been going on over the past decade. Noteworthy projects that she discussed included:
Save Outdoor Sculpture:
This project took shape before the advent of social networking applications. The aim was to collaborate with individuals to gather user-created content about outdoor sculptures. The collaboration involved the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Heritage Preservation Organization who worked with 7000 individuals to catalog condition reports on outdoor sculpture across the U.S. The project data was recorded on paper, through email and photographs. The result was the creation of an extensive database on outdoor sculpture that is now being imported into Google maps.
Fill the Gap: Sponsored by the Luce Center at the American Art Museum, this project enlists the collaboration of photographers to “fill the gap” in empty art display cases. When an art object goes out for restoration or on-loan for an exhibition, there is a gap in the museum display cases. This project asks photographers to upload images artwork to Flicker that might “fill the gap” in a particular display case. The aim is to engage the members of the public in dialogue about the nature of the collection and to demonstrate the kinds of discussions that go on among curators about the presentation of art within the museum context.
The Wikipedia Loves Art Project: Led by the Brooklyn Museum, in collaboration with twenty other international museums, this project is structured like a scavenger hunt in that it invites people to visit museums and take photographs of artworks on certain themes. The photographs are uploaded to a Flickr site, and are then evaluated in terms of quality and thematic appropriateness. The winning images are used to provide illustrations for Wikipedia articles. Photographers (or teams) get full credit for any image used.
The Handheld Wiki: This project allows museum professionals to share expertise and experience on the use of handheld devices and mobile media.
In reflecting on these efforts, Proctor identifies the key elements of collaboration: 1) The creation of community and sharing practices, 2) the development of dialogue and storytelling, 3) integration efforts and the creation of relevance, 4) the development of trust and interdependencies, and 5) (most of all) the creation of fun experiences. She notes that these project also highlight the significant challenges to fostering collaboration—including the fact that people are sometimes stingy with their contributions, that tasks must be prioritized, that intellectual property and brands must be respected and managed, and that quantity does not guarantee quality. In her conclusion, she returns to her original question: what is the museum in a 2.0 world of information on demand? To this she responds that the museum might best be considered as a distributed network of networks. The Web 2.0 Museum is staged on different kinds of platforms: onsite (at physical brick and mortar locations), online (at digital environments and sites created by the museum), online elsewhere (at digital environments and sites created and governed by others such as Flickr and Wikipedia) and on mobile devices. As she reminds us, audience members and visitors might access the museum through any (or all) of these sites. In reflecting on this phenomenon, Proctor asserts that the museum is transforming from the Acropolis (the remote shrine that keeps cultural treasures safe) to an Agora—a space for community, encounter and exchange. For this reason, she argues that the museum is preeminently a collaborative space in digital age.
Indeed, the postings in this next section will consider a range of practices that museums are using to create new collaborative experiences for and among their visitors. We focus on the use of digital media in two general types of museums: the art museum and the science/technology center. Art museums with large collections are strongly aligned with libraries in providing archival services and face issues similar to those of libraries relating to the digitization of collections, providing access, and protecting ownership rights. While other museums such as science centers and technology museums are less focused on the collection of artifacts as they are on the staging of particular experiences with new technologies or the demonstration of basic scientific principles. We consider the efforts going on in art museums as separate from those that are happening within the context of the science/technology museums only for the purposes of organization of the background research. The postings will discuss how museums have moved from a focus on digital collections to the project of creating a web presence for visitors. One posting will look at a variety of on-line museums experiences including museums in Second Life and teen web sites. A later post will examine new practices of media making, playing, and tinkering that are now offered by various museums as a way to connect the physical and the virtual for the purposes enhancing visitor learning experiences. The final posting in this section will consider specific edge projects that are designed to explore new learning opportunities in a digital age. The trajectory of these postings track the changes going on in museums from providing access to information to staging new forms of participation.
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
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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/
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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
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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
Virtual Museums: Where to Begin?
The topic of virtual museums induces list-making mania in me. Twenty pages deep into the Google results for a search on “virtual museums” I have a personal list of more than 100 “special topic” VM efforts. My collection of virtual collections spans the gamut— from the Cultural Revolution and the city of San Francisco, to widescreen cinema and LEDS. The explosion in the number of virtual museums didn’t happen overnight; it is the result of a long engagement between museum professionals and new technologies. Some of the earliest efforts at what might be understood as a “virtual” museum include physical replicas of ancient structures, such as the Lascaux caves and various Greek monuments. As Victoria Newhouse (“The Virtual Museum,” 1998) argues, the use of “reproductive technologies” by museums has a long history. When the originals were too fragile or lost altogether, museums often displayed copies of important cultural artifacts. As she rightly points out, the Internet, and the WWW in particular has profound implications for the circulation of digital copies of museum holdings and the creation of digital collections. “Open to anyone who wants to set up his or her own site, it [the Web] is the great leveler, and an unknown artist and a powerful corporation have addresses of equal weight” (267). With this statement she anticipates the proliferation of virtual museum websites that include the sites sponsored not only by the most venerable institutions such as the Vatican (The Vatican Museums Online), but also by those devoted to niche topics such as valves, typewriters, toilet paper, and (one of my personal favorites) shoes.
Media archeologist and scholar, Erkki Huhtamo was the first one who introduced me to the notion of the virtual museum. His article, “On the Origins of the Virtual Museum” begins by pointing out that the term “virtual museum” is extremely vague. Indeed, even a cursory web search demonstrates that the term is invoked to describe a broad set of digital practices and online resources. As Huhtamo notes, the idea of a vast linked set of cultural documents was the key idea behind Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project. In this sense, both the notion of the virtual museum and the virtual library were prefigured in Nelson’s vision. Other precursors to the development web-based virtual museums include various CD-ROMs produced as supplements to traditional museums. (See for example: Virtual Museums: Uffizi)
Many of the virtual museums that exist online now began as websites for brick-and mortar-institutions. According to one account, the first virtual museum was the EXPO created in 1993 as a guide to artifacts from the Vatican Library on display at the time at the U.S. Library of Congress. The exhibit, “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture” included 200 artifacts from manuscripts, books and maps. The digital guide, which might be more properly identified as an example of an online exhibit, consisted of a set of html pages that included textual descriptions and images of items on display. Another early effort was the WebMuseum, an exhibition of artworks by begun in 1994 by a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique in Paris. It too consisted of hypertext pages containing textual descriptions and images of artwork.
But for Huhtamo—who is a media archeologist after all—the precursor of the virtual museum was the development of “exhibit design” as a medium in and of itself. He traces the origins of virtual museums to the experimental efforts of artists (such as László Moholy-Nagy, Frederick Kiesler, and Eli Lissitzky, among others) in the 1920s to redefine the viewer’s experience within the (art) museum setting. He suggests that the idea of the virtual museum was explored and developed well before the technologies of the Web became ubiquitous tools within museums. (On this point he also draws attention to in Jeffrey Shaw’s 1990 interactive work called “The Virtual Museum” in which visitors sat on a motorized rotating platform in front of a large screen and could “virtually” travel through images of galleries and museum spaces.)
Current efforts to track the use of the term “virtual museum” support Huhtamo’s basic claim that the term is used inconsistently. Many of the lists annotated below—lists of “virtual museums"—actually consist of links to museum web pages even though the museum sites don’t refer to themselves as “virtual museums.” Moreover, many of the lists of “virtual museums” include not only links to museum websites but also links to virtual field trips, virtual tours, and other kinds of online learning resources. See for examples: The Tramline site called Virtual Field Trips; the Homework Spot site with a field trip archive; and the list of Internet field trips sponsored by Scholastic.
(And of course we know that a “virtual museum” is not to be confused with the notion of a fictional museum such as the Flash Museum that appears in the DC comic superhero Flash stories or the Museum of Curiosity—a comedy game show on BBC Radio.)
Among the several thousand Google results are examples of virtual museums that consist of collections of digital representations of artifacts (images, sounds, texts) that do not exist as a collection anywhere specifically. For example, the “virtual car museum” maintained by Phil Seed includes images of cars taken from his collection of automobile brochures as well as images contributed by other car enthusiasts. While many of the “virtual museums” included on these lists are sponsored by formal institutions, others are created (and maintained) by people without any specific museum affiliation or background. In this sense, the notion (and indeed the creation) of many a virtual museum is an example of the blurring of the boundary between professional and amateur when it comes to matters of knowledge production. These sites are signposts of the pro-am phenomenon of creative participation in digital culture.
At the end of his 2002 talk on “The Origins of Virtual Museums,” Erkki Huhtamo offers a set of questions about the “historical challenges for creators of virtual museums.” For example, he poses questions such as:
- What is the role of tactility? Can tele-tactility replace the physicality of touch?
- How does one make a distinction between a museum exhibit and an entertainment application?
- How should the physical museum relate to the virtual one?
- Can a virtual museum be a replica of the physical one, or should it be something radically different?
Of course, Huhtamo wasn’t the only one at the time suggesting the need to develop metrics for the assessment and analysis of virtual museums (see for example the paper by Falquet, et. al., Design and Analysis of Virtual Museums, from the 2001 Museums and the Web conference). But he did prefigure some of the contemporary research and conversations among museum professionals about the design and analysis of virtual museums, online exhibits, and visitor (digital) experiences. In a book chapter published in 2006, for example, Lianne McTavish discussed the nature of the visitor experience of a virtual museum to ask whether the participation is “merely passive clicking” or actually encourages new ways of thinking. In the early 2000s, a large project called The “Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage” (PEACH) (funded by the Province of Trento in Italy) explored the possibilities of using new media technologies to enhance vistors’ experiences at various European cultural heritage institutions. The PEACH project specifically investigated the creation of novel user interfaces and the use of mobile devices. More recently, a collection of articles published by the American Association of Museums in the book, The Digital Museum: A Think Guide (Din and Hecht, eds.), chronicled the ongoing discussions about the design, creation and technological support for virtual museums. Whereas earlier AAM publications, The Wired Museum (1997) and The Virtual and the Real (1998) focused on issues pertaining to the digitization of collections, data integration, authorship and museum authority (among other issues), the essays in The Digital Museum collection address issues pertaining to the broad impact of the Web on the contemporary museum. As Selma Thomas writes in the introduction:
The significance of the online museum—to institutions and to their audiences—has been debated from the Internet’s earliest days. The second generation of Web tools has only intensified that debate. In the early 1990s, museum professionals worried about the role of the “virtual museum online. Would it compete with the bricks –and-mortar museum for visitors, funds and programs? Would it dilute the brand of the museum that monument to civic and cultural pride? Would it demean the value of the collections by circulating tiny pixilated images? Could museums, with their commitment to “real” objects, protect the authenticity of those objects while developing Web-based programming? And what about visitors? Would they want to see the real thing if they could see the digital versions of the collections online? (3).
As the book chapters demonstrate, current discussions among museum professionals now also need to address how the Web (and the creation of online museums) demands the development of new business models and requires collaboration among institutions. Moreover, several authors mention the need to develop web-specific assessment methods for evaluating online visitor experiences, such that museums can better understand how their investment in the creation of web experiences (in terms of staff, technology, and creative energy) really contributes to the realization (or not) of core missions.
One of the questions not addressed in that book that comes up in other articles concerns the cultural politics of virtual museums. Some museum professionals suggest that the virtual museum is an important vehicle for purpose of cultural repatriation (Resta, et. al. 2002). Indeed, this is a point where the concerns of museum professionals and those of library professionals merge. The special issue of D-Lib Magazine (March 2002) was devoted to the topic of “Digital Technology and Indigenous Communities.” Contributors included library as well as museum professionals who discussed issues of preservation, networking, collecting and the creation of digital representations of the cultural artifacts of indigenous peoples (Atkins and Holland, eds. 2002). As might be expected, there was wide agreement on the value of creating digital archives; what wasn’t as strongly addressed in that volume was the need to provide sites of public access to those archives. The first step was to simply ensure the creation of digital representations of important artifacts. Clifford Lynch, in a 2007 Educause article pushes the argument to the next step. While he doesn’t specially cite the advantages of creating a “virtual museum” per se, he argues that when artifacts are to be repatriated, it is vitally important that the process include the creation of digital surrogates of the cultural artifacts. But he goes on to make the point that indigenous artifacts are also part of a collective cultural heritage. For him the creation of digital surrogates serves not only to advance scholarship and research but also, equally importantly, maintain (collective) cultural memory (Lynch, 2008). The broader point Lynch makes is that with the advances in digitalization technologies the quality of the digital surrogates has improved greatly such it is possible now to create highly detailed images and information records that virtually outstrip the original object in terms of its information capacity. This points directly to one of the key cultural affordances of virtual museums: the capacity to create media-rich information environments for the display of surrogate cultural objects. The possibilities for the creation of complex narrative contexts and participatory story making (through the use of games and digital avatars) are the real cultural promise of virtual museums.
Creating Complex Virtual Museums, Exhibits, and Online Experiences
The development of virtual environments has spawned several interesting experiments in creating new forms of virtual museums and web-based exhibits that actively engage participants in creating new understandings about digitized representations of cultural artifacts. Probably the most familiar and commonly cited virtual environment is Linden Lab’s Second Life. But other environment such as WhyVille and Active Worlds are also serving as the platform for creative experiments in the design of virtual museum experiences. In 2008, Paul Doherty and colleagues hosted a workshop at the annual “Museums and the Web” conference on the topic of Museums in Virtual Worlds. They focused workshop activities on Second Life and offered a list of museums already established there.
- The Splo, Second Life’s oldest Science Museum founded April 1, 2006.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Midnight%20City/175/60/26 - The Exploratorium has a sim with some exhibits, a model of an asteroid impact on Mars, and a Brownian Motion exhibit.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Exploratorium/147/118/21 - The International Spaceflight Museum includes models of spacecraft from around the world, planetarium, rocket ride, and a tour of the planets.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/48/83/24 - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has two islands with interactive weather experiences.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteroa/116/143/54 - At the Virtual Starry Night site, Van Gough paintings are used to inspire 3-d constructions.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Luctesa/105/127/26 - The Second Louvre: a collection of art created in Second Life.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tompson/153/97/100
The various museums (or museum-like activities) going on in Second Life (SL) have garnered critical attention. Richard Urban, et. al., (2007) offers an overview of various SL museum efforts. Urban’s paper offers a useful summary of the predecessors of SL (MUDs, MOOs, and VRML) as well as a list of characteristics that differentiate SL museums: (scale, setting, persistence, media richness, mode of visitor engagement, social interaction, intended purpose, collection type, and target audiences). Not only have museums set up spaces in SL, the virtual environment has also become an important site for conferences on the topic of virtual museums. In 2009, the Second Annual Virtual Worlds conference was held in Second Life on the topic of “Libraries, Education and Museums.”
On March 19, 2009, the Smithsonian Museum opened its virtual doors to three Second Life “islands” of the Latino Virtual Museum (LVM). The effort is described as a pan-institutional digital initiative that highlights the vast and rich collections, research and scholarship, exhibitions and educational activities of the Smithsonian Institution as they relate to U.S. Latinos and Latin America. The aim is to use the latest media and communication technologies (i.e., Second Life) to provide access to information and resources and to facilitate the increase and diffusion of knowledge to local and global online audiences about Latino/Hispanic history, heritage and American experience. The website description claims that it is an example of the Museum Web 3.0—the creation of an educational virtual world environment
Other virtual world environments are also serving as platforms for innovative museum experiments. WhyReef is a coral reef in Whyville—a virtual world for younger children. Created and operated by the Chicago Field Museum, WhyReef includes a game that engages children in identifying marine animals. Launched in March 2009, the site has had more than 150,000 visits since. (For more information on the project see the MacArthur Foundation Spotlight Blog posting by Audrey Aronowsky.) The New York Hall of Science has created a virtual museum space within Active Worlds called the Virtual Hall of Science (VHOS). The VHOS project is virtual space within the Active Worlds Universe in which the New York Hall of Science intends to create interactive exhibits through a collaborative process involving the contributions of Hall staff, Hall Explainers, participants of the Hall’s camp programs and casual visitors. The first phase of the VHOS project involved a group of 18-23 year olds who participated in a four-day camp to learn how to navigate and build in the Active Worlds environment, research a STEM topic of their choice, learn exhibit design from and expert, and finally design their own exhibits in-world. Prior to the camp, a team of Explainers (the Hall’s equivalent of a docent) went through a series of AW trainings in order to help camp participants realize their designs. At the conclusion of the camp participants completed a draft of their exhibit designs. Currently in its third phase, the VHOS project is focusing on methods to develop richer content as part of virtual exhibits.
Probably the most ambitious and impressive interactive virtual museum that exists entirely as an interactive virtual space is the Museo Virtual De Arts El Pais (MUVA). It is the most fully realized vision of a graphic and spatialized virtual museum. The site is accessible in Spanish and in English. It is a media rich virtual museum that invites visitors to spend time exploring the space. It rewards the long visit.
Museo Virtual De Arts El Pais (MUVA).
Other noteworthy projects include:
- The Creative Spaces Web Project is a joint effort by nine British museums that creates a place for people to curate a collection of photographs/videos of items from their famous collections. It is a complex multi-institutional collaboration that has sparked interesting discussion about the the nature of authority and cultural information. (See the blog posting on jon pratty/machine culture.)
- In the U.S., a consortium of telecommunications related museums and archives in the U.S. have banded together to provide educational and entertaining on-line exhibits that make use of their individual collections. The Telecommunications Virtual Museum involves materials from the Capehart Communications Collection (TX), Rye Telephone Company (CO), SNET Archives (U of Connecticut), Telephone Museum of New Mexico, and Telecommunications History Group (CO and WA).
- This Old Habitat created by the Chicago Field Museum is a hybrid field trip and interactive game.
- The website for the Museum of Tolerance to be built in the heart of Jerusalem includes a 3-D representation of the proposed physical museum.
The List of Lists
In 2008, the Institute of Museums and Library Services released a “National Study on the Use of Museums and the Internet.” The results of the study provided solid evidence for what many museum professionals had already suspected: that the amount of use of the Internet is “positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums.” This suggests that we will continue to enjoy the development of new virtual museums. The following sites maintain lists of Virtual Museums, online museum tours, or web-based museum collections.
The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) is a project sponsored by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) that includes links to WWW services offered by various museums around the world. The current VLMP site includes pages of links to international museums, galleries, libraries, and Wikipedia pages on museums. The original VLmp site was founded in 1994 at Oxford University. Page notes indicate that the original page hasn’t been updated since September 2006. On a list of the mirror sites for the page is a description of the reorganization of the project. Here we learn that the project evolved from being maintained by a single person and organization (Jonathan Bowen and the ICOM) to one that was to be expanded and maintained by a distributed group of self-identified volunteers. It is unclear at this point how extensive is the group of people who contribute to the links list on the site. The WWW Virtual Library mirrors the VLmp page. It includes links that were first added in the mid-1990s. While the links to the 1995 sites (such as to the Ontario Science Center) now point to contemporary sites (that announce 2009 events for exmple), the early list of links would be valuable as a resource for anyone studying the history of the development of virtual museums. The WayBack Machine doesn’t have pages from the earliest sites (1995), but would be a useful archeological tool for the other early attempts by museums to create a web presence.
The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM) is a delightful site created by the Chicago design firm, Coudal Partners. It includes a long list of links to museum websites, online exhibits, and virtual museum experiences.
MuseumSpot is a portal to web-based information about museums. It serves as a directory of museum website links that enable users to search by topic, by country/state/city, or by type of resources. It includes articles and activities for children. An editorial team selects the information listed on the site. Links from this site include: MuseumStuff.com that provides a directory to museum websites organized by state (in the US), country, or type and MuseumsUSA MuseumUSA that offers a comprehensive list of US museums.
The Virtual Museum Exhibit….Museum on Demand site include links to different topics of virtual exhibits sponsored by museums across the globe.
Museumlinks’ Museum of Museums: This site began as an effort to share online resources among Illinois museums in 1997. The website boasted that it would eventually contain links to every “museums on the planet, from the world’s largest to the most obscure.” As of 2009, its list of “virtual museums” includes 59 links.
Virtual Free Sites includes a page of links to virtual tours of museums, exhibits and special points of interest. There are 45 links to virtual tours of museums; 17 tours of virtual exhibits; 83 tours to places of interest (including a tour of a domestic violence shelter); 23 tours of “real-time” adventures; and 20 virtual reality tours.
The Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) provides an interactive space that offers activities and experiences based on Canadian museum collections. It includes links to virtual exhibits and tours, but also creates new online activities that span the collection of different museums.
A list of Online exhibits throughout Australia is provided by the Australian Libraries Gateway site.
The Association of Science-Technology Centers maintains a site called Try Science that includes interactive experiences and activities created and hosted by its member organizations.
The Exploratorium maintains an extensive set of web pages that provide online science/technology related activities and experiences. The Exploratorium Digital Library is a rich resource for photos, videos, learning activities, and web casts.
The Teachers Tap is a free professional development resource that helps educators and librarians find useful online resources and activities. It maintains a page on “Digital and Virtual Museums” that includes briefly annotated links to 32 online museum sites across the globe. The site also includes a long list of links to virtual field trips that were ONCE created by the Apple Computer Corporation’s Learning Interchange Team, but are no long available. The list of dead links remains useful though for those doing research on the history of interactive educational efforts.
A page called “Oldies and Goodies: The Grand List of School Virtual Museums” announces that as of 2006 it is no longer up-to-date. As of its last update, it listed 45 “museums” that were created by elementary school classes. Almost all of the links are no longer active, but one example persists: The Deer Creek School “Our Town” project to create a museum about the Gold Country (Nevada Count) of California. As the site explains:
This community project provided hands-on experiences that involved students while they learned the history and geography of Nevada County. The outcome of student participation included publishing a book of Community Treasures for Thomas Brothers’ Maps Educational Foundation and developing a web site about Our Town using state-of-the-art technologies. The book will be on display at the California State Capitol in Sacramento in conjunction with the California State Sesquicentennial celebration this coming year. At a later date, Thomas Brothers Maps Educational Foundation will take the books on a tour of the United States on horseback along the old Pony Express Routes to share California communities with other children. The process involved fifth grade students and high school mentors who met one day a week after school for an enrichment class. They formed cooperative teams and selected subject areas to study. Each team made appointments to interview and videotape local people and historical experts.
The Library of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies includes a page with links to more than 40 sites about Jewish museums or exhibits.
The Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University maintains a list of medical museums and thematic virtual museums.
Midge Frazel collated a set of links to web museums and virtual field trips as a resource for teachers; the site also includes a toolkit to help teachers create virtual tours and field trips.
L.S. King has compiled a list of virtual field trips, museums, and tours for use in home schooling activities.
Philip Harland maintains a site that offers educational
virtual tours of archeological museums.
The Pygoya Webmuseum, also referred to as the Pygoya Museum of Cyber art or the Pygoya Web Art Museum, is a creation by Hawaiian artist/dentist Rodney Chang, who claims that his “Truly Virtual Web Art Museum” was one of the first websites of internet based cyberculture.
References
Atkins, D. and M. Peterson Holland, eds. 2002. “Digital Technology and Indigenous Communities.” D-Lib Magazine 8.2 (March).
Din, H. and P. Hecht, eds. 2007. The Digital Museum: A Think Guide. New York: The American Association of Museums.
Falquet, G., J. Guyot, and L. Nerima. 2001. “Design and Analysis of Virtual Museums.” Museums and the Web Conference. Seattle, WA.
Hazan, S. “Cultural Institutions take on a (second) life of their own.” http://www.musephere.com/about/IJDCE-SL.html
Huhtamo, E. 2002. “On the Origins of the Virtual Museum.” Virtual Museums and the Public Understanding of Science and Culture: Nobel Symposium (NS 12). May 26-29. Stockholm, Sweden.
Jones-Garmil, K., ed. 1997. The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms. New York: The American Association of Museums.
Lynch, C. 2008. “Repatriation, Reconstruction, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Digital World.” EDUCAUSE Review 43.1 (January/February): 70-71.
McTavish, L. 2006. “Visiting the Virtual Museum: Art and Experience Online.” In Janet Marstine, ed. New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. New York: Blackwell.
Newhouse, V. 1998. Towards a New Museum. New York: Monacelli Press.
Rayward, W. B., and M. Twidale, 1999. “From Docent to Cyberdocent: Education and guidance in the virtual museum.” Archives and Museum Informatics, 13, 23-53.
Resta, P., L. Roy, M.K. de Montano, and M. Christal. “Digital Repatriation: Virtual museum partnerships with indigenous peoples.” Proceedings of the International Conference Computers in Education. 3-6 (Dec. 2002): 1482 –1483.
Rothfarb, R. and P. Doherty, 2007. “Creating Museum Content and Community in Second Life.” Museums and the Web Conference. April 11-14: San Francisco, CA.
Stock, O. and M. Zancanaro, eds. 2007. PEACH: Intelligent Interfaces for Museum Visits. New York: Springer.
Thomas, S. and A. Mintz, eds. 1998. The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum. New York: American Association of Museums.
Tsichritzis D, and S. Gibbs. 1991. “Virtual Museums and Virtual Realities.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums. Pittsburgh, PA.
Urban, R., P. Marty, and M. Twidale. 2007. “A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums.” Museums and the Web Conference. April 11-14: San Francisco, CA.
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html
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 August, 2009).
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.
Learning from the Edges, Part 2: Technologies of Participation
This is the final posting reporting on the literature review conducted as part of the grant “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: The Future of Museums and Libraries as Mixed Reality Learning Spaces.” This post reviews innovative science center efforts to engage visitors in making and tinkering activities. These efforts might be considered as part of a broader cultural logic that media theorist Henry Jenkins (2006) characterizes as a culture of participation. For Jenkins, this cultural logic is marked by a transition from individualized media consumption to the formation of “consumption communities” that enable new forms of participation and collaboration. The activities and programs offered by these museums are intended to engage visitors in collaborations with one another and in the process of creative making practices.
It is a bit of a misnomer to identify any of the projects reviewed here are truly “edge” efforts. The organizations discussed in this list are well-respected and popular cultural institutions that have been actively involved in using new technologies to stimulate visitor participation for several decades. The 1999 issue of Dimensions—the publication of the Association of Science Technology Center (ASTC)—was devoted to the topic of “Science Centers on the Web.” In that issue, ASTC Director Wendy Pollock reported on a two-year collaborative investigation of how to incorporate web experiences into science center exhibit programs. The “lessons learned” from that investigation, as reported by Pollack in her 1999 editorial, are ones that many museums and libraries are now just coming to appreciate and explore. For example, Pollack noted that the web “opens up possibilities for collaboration on a global scale” and with those possibilities come the management challenges of organizing and coordinating a (potentially) high volume of online visitor responses. (Remember that in 1999 we didn’t have social networking applications that facilitate online peer-to-peer participation.) Eager to explore the potential of the web to augment their educational missions, science centers were early adopters of the use of the web for communication and collaboration with (and among) intended visitors. Pollack ended the editorial by commenting on the importance of keeping focus on core values. On this point, she cites the director of the Science Museum of Minnesota, Joel Halvoron:
Joel Halvoron cited futurist John Naisbitt, who wrote in his 1995 book Global Paradox that “every high-tech revolution is followed by a high-touch revolution.” Less important than how technology is used in exhibits or programs, Halvorson suggested, is ongoing and cross-disciplinary reflection about the nature of the museum experience. Thinking of Naisbitt’s forecast, [Halvoron] said, “the affective dimension of the museum experience should be stressed, to provide the compensatory human response - or ‘high-touch experience’ - demanded for survival in a highly technological society.”
In fact, some of the best discussions about the methods of designing “high-touch” museum experiences using high-tech has taken place on the web. Nina Simon started the Museum 2.0 blog”>Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 to explore the way that the philosophies of Web 2.0 can be applied in museums to make them “more engaging, community-based, vital elements of society.” Simon’s blog has been a well-visited site for discussion and dissemination about new uses of web applications for science centers and and other kinds of museums. Recent postings have explored the design of participatory experiences based on
new recommendation systems and creative uses of post-it notes. More to the point of this posting, Simon’s blog includes several substantive discussions on the nuances of the difference between “participatory design vs. design for participation.” As Simon argues: “participatory design means innovating the process,” and “design for participation means innovating the product.” (In fact, Simon is writing a book about the topic. For a sneak preview see her Museum 2.0 blog).
Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 Blog
To explore the differences between these two notions, the following section describes the efforts of two noteworthy science centers: The Exploratorium in San Francisco, and The San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Both of these institutions have been discussed frequently in Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog as offering innovative experiments in the creation of participatory museum experiences.
The Exploratorium is one of the most highly regarded institutions for the creation of participatory informal science learning experiences. Exploratorium staff are industry leaders in the approach to design that focuses on “innovating the product.” According to Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich, exhibit designers at the Exploratorium, there are six principles that guide the creation of compelling participatory activities within museums.
- The activities must evoke intrinsic motivation.
- The activities must be challenging. The projects must test users so they have to learn new skills and think of new ideas.
- The activities and explorations of individuals should be designed to contribute to something larger.
- The activities should build relationships among people, and between people and tools. It is key that museum staff understand how to facilitate the formation of these relationships.
- The activities must have simple starting points, but be complex enough to sustain interest. Scaffolding of experience is important.
- The activities must be inspiring and provide opportunities for those who don’t feel they’re artistic, scientific, or creative.
At the Exploratorium, Wilkinson and Petrich have created a project called the “PIE Institute” that is based on their collaborative research with Mitch Resnick from MIT. The Exploratorium PIE Institute is part of the PIE Network—a network of organizations and projects that explore the PIE approach to learning. PIE (Playful Invention and Exploration) is an approach to using new technologies that integrates art, science, music, and engineering. The Exploratorium’s PIE Institute, led by Wilkinson and Petrich, was launched in 2005 with a workshop that explores ways to integrate digital technologies into construction-based science and art activities.
The Exploratorium PIE Institute Idea Library
The PIE Network of projects has been supported by the National Science Foundation since 2000 and is based on Resnick’s work with the Lifelong Kindergarten research team at MIT. In addition to events at the PIE Institute at the Exploratorium, the PIE network has (by 2009) included events held at several institutions such as: Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Ft. Wroth Museum of Science and Industry, American Museum of Visionary Art, Science Museum of Minnesota, the MIT Museum, and the Singapore Science Center.
The PIE Learning Philosophy
The key elements of the PIE learning philosophy are identified as the following:
- Constructionism: Refers to two kinds of construction: constructing ideas and constructing personally meaningful projects.
- Hands-On Inquiry Science: Science museums provide opportunities for people of all ages to learn through hands-on exploration of natural phenomenon.
- Bridging Physical and Virtual Worlds: PIE activities bridge the divide between digital technologies and the physical world, allowing artful exploration of the world beyond the computer screen.
- Informal Learning: PIE activities generally take place in informal learning environments.
The Tech Virtual Test Zone is a new area in the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation that opened on June 3, 2008. When it first opened, it showcased several hands-on, interactive exhibits conceptualized and developed originally in the virtual world of Second Life (virtual-world-to-real-world exhibits). These new exhibits were the result of The Tech’s virtual exhibit design initiative and competition, called The Tech Virtual, which was launched in December 2007. The projects were originally developed in Second Life by creative amateurs from around the world and submitted electronically. The Tech Virtual was launched as a two-platform system: a website and a Second Life island. Of the many projects submitted, seven were initially chosen to be installed in the real Tech Museum. All projects incorporated interactive multimedia including streaming video, musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) controllers, rear projections, avatars and web cameras. The first theme featured in the Test Zone was Art, Film & Music, which is also the theme of a new permanent gallery that The Tech plans to launch by 2010, featuring some of the people and innovations from Silicon Valley that have contributed significantly to this field. The next Tech Virtual Museum Workshop will invite visitors to participate in designing advanced and interesting museum exhibits—using the newest interfaces available--in the areas of art, film, music, and games.
Among the concepts and equipment that this exhibition will employ are 3D screens, PhotoSynth type applications, tangible interfaces, haptic interfaces, telepresence, gesture recognition, RFID, virtual worlds, augmented reality, holograms, accelerometers, surface computers, particle and physical software effects, web cameras, Arduino boards, 3D printers, flexible displays, synthetic experiences, real time photo manipulation, accessible low cost technology such as One Laptop Per Child, HD cameras, multi-touch interfaces, technology and the future of digital entertainment. If you were to build the ultimate destination where visitors could immerse themselves in the latest technologies while becoming engaged, informed and educated users of it, what would it look like?
The Tech Museum Virtual Tech Test Zone
The Tech Virtual Museum is an example of what Nina Simon refers to as a participatory design. In fact, she was one of the people involved in initiating this ambitious experiment involving people in the exhibit design process. Simon describes some of the key lessons that guided the development of this experiment in participatory design (these are six of her top 10):
- Give away the fun and easy part. Do not ask people to design whole exhibits; The Tech Virtual community contributed great ideas for exhibits.
- Level the playing field, or tip it in their favor.
- Contests are good for raising awareness and focusing behavior, but not good for building sustainable communities or work in a flexible environment.
- Provide a way for folks to build their exhibit. The participants should have the tools to prototype the exhibit.
- It’s more important to have social instigators lead your community than authoritative professionals.
- The community provided great exhibit inspiration but their projects required heavy translation to become real exhibits.
As an example of a co-created museum experience, The Tech Virtual Test Zone was an experiment in working with the public to create museum-quality exhibitions that involved the redesign of the process of exhibit design and fabrication. In this case, the exhibit design process unfolded in a virtual world, Second Life. Other museums are experimenting with the creation of dedicated physical spaces for the creation of participatory making and discovery visitor experiences.
There are more than 250 science centers and museums throughout North America that have hands-on exhibits or laboratories that encourage visitor participation in discovery and making activities. Many of these are feature focused, hands-on learning experiences for school groups that are integrated with state-based learning objectives and curricula. Some of the other noteworthy examples include:
The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
The Crown Family Playlab includes real artifacts and specimens, and offers six themed play areas such as digging up dinosaur bones, grinding corn in a pueblo, putting on an animal costume and crawling, hopping, or flying, listening to stories and other family programs.
Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago
The Idea Factory provides children with opportunities for scientific exploration through interactive activities that allow them to discover scientific principles for themselves.
The Fab Lab—a small-scale fabrication workshop—that was opened in 2007 by Argonne National Laboratory, in conjunction with the University of Chicago.
California Science Center, Los Angeles
The Big Lab is 32,000 square feet of space to do hands-on science.
The Discovery Rooms are designed to foster and support science exploration of young children (age 7 and younger). These learning environments provide opportunities for interactive, inquiry-based investigations that prepare young visitors for later science experiences.
The Ontario Science Center
The Weston Family Innovation Center is a new environment that encourages visitors to take on and find practical solutions to current world problems.
The End of the Literature Review, The Beginning of New Conversations?
This is the final post of the literature review of the project. We invite readers to make comments on individual posts that offer pointers to other projects, activities and initiatives that illustrate some of the key points or themes discussed in these reviews. We are hoping that by blogging the literature review we will be able to encourage a dynamic forum for the circulation of scholarship where the initial reports (such as these postings) serve as the beginning of collaborative note-making and reporting.
The next, and most final posting will include a comprehensive bibliography of citations and web addresses of the literature and web sites discussed in these posts.
References
Hein, Hilde. (1990). The Exploratorium: The Museum as laboratory. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYU Press.
Pollack, Wendy. (1999). “Science Centers on the Web.” ASTC Dimensions September/October. (online) Retrieved on July 19, 2009 from: http://www.astc.org/pubs/dimensions/1999/sept-oct/sconweb.htm
Resnick, M. (1994). Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Resnick, M. (1996). “Beyond the Centralized Mindset.” Journal of the Learning Sciences 5, 1: 1-22.
Resnick, M., A. Bruckman, and F. Martin. (1996). “Pianos Not Stereos: Creating Computational Construction Kits.” Interactions 3, 6: 64-71.
Resnick, M. (1998). “Technologies for Lifelong Kindergarten.” Educational Technology Research and Development 46, 4.
Resnick, M. (2006). “Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play and the Creative Society.” In Singer, D., R. Michnick Golinkoff, and K. Hirsh-Pasek, eds. Play=Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. Oxford UP, New York.
Resnick, M. (2007). “All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten.” Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition.
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 August, 2009).
The Future of Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age: A Bibliography of Resources and Weblinks
This posting includes the references cited in the previous posts that were part of the “Inspiring the Technological Imagination” research project.
Anderson, S. and A. Balsamo. (2007). “A Pedagogy for Original Synners.” In Tara McPherson, ed. 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.
Asen, R. (2004). “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90: 189-211.
Atkins, D. and M. Peterson Holland, eds. (2002). “Digital Technology and Indigenous Communities.” D-Lib Magazine 8.2 (March).
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/
Balsamo, A. (2005). “Taking Culture Seriously: Educating and Inspiring the Technological Imagination.” Academic Commons. http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/balsamo-taking-culture-seriously
Balsamo, A. (Forthcoming). Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Duke University Press.
Berwick, C. (2007). “Nonsmoking Capricorn mMuseum Seeks Networking, Dating, Serious Relationships, Friends.” ARTnews. October: 194-197.
Bowen, J., et al. (2007). “A Museum’s Wiki.” In J. Trant and D. Bearman, eds. Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/bowen/bowen.html
Braun, L. W. (2004). “What’s in a Game?” VOYA, August: 189.
Bressler, D. (2006). “Mobile Phones: A new way to engage teenagers in informal science learning.” In J. Trant and D. Bearman, eds. Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/bressler/bressler.html
Brown, J. S. “New Learning Environments for the 21st Century.”
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Bush, V. (1945). “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly. 176, 91 (July): 101-108. http://ww.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush/
Cardiff, R. (2007). “Designing a Web Site for Young People: The challenges of appealing to a diverse and fickle audience.” In J. Trant and D. Bearman, eds. Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/cardiff/cardiff.html
Castells, M. (2001). The Internet Galaxy. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Chan, S. (March 5, 2009). “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/
Chun, S., Cherry, R., Hiwiller, D., Trant, J., and 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.
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Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYU Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.
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WEB LINKS:
2009 Virtual Worlds Conference
http://www.alliancelibraries.info/virtualworlds/
2004 WebWise Conference
http://www.imls.gov/news/events/webwise04.shtm
2009 WebWise Conference
http://webwise2009.fcla.edu
“A Closer Look at the Winning Libraries”
http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1130000713/post/1940043994.html
ALA Teen Tech Week Resources
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/teentechweek/ttw09/resources/resources.cfm
American Association of Museum: Center for the Future of Museums
http://www.futureofmuseums.org/
Andy Hold Virtual Library
http://www.utm.edu/vlibrary/vlhome.shtml
American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC)
http://www.aihecvl.org/
artCloud
http://www.artcloud.com/home/index.php
Art Collector, Walker Art Center/ Minneapolis Institute of Arts
http://www.artsconnected.org/
Artefacts Canada
http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Artefacts_Canada/index.html
Art Institute of Chicago: My Scrapbooks
http://www.artic.edu/artexplorer/
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)
http://www.amico.org/
ARTPORT, Whitney Museum of American Art
http://artport.whitney.org
ArtRage Freeware
http://www.educational-freeware.com/freeware/art-rage.aspx
ARTshare
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7723691927&ref=pr
ArtsConnectEd (Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
http://www.artsconnected.org/
ARTstor
http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml
Association of Science-Technology Centers Try Science site
http://www.tryscience.org/home.html
Australian Libraries Gateway
http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/resource/ex.html
Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Baltimore Museum of Art: Matisse for Kids
http://www.artbma.org/flash/F_conekids.swf
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/
Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/mydefinitions.html
Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Digital History Project
http://bdhp.moravian.edu/about/about.html
Brown, John Seely
http://www.johnseelybrown.com
California Science Center: The Big Lab
http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Education/AboutUs/Annenberg/BigLab/BigLab.php
Center for Urban School Improvement
http://uei.uchicago.edu
“Challenges to Building an Effective Digital Library”
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/cbedl.html
Champaign Public Library
http://www.champaign.org
Chicago Field Museum: This Old Habitat
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/thisoldhabitat/
Chicago Public Library: For Teens (Teen Volume)
http://www.chipublib.org/forteens/index.php
Circuit Bending
http://www.anti-theory.com/soundart/circuitbend/
Click! A Crowd Curated Exhibition
(Brooklyn Museum of Art, June 27-August 10, 2008)
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/
Coalition for Networked Information
http://www.cni.org/
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 Website)
Contra Costa (CA) library
http://www.myspace.com/ourlibrary
Creative Spaces Web Project
http://twc.nmolp.org/creativespaces/?page=home
and
http://machineculture.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/new-museum-web-project-creative-spaces-sparks-debate-among-web-experts
The Davis LAB at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
http://www.imamuseum.org/connect/interact
Deer Creek School “Our Town” project
http://www.ncgold.com/goldrushtown/ourtown.html
Denver Public Library: Co-evolver
http://teens.denverlibrary.org/index.html
Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/
Digital Library Federation
http://www.diglib.org/dlfhomepage.htm
Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University
http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/links/thematic.htm
EDUCAUSE: Onoline list of Digital Libraries
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/DigitalLibraries/17142
e.space, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/espace
The Exploratorium’s Digital Library
http://www.exploratorium.edu/
The Exploratorium in Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Exploratorium/147/118/21
The Exploratorium’s PIE Institute
http://www.exploratorium.edu/pie/gallery/pie_workshop05/index.html
Field Museum of Natural History: Crown Playlab
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/playlab/
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: ImageBase
http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase/
Flash Museum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Museum
Flickr: The Commons
http://www.flickr.com/commons?phpsessid=ea7b4da468f5935f24b65f41dbfc356f
Freesound Project
http://www.freesound.org/
Midge Frazel: Virtual field trips
http://www.midgefrazel.net/fieldtrip.html
Beth Gallaway: The Librarian’s Guide to Gaming!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1NHI-Z9j4g
Games in Libraries podcast
http://www.gamesinlibraries.org
Game On: Games in Libraries
http://libgaming.blogspot.com/
Gaming Blog Bibliography
http://bibliogaming.blogspot.com
Howard Gardner: GoodPlay, Good Work
http://www.goodworkproject.org/research/digital.htm
Get Connected: Tech Programs for Teens
http://www.neal-schuman.com/bdetail.php?isbn=1555706134
Getting Started: Making Music with Teens
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/teentechweek/ttw08/techguide_music.pdf
J. Paul Getty Museum: Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online (AAT)
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_researach/vocabularies/aat/
J. Paul Getty Museum: Bookmarks
https://www.getty.edu/mygetty/
J. Paul Getty Museum: Getty Games
http://www.getty.edu/gettygames/
J. Paul Getty Museum: The Getty Museum in Whyville
http://www.whyville.net/smmk/top/gates?source=getty
2005 Getty press release:
http://www.whyville.net/press/news_from_getty.pdf
2006 assessment by Susan Edwards:
http://www.getty.edu/museum/research/metrics_evaluations/downloads/whyville_assessment_2007.pdf
GIMP software
http://www.gimp.org
Google Public Policy Blog on “Google Book Search Settlement”
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-book-search-settlement-will.html
Guidelines for Media Resources in Academic Libraries (2006)
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/mediaresources.cfm
The Handheld Wiki
http://MuseumMobile.info/wiki
Handheld Online Conference (June 3, 2009)
http://www.handheldconference.org
Hip Hop Academy
http://www.hiphopkc.com
Homework Spot
http://www.homeworkspot.com/fieldtrip
Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org
The International Spaceflight Museum Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/48/83/24
International Council of Museums (ICOM)
http://icom.museum/
Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS)
http://www.imls.gov/about/about.shtm
IMLS: “National Study on the Use of Museums and the Internet”
http://interconnectionsreport.org/
IMLS: “Connection to Collections”
http://www.imls.gov/collections/index.htm
IMLS: “Engaging America’s Youth Initiative”
http://www.imls.gov/about/youth.shtm
IMLS: “International Strategic Partnership”
http://www.imls.gov/about/international.shtm
Ito, Mimi (Personal Blog)
http://www.itofisher.com/mito/
and
the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative: Ethnographic investigation http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=2117175&ct=2994405
Jacksonville Public Library, FL: JPL for teens!
http://jpl.coj.net/teens/index.html
The Jefferson County Library
http://www.myspace.com/jeffersoncountylibrary
Philip Harland: Virtual tours of archeological museums
http://www.philipharland.com/museumindex.html
Henry Jenkins Personal Blog
http://www.henryjenkins.org/
Joconde, France
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/
L.S. King: list of virtual filed trips
http://home-educate.com/fieldtrip.shtml
Latino Virtual Museum (LVM)
http://latino.si.edu/education/LVM.htm
Librarians’ Internet Index
http://www.lii.org
Library of Congress on Flickr.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/Library_of_Congress
Library Gaming Toolkit
http://www.librarygamingtoolkit.org
Library Gamer Blog
http://librarygamer.wordpress.com/about/
“The Library”: teen tech week song
http://www.archive.org/details/ttw2008_mvisent_625
Library of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
http://www.library.upenn.edu/cajs/museums.html
Louisiana Digital Library
http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/
Luce Center at the American Art Museum: Fill the Gap Activity
http://eyelevel.si.edu/2009/03/in-this-case-fill-the-gap.html
MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2117175/k.F4C6/Individual_Projects/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp
And
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2029319/k.4E7B/About_the_Initiative.htm
MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative: New Media Literacies Project
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=2117175&ct=299473
MacArthur Foundation Spotlight Blog posting: “Audrey Aronowsky: WhyReef”
http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/audrey_aronowsky_whyreef
Maine’s Virtual Library: MARVEL
http://libraries.maine.edu/mainedatabases
Michigan State University: Museum Quilt Index
http://www.quiltindex.org/search_results.php?qproject=Michigan%20State%20University%20Museum%20Collection
Minnesota Historical Society: Placeography wiki
http://www.placeography.org/index.php/Main_Page
Minneapolis Central Library: “Quiet on the Set” Contest
http://www.melsa.org/quietOnTheSet/index.cfm
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
Museo Virtual De Arts El Pais (MUVA)
http://muva.elpais.com.uy/flash/muva.htm?&lang=en
Museum Computer Network (MCN)
http://www.mcn.edu/
Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma)
http://musedoma.museum
Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL): 1995-1997 archives
http://www.oit.umd.edu/as/MESL/
Museumlinks’ Museum of Museums
http://www.museumlink.com/virtual.htm
Museum Meetup
http://museum.meetup.com/
Museum of Curiosity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Museum_of_Curiosity
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Mobile wallpaper
http://www.mfa.org/mymfa/index.asp
Museum of Modern Art: Guide system
http://www.moma.org/visit/plan/atthemuseum/momaguide
Museum of Modern Art: Red Studio
http://redstudio.moma.org/
Museum of Online Museums (MoOM)
http://www.coudal.com/moom/
Museum of Science and Industry: Idea Factory
http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/idea-factory/
Museum of Science and Industry: Fab Lab
http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/live-science/dream-it-design-it-make-it/
Museum of Tolerance: Jerusalem Virtual Museum
http://www.motj.com/Virtual_Museum.html
Museum on the Go
http://www.museumonthego.com
MuseumUSA
http://www.museumsusa.org
MuseumSpot
http://www.museumspot.com
MuseumStuff.com
http://www.museumstuff.com/museums/
The MuseumsWiki (Jonathan Bowen)
http://museums.wikia.com/wiki/MuseumsWiki
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)
http://digitalpreservation.gov/library
National Digital Library Program (NDLP)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html
National Gaming Day @ your library
http://www.ilovelibraries.org/gaming
National Museum of Mexican Art” WRTE RadioArte 90.5FM
http://www.nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/radioarte.html and http://www.wrte.org/
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteroa/116/143/54
National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Educational Digital Library (NSDL)
http://nsdl.org/
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)
A Nation Online Reports
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/reports/anol/index.html
NMC Pachyderm Conference, Dallas, TX
http://pachyderm.nmc.org/
Susan Chun, Opening Plenary Speech, 2007
http://www.nmc.org/podcast/tagging-art)
“Nebraska Auditor Cries Foul on Gaming in Libraries”
http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2009/february2009/nebrgamingaudit.cfm
The New York Hall of Science: Virtual Hall of Science (VHOS)
http://museumvirtualworlds.org/?cat=26
New York Public Library, NY: Teenlink
http://teenlink.nypl.org/index.html
New Haven Free Public Library
http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/library/
Newark Museum Wiki
http://www.newarkmuseumpr.org/mwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
New Museum of Contemporary Art: Rhizome
http://www.rhizome.org/art/
Nichole Pinkard, Digital Youth Network
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=2117175&ct=2994923
Scott Nicholson: 2006 survey of libraries and games
http://boardgameswithscott.com/pulse2007.pdf
Open Content Alliance
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/faq/
Ontario Science Center
http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/
Ontario Science Center: Weston Family Innovation Center
http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/aoc/wfic.asp
The Prado at Google Earth
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/prado/
The Prado YouTube video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1EOJr11bvo
The PIE Network
http://www.pienetwork.org/about/
Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org
Public Catalogue Foundation, England
http://www.thepcf.org.uk/
Pygoya Web Art Museum
http://www.lastplace.com/PygoyaMuseum/index.htm
Quest to Learn
http://www.q2l.org/
Scott Rice and Amy Harris: Library Games Blogs
http://librarygames.blogspot.com
San Jose Museum of Art: iPhone audio tour
http://www.sjmusart.org/iphone
San Jose Tech Museum: Tech Virtual Test Zone
http://www.thetech.org/testzone/
Save Outdoor Sculpture
http://www.heritagepreservation.org/Programs/Sos/index.html
Scholastic’s Internet Field Trips site
http://teacher.scholastic.com/fieldtrp/science.htm
Seattle Art Museum: My Art Gallery
http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/myartgallery/
The Second Louvre
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tompson/153/97/100
Second Life Alliance Library System
http://alliancelibraries.info/secondlife.htm
Phil Seed: Virtual Car Museum
http://www.philseed.com/
The Shifted Librarian
http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/
Simon, Nina. Museum 2.0 Blog.
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/
Smithsonian American Art Museum; Meet Me at Midnight
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/midnight/default_flash.html
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Ghost of a Chance (Artificial Reality Game)
http://ghostsofachance.com/
Final report http://ghostsofachance.com/GhostsofaChance_Report2.pdf
The Splo: “Second Life’s oldest Science Museum founded April 1, 2006.”
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Midnight%20City/175/60/26
“Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians: Exploring Considerations and Engaging Participation”
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/22/paper-social-networking-literacy-competencies-for-librarians-exploring-considerations-and-engaging-participation/
Sonoma County Library, CA: Teenspace
http://sonomalibrary.org/news/ya/
The Steve Project
http://www.steve.museum/
“Summary of Effort and Result for the Carvers Bay Digital Arts Experience”
http://www.webjunction.org/programming-and-outreach-for-young-adults/articles/content/454476
Teachers Tap
http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm
Tate Museum: Young Tate
http://www.tate.org.uk/youngtate/
Tate Museum: Tate Kids
http://kids.tate.org.uk/
Tate Museum: Handheld Conference, London (September 4 and 5, 2008)
http://tatehandheldconference.pbworks.com/
Tate Museum: Events podcast
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/
“Teen Poetry Video Workshop”
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/newsandeventsb/teenpoetryvideo.cfm
Teen Tech Week Wiki
http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/Teen_Tech_Week
Telecommunications Virtual Museum
http://www.telcomhistory.org/vm/museums.shtml
University of California Santa Barbara Library
http://www.myspace.com/ucsblibraries
U.S. Library of Congress American Memory Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html
US Library of Congress: Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture exhibit
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/Vatican.exhibit.html
The Vatican Museums Online
http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/MV_Home.html
“Videography workshops coming to area libraries”
http://www.news-star.com/arts/x1083525314/Videograhphy-workshop-coming-to-area-libraries
“Video Production Workshops”
http://dentonlibrary.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/video-production-workshop-the-north-branch/
Virtual Free Sites
http://www.virtualfreesites.com/museums.html
Virtual Field Trips
http://www.field-trips.org/trips.htm
Virtual Museum of Canada: Image Gallery
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp;jsessionid=FAD707DD32B257B689F954CA392AAAB9
Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC)
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp;jsessionid=7544D207B0F23547976DD02F72F61AAC
Virtual Museum Exhibit….Museum on Demand
http://www.virtualmuseumexhibit.com/Virtual_Museum_Exhibits.html
Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp)
http://icom.museum/vlmp/
Virtual Starry Night in Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Luctesa/105/127/26
Virtual Museums: Uffizi
http://www.artchive.com/cdrom/uffizi/cd_uffizi.htm
Virtual Toilet Paper Museum
http://www.nobodys-perfect.com/vtpm
Virtual Valve Museum
http://www.tubecollector.org/about.htm
Virtual Typewriter Museum
http://www.typewritermuseum.org
Virtual Shoe Museum
http://www.virtualshoemuseum.com/vsm/r.php?col=style&sub=animal
The Walker Art Center: WACTAC
http://teens.walkerart.org/
Walters Art Museum: Waltee’s Quest: The Case of the Lost Art
http://walteesquest.com/
WebMuseum
http://www.ibiblio.org/louvre/?MU=3
WebWise 2009 Conference on Stewardship in the Digital Age (Institute of Museum and Library Services).
http://webwise2009.fcla.edu/index.html
The Whitney Museum of American Art: Youth2Youth
http://www.youth2youth.org/
Whyville.net
http://www.whyville.net/smmk/nice
“Wikipedia Loves Art”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Loves_Art
Wilmington (DE) Stroop Branch Library
http://www.myspace.com/wilmingtonstroopteensdml
“World Digital Library debuts in Dozens of Languages”
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6652453.html?q=%22world+digital+library%22
WWW Virtual Library
http://vlib.org/
Yale University Art Gallery: Schoolhouse
http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/whatisart/what_school.html
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