3rd  post of Notes from ‘The Shape of Things: New and emerging technology-enabled models of participation through VGC’ conference at Leicester’s school of Museum Studies, part of the AHRC-funded iSay project focusing on Visitor-Generated Content (VGC) in cultural heritage institutions.

My Notes on both Jeremy’s and Jack’s presentations are brief as I know both projects pretty much inside out.

Jeremy Ottenvanger – Inbound Communications as a catalyst for organisational change

• A tale of two fiefdoms- who is responsible for responding to VGC
• Characterising online contributions:
• personal: emotional, opinion, personal information, anecdotes, family history
• requests and queries: object info, valuation, family history, digitisation and licencing, offering material, access, history, general/website
• informational: new information, corrections
• online comments tend to be more thoughtful than in-gallery comments online commenters have sought out the content, so already have a deeper engagement with those specific items, rather than just coming across them while moving through the physical gallery.
• important issue of sustainability of VGC. How do museums resource it in the long term?
• IWM trying to find an internal workflow that was appropriately responsive to online comments
• A gap between two departments – collections access and digital media
• Sources of value:
• External mission value- giving people what they want
• Engagement through UGC contribution
• Internal mission value- strengthening the missions values
• Shaping future services
• IWM don’t have a plan. Yet.

Jack Ashby: The Grant Museum and QRator

• A turtle is a turtle. That’s a fact. How can visitors participate in Natural History Museums
• For the Grant Museum the act of participation isn’t enough. It has to have a more in depth levels.
• Are museum visitors unwitting guinea pigs?
• allowing content to go live post-moderated
• Both Areti and Jack raised issues about the subjective nature of moderating VGC.