digital culture

Developing a digital museum idea should never start with the technology

/ claireyross / Leave a comment

 

giphy

Incredible #museumgif from remixthemuseum.com

 

Last week I was part of a Digital Creative Media workshop for museums and heritage sites organised by the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries Cultural Heritage Research Group held on 27th July.

The event explored opportunities for using creative and digital technologies to enhance museum and cultural heritage interpretation and management, my quick and dirty notes are below.

The guest speakers for the event were the equally brilliant Kevin Bacon from Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove and Pat Hadley from Cogapp.  Despite coming at it from different angles the overriding message from both talks focused on the fact that any digital experience should never start with the technology and should always be visitor focused and object centred.

The Use of Digital Media at Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums, Kevin Bacon, Digital Manager, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove

Kevin started from the position that it is actually quite difficult to articulate the collections online, as it is such a diverse collection.   So it is important to think about the collections strategically rather than as a cohesive whole.

When it comes to talking about digital, the conversation tends to be framed to touch by the technology.  Should we always think about digital as products? If we were a tech company that would be fine. But we are a museum. Digital, therefore, should be about relationships. At Brighton Staff digital literacy is all about transparency and communication.  Digital is pervasive.  Only 2 actual members of Digital Staff who focus on helping other staff to develop digital ideas and skills.

Golden rule: developing a digital idea should never start with the technology

Start with two questions:

  • What assets do you have? – museums are about stuff, stories and staff
  • Who are you aiming for? Audiences

Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums Examples

  • Getting a young person to run the museum Instagram account.
  • Discovery – how can we help other people find and use our collections? Collections search – what is the point of the museum online catalogue? At Brighton, they are moving towards a Digital media bank – digital asset management system. Creating a sense of agency. Creative comments – system works much better for users
  • Blogging has been really successful for Brighton. 69x more views than a collection record.  People like narratives. It also opens up opportunities for new perspectives
  • Remix the Museum and excellent uses of museum gifs.  A very good reminder that being playful with collections is really important!
  • From 2D design… to 3D model: Coins and Medals. A great example of  Reflective transformation by working with the University of Brighton to do PTM-RTI (Polynomial Texture Mapping-Reflectance Transformation Imaging – in essence taking lots of photos with different lighting conditions and different angles and then stitching them all together)
  • Blogger in Residence. Bringing other voices into the collections.
  • Map the museum – stripping back to a very simple idea. Release raw Collections data to the public, and get people to locate objects on a map, correcting items that are in the wrong place. The data collected helps the museum to learn more about our collections, and the data is also released as open data.
  • Story drop mobile app – reminded me a lot of the TWAM’s Hidden Newcastle app.  A way of discovering the hidden histories and surprising stories geolocated across a city.

Final top tips from Kevin

  • Importance of narrative over objects
  • Build in scope for failure.
  • Be happy with a smaller audience.
  • Be more experimental
  • Use your prototype as a real thing.  – appreciate this is quite hard to do with public funding.

Thinking through digital: Top tips for designing projects and working with technologists, Pat Hadley, Developer, Cogapp Digital Media Projects

Pat’s slides are available here.

 

IMG_1723

contemplating post-its

First off Pat got us thinking with a Post-it notes exercise about what types of digital technology we use, and what digital stuff we had heard of, but had no clue about.  It was an interesting exercise and a great way of seeing where knowledge gaps are.

 

Making museum collections and heritage sites engaging, accessible and useful for today’s audiences. This set of problems is one of the most exciting challenges areas to apply digital technology. Collaboration is key, with staff and visitors, and external partners. When thinking about digital projects you need to consider organisational culture, visitor centred approaches, and content.  Joining these up can sometimes be quite challenging sometimes. Ultimately, when thinking about digital projects, other museums are not your competition. The competition is Netflix and Candy Crush.  How do museums compete with that?

Pat touched on lots of excellent ideas and lots of projects, and then really hit home the following points:

  • How do people use technology?
  • YOU ARE NOT THE AUDIENCE
    • Unless… you are the audience.
  • How to think through Digital? rather than stuff, stories about the stuff, technology and then people.  It should be People first, with a lit bit of stuff, a little bit of stories about the stuff and a little bit of technology.
  • It comes down to what do you want the visitors to leave feeling….?

How to write a brief… think about the audience. 

  • What do you want the Visitor to feel?
  • At the start of any project, you know the least about the end point. Don’t demand a race car and then realise you need a horse.
  • Find experts – collaborations with external partners, your audiences, your nephew.
  • Get perspective. What can we uniquely do? What problems can be escaped?
  • What is your unique capability to offer audiences?
  • Think big, start small, move fast.
  • Adjust goals accordingly.

Lots to think about.

What Can We Learn from Digital Artists’ Projects in Museums?

/ claireyross / Leave a comment

Innovation and experimentation in museums has been a growing topic of conversation of late, and an increasing number of organisations have gone down the path of taking risks and developing new kinds of projects that push the boundaries.  As part of this shift in museums, more and more institutions are working with artists in new ways that go far beyond simply placing their works on the walls.  New collaborative projects that consider the roles of art, artists, and visitors from a fresh perspective are becoming more common. More museums are inviting artists to bring their creative artistic practice to focus on museum collections and on creating new participatory and immersive experiences that actively engage visitors and, in many cases, also interrogate the role of the museum.

While you do hear stories about these types of projects meeting some resistance from within the museum for seeming to be trivial, ‘arty-farty’ or without intellectual content, in my opinion more often than not these collaborative creative projects largely succeed in transforming museums into spaces of curiosity, experience, collaboration, risk-taking, and creativity.

This post looks at the process of working on Decoded 1914-18 as part of the umbrella Wor Life project at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

Between October 2014 and February 2015 Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums and Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice came together to explore some of the issues and questions surrounding experimental digital art projects in museums, thinking about public practice as well as working with digital artists.  The final project – Decoded 1914-18 produced a programme of AV installations and events that explored the First World War and its effect on those living in Tyne & Wear. Seven artists took inspiration from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM) collections to create artworks and performances which examined and interpreted Tyne and Wear in the First World War in innovative ways. It was a fantastic process and I learnt a lot, and I have well and truly been bitten by the power of AV for visitor engagement.

In an excellent blog post entitled “Do We Need Artists in Art Museums?”, Annelisa Stephan states:

“Inviting artists into the institution … has ramifications far beyond any individual project. Including artists means taking risks and ceding control; it means changing how museum staff work together; and it even means shifting what a museum is, from a space for art to a space of art.”

This is very much something I would agree with after working on the Decoded 1914-18 project.

So here is what I learnt about working with digital artists in museum spaces during Decoded 1914-18:

N.B.

Before I started at Durham University I held the position of the Assistant Digital Officer at TWAM, my role was to work with the Digital Coordinator (the excellent John Coburn) to deliver a programme of digital projects that would innovate digital access to TWAM’s collections and increase public engagement.   Decoded1914-18 was one such project.

 

1. Museums Need to Embrace Risk

Working with digital artists to create visitor engaging projects inside the museum is fundamentally different from, and more challenging than, simply commissioning works of art. It means working collaboratively and bringing artists and creative practitioners into the organisation, and equally involves bringing museums in to the risk-taking of the creative process.

The aim of Decoded 1914-18 was to invite a fresh perspective to discover and reimagine stories and material from museum collections.  The project focused on creative arts practice where museum collections, artists and innovative digital practice merge to create a new kind of digital audiovisual experience.  This collaborative innovative creative practice fundamentally disrupts the way in which museums interact with, and provide for, visitors.   This was no mean feat. Not only did we have an aspirational project to deliver but we were also trying to do it with a difficult and challenging subject matter (the impact of the First World War on the North East), across a range of TWAM venues. It was a risk – and to TWAM’s credit, one it was willing to take. Rob Stein in 2012 suggested that creating a culture in museums that embraces risk is a prerequisite to allow significant innovation to take hold.  A certain amount of risk is always associated with digital projects because they are ‘new,’ ‘innovative’ and ‘cool,’ but there are uncertainties about how much risk is too much risk. How far can the boundaries be pushed with one project and how much tolerance does the museum have? These are questions that all museums are now facing and questions which Decoded1914  tried to tackle in a relatively short amount of time and budget.

 

2. Artists Disrupt the Institutional Voice

One of the most dramatic effect of digital artists’ interventions in museum spaces is to disrupt the institution’s voice, content and collections so they can be seen, reimagined and presented from a new perspective. This can transform the museum from a place of information and authority to one of experience, engagement and curiosity.

For example, one of the Decoded artworks took place in the basement museum store of the Discovery Museum, completely changing the space from a working museum collection store not normally open to the public to an immersive art experience.  This was challenging and involved a lot of risk management but the final artwork was well worth the oodles of risk assessments.  Including artists in the exhibition process means taking risks and letting go of authority, and challenging staff working practices. All good things in my book.

 

3. Friction is a Good Thing

Differing perspectives create tension and friction, sometimes unpredictably so.  But tension can be incredibly good for the collaborative and creative process.  If everyone worked in the same way, it would make for a very boring world. For Decoded we worked with a range of artists and creative practitioners.  I was surprised how much friction there was on some projects, whereas others went smoothly without incident. Now I don’t mean friction in terms of disagreements, misunderstandings or negativity.  It is more of a friction in terms of approach and expectations.  There was a disconnect between museum timescales and artistic timescales.  It was really refreshing to work with varying perspectives on timescales and project management and throughout the process we learnt a lot about expectations around museum collections availability, documentation and retrieval.  Despite some difficulties the friction between artists and museums is really interesting.Our ideas were challenged, tested, and in turn better projects were produced. This is the kind of useful friction that leads to new ways of working.   It highlights the challenges of working in a museum, and particularly highlights the need for museums to evolve their understanding around public expectations of collections access in projects.  Friction pushes all staff and can innovate all areas of the museum, by engaging them in the creative process.

 

4. Adapting and Compromise

Flexibility, adaptability and accepting change became key components of the Decoded project.  The nature of creative practice means that things can change quite quickly and often, for example in terms of what is possible. As a result of such changes, there can be impacts upon such things as collections material availability, installation, and evaluation. There is therefore a need to be able to react quickly to changes to the project, by both the artist and the museum, but also to find the space to accommodate these. It is important to constantly refer back to the aims and objectives of the project, and to reflect. Both artists and museum staff need to become very good at adapting to change and adjusting the process accordingly to match that change.

 

5. Encouraging Dialogue, Provocation and Confusion

By working with digital artists to reimagine museum collections, it encourages dialogue, provocation, and confusion for staff and for visitors. Confusion is a profound tool, because it prompts museum staff and the visitors to ask questions.  Seeing museum collections through an artist perspective has really challenged my perceptions of what is possible when it comes to digital interpretation.  It has made me think beyond text and image and to look at the abstract, the immersive and the noisy.

 

6. Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

Decoded resulted in a two week temporary installation, it was ephemeral by its very nature. It’s not unusual for artists’ projects in museums to be ephemeral, which makes documenting them essential. They are full of lessons that can guide future projects inside and outside the museum, so despite the short nature of the installation, it is important to document the process and the outcomes.   For Decoded we decided to use video to document the process of the project as well as to act as a legacy for each of the Decoded artworks.  This rich video documentation serves as a archive of ideas that can be used as inspiration for future digital projects.

 

A big thank you to all the artists,TWAM and Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice, and Dominic Smith.  It was a great project!

I’d love to know what you think. What else can we learn from digital artists’ projects in museums? What have I missed? Are the learnings different with an artist in residence project compared to a collaboration for a specific theme? 

 

What is Digital Change in Museums anyway?

/ claireyross / Leave a comment

Or to put another way: Do we need to understand Digital Change in Museums?

I’ve been thinking about digital change a lot lately. Change is very difficult to do, let alone manage, and what happens when you throw digital into the mix?  We continuously wonder and marvel at the possibilities digital presents, yet we seem to be constantly separating ‘digital’ out as an individual entity and therefore struggle to make sense of its impact on our lives. And if individuals find it difficult to understand, adapt and accept these digital transformations, how do cultural organisations deal with digital change?

But the more I think about digital change, the more I begin to wonder what on earth is it?  Is the term ‘digital change’ a bit of a misnomer? Is it still true are we really struggling to understand digital? Personally I feel like we are at a tipping point, where digital isn’t something separate anymore but is something which is embraced and no-one runs screaming from the building when the term is mentioned.

Today digital touches everyone and everything. It is part of everyday life – communications, retail, entertainment, education, medicine etc. So why when it comes to museums and change is it seen as something separate, and actually quite daunting?

Over the past few weeks there has been the Arts Council and Culture 24 Digital Change: seizing the opportunity online’ event at BALTIC – Centre for Contemporary Art and the Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2015 by Baroness Martha Lane Fox – both discussing the need for change when it comes to understanding technology and the internet.

But what does Digital Change actually mean to cultural organisations?  How is it defined? How is it understood?  And what is the appropriate response?

It may very well mean one thing to large national cultural institutions – “Digital as a Dimension of everything” from the Tate springs to mind and large ongoing digital transformations at the nationals are prime examples, leading Ross Parry to believe that the cultural sector is at the beginnings of being ‘Post Digital’.  But what about the smaller organisations? The museums in the regions? Are they ‘Post Digital’? Do they understand digital change?

One thing the Digital Change conference at the Baltic discussed was the fact that doing digital well is difficult. “It takes skills that cultural organisations often don’t have in-house, it costs money they don’t have and it’s hard to measure if anything is really having an impact.”  This doesn’t sound like something that has been accepted and embraced now does it?

But really should we be talking about digital change or just change?

Instead of thinking digital change perhaps we should be thinking about organisational change and how it is managed within museums. Ultimately how we think about and understand change affects our ability to anticipate, shape and direct it using digital technologies.

Within museums there is a sense of fluid, fast-moving change arising from the proliferation of digital technologies. Signs and talk of change are everywhere.  But, there’s no avoiding that museums are generally conservative, and change and innovation are often lost in translation in between the realms of bureaucracy, financial streamlining and supposed time and resource efficiency savings. This friction is clearly a frustration for those angling for change.

Perhaps we should reconsider the overemphasis on digital and of digital strategies and planning in our discussions and management of change processes within museums.  Instead, we should focus our attention and effort on the dynamic, interactive and conversational basis of organisational change.  One of the best books I’ve read about museums and change is Robert Janes’ Museums and the Paradox of Change.  It suggests understanding change is more about encouraging responsiveness and learning, not necessarily strategic planning.  If you haven’t read this book, I do recommend it.  It’s a really honest and open account of organisational change within a museum.

Once we understand organisational change processes then we can start to think about our ability to predict, shape and direct it using digital technologies.

 

HOW HARD IS IT TO 3D SCAN A LIGHTBULB? Part 2

/ claireyross / Leave a comment

Can you 3D print a Lightblub?

In my last post I discussed the difficulties of scanning a light bulb.  Its transparent, and this causes quite a few problems with 3D scanning technology.

 

But we managed sort of, so now I’m going to discuss the process of turning the digital scan into a 3D printed object.

The chances are you already know all about 3D printing and the potential it offers museums in numerous ways.  If not. Liz Neely and Miriam Langer’s Museum and the Web 2013 paper Please Feel the Museum: The Emergence of 3D Printing and Scanning is a good place to start, as is the Collections Trust post are we ready for 3D printing?

The 3D scanning of a historical light bulb from the UCL Science and Engineering collection raised a number of challenges that museum face when wanting to scan their objects, but we held an rather ‘suck it and see’ attitude and wanted to test out the possibilities.  A quick and dirty action research approach as a means to understand the technological potential.

A point of note, there are really three steps to 3D printing; scanning, modelling and printing.  Due to our novice status in the 3D printing world (and the time we had available), we pretty much skipped the modelling phase.  Hindsight suggests we should haven’t done that.  The scans we produced were not faultless, but scans can be cleaned up using free tools (see my earlier post about my 3D printed head – where MeshMixer was used to fix gaps in the models).  A nice free tool is MeshMixer which has built-in tools to help identify gaps in the scanned mesh and can auto-fix these.  MeshMixer is by AutoDesk and is free to download.  http://www.meshmixer.com/download.html

The Printer:

IMG_8502

We used a MakerBot: Replicator 2 to print our light bulbs.  UCL CASA kindly let us experiment with their Replicator 2.  If you look carefully you should be able to see my 3D printed head in the photo.

This uses heated plastic as a raw printing material and recreates objects from the scanned mesh files using a moving nozzle which melts the plastic and repeatedly plots layers molten plastic on top of each other to form a matrix.

IMG_8503

3D printing is a fairly temperamental process. Because the plastic reaches incredibly high temperatures and the printer has to run for a long time it can be a dangerous to leave it unattended.  So you can spend a long time watching the printing process.  Which is fun to start off with, but it soon gets really really dull.  This light bulb took about 3 hours to print.

IMG_8508

The final product:

IMG_8509

Over all we were quite impressed with the final product. It isn’t a bad representation.  I still don’t think we can call it a replica but it definitely looks like a lightbulb.

Once we had our printed objects, we did a couple of workshops in the Grant Museum and Sidmouth Museum, and talked to lots of people about 3D printing and whether creating new objects in this way can encourage a closer inspection and deeper understanding of historical museum objects.  Overall, all the visitors we spoke to were really interested in the process of 3D printing, many had heard of it, but had not seen or more importantly held a 3D printed object in real life.  But does 3D printing create a level of deeper engagement with the original museum object?  It certainly provoked visitors to look closely at the original and the 3D printed object, but I’m not sure if a deeper understanding of the historical objects was reached.  But there is definite potential there, which we want to explore in the future.

Despite the relative rough and ready approach, we really learnt a lot, and the process provoked a lot of questions about how museums are responding to 3D printing.

How hard is it to 3D scan a lightbulb? Part 1

/ claireyross / Leave a comment

Last year whilst curating the temporary Digital Frontiers exhibition in the brilliant Octagon gallery at UCL, both myself and Nick Booth (UCL curator of the science and engineering collections) became a bit obsessed with light bulbs.  From this slightly odd obsession, and thanks to a kind research grant from the Institute of Making, Nick and I get to play with light bulbs and call it research.

We’re looking at the process of materials and making using 3D scanning and printing to see if creating new objects encourages a closer inspection and deeper understanding of historical objects – in our case light bulbs.  Neither Nick nor I claim to experts in 3D scanning museum objects, we wanted to see what we could do with the bare minimum of training on the devices.  How easy is it for a relatively normal person to scan and print museum objects.

Firstly we played with 3D scanning.   In the next blog post I’ll talk about the process of 3D printing.

We wanted to look at different ways we could scan and create a 3D mesh of a light bulb.  We have tried two main ways of scanning, firstly using easily accessible and relatively cheap (in this case free) technology using 123D Catch and then having a go with a NextEngine.

123D Catch is a free application from Autodesk that enables you to take a series of photos and turn them into 3D models.  We used the handy iPhone app.  It works by taking multiple digital photos that have been shot around a stationary object and then submitting those photos to a cloud based server for processing.  The images are then stitched together to produce a 3D model.

NextEngine is a desktop 3D scanner which captures 3D objects in full colour with multi-laser precision.

We knew a light bulb wasn’t going to be easy to scan because scanners don’t tend to like transparent, shiny or mirrored objects.  But we thought we’d have a go anyway.

Scanning transparent objects in practice

Before we experimented with some of the historical science and engineering collection, we used a normal every day bulb to see what worked and didn’t.

Firstly 123D catch

And now NextEngine

IMG_8366

As you can see the fitting shows up pretty well, but the glass bulb itself really doesn’t work.  And 123D Catch has gone completely funny.  So after a bit of googling, tweeting and advice from the 3D pros at UCL we decided to try and disguise the transparency with talcum powder.

So here are the versions with talc.

123D catch

NextEngine

IMG_8377

Which amazingly worked!

After checking with conservation and we decided to cover the historical lightbulb in talc and try scanning that and here are the results:

123D catch

NextEngine

IMG_8450

The NextEngine scan is pretty good. It doesn’t quite capture the peak at the top of the bulb, but it isn’t a bad representation.  I don’t think we can quite call it a replica but it definitely looks like a lightbulb.

Obviously covering a hisitorical object in talc throws a lot of questions up about how museums could utilise 3D scanning if they have to cover delicate and fragile glass objects in powder to get a adequate scan. We’d be really interested to hear if anyone has found a more conservation friendly way of dealing with transparent objects without having to coat them in talc.

It also brings up questions about how accurate 3D representations of museum objects should be.  Should they be identical? Or is an approximate object acceptable?

SMKE workshop: Social Media and the Museum

/ claireyross / 1 Comment

SMKElogo-370x100Yesterday as part of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange project, UCLDH hosted  a workshop on  Social Media and the Museum.It was targeted specifically at doctoral students and early career researchers.

The general workshop theme: how Social Media is changing museum practice and visitor experience; and how Social Media can be integrated into museum exhibitions and events.

Its not news to most of us that museums are embracing social media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their visitors.  A large number of museums now have a profile on social media sites to post news, promote their exhibitions & events, or disseminate their content; and also to  to interact with visitors by starting conversations, debates and organise participatory projects.   This in itself is brilliant.  But what is less well understood from an academic and a museum professional perspective is the key questions and challenges that are arising out of the use of social media.

Some of the key (well most obvious at least) questions the workshop tried to address were:

  • how do we engage visitors and encourage users of the collections to build an online community?
  • how do we start conversations with visitors in such a way that they feel that it is appropriate for non-experts to contribute?
  • how do we create a feeling of ownership of museum collections amongst the visitors and users?
  • What does this type of social engagement mean for the museum experience?
  • How do we evaluate the impact of social media?

These questions came up throughout the day, and naturally more questions came out of that than answers.

There was a range of talks by academic and museum professionals to discuss how Social Media is changing museum practice and visitor experience:

Social Media in the Humanities: Claire Warwick (UCL)

Claire spoke using social media as a different way to engage people with historical content. The focus of Claire’s talk was around the D-Day as it happens initiative led by Channel 4. Utilising Twitter as a different way of presenting oral history.  Suggesting that social media offers a sense of engagement which is very different to reading from history books. Providing a sense of immediacy. The personification of history.  Claire highlighted how social media allows contemporary voices to be heard, but it can also bring historical figures and events to life. Throughout her talk interesting questions were raised about physicality, immersive theatre and emotional engagement with historical events and how social media can be involved in all three.  In essence are historical figures tweeting in the social media space in the same genre as live interpretation in the museum space?

There has been a lot of discussion about what museums can learn from immersive theatre lately.  See Seb Chan’s post on Fresh & New(er) of 23 May 2012. “What if we made ‘wonderment’ our Key Performance Indicator?” and Ed Rodley’s post, http://exhibitdev.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/on-immersion-theatre-and-museums/  and Suse Cairns Rethinking why immersive theatre is compelling. It might not be the immersion after all and I think this is something which will need to be explored further.


Tweeting Moles? Social Media from the Grant Museum: Mark Carnall (Grant Museum)

Mark Carnall, curator from the Grant Museum spoke about their strategic use of social media.  Mark explained that Social media in the museum is a continually changing landscape and questioned how do/should/could museums manage this evolution.

The Grant Museum uses social media in 4 key ways:

  1. Twitter- transitory, irreverent, topical
  2. Facebook – badges and postcards
  3. Blogs- long form, publication, cv
  4. Flickr, YouTube and others – hosting tool.

Mark really hit home the need to think strategically. Museums shouldn’t use social media for social medias sake. There is a need to make time to fit social media into working practice.

Mark also raised some social media issues for museums to think about:

  • Is there an institutional format you should adopt?
  • Institutional buy in and support
  • Get image crediting right.
  • What voice will you use?
  • Dealing with the digital divide. Who is your audience? Social media doesn’t reach everyone. – in reality the people who aren’t using social media are people the museum most wants to reach
  • Sustainability: Social media in museums need to be sustainable and you need to be prepared for infrequently of returns because they aren’t always apparent instantly.

Mark also shared this brilliant infographic from informationisbeautiful.net: Hierarchy of digital distractions.

1276_hierarchy_of_digital_distractions


Social media: worth the time for small museums?: Alex Smith (Islington Museum)

Alex Smith from Islington Museum gave a great example of how small museums can blog, tweet and use social media as a knowledge experience with limited time and budget highlighting the benefits as well as the reasons why small museums show become involved in social media activities.   Alex started by highlighting that the Islington Museum is constrained by council ICT strategy/guidelines and how council museums have to think outside the box to deal with this adequately.

Islington Museum use social media tools in the following ways:

  • Facebook
    • Events management system
    • Sharing Photos
    • Timeline – Ambitious use of Facebook timeline as a general historic timeline of objects and events relating to Islington Museum
    • Community engagement
    • Building brand identity
    • Twitter
      • Discus things that are happening now at the museum
      • Hashtags – the example of the Joe Orton Trial Reconstruction
      • Time management – hootsuite helps schedule and organise tweets
      • Conversations and praise –  Alex says the power of anecdotal evidence as well as statistics helps with convincing management.  Bite sized chunks from socmedia
      • Blogging
        • Example of the Sadlers Wells Theatre Archive blog
        • Found that visitors do interact
        • Important to get time management right
        • Historypin
          • New for the museum
          • Easy for people to use museum images
          • Builds a community of interest
          • Supports our current activities

Collecting Social Media as a museum object: Laura Lannin & Ellie Miles (Museum of London)

Ellie Miles and Larua Lannin from the Museum of London, gave a really interesting talk about the citizen curators project and what they have discovered about trying to collect social media as a museum object.  I attended an event at the Museum of London about collecting social media earlier in the year (My post on the Museum of London social media event: can a museum collect tweets & should it? ) so it was great to continue the conversation.

The Museum of London’s main aim is to be a contemporary collector of objects, events and ideas from and about the city of London, and because of this contemporary collecting policy they began to think about digital capture of events in London quite early on. They now have the experimental role of a digital curator which aims to develop fresh ways of collecting contemporary digital culture.

One of their projects is #citizencurators – a social networking project for London2012.  It’s a great  project and it has some really interesting research questions which you can see at http://t.co/g4NNg9zoMS

Production/consumption – museum social media in use: Daniel Pett (British Museum)

Daniel Pett (Portable Antiquities Scheme) gave a mesmerising talk about production and consumption of social media.  Dan’s key message was to ensure that any social media activity in museums needs to be relevant.  Important to have a social media museum strategy and to think about issues like:

  • Who is ultimately responsible for social media content
  • How do museums create interesting social media content? Who decides what is appropriate?
  • How seriously does the institution take social media channels – who are the advocates and for what?
  • Do you have institutional buy in?
  • Impact of social media in museums. can you measure interactions? Is the engagement meaningful? Are stats enough?
  • Multi-vocality. Everyone can have a voice. How do you deal with that?
  • Does anyone in your organisation already have useful social media skills, can you utilise them?
  • Adequate time management
  • Moderation
  • Who is the target audience?

Dan then went on to discuss consuming social media as code and gave some really useful ways that utilising the right code can make archiving and optimising social media a piece of cake.  Check out Dan’s google drive presentation for some great info on how to consume and produce social media using some simple coding.

The rest of the Social Media and the Museum session was a bit more hands on.  We went to see Jeremy Bentham and discussed Transcribe Bentham and the The Bentham Pop-up, which waspowered by QRator, and posed a set of Bentham-esq questions to visitors.  From there we went to have a look at my Digital Frontiers exhibition and asked question about the challenges and benefits of utilising all digital interpretation and social media inside a museum space.   Finally Mark Carnall led a great social media challenge and asked us to work in teams to come up with how we would respond to different social media comments from the public.  It really hit home some of the issues you have to think about when dealing with social media responses.

A really great day full of interesting discussions.