Building communities of interest with museum collections, libraries and museums - Effie Kapsalis, Martin Kalfatovic and Darren Milligan 30/10

Smithsonian is mandated to serve the public who is everyone.  Smithsonian Flickr commons launched 2 years ago.   They have their own creative commons and institution’s photostream.  Aim was to increase public knowledge of institution and access to the collections.  Also to develop an online community, reuse is encouraged.  They have no known copyright restrictions and they have been scraped by Wikimedia.  The images have been on the Smithsonian’s website for years but their stats have been blown apart by stats from Flickr.

Public has contributed to collections and more information about some subjects in the photographs.  Flickr is a more open space where people can respond and interact with collections.

Behind the scenes there are areas which are closed off: data in card catalogues, databases and reserve collections.  Bio Heritage Library aims to work in partnerships across the world to digitise out of copyright specialist literature and make it available online.

Smithsonian teachers night: wine, demos, where each museum talks about what they have to offer teachers and students.  The purpose of this is to increase use of Smithsonian by teachers.  They also offer teachers online conferences about specific themes where Smithsonian curators and researchers interact with teachers.

THATcamp unconference session: Mobile technology and the school field trip: can it work? – Wendy Jones and Jennifer Sly 30/10

Minnesota History Centre, wanted to look at 21st century learners, AKA the digital native, and work out how to serve them, their parents and their teachers.  They are building a new exhibit and working out how to embed the mobile experience into it.  The aim is to create a transformative learning experience.

The history centre wanted to find out how kids naturally behave and what are their needs.

They are conducting research through 4th to 8th grade teacher focus groups, parent-chaperone focus groups (those who accompany kids on trips), and focus groups with kids.  The next piece of research will be to go into classrooms to test the other end of the experience, namely what happens back in the classroom.

Focus groups with teachers asked them about how their learners have changed over the last 10 years.  Most teachers took 2-3 field tips per year. This figure is about average across the USA.  Teachers even fundraise so they can take their students on field trips.

Their first finding is that their learners feel it is more about style than content.  Children now have less of an attention span, if tasks are too hard, children are not interested and if it is too easy the kids feel insulted.  Children respond better to the same text from a book projected onto a screen.  Children struggle to imagine stories, they can remix from movies but struggle to create something original.  Some research suggests children’s brains today are neurologically different because of their exposure to and use of technology.

Children consume mobile content through their phones and apps, but most teenagers don’t yet have smartphones, so can’t create apps for them yet.  Phones banned in schools, but that’s an advantage because they are taboo, the kids will be really excited about using their phones for learning.  Most important skills identified by teachers for their students is ‘critical thinking and problem solving’.

Parents felt the most important skills for their children was social skills.  They don’t have any preparation for the trip but they are a key player in the experience.

Kids are most engaged when they get to touch things, make their own choices and collaborate in groups.

Mobile apps fall into four categories: guide and focus eg maps, record and collect eg ookl, think and solve eg kids trying to find the answers and then create and share eg use photos they took during trips, make into a scrapbook and then show it to their parents.

Did some testing and found QR codes were very successful, kids scanned them and enjoyed hunting them out.  When educators posed questions the kids preferred to record their answers as audio rather than write them.

Case study session 2 29/10

Engaging viewers through touchless interactive art – Collin Hover and Seiji Ikeda
This piece of webart is a bunch of particles which, using a webcam you can interact with.  Web art is more universal, it is accessible through physical activity. It is touchless. With web art, everyone can experience the original, it is free, you can visit it anywhere and at anytime.

Hands on augmented reality -Paco Link
Augmented reality juxtaposes real world with virtual.  AR experience created around one object; a display cabinet.  It is designed to be used online, not in a gallery.  It is a flash programme.  You get a card with marker and hold it up to webcam.  Put demo on youtube and twitter, people finding it that way and coming to it through the back door.
Www.getty.edu/collectorscabinet
Is fascination and wonderment from technology or object?  In gallery there is a 3d screen with higher res images, hotspots and collections data. Fair to use technology as a hook for visitors who’ll never visit Getty.

Championing innovation: multi-touch table development at the Getty – Jack Ludden
Started with aim of trying to improve way-finding at the Getty centre.  Build an interactive table.  Inspired creativity in the institution, partly because its new technology therefore staff felt you’re ok to fail.  

The invisible interactive – Ryan Doherty and Joe Baskerville
British Library and Cogapp
Have digitised map, projected onto table, walk up with magnifying glass which will zoom. You can put it over a hotspot for more information.  Its multi-user, as each user doesn’t interfere with each other’s experience.  Can walk around table and view from any side.  Cameras above the interactive picks up infrared lights on magnifying glasses.

THATcamp unconference session-  Visualizing Museum Collections

The wiki for this theme is Museumviz.pbworks.com and examples of visualisation can be found on Museumpipes.wordpress.com

Visualisations of data give a snapshot view, which you can drill down into for data analysis.
Some examples we looked at included a visualisation to show relative size of objects.  And another mashed data from a collection and the New York times, where it mentions artists.  In the resulting social network graph you could sometimes see links between artists you may not have known of.  

When working with collections data you can use visualisations as a diagnostic tool to get an idea of your messy data because you can see its anomalies.

Another application using collections data would be to find out which objects do not fit in with your collections policy or the rest of your collection and could be more easily identified during rationalisation projects.

Surveying the gap between the digital and physical visitors – John Gordy, Jessica Heimberg and Emily Skidmore 29/10

So popular that the session started with us relocating to a larger room

National Gallery of Art  (US)
Start point for them was to extend the museum experience online.  They asked themselves if a game can do this?  Conducted interviews to measure this.  No significant differences in the learning of visitors who accessed it physical in the museums space and digital visitors to their website.  Museum visitors motivation for online game was low.  They discovered a difference between people who found it on their own to those who were directed, independent visitors wanted a more in-depth gaming experience to directed visitors, they often became frustrated and gave up with game.

Their online visitors are completely different to the physical visitors, 19% of physical visitors also use the web.  When we do web development we often only think of the physical visitors that we see.  Physical visitors enjoy guided tours so the National Gallery are putting lectures online which has proved very popular.

Dallas Museum of Art wanted to redesign their website.  Used a framework for engaging with art.  Used a pop-up survey on their site before and after the redesign.  
Top reason for people visiting the site was to see the schedule of events followed by planning visits, then thirdly exploring collection.  There was no significant difference between the visitor’s reason for visiting the website pre and post design.  

Using visitor segmentation there was a group of physical visitors, the socially motivated who didappeared [?] to be replaced with an online group of pragmatic visitors interested in things like planning their visits.

Q&A

Same audience for a website whatever site in or out of the sector.  We like to convince ourselves as a sector that each museum’s visitor profile is unique, it isn’t.  
Important to build a connection on the site between the visit us and explore collection pages.

When building sites, as with other experiences, you need to know your mission and work to that eg do you want people through the door or to provided access to your collections?

Can you get physical visitors to interact with website after their visit?
Library of congress does this.
Tate Modern ceramic sunflowers, have a kiosk where you can make a video to ask artist questions and these go on website along with an answer from the artist.  This encourages visitors to use the website after a physical visit.
  
San Fran MOMA found number of people who use kiosks has got thinner over time. Computers not as appealing because visitors sit in font of them all the time. If you have a kiosk it does signal you have multimedia content and people will know to go look for it online later if they’re interested.

Art babble is a successful sector version of youtube

Conference roundup 29/10

This session consisted of 5min briefings from people who had attended other conferences over the year which were of interest to MCN delegates.

MW2010
International participation 500+people attend
Programme is built from the bottom up, based around what people are working on and thinking about now. Encourages conversations.  Social media activities were highlighted.

CIDOC
Highlight of the programme was a new mutilingual archaeology thesauras. There was also presentations about the Athena project and Europeana. Papers and presentations are available online. There are working groups which are like SIGs but have time during the conference to do things.  Working on new LIDO standard which will be international and incorporate Spectrum.

Assoc American Museums Annual meeting
MCN is an affiliate organisation
Theme museum without borders. This looked at the idea of the ‘young 21st century is about connectivity’
Highlight: serendipitous conversations with non-tech practitioners

New media consortium
Technology conference.  Had a host university, attendees are generally faculty staff from member institutions. Videos of keynotes on NMC’s website.

Texas Association of Museums
Not being derailed was conference theme. Economic problems and devastating weather of last few years.

Research roundup from Dublin Core Conference
Around management of the DC standards community struggling with the need of an abstract model.

American society of info science and technology
Highlight about how to manage your institution’s twitter account

Tate handheld conference
Workshop day by invitation only to discuss mobile work going on in museums.  Day  two series of presentations.  Big conversations about who brings the device? The visitor or is it provided by the museum?  Day 3 about mobile standards. Included ways to package content so that when exhibitions go on tour content can be reused.

Design4mobile
Corporate user experience development conference.  This also talked about divorcing content from the device eg content on drop box and used through different devices.

You don’t need a mobile strategy but mobile needs to be part of the strategy.  Mobiles absorb the technologies they encounter eg cameras and GPS
Next generation CMSs have content and presentation layers.  All presenters focussed on audiences.  Users misbehave and don’t follow the path you expect.
3min rule was introduced.  This considers what were users doing 3 mins before and 3 mins after mobile experience?

Takeaway that museums are up there technologically and business isn’t more developed.  Also due to competition they don’t share information about things which are in development whereas museums can and are able to stand on the shoulders of giants.

South by Southwest SXSW
Started as a music festival, then film festival, now there’s another part which is an interactive festival. Programming is broad.  No groundbreaking announcements, but they saw a maturing of existing technologies eg twitter announced at a previous SXSW.

Big themes across the sector:
QR codes are on the way out, instead we will go to image recognition ie google goggles.

Apple is edging out flash, so a move to HTML5

Opensource 28/10
Omeka: open source for open museums? Sharon M. Leon
Omeka is an open source publishing platform, it is a CMS (content management system).  Has flexible feeds so can export to other systems. Underneath is mysql and dublin core
Fully customisable with css and php knowledge.  
They Analysed what types of pages users have built with omeka by google searching keywords and sending out surveys.  People doing the most with omeka are in the library and archive world.  These include digital collections, narrative exhibitions, journal sites.  

Less adoption by museums but why?
Barriers: fwd thinking institutions already have other systems in place
Getting access to linux servers
Support not there, so you need a willingness to tinker.
Smaller institutions not comfortable with set up.

Launched today omeka.net hosted omeka site

Unlocking museum systems with open source – Richard Barrett -Small @richbs from V&ampA

V&ampA developers working with opensource to add new features to and enhance website. 
Use opensource tools to talk to and release data from legacy systems.  Search the collections site uses python and django. Use json api to website, mobile site and in-gallery kiosks. Sphinx is the opensource search engine they use. 

A reason to use Opensource is to try things you might not have tried if you had to pay for it

One week, one tool: Effie Kapsalis anthologize.org
@digitaleffie

This was a week-long residential project billed as a digital humanities barn raising. They raised an open source tool

“Leadership is momentum building” ie after 15min discussion, where both options equal you just need to decide
Designed tool around programming skills the had in the team, they had a diversity of skills on one team
Tool they created is anthologize a wordpress plugin
Not impossible to implement some of this in our everyday work,  eg cross skill teams

Q&As
With opensource as barriers go down, the advantages go up

MCN idea floated to create a resource of current projects or a who is working on what resource. So can work together and connect with other professionals. 

Case study session 1 28/10 – Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)

Vads.ac.uk – Leigh Garrett university of creative arts Look Here! project

They are measuring impact of digitisation projects.
JISC and AHRC funded projects had condition that material gets deposited with VADS. Provides a hosting service.  Diversifying from just images into hosting research data.
Their system takes metadata from collections which use different standards eg spectrum, then the VADS system maps data so they can import variety of people’s data.  VADS data served up to Europeana.

Engaging the audience session 28/10
Kate Goldman – decision points in creating virtual humans and avatars

Uncanny valley, research from 1970s resulting in a graph showing cognitive issues we have with realism.  You build a robot and as it gets closer to a human people respond well.  until they get to a point of realism where they back off, dislike it and find it freaky.

Emily Black -Evaluation of avatars
Nelson-atkins museum of art-studio 33

Focus groups, liked website content but not sites’s entrance page. They worked to profile visitors.

Did a telephone survey of 400 people in the Kansas area they learnt that:
People knew about museum through web page, but have not visited. 
Those with kids more likely to come than those without.  So how can you react and make your website more family friendly?

Results meant entry page would:
Allow people to identify with museum using avatars, allowed visitors to select their avatar to guide them through the site.

Avatars photos of actual people connected with the museum.  They talk via text in speech bubbles.  How to mesh online visitors who don’t come to museum? Avatar leads you through site and suggests what you may want to check out.

Sharisse Butler – Smart phone tours at Dallas museum of art www.dma.mobi

Framework for engaging with art-Randi Korn and associates audience segmentation research.  This study gave them 4 types of visitor who come to gallery.

Gave them idea to create content for each type of visitor on smart phone tour.
Deliberately a www, not an app, to make it as flexible as possible.
Has object information, videos of artists, curators speaking, this means user chooses what they’re interested in and should be content for each type of visitor.

Visitors can borrow a device or use their own smartphone.  Need data to know what visitors are using, cos if see people using their own device, might not be for your tour.  2% of visitors used tour and 10% aware of it. There’s an issue around getting people to self-select to use the smartphone tour.  Interviewed visitors who didn’t use it.  And they said they didn’t have a smart phone,  so moved the information that they had free ipods to borrow to the top of the wall text info.

People needed explanation of how to use ipods.  These are issued as lanyards so they’ve added a physical tag to lanyards with basic instructions eg volume control.

Popular implementation during landscape paintings exhibition.  On device could call up photos of the same landscape.
 

Keynote 28/10 Larry Johnson
New media consortium midea.nmc.org

1 Tech has no meaning:
Specific techs are interesting eg GIS not generic term of ‘tech’

2 keyboards are for old people
Mobiles, what is a mob. Unphone, projected onto hand so gesture based computing. Devices we use converging to a v small footprint.
Not one company working on next generation keyboard cos thats not what we’ll b using.

3 the network is us
Currently 5bn active cell phone accounts,  world population is 6.7bn
Google tv
We still gather around tv shows, not as a family round tv, but online eg commenting on youtube, watching and discussing together

4 the network is everywhere
By 2015 80%of ppl who go online anywhere in world will b thru a mobile device. (Ericsson phone manufacturer) this is currently true in Japan.  Start carrying mifis to be connected.
Cell phone network expanding diff to networks which r made up of wires. In Qatar mobile cell twrs. Countries coming in later, skip wired networks and straight to mobiles. 1/3 pop of Africa have mobiles.

Q&A
Post smartphones: faster, more powerful. Greed is keeping networks slow at the moment.
Voice recognition supercedes keyboard interfaces
What should we do different? Tech not answer to every question, is part of our world.  Which tech advances in society eg social networking. Ones which make sense to pick up are the ones which will further your institution’s mission.  Pay attention to whats going on in the world.
Can’t move museums onto web, needs to be an AND not an OR. Lose something on web, scale, perspective, context. 
TV, books and music have been eaten by the web. Future isn’t second life, but its in the browser.