6 July 2006, University of Leicester
Hosted by The University of Leicester's Digital Heritage Research Group
Lead sponsor: The 24 Hour Museum, with
Ke Software and ReadSpeaker
UK
Summary and some take-homes
A selection of themes raised by the presentations given during the day. These are the personal thoughts of Mike Lowndes and do not necessarily represent the views of the presenters or the mcg.
1. Museums have a perennial problem in identifiying our website audiences. A mixture of analysis, feedback and surveys gleans information, usually in a snapshot. However, more than ever, the audience is changing, as its expectations of website functionality continue to increase. Can we rise to this new challenge and can it actually help us identify our audiences?
2. 'Web 2.0' (wikipedia entry)' is raising expectations of what a website should do all over again. Almost anyone can now publish to the web, join online communities and share experience. People can and are generating content about our websites, sometimes on our sites, but often in their ownspaces. What does this mean? One thing it means for Museums is that the 'who are our website visitors' problem may well go away. More and more our visitors are online, in our face and publishing. As content aggregates, can your museum afford not to take note of what's being written about it? Have you checked your Wilkipedia entry yet? If there isn't one, create it...
3. We need to get away from a simplistic approach to measuring website usage or impact. Logs are a poor measure, and newer better methods are here now, but should be used in conjunction with qualitative methodologies. Where you can, engage directly with your proposed audiences. The 'audience' behavior changes outlined above are useful - go and see what people are sharing about your Museum, online.
4. Web 2.0 is empowering people. People so empowered can be amazingly creative, and this creativity is happening in the context of an explosion in online functionality and new ways of interacting that has only just begun. This has engendered a 'technorati' and as such can lead to a digital divide - but the tools are getting simpler and more widely used (c.f. MySpace).
5. Fear - lose it, we have nothing to lose... Far more of an issue for many museums continues to be the lack of resources with which to take advantage of these developments.
6. Wag the long tail!
7. The future? Content fragmentation and the need for flexible resources are already here. 'Mashups' are the first really popular attempt to break down the traditional 'website' barrier as content is remixed by users and developers. We need to be ready for this world - RSS is the first tranch of this, but in the future of our content is distributed. We should make it accessible below the traditional 'web page' level. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces - exposing programmatic methods for developers to reuse content) are the way of the future as much as 'multichannel'.
8. What, nationally is still holding many Museums back? It is easier to attempt, or at least consider a lot of this innovative stuff if your institution is a national or large regional. For the rest of us we're usually wondering if they'll update that email address any time this month. The mcg needs to work harder to see how we can push relevant bodies to help smaller cultural institutions improve their web presences, raise profile and get content out there.
9. As mentioned several times during the day, part of the issue is that many institutions often can't get thiet stuff into digital form in the first place. Getting it so can help both the physical and virtual Museum. Web 2.0 tools may provide solutions here. For example, a Wordpress account is free and you can build quite a sophisticated website, thank you very much, with little or no technical skills. With a template for corporate complience, there's no real reason not to host your site like this if its simple, though mapping to the nested domain of a local or regional body may prove more of a thorny issue..
10. Teachers want data - often in simpler forms than we expected. Simple access to digital objects with simple context seems eminently sensible... This is strangely parallel to the issue above - the fragmentation of our content uinto small units for use in other people's contexts. To be followed up...
