Four recent events have prompted me to think about trending topics in digital heritage:

- Museums and the Web 2010;
- Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media;
- MuseumNext;
- Museums & Heritage Show

This post gave me the opportunity to revisit my notes and attempt to pull out some common threads. Here are three:

Sober social media

At MW 2010, the ever-prescient Sebastian Chan described his investigation of how school children and teachers accessed the Powerhouse Museum website. To his surprise, these educational users were not using the modularised collections database with its tags and other free metadata. Instead, they preferred 10-year-old microsites whose content was no longer maintained. These silos of stranded content without web 2.0 features and without links into other areas of the Powerhouse site, appeal to teachers because they are walled gardens within which students could complete structured classroom activities. Statistics showing a dramatic drop in the number of students accessing the museum sites during school holidays, demonstrated the failure to of the microsites to convert formal learners to informal explorers. Seb’s findings reinforce experiences at the British Museum and Museum of London, where dated islands of content on sites like Ancient Egypt and Great Fire of London Game attract massive numbers of educational visitors.

In attempt to deliver more current content to school audiences, Seb and his team repurposed records and pushed them out to an external resource portal for teachers at www.thelearningfederation.edu.au. However, because of the time and effort involved in repackaging museum data for the external venue, the practice was not sustainable. Seb’s presentation and its ensuing discussion in which Peter Samis asked what we would do if, when asked, teachers said they preferred microsites to the integrated web 2.0 websites we are designing, drove home for me that social media has now come full circle. Now that the initial excitement has worn off, and data on the usage of completed projects is available to analyse, we are entering a more sober phase. We are returning to questions we have always asked, namely, how does what we are building meet (or not meet) the needs of the specific audience it is intended to serve?

Further examples of this trend emerged at MW including Koula Charitonos’s research on Tate Kids, which showed that social media features like commenting on artworks did not work for primary school children. Even at MuseumNext, where the strong marketing focus meant that some attendees may have been more inclined to hype social media, there was a sense that the honeymoon is over. Seb summed things up simply: ‘Setting data free is not enough because our audiences may not get it.’

Mobile uncertainty

I followed the fascinating discussions from Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media on Twitter, attended the Mobile Untours un-session at MW, and saw lots of promising iPhone apps the M&H Show, at MW. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that the mobile space is dauntingly chaotic. There has been undeniable progress since Kate Haley Goldman talked about moving beyond the pilot stage with mobile in 2007. After trialing various devices during its Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint exhibition, SFMOMA forged ahead with partner NousGuide to launch an iPhone guide that launched earlier this year. The Brooklyn Museum, IMA and National Gallery are all successfully serving up iPhone apps and nearly every established audio guide vendor is offering or plans to offer iPhone versions of the traditional tour. Clearly, Apple has cracked a model – but it is still only one model.

For many institutions, including my own, for which Apple devices present numerous practical and logistical challenges, the way forward for mobile is far from clear. Android devices are promising, but not mature, with great variation in implementation across hardware manufacturers. (A developer from Toura complained to me about the problems building for Android phones with inconsistent screen resolutions.) Other mobile platforms seem at risk of expiring without notice. Roaming costs across national borders still discourage phone usage by foreign visitors. And hardware is only one piece of the puzzle: What about the types of interactions they provide?

The Un-tours unconference session at MW identified some potential alternatives to the traditional gallery tour based on serendipity, user generated content (oral histories, photos), geo-positioning and theatrical soundscapes like those created by multimedia artist Janet Cardiff. The exhibition floors at MW and M&H Show were scattered with Augmented Reality and 3D applications – most of which were in limited use within highly specific contexts. At MuseumNext, Mike Ellis pointed out the ubiquitousness of text messaging which a few companies like SCVNGR are exploiting. Despite numerous exciting ideas, it feels like practical constraints are still holding back museums from jumping into meaningful experimentation in the mobile space.

Conversations

Another strand from the last few weeks was discussion-based interpretation. Collaborating with the Portland Museum of Art, the team from Smarthistory (Beth Harris and Steven Zucker) recorded museum staff talking in pairs about works of art. The resulting videos were shown to visitors whose reactions were analysed. Visitors seemed to appreciate the more casual, conversational approach which was intended to draw them into the debate and empower them to form their own opinions. I was encouraged that the technique was found to work with non-Western art as well as previously tested Western artworks. Presumably, this initial pilot project will be developed further.

Another interesting link to discussion-based interpretation surfaced at Museums, Mobile Devices and Social Media: PlayDecide – designed to get groups of people talking about controversial topics. At MuseumNext, Georgina Bath Goodlander pushed these ideas further still with inspired examples of visitor participation at the Luce Foundation Centre for American Art. Among the examples she described were informal audio recordings of docents telling stories about the collection which are available for visitors to browse, and a plans for a new Alternative Reality game which builds on the success of Ghosts of a Chance.

I am interested to hear what others have observed, and, as many of our colleagues head to Los Angeles next week, I am curious to see what new themes may emerge from the technology sessions at AAM.

I will start with a confession: the title of this post is really a lie – I’m mostly writing about the last fortnight in cultural heritage.  As one of those stranded overseas by Iceland’s volcanic ash, my post-Museums and the Web conference week was oddly disrupted, and it’ll be a while longer again before I’m caught up on everything else I was meant to be doing in those eight days.

I arrived in Denver early to take part in the Wikimedia@MW2010 workshop.  I’ve been reflecting on the results for several days, and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on it.  At first, I felt that museums and Wikimedia were two ships that passed in the night, however friendly and well-intentioned the waving between them.  I didn’t feel we really engaged with the big issues between museums and Wikimedia on the day, though perhaps this was too much to expect with a large group in just one day.  Each group is decentralised  – individual Wikimedians must answer to the distributed community of Wikimedians, and a single museum cannot speak for any other museum – so while there was lots of interesting discussion, it’s difficult to pinpoint any big headline outcomes from the meeting.

However, in the short term the real result will probably be lots of smaller partnerships that will map the path to future discussions through their successes and failures.  It may be that the only way to really understand each other is to encounter and resolve a thousand tiny misunderstandings.  I hope that these projects will help us learn more about each others’ motivations, difficulties and issues (perhaps even to understand enough to feel empathy) so that we can work together to help everyone access quality content and experiences online. After all, as one of the keynote speakers said, ‘we’re all dedicated to preserving human knowledge’.

Discussions about automated harvesting and publishing at the technical breakout session started me thinking about what become one of the themes I mused on of the rest of conference.  While there are basic technical issues that we need to solve to provide a core level of service to the wider community, we will always need curators to define and select objects and stories that are of more intrinsic interest. We all have hero objects, and we all have more widgets than heroes, even if your widgets are pottery sherds or flying ants rather than spark plugs.

I think we will also see an increasing demand for curators, educators and specialists who can communicate with distributed communities of visitors who want to continue accessing and learning with collections regardless of the barriers of time and space.

Personal highlights of the MW2010 conference were Thursday’s ‘Collections: Tag / Search / Deploy’ papers, and the unconference. [At that stage we didn't know we'd be holding a few more to keep ourselves occupied while grounded] There were several interesting papers I didn’t get to see in other sessions – luckily all the papers are online so I can catch up with them later.  I was also involved in the creation of the Spinny Bar Historical Society, which effectively demonstrated that with a bit of know-how, several social media addicts and about $100 you could create an effective, multi-channel online presence for a small organisation in just 24 – 48 hours. The SBHS even has a collections management system, though we admit that in this case it did help to have their CEO at the conference.

The end of the conference was somewhat overshadowed by anxious thoughts of being stranded in Denver.  As those fears turned to reality, we were able to make the most of it, organising further unconferences, meals and frisbee sessions as well as simply banding together and working in the same space.

The ‘mobile games’ post-MW2010 unconference session at Leela’s Cafe

[This week's guest post is by Jeremy Ottevanger, Web Developer at Museum of London

Pecker up, Buttercup!
Following the uplifting experience of the 2009 Jodi Awards, I vowed to stop being such a miserable sod and to blog some optimism. Well, due to some duplicity on the part of the space-time continuum that never happened, so now is my chance to set that straight. I have to confess upfront that I suddenly have my own particular reason for feeling optimistic (I’ve got a new job), and in contrast I know some of you may be facing all sorts of work-related strife of your own, and you have my heartfelt sympathy. I hope you can see it through.

For you more than anyone, though, you who are struggling with motivation or threatened by the state of public finances and politics, as well as those of you in happy and healthy organisations, why not stand back for a moment and say “this is digital heritage, ain’t it grand?” So here’s are three overlapping reasons why I think digital heritage is in good shape, and getting better. I’ve picked out big-picture things and largely neglected more specific and enervating stuff – cool apps, innovative ideas, exciting content – but why not add a comment with the top 3 things that excite you? Be as broad or specific as you like, and we can crowd-source a list of guaranteed-to-titillate digital heritage slam-dunkers to go along with the Best of the Web awards coming up at Museums and the Web 2010 next week in Denver.

#1 An awesome community
I’m sure many other professions have vibrant communities of practice, but it’s striking in ours where expertise is spread so thinly across the globe. The Museums & the Web conference, those of the MCG and MCN (call for papers out this week) along with their mailing lists, and many other irregular meetings worldwide really do seem to bust the bounds of geography that make it unlikely there’s more than a handful of practitioners in any given city. Together with Twitter, blogs, social sites like Museum 3.0 and conference.archimuse.com, LinkedIn and all the rest it can sometimes even become too intense (right?). A few years ago I was content in my job and was part of a good, motivated team, but didn’t really participate much in a bigger community; since waking up to what I was missing I feel better informed, more engaged and networked, and I would hope I am a stronger museum technologist and more valuable asset to my museum. It’s a pretty healthy ecosystem, it’s growing all the time, and we all benefit from it.

My big caveat to this, or what I want to see change, is that the networks on my radar are composed almost entirely of practitioners in the English-speaking world. There are some invaluable exceptions – especially people from countries where speaking excellent English is as common as speaking the native tongue – but when it comes to sharing experience with Asia, Africa, South America or much of Europe we’re at the stage of sending and receiving the occasional diplomatic mission, not of building truly global communities (Taiwan is the exception here in having its own thriving chapter of MCN, and Europeana is also a network as much as a project). Digital heritage being what it is, in principle we have the opportunity to do things that can’t be done in the real world, like creating new or impossible intercontinental collections, services and aggregations of knowledge and creativity. This sort of collaboration, though, really needs to start with networks of people, and we need to make these more global. Of course, starting (relatively) small and then trying to scale is a way to approach this. Which takes us smoothly to Thing 2…

#2 Networked knowledge
I’m not going to do an API/Linked Data/Semantic Web/federated search thing here, only say that after a decade of stuttering starts I believe that we are seeing the true beginnings of properly networked (or at least massively aggregated) knowledge. This has been built on top of hard-won standards, and has recently been given a huge boost by a number of governments opening up their data and encouraging people to find ways to hook it all together. This includes UK.gov opening up big-time (Ordnance Survey, you can come out now, you need no longer be ashamed of yourself. It’s worth remembering that this is the Dr Jeckyll aspect of the UK government: Mr Hyde, on the other hand, just passed the Digital Economy Bill, and who can love that?

Why is this important? Well cultural heritage data is fine on its own terms, but I think we’ve come to realise over the past few years that hooking it together with more of the same is great in itself but limited: knitting it into a wider ecosystem of data is what will really make the network effects take off, so the a glut of new non-heritage data sources appearing now really could provide that impetus.

You may not be surprised to see me mention Europeana here, too. Whatever else it is, it’s the grandest experiment yet in what happens if you mass structured cultural heritage content together from many different countries and lanaguages, and how you do it in the first place. The challenge is every bit as much about gaining consensus from participants who always have the option to pull out, as it is about technical problems, and I don’t know of another project that has braved quite this challenge before in
digital heritage. Anything we learn is good, but with any luck we’ll end up with a core of content massive enough to attract all sorts of unexpected attention and novel uses. That’s the strength of networked knowledge.

#3 Professionalisation, recognition and integration
Lots of the people I know in this game got into it in the same way as I did: entirely by accident. Many picked up their tech skills on their semi-random walk from somewhere in the arts, the sciences, maybe a museum studies degree (but a few have built on a proper education in computer science). As a result my peers have amazingly diverse backgrounds and each brings a unique perspective to digital heritage. This is surely partly why we have such vibrant discussions and creative ideas zipping about.

And yet, it’s also time for professionalisation, and it’s coming. In the UK I know of several universities running courses in digital heritage and digital preservation or relevant modules on museum studies courses*. A deepening literature and progressive theorisation of the discipline all play a part too, as do the communities of practice and partnerships I mentioned before. We need museum management to recognise that our work is a valid branch of museological practice, peopled by skilled specialists possessing knowledge you can’t find in a coder plucked off the street, and that we can shine a new light on the museum’s mission.

So whilst it would be a shame if we lost all the diversity that the first colonisers of this “museum computing” space brought over its first couple of decades (ok, Ross, let’s say four decades), I’m sure that professionalisation and recognition are worth a bit of a trade-off in that regard. But not too much, I hope.

For an example of professionalisation and recognition we can probably look at the overlapping field of archaeological computing, where some of the most proactive people in the digital heritage community actually work. From my glancing acquaintance with academic and commercial archaeology it strikes me that practitioners are recognised as another kind of archaeologist, just like geoarchaeologists, finds specialists, osteologists or geomatics folks, rather than being seen as the necessary nerd in the corner. Museum computing and archaeological computing are twins serving different masters, but the one is regarded quite differently to the other and it will be good if we see that situation improve.

*check this distance learning MA out: http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/study/digitalheritage.html. I must declare an interest (like half the MCG board), but it’s a ground-breaking beast.

#4 the iPad
Ah well why not have an unplanned fourth thing? I’ve been way too serious so far, and anyway the iPad is the talk of the week I’m meant to be covering. Whether it turns out to be the long-awaited paradigm-shifter and market-maker for slate-style gizmos, or merely a cool toy we’ll have forgotten in a couple of years, well, it’s certainly got us talking about what we can do with something like that – when it finally reaches these shores, of course. And I imagine there’ll be a small glut of them coming over at the end of MW2010…

That’s it, then. A list of things that make me think “hmm, this is a great profession and it’s getting better”, despite the Sisyphean sensation we often feel at the chalk-face. So, if your director thinks “social media” means a growth substrate for bacteria; if open data equates to an invitation to IP theft in the mind of your information managers; if, at your museum, any chance of failure is seen as worse than never developing; if your IT manager can recall their yearly targets but doesn’t know the museum’s purpose or values; if your manager is a marketer for whom “digital sustainability” means how long they can hold up two fingers at you; you have my sympathy, nay, my empathy. But surely these people are on borrowed time. No cultural heritage organisation that sees digital media as anything other than integral to achieving their purpose will succeed and grow - perhaps this is even more true during financially straitened times, which is one inference I take from both Nick Poole’s and Günter Waibel’s excellent recent posts – and so these myopic attitudes must inevitably die out. Funders will look at examples of places large and small that do it well and will ask searching questions of those institutions that haven’t worked out their place in this fast-evolving world. At that point, when a dazed-looking director knocks at your asking how your museum can “lead at digital” or some such vapid nonsense, as the realisation dawns that they’ve been missing something and no one’s going to pay them to fail their audiences forever, it falls to you, me, we to be prepared with a plan, a feel for what’s out there and what your gaff could be doing with some imagination, some support, and some cojones. Then you can show them a profession with rigour, cohesion, vitality and loads of whizzy stuff, and more opportunities than you can shake an accounting package at. I think that’s a pretty good place to be.

I can’t help but end on a selfish note that is a little at odds with the tenor of this post. As I mentioned earlier, my own reason for optimism is chiefly that I’ve been offered a really exciting new opportunity to work at the Imperial War Museum, which has put a spring in my step. Which means that, whilst I’m sure that attitudes to digital heritage will mature, accompanied by a recognition of the validity of the discipline, I’m not waiting around for that change to come to my present place of work. But maybe after 8 years of me they need me gone as much as I need to move on and it will do us all good to start again.

So, comment away with what gets you excited in digital heritage, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.