The Powerhouse Museum has gone live with its first public experiment with QR codes.
QR codes are really glorified barcodes with the capacity to hold far more information than a standard barcode. Because of the prevalence of mobile phone cameras and the desire of telcos to drive data usage on mobiles, QR codes are getting a bit of a push at the moment outside of Japan (where they began).
[Read more →]
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Today we completed the circle.
We have started presenting the tags that Flickr users have left on our images in the Commons on Flickr in their associated collection records in our online collection database. What this means is that the large number of tags added to our photographic collection in Flickr now are available in our OPAC to help others navigate the rest of our OPAC and connect with similar objects not available in the Commons and not in Flickr.
It is important to realise that almost none of the Tyrrell images were tagged in our own collection - even though the ability to tag was there. This means the effort that the Flickr community has made in tagging our collection in Flickr has a second life in our OPAC, reaching even more users and increasing their navigational and use value as metadata.
We first thought about merging the Flickr-originating tags with the tags submitted on our own site but realised that this could create confusion - especially because the Flickr tags couldn’t be deleted. Thus they now live in their own temporary tag space until our next redesign launches. After Luke did a bit of code tweaking we have managed to pull everything back in the correct character set (to accommodate all the double-byte tags in Flickr) and with spacing intact.
Here is the image in Flickr, and how it now appears in our OPAC. The same tags on both.
We now import Flickr tags each week (so don’t expect your latest tags to show up immediately!). The import script runs alongside the script that uploads our latest image to the Commons on Flickr each week.
Thank you again to all the Flickr-ites who are making such a useful contribution to the Museum’s catalogue metadata.
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The first three months of having images from the Tyrrell Photographic Collection in the Commons on Flickr have been very interesting. We launched on April 8 with 200 images and have been adding more each week since.
At the 12 week mark we had 600 photos uploaded, mostly location photography with just under
Splash! Playable collections
In the first 4 weeks of the Commons we had more views of the photos than the same photos in the entirety of last year on our own website. It wasn’t as if we made the images on our own website all that hard to find - they were well indexed on our own site by Google, they were made available to the national federated image search/repository Picture Australia, and they also existed in our OPAC. Still, that was no match for Flickr.
Flickr’s roots in MMOG ‘Game Never Ending‘ makes it the ideal place for cultural institutions to explore the notion of ‘playable collections’. The social norms and community behaviours that have emerged and are encouraged around image content in Flickr (as opposed to other photo sharing sites) enable historic photographic collections to become game entities. Albeit with a slightly different rule set.
In the Commons images lose the boundaries placed on them by collecting institutions. They take on new contexts and meanings, and they become maleable. All images in Flickr take on these more fluid characteristics, but in the Commons they way others see, respond and interact with these images is slightly different.
In fact I think it is really important to point out the difference in observed behaviours between our photos in our standard Flickr account. I’m not sure how the other institutions who are contributing to the Commons are finding it, but we’ve noticed that there seems to be a difference in behaviour and social norms in tagging and commenting on our Commons images versus our other images. Presumably the obvious ‘historic’ nature of the images combined with the fact that the institutions aren’t the photographers has an effect on this.
The global reach of Flickr and its active international user base (although far from evenly distributed proportional to online population) is impressive. Although our collection is very much focussed around Sydney and NSW, we’ve still managed to attract some tagging in other languages. Other Commons contributors have far more international images and should be drawing more internationalised tags and comments.
What are people doing?
The Commons has several obvious types of engagement from the point of view of a contributor. I hesitate to put these into ‘levels’ because almost everyone does each of them. The first seven, at least, are integral to the ‘game play’ of Flickr and should be judged against the rule set of the game system itself, rather than necessarily against outside behaviours.
Visitors can engage in -
1. Viewing
Viewing comes in many forms and can be counted when those views occur on Flickr. This is the simplest but also least useful way of measuring the project. What is useful about view data, however, is the ability to track the trends and patterns in viewing and observing when and deducing why certain images generate more views at a particular time.
2. Favouriting (”bookmarking”)
“Favoriting” (US spelling) on Flickr is the equivalent of bookmarking. Flickr users ‘favourite’ for many reasons and this is another very simple measure of the relative popularity of an image. It is important to understand that whilst an image may be ‘favourited’ by many different users the reasons for their ‘favoriting’ are not revealed. Again, it is through observing bursts of favouriting of the same object by multiple users, or the favouriting of many objects by the same user that potentially reveals more.
3. Friending (”I am interested in seeing more/connect with me”)
Friending on Flickr identifies a desired but not necessarily reciprocal relationship between the ‘friender’ and the ‘friendee’. The Powerhouse decided after a few weeks to reciprocate all friend requests and we also look at the photos taken by our ‘friends’ and where appropriate tag, comment, and ‘favorite’ their images too. This social reciprocity is really important but also time consuming.
At 12 weeks we had hit 612 ‘friends’. Each of these friends now gets visual notification of new images we upload.
4. Social commenting (”here I am”)
I’m calling the comments that say ‘awesome photo’ or ‘cool picture’ as social commenting. This is a really loose way of describing comments that are really about leaving a linkback-ed mark of a visit. Akin to an “I woz ere” but in a more networked way.
On Flickr this social commenting acts as the ’social glue’ that binds the communities that play the ‘Flickr game’, together. Whilst it is very tempting for museum professionals to downplay or scoff at this sort of interaction, it might be useful to think of these sort of comments as playing a role akin to comfortable seating or a nice cafe in a museum gallery.
5. Tagging (”let me help”)
Because the Commons specifically asked the Flickr community to ‘help tag’ images the tagging that is done within the Commons tends to generate some pretty useful additional metadata. Whilst the account holder can see who the tagger was, the rest of Flickr cannot. Tagging here is a great example of altruistic behaviour as the tagger is neither the image creator or owner.
6. Image content tagging (”here’s something interesting”)
Flickr also allows the notation of an image with the ‘add note’ function. We’ve noticed that some users are helpfully identifying particular buildings, landmarks, signage, flags and other important elements within an image with these tools. This creates a certain kind of additional metadata that isn’t about the object/image as a whole, but about a certain subset of the content.
7. Content commenting (”let me tell you more about this”)
Here’s where the value of the Commons is easiest to explain to other cultural sector professionals. This is old-fashioned community engagement and we’ve been really lucky to have engaged a number of prolific and dedicated members of the Flickr community who have taken up the challenge of identifying the exact dates, locations and other unknown details about the images we’ve uploaded.
Whilst some of the information we are learning about the images this way could probably have been discovered by the Museum itself, that the public has been able to do this for us and often within hours of new images going up on to the site speaks volumes.
This is also very much about empowering and acknowledging the importance of ‘amateur’ knowledge, which in the networked environment can often outpace, and sometimes outperform, isolated ‘professional’ knowledge.
8. Content embedding (”I’ve stuck this on my site/blog/profile”)
9. Content remixing and connecting (”here’s my images that fit with yours”)
Although harder to track, the other obvious purpose of the Commons is to encourage re-use. Re-use of heritage materials radically asserts their relevance in contemporary society and is an increasingly necessary bridge between the world of ‘museums as holders of old stuff’ and the world of ‘museums as places for inspiration (and connection)’.
All of this is ‘user generated context’ (cf. Haque) as much as it is ‘user generated content’. Context is increasingly what matters in a world overloaded with content, and museums through the exhibition medium should be specialists in understanding the importance of ‘context’.
And of course, our Tyrrell Today group has already gathered 123 images that are contemporary location photography matching the historic photography of the Tyrrells. This shows a huge amount of commitment from others in the Flickr community - to go out and purposely reshoot a Tyrrell from today’s perspective and we’re thrilled to have generated this much interest. We hope we can reciprocate.
Here’s an example.
(contemporary image by lifeasdaddy)
Some basic quantitative stats at 12 weeks
So with all that in mind, here’s some raw figures to consider.
How many?
600 photos uploaded (at 12 weeks)
103,000 views of photos
How are they being found?
69% via Flickr
2% via external search
6% via other websites (blogs etc)
21% direct to URL
Most popular:
Woman inside a settler’s hut (2nd most favourites) - 1735
Wool sorting room, Clifton Station - 1334
Cutting Out - 1011
Bondi Bay, Sydney (3rd most favourites) - 967
Circular Quay 1892 - 945
Perhaps not surprisingly for a global audience the top three images are those without geographic specificity and thus more general global appeal.
Most favourited:
Kookaburras - 29
Woman inside a settler’s hut - 19
Bondi Bay, Sydney - 15
Frank Senior, sculler - 13
The start of girls’ snowshoe race, Kiandra - 11
How many tags?
2433 tags (excluding machine tags)
Average tags per image - 4.055, median 2, standard deviation 4.93 (a fair number of objects have no tags, mostly the newest)
Most tagged:
George St, near Hunter St - 26
A farm homestead - 24
Choir, St Andrew’s Cathedral, looking east - 23
Sydney from Shell Cove, North Shore - 22
Woman inside a settler’s hut - 21
Some answers to some other frequently asked questions
1. What has been the impact on image sales?
It is early days and too early to tell whether or not we’ve ‘lost’ sales as a result of putting these images in Flickr. Interestingly we are getting a lot more online enquiries about purchasing these images and the offline (telephone, fax, etc) haven’t noticeably declined. It is too early to tell but I think once the other benefits of being in the Commons are brought into the equation we will have massively gained.
2. What happens when other institutions add their images? Do your images get ‘lost’ in the flood of new content?
Actually we’ve found that in this situation more is more. When new institutions add their images we see new peaks appear in our stats. This is because with each new addition comes a slew of blog posts across the blogosphere. The addition of the George Eastman House recently and the Bibliotheque de Toulouse both generated new types of media coverage of the Commons as a whole.
Also as the Commons evolves new features are added by the Flickr team so with the George Eastman House came cross-Commons ‘search‘ which will become even more useful as more complimentary collections are added - which in the case of the Powerhouse probably means more Australian collections.
3. What is your favourite story about the power of the Commons?
See my earlier post on the ‘discovery’ of the Mosman Falls.
4. Aren’t you worried about releasing these images as de facto ‘public domain’? Don’t you want attribution and credit for collecting, preserving and making these available?
We’ve noticed that our images are now spreading to the Wikimedia Commons, and are also being used in blog posts and various websites. And, although we haven’t specifically encouraged remixing - primarily because of the nature of the content of most of the images - there have been some Flickr users who have notified us of the intent to create screenprints and other derivatives of some images.
Now, because these images have been identified as ‘no known copyright’ there is no legal need to attribute the source of these images but every single re-use or embed of our images to date has featured an attribution. This is another testament to the nature of the Flickr community. Now that some of these images are also in the Wikimedia Commons it will be interesting to see whether the same courtesy attribution occurs.
5. I work in a museum/library/archive and we already have a Flickr account. As a matter of fact, we’ve had one for ages. Why is the Commons so different?
The two obvious differences are the banding together of collections under the promotional umbrella of ‘The Commons’; and the application of ‘no known Copyright’ to the images. The increasing prominence of the Commons within the Flickr ecosystem brings Commons images to many more people than a regular Flickr account. Together this creates an interesting effect - comparatively more interest in the images and more engagement around them. I wonder whether this is the effect of providing a clearing in the surrounding data smog where the intention of putting up historical images is very clear and contextualised (rather than obscured)?
6. What is the big deal about ‘no known Copyright’?
I guess the answer is both philosophical and practical. Philosophically it makes sense for publicly-owned heritage images to be made available to the public in a digital form to reuse and repurpose except where there are cultural sensitivities involved. This may not apply to institutions that aren’t publicly funded of course.
On a practical level it makes sense because asserting Copyright (or even Creative Commons) over something that clearly wasn’t made by you is full of legal complexities. Not only that, it complicates matters for learners of all ages who legitimately want to see and use these images - if only they knew they existed.
7. What are you doing with all the tags and comments?
Tags are easy and we’re treating them just like our other community generated metadata. Now we’ve passed the 3 month mark we’ve pulled all the tags to date back into our own collection database online where they will soon appear alongside the tags that have been on our own site.
Comments are a little more tricky and we’re working out ways that we can dedicate resources to going through these and updating the collection records properly. There are several factors that make this less than trivial - paradoxically many of the images with the most ‘documentation’-style comments are also the ones that have not been fully catalogued by our own curatorial staff. I expect that we will have resolved a proper process for the ingestion (and crediting) of information supplied via Flickr comments in the next six months.
8. How do you manage the community that is forming around your content on Flickr? What is the time commitment?
As I mentioned right at the top of this report we are still coming to terms with this. Our Image Services Manager, Paula Bray, does the bulk of the responding, commenting, favouriting and interacting. She is an avid photographer too and had her own Flickr account prior to joining the Museum and well before this project. She spends at least an hour a day in Flickr - yes, even weekends - and that’s not counting the time she spends selecting and preparing the content for bulk upload.
I drop in and out of our account to check what is going on each day also spending about 20-30 minutes a day making sure things are as they should be.
This need for ‘continuous participation’ is a challenge but it is reaping enormous rewards. However within an institution of our size and structure both Paula and I are spending considerable time ensuring we have a strong case for the resourcing of this ongoing participation which is part of the reason why we’re testing different metrics and documenting outcomes as we go.
9. How do you upload the images to Flickr? (and pull down those tags and comments)
We use the very well documented Flickr API to both upload and download. It took about 5 programming hours at most to build our uploader and also a downloader in PHP. After the images are uploaded from our collection database we have to go in and add them to the correct groups, geotag what we can, and then change their permissions so everyone can see them. Easy.
Need to know more? I will continue to post reports periodically. Courtney Johnston at the National Library of New Zealand (kia ora!) has posted a similar report on what they’ve learnt from the first year of having a ’standard’ Flickr account. And, Bridget McKenzie in the UK has produced a good discussion paper arguing the pros and cons of having a Flickr presence for your institution.
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It has been an interesting day down in Melbourne brainstorming many of the technologies that might impact on the higher education sector in the next 5 years. This brainstorming is forming the basis of the upcoming Horizon.Au Report - a version of the Horizon Report tailored specifically for the Australian and New Zealand community.
The North American 2008 report is available from Horizon, and there is a special Museums Report coming very very soon too. [Read more →]
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We’re all working hard to ensure that our own content is identified with persistent URLs - a referrer that will stand the test of time - but often when we are writing a paper we need to refer to someone else’s URL, most of which are not designed to be permanent.
Traditionally when we reference something on a website we put ‘accessed on X date’ but that is of little use to a reader who follows up a reference only to find the original has moved or gone.
That’s where WebCite comes in. WebCIte is a bit like TinyUrl or any number of URL shortening services, a social bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us, combined with a snapshotting tool. It provides a ’shorter’ URL and it also keeps a copy of the entire page you have cited in its archive. This means that readers can read the exact same page, as it was when you were referencing it, at any time into the future - even if that page changes regularly (like the front page of a newspaper website).
You can also add custom DC metadata.
Here’s a WebCite capture of the Sydney Morning Herald’s front page as it was at the time of this post. http://www.webcitation.org/5ZAbxFdgI
As you can see there are some problems in that it has been unable to capture the CSS to lay out the page properly, but for references to the text contained in a page it does a pretty good job.
Here’s a capture of an article from an online journal, D-Lib, which being predominantly text, works better. http://www.webcitation.org/5ZAcGpnPz
There’s even a bookmarklet to add to your browser toolbar to make capturing even easier. Otherwise use the service manually via their archiving submission page. A submission takes about 20 seconds to capture.
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Lorcan Dempsey pointed to this rather excellent presentation titled ‘There’s No Place Like Home?’ from Ann Cameron at the National Library of Scotland. In it she describes way that the NLS has been uploading archival video materials to YouTube and highlights some of the issues around Copyright, and metadata that have emerged from the project. The issues around context (slide 15) are also important in light of Henry Jenkins’ recent presentation. [Read more →]
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Whilst we are collating the data to report on the Museum’s first three months in the Commons on Flickr, I’ll share one of the best stories to come from the project for us so far - the story of finding the Mosman Bay Falls.
Amongst our photographs we found two images simply titled ‘Mosman Bay Falls’. Here’s one of them [Read more →]
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Here’s the second of a set of notes scribed during the main sessions of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘.
Camilla Cooke was the strategist behind the Kevin07 digital campaign in what she described as ‘Australia’s first digital election’. In a fantastic presentation she went through the rationale behind the digital elements of the Kevin07 campaign and some of the figures and outcomes (beyond the election result!). [Read more →]
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I’ve been in Brisbane the last few days - presenting the Powerhouse Museum’s Creative Commons and public domain projects and also managed attend one day of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘. In amongst some truly awful examples of how not to use Powerpoint, there were some interesting presentations and papers.
Here’s the first of a set of notes scribed during the main sessions. [Read more →]
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Google Trends has started to allow domain level searches. This means that you can now pull up rough traffic figures, as calculated by Google, on any top level domain (subdomains like play.powerhousemuseum.com or artgallery.nsw.gov.au won’t work), and compare them to others. This moves Google Trends into territory covered by services like Compete, Quantcast (both US-centric) and, to a lesser extent, Hitwise. [Read more →]
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Chris Sizemore at the BBC’s Radio Labs demonstrates an experiment in automated metadata, much akin to Open Calais.
Sizemore has taken Wikipedia and has built a simple web application that uses Wikipedia to disambiguate entities in a block of text and suggest broad categories for the content. Because Wikipedia has broad coverage of topics and deep coverage of specific niches, it can provide, as Sizemore writes, for some areas (especially popular culture), a good enough data source for automated classification.
Here’s Sizemore’s methodology -
1. Download entire contents of the English language Wikipedia (careful, that’s a large 4GB+ xml file!)
2. Parse that compressed XML file into individual text files, one per Wikipedia article (and this makes things much bigger, to the tune of 20GB+, so make sure you’ve got the hard drive space cleared)
3. Use a Lucene indexer to create a searchable collection (inc. term vectors) of your new local Wikipedia text files, one Lucene document per Wikipedia article
4. Use Lucene’s ‘MoreLikeThis’ to compare the similarity of a chunk of your own text content to the Wikipedia documents in your new collection
5. Treat the ranked Wikipedia articles returned as suggested categories for your text
Basically what is going on here is that the text you wish to classify is compared to Wikipedia articles and the articles with the ‘closest match’ in terms of content, have their URLs thrown back as potential classification categories.
Combine this with Open Calais and there will be some very interesting results across a broad range of text datasets.
As regular readers will know, we’ve been experimenting quite a bit with Open Calais at the Powerhouse with some exciting initial results. We’ve been looking at the potential of Calais in combination with other data sources including Wikipedia/dbPedia/Freebase and we’ll be watching Sizemore’s experiment with interest.
Perhaps my throwaway line in recent presentations that ‘humans should never have to create metadata’ might actually be becoming closer to a reality.
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The most popular object in our online collection database is still a dress worn by Delta Goodrem.
I’ve previously written about how the popularity of this dress was driven in part by coverage on a number of Delta Goodrem fan forums. But this neglects the criticality of search. Google has always driven traffic to this object and looking at last months analytics where Google search represented 86% of referrers to the object, the top 5 keywords used to discover this dress were these -
1. lisa ho - 11.24%
2. evening dresses - 4.55%
3. lisa ho dresses - 2.71%
4. formal dress - 2.13%
5. chiffon dress - 1.07%
Because of the frequency of the keywords ‘lisa ho’ in the title, description and body text of the object record, and the trusted PageRank of the Powerhouse Museum domain, we rank 11th in Google search results for ‘lisa ho’; 2nd for ‘lisa ho dress’; and 4th for ‘lisa ho dresses’.
Fortunately for us, this external traffic isn’t fleeting. Visitors to this object view almost double the average number of pages viewed by others on our site; and they spend more time on the site too.
Looking at the internal search terms for that same object the results are very different.
1. Australian fashion (also a subject classification)
2. tennis (user tag)
3. lisa ho
4. delta goodrem
5. elegant (user tag)
External search has effectively driven nearly 10 times the traffic of internal users to this object. It has also brought audiences to the object who have very little behavioural similarities to those who search within the context of our own site (internal search). This creates many new challenges in terms of usability and user experience.
Over the entire collection there are pockets of objects for which the difference between internal and external search is not as great however this needs much greater data analysis (and may be the subject of a future post or paper).
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One of the most common questions asked over the past few years has been “how do I get the best out of SEO for my museum?”. This comes up in casual conversations and without fail at conferences. We are all becoming increasingly aware of the higher and higher proportion of our traffic coming via search, and that as content on the web grows exponentially the chance of our content lying buried deep in search engine results increases.
Often the problem for museums with search relates to the diversity of their web presence. Other than our brand name, our content, especially those held in collections, is often very diverse and our exhibitions equally so. I’ve previously written about the need to tackle exhibition naming so that at least on the web exhibition titles are more ’search-friendly’, but this is very tricky to apply to collection and education content.
The news media have taken to rewriting headlines for search - knowing that timeliness and findability are crucial to their success of their content - Scott Gledhill’s fantastic SEO presentation from Web Directions South 2007 is an eye-opening look at how News Limited journalists in Australia are maximising the reach of their articles (link is to a full Slidecast).
Is this possible with museum content?
Should (and can) curators, education staff, marketing staff, get a quick dashboard that reports the web performance of the content they are creating? Should (and can) they iterate their content, improving it, guided by real world performance? If museums are ’slow media’, then is performance-guided content creation even a desirable outcome? (Update: do we really want to get to a situation like this parodied in the Slate?)
Maybe you need to tackle the basics first - getting your key content more visible. So where do you start?
Fortunately there are plenty of great SEO resources on the web and plenty of ways of testing SEO performance for free or very low cost. Last month Web Designers Wall posted a simple introduction to SEO which is worthwhile reading for the very basics. This along with Scott’s presentation should provide a good start point.
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I’ve been wondering for a long time about the real popularity of Facebook apps that are targetted at specific niche user groups.
Well with Developer Analytics you can find out - without needing to be the actual developer of the Facebook application in question.
With the museum community starting to build useful applications like the Brooklyn’s ArtShare or the Steve Art Tagger, the ability for us all to evaluate the success of these sort of projects is increasingly important. This is especially the case for cross-institutional projects to which we are all beginning to contribute our content. Are these projects reaching the audiences that we want our content to reach? Where should we focus our energies?
What can you learn from Developer Analytics?
For Artshare I can quickly see that as of today it has 2,900 install with 58 average daily users, as well as pull up a popularity graph to see this over time. (Update: Shelley at the Brooklyn says that these stats conflict with the ones she can pull up from within Facebook - see comments below) I can also compare it with the Steve Art Tagger which has been up for a few months and has 200 installs but only an average of 2 active daily users. Readers from the libraries world might be interested in taking a look at the statistics for the OCLC’s recently released WorldCat Facebook app.
I can also look at which commercial applications are most successful and track trends across, say, the multitude of Flickr-related applications to see which are the most sticky and used.
There are important lessons to be learnt from the other successful Facebook applications which we can draw upon when building our own.
Here’s a chart from the My Flickr application which, being an app with a large-ish userbase provides significantly more data about users - including the other apps that users of My Flickr use, gender, age and friend demographics. (A side note - the availability of this information to application developers in itself should be of interest to all Facebook users concerned with privacy).
Head over to Developer Analytics and do some digging of your own.
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Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has been griping about his experience using his local newspaper website which just so happens to be the Washington Post. Driven by a desire to find out about power cuts as a result of storm, Karp was unable to quickly find what he wanted, and thus turned to other websites, finding them through Google. [Read more →]
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One of the really wild things at Museums and the Web 2007 was a demonstration booth from the National Science Museum, Japan. At the booth were a series of paper pop up dinosaurs. By themselves the dinosaur popups were impressive but once a consumer grade webcam was pointed at the paper cutouts they came to life as proper 3d models on screen.
The technology was written up in their paper over at Archimuse. [Read more →]
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The Brooklyn Museum have just joined the Commons on Flickr and some of the material they’ve released is spectacular. Amongst the highlights are some amazing lantern slides of Egypt as well as colourised photographs from the Paris Exposition in 1900. Some of the colourised images are quite surreal.
Brookyln have also released some of them at 3000 pixel and higher resolutions - asking re-users of these images to contact them to tell them whether this extra high resolution is useful. (I immediately thought that it might be fun to Photoshop in some Indiana Jones images into some of the Egypt images).
Flickr is already flagging that there will be many more contributors to the Commons coming very soon and that there will be some new features - an internal Commons search - as well as greater promotion of the Commons across Flickr. The addition of Brooklyn also seems to have solved the problem of the Commons needing a separate account - Brooklyn have sensibly merged their Commons images into their already very successful Flickr presence.
Back at the Powerhouse we’ve just uploaded our 500th image. This latest batch includes some lovely shots of the Sydney Observatory which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. There are also more shots of old Sydney, and the Tyrrell Today group is now starting to fill up with complimentary contemporary shots of the Tyrrell locations takne by a diverse range of other Flickr users.
And two other things, if you search Flickr regularly then you will love CompFight. It is a really nifty quick search of Flickr with various options for Creative Commons images and (un)Safe Search that leverages the Flickr API.
If you want the more ‘wow’ but far less practical search of Flickr then this 3D globe-style search from Germany, Tag Galaxy, is pretty amusing - especially on a fast connection.
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At MW08 there was the beginnings of a push amongst the technically oriented for the development of APIs for museum data, especially collections. Driven in part by discussions and early demonstrations of semantic web applications in museums, the conceptual work of Ross Parry, and the presence of Eric Miller and Brian Sletten of Zepheria; Aaron Straup Cope and George Oates of Flickr, MW08 might well be a historic turning point for the sector in terms of data interoperability and experimentation.
Since April there has been a lot of movement, especially in the UK.
The ‘UK alpha tech team’ of Mike Ellis, Frankie Roberto, Fiona Romeo, Jeremy Ottevanger, Mia Ridge are leading the charge all working on various ways of connecting, extracting and visualising data from the Science Museum, Museum of London and the National Maritime Museum in new ways. Together with them and a few other UK commercial sector folk, I’ve been contributing to a strategy wiki around making a case for APIs in museums.
Whilst the tech end of things is (comparatively) straight forward, the strategic case for an API is far more complex to make. As we fiddle, though, others make significant progress.
Already a community project, dbPedia, has taken the content of Wikipedia and made it available as an open database. What this means is that it is now possible to make reasonably complex semantic queries of Wikipedia - something I’m yet to see done on a museum collection. There are a whole range of examples and mini-web applications already built to demonstrate queries like “people born in Paris” or “people influenced by Nietzsche“. More than this, though, are the exciting opportunities to use Wikipedia’s data and combine it with other datasets.
What should be very obvious is that if Wikipedia’s dataset is made openly available for combining with other datasets then, much as Wikipedia already draws audiences away from museum sites, then their dataset made usable in other ways, will draw even more away. You might well ask why similar complex queries are so hard to make in our own collection databases? “Show me all the artwork influenced by Jackson Pollock?”
On June 19 the MCG’s Museums on the Web UK takes place at the University of Leicester with the theme of “Integrate, federate, aggregate“. There’s going to be some lovely presentations there - I expect Fiona Romeo will be demoing some lovely work they’ve been doing and Frankie Roberto will be reprising his high entertaining MW08 presentation too.
The day before, like the MCGUK07 conference, there will be a mashup day beforehand. Last year’s mashup day produced a remarkable number of quick working prototypes drawing on data sources provided by the 24 Hour Museum (now Culture24). This year the data looks like it will be coming from the collection databases of some of the UK nationals.
Already Box UK and Mike Ellis have whipped up a really nice demonstration of data combining - done by scraping the websites of the major museums with a little bit of PHP code. Even better, the site provides XML feeds and I expect that it will be a major source of mashups at MCG UK.
I like the FAQ that goes along with the site. Especially this -
Q: Doesn’t this take traffic away from the individual sites?
We don’t think so, but not many studies have been done into how “off-site” browsing affects the “in-site” metrics. Already, users will be searching for, consuming, and embedding your images (and other content) via aggregators such as Google Images. This is nothing new.
Also, ask yourself how much of your current traffic derives from users coming to explicitly browse your online collections?
The aim is that by syndicating your content out in a re-usable manner, whilst still retaining information about its source, an increasing number of third-party applications can be built on this data, each addressing specific user needs. As these applications become widely used, they drive traffic to your site that you otherwise wouldn’t have received: “Not everyone who should be looking at collections data knows that they should be looking at collections data”.
I’ve spoken and written about this issue of metrics previously, and these and the control issues need to be sorted out if there is going to be any real traction in the sector.
Unlike the New York Times (who apparently announced an API recently), and the notable commercial examples like Flickr, the museum sector doesn’t have a working (business) model for their collections other than a) exhibitions, b) image sales and possibly c) research services.
Now back to that semantic query, wouldn’t it be useful if we could do this - “Play me all the music videos of singles that appear on albums whose record cover art was influenced by Jackson Pollock?”. This could, of course be done by combining the datasets of, say the Tate, Last.FM, Amazon and YouTube - the missing link being the Tate.
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It shouldn’t take much imagination to see the enormous potential afforded by this prototype project coming out of Germany via Japan - Enkin.
Built on Google’s Android mobile platform (for which, it should be pointed out, no commercially available devices exist), Enkin looks amazing, even as a prototype. David Bearman has written recently about the notion of the ‘inside out museum’ where collections can be ‘digitally repatriated’ and connected up in both space and time (previously discussed). Enkin is one glimpse into that potential future.
If you have only a short amount of time take a look at the video (hat tip - Renae), otherwise spend the time and read their technical PDF.
Of course it is going to take a long time for mainstream audiences to engage with augmented reality heritage content and there are many barriers to be overcome. Interface is perhaps the easiest to solve - already mobile carriers are finding that iPhone users make considerably more use of mobile data than other phone users (see Jason Grigsby great presentation on this and other mobile usability issues over at Slideshare - especially slide #15). More problematic are carrier issues around the charging of data, and even more problematic are the philosophical issues that museums need to deal with in order to release their collections and other content in these new ways.
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This is a long and sprawling post and comes off the back of two weeks of presentations around the country and a lot of discussions about the ‘future of museums’. Perhaps find a comfortable chair and a hot beverage.
Checking my RSS feeds this morning I came across this piece from the Boston Globe which looks at the way the nature of what constitutes ‘history’ is being opened up with social web tools. It talks about the Commons on Flickr and the respective contributions of the Library of Congress and the Powerhouse Museum. Given the typical questions I’ve been asked in recent weeks about our own experience in the Commons, this section jumped out immediately.
Late last year, the Library of Congress posted several thousand of its photographs on Flickr and asked the public for help: What is this? Who is this? When was it taken? Curator Helena Zinkham, who oversaw the program, was stunned to discover how quickly the gaps were filled by amateur enthusiasts - and in some cases, people with firsthand recollections.
This was particularly the case where the images attracted the attention of a particular group of enthusiasts: military aviation buffs, for example, or aficionados of early baseball. One collection depicted early-20th-century boxers, many without vital information - perhaps just a last name, like “Wells.”
“By the time the conversation was done,” Zinkham says, “we were able to tell Matt Wells from Bombardier Billy Wells.” (emphasis mine)
Conversation - this is what social media is fundamentally about - and Zinkham’s use of the word says a lot about how the Library of Congress has approached the whole Commons project. As we know (from meat/meetspace) conversations are unpredictable and whilst they can be steered they can rarely be controlled. For this reason we’ve traditionally been unable to ‘let go’ in our marketing campaigns and our gallery and online experiences. Conversations are hard work too, and require ongoing work to maintain.
Thinking about the Museum Futures summit last week in Canberra (organised by Museums Australia) I’ve come to the conclusion that museums must “assert relevance, don’t assume relevance”. As others at the summit have noted, there still seems to be an assumption within the sector that museums are, by their very presence, relevant. This is not the case.
Alternatives are everywhere. ‘Experience venues’ are less the preserve of museums than every before. Take a look at the cinema industry and you quickly realise how the declining cost of home cinema equipment combined with DVDs and the internet have, in a very short space of time, greatly reduced the appeal of the ‘cinema experience’. There is now very little reason to visit a cinema to actually ’see’ a film - that act can be performed anywhere - and the connection between the ’seeing’ of the film and physical space of the cinema has been well and truly severed. Of course there are still some who enjoy the cinema experience, but the ‘need’ to attend to see a film is no longer.
If we think that ‘information’, ‘fact’ and ‘knowledge’ are our domain then again the alternatives are everywhere. The internet as an information space is dominant, faster and easier to access.
Fortunately we aren’t alone in facing this disruption.
I was excited to hear Cathy Johnson, a reference librarian talking about the ‘Slam the Boards’ initiative that she has been eagerly taking part in. (Cathy was talking at the State Library of NSW last week at the Reference at Metcalfe conference that I also spoke at). Slam the Boards originated in the US as a way of reference librarians making their presence felt in the rather unruly world of internet Q&A boards.
It is a great example of ‘asserting relevance’. What Cathy and other reference librarians do is all head over to Q&A boards like Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers and the like and start answering questions. It sound simple but as even some in the audience felt, reference librarians find it incredibly challenging - even though they do the same every day in face to face situations in libraries. In answering questions professionally and tagging their posts and also identifying their avatars as ‘librarians’ Cathy argued that not only are librairans engaging audiences that have either forsaken libraries or are just unaware of their services; their answers act as promotion - not just of themselves and their library, but also of the idea of libraries as ‘trusted navigators of information’.
Actually all media industries face this question of ‘relevance’ in the face of alternatives. And, as ‘Future of media’ consultant Ross Dawson mused last week after attending a Powerhouse Future Directions Forum, museums are essentially media.
Come this morning and digital radio blogger, Tony Walker over at the ABC linked over to a fascinating post at Reportr about the changing motivations behind the newspaper world’s (slow) embrace of social media.
The Reportr article by Alfred Hermida is a fantastic read, as is the longer form report (by Hermida and Neil Thurman) it references midway through. As an investigation of how British newspapers have adapted to the changing media landscape - a result of the democratising of media production equipment and publishing technologies - it is very illuminating. We have seen similar adaptations attempted by Fairfax and News Limited.
Most of all Hermida’s research mirrors the attitudes and reactions of the museum world to social media, user-generated content, and the new demands of “asserting relevance” and engagement. From his earlier work -
While news organisations were providing more opportunities for participation, we also found evidence that they were retaining a traditional gate-keeping role. Moderation and or registration remained the norm as editors’ concerns over reputation, trust, and legal liabilities persisted.
This said, we did record a greater openness among editors. One described user media as a “phenomenon you can’t ignore”, another said they “firmly believed in the great conversation”, and one editor explained he was “very interested in unlocking” information from his “very knowledgeable” readers.
Sound familiar?
Hermida’s later research is showing that in light of low particpation rates (when compared to overall site visitation), and a lack of tangible ‘ROI’ and metrics, and ongoing concerns over ‘moderation’, there is still little in the way of more open forms of collaboration between audience and newspaper - potentially the most transformative.
Although there has been a continual increase in opportunities for readers to contribute over the three years of our work in this area, textual contributions are, in the main, still limited to short ‘comments’ on subjects or stories determined by professional editors. There is little in the way of longer-form contributions or opportunities for readers to set the agenda. We could suggest then that the media is creating an architecture of publication for material from the audience, rather than an architecture of participation.
Where opportunities for readers to set the agenda do exist (for example in readers’ blogs; or at message boards) they often seem to be part of what some have described as a “closed-off annex where readers can talk and discuss, as long as the media companies don’t have to be involved”.
Attempts to create genuinely open spaces where readers can set the agenda are few and far between. The Times’ ‘Your World’ travel site is one, but after initial external investment to get it running (it was sponsored by BMW) the site has atrophied without ongoing support and management. The most recent posts are 4 months old.
Will museums reach a similar point in their engagement with social media and pull back? At this stage I think there is a 50/50 chance. The gains that have been made with social media in terms of audience engagement and the transformation of the very idea of a ‘museum’ lie in the ability of the sector to overcome its inertia and begin to demonstrate the gains made so far and the opportunities that lie ahead.
Our relevance lies not in just creating an ‘architecture of publication’ but as Hermida and others say, designing ‘architectures of participation’. And this is not easy.
Coming back to where I started this post, George Oates from Flickr (and the architect of the Commons project), has written a nice piece over at A List Apart called “From Little Things”. The article is a nice introduction to the basics of designing for community interaction. Here she describes how Flickr operates as game -
If you imagine Flickr as something like Game for the Masses—a playing field without rules or a “way to play”—you can see how people can learn to engage with one another through conversations about their content.
This has certainly been our experience with the Commons. And the open nature of the game, and its evolving rules and social mores poses significant challenges for us. Museums are good at closed games - our galleries are full of them, our websites too. But we are only getting started at open ended evolving interactive experiences.
We better get a move on.
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We were very lucky to have non-profit and NGO social media trainer Beth Kanter drop by to run a whirlwind seminar for us on Friday. Beth lives social media and technology. My team’s first words with her were captured and streamed live to the web on her Nokia N95 phone via Qik.com - even us technophiles were surprised by her gadgets! I had never met Beth in person myself before Friday although we’d exchanged ideas and methodologies over the past few years; most recently for a piece on ‘Effective social networking‘ over at Techsoup.
Lynda Kelly from the Australian Museum took copious notes and blogged during Beth’s 2 hour micro-workshop - which was held with a mix of Powerhouse staff and those from other arts agencies. Lynda’s notes capture the overall flow of the workshop and covers the main points that were discussed - it should be noted that the focus of the workshop was on social media in marketing and fundraising for non-profits.
In her work Beth emphasises the value of the network of people with whom she is loosely and electronically connected. She places a lot of trust in that network - a trust that has paid back many times over - as her fundraising is a testament to. Her blog is her diary of her explorations, trials and discoveries and as such provides a very accessible entry point to everything from video blogging to NGO web strategy.
Many of the strategies Beth outlines are applicable within the museum and cultural sector - especially amongst those developing next generation marketing strategies.
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The folks at McGraw Hill/Harvard Business Press recently sent me an advance copy of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies for review. The book builds on Li and Bernoff’s Forrester research blog and in particular their social technographics work.
Aimed at managers, executives and marketing staff, the book (usefully) steers well clear of specific technologies and technical solutions and instead provides numerous case studies of how social technologies are being deployed by savvy companies to improve and transform their businesses. More so than the social technographics profiles, these case studies are the book’s strength. The case studies featured cover different audiences and social technographic profiles, widely different industries, and also very different strategies and are all interesting reading.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how museums might apply their methodologies - in particular their POST (people, objectives, strategies, technologies) method - to exhibitions and online content.
The POST method is simple but forces you to look first at the people you are trying to promote/engage/sell to and the objectives you are trying to achieve. Then choose a strategy and last, the appropriate technology. The Groundswell book covers, in detail, this methodology applied to examples such as the sale of tampons to young women . In this case study Procter and Gamble built a discussion forum, Being Girl, which is a platform for the marketing of a particular brand of tampons. It became a bigger and ongoing platform with which to engage the target audience. What the Being Girl case study shows is that by looking at the behaviour of the target audience first and their online behaviour it was possible to create a better aligned and more successful campaign that not only met the objectives of the tampon company (and created new opportunities as well) but importantly met the needs of the audience (to have a safe place to discuss adolescence - beyond just tampons). The company involved is also able to now undertake ongoing audience/market research through the forum to inform future campaigns.
Of course, engaging with audiences in these and other ways radically changes the communication flows from the traditional one-to-many shout methods of traditional marketing to multi-directional communication. These inevitably begin to transform the organisations involved as well as the customers/audience too. Groundswell outlines some of the challenges, especially around corporate transparency, that this throws up such as whether or not to acknowledge the existence of competitors in one’s own discussions with customers. (What if ‘other brands of tampons’ are discussed?)
Put simply, if you do engage, you organisation will change. If you engage strategically then this change can be managed and paced appropriately. For some organisations it might be most appropriate to deploy a range of ‘listening’ techniques and technologies before leaping into an poorly planned social media project. Even here at the Powerhouse we’ve had social media projects fail because we have over-estimated our intended audiences and their predicted behaviour.
Museums tend to focus on audience evaluation rather than market research - focussing on those who have made the choice to come to our sites already, rather than those who haven’t yet. Thus for museums there is a real need for us to understand the technographic profiles of our multiple audiences - and then take the most sensible approach for each audience niche. Unlike companies who tend to target a product line at a group of consumers and then develop that relationship across the lifespan of the product line, too often museums take a more schizophrenic approach to exhibitions (as products) - serving one niche with an exhibit then moving on to serve a totally different niche audience with the next. The audience cultivated through the first exhibition may not be served with a follow up ‘product’ for several years - or in some case, ever again. This is a grave strategy error.
Of course museums are more than just exhibitions, they are a collection of experiences. So, if we consider museums as experience venues with a visit containing multiple ’samplings’ of a diverse product line - the average museum visitor stopping by several exhibitions in one visit - then we also need to be considering the impact of different technographic profiles for different audience needs and intentions as well.
In Lynda Kelly and Angelina Russo’s recent research presented at MW2008 they applied the social technographics methodology of Forrester to visitors to Australian museums. What is interesting in their work is that they found that the use rates of many social media tools was, in fact, higher than national averages. At the same time their qualitative research showed that amongst teenagers whilst usage of social networks is high, that there was an impression that these were for ‘private’ and ‘personal’ use - and that the intrusion of museums into these spaces were not necessarily desirable. Similar findings are being made by others across many industries. Likewise, Dana Mitroff and Katrina Alcorn’s exploration of the SFMOMA audience informing a web redesign sounded an early warning that any museum’s pursuit of Web 2.0 participative methods needs to be strategic. Social technologies aren’t yet appropriate for all audiences, nor are they necessarily desirable without strategic alignment.
Forrester provides an online social technographics profile tool in the promotional site for the book. This is a simple tool to start a conversation with managers about the general online behaviours of your audience and I’d strongly recommend exploring it with the backing of existing audience research around your ‘product range’ (exhibitions, interactives, online projects) rather than just applying it generally to your entire museum.
So where from here?
What Groundswell does is provide your web or digital team with a range of examples to present management, and it also provides management with a strategic framework with which to begin to evaluate proposals from digital teams irrespective of the technologies involved.
I’ve got two copies of Groundswell in the office now which are being read by everyone in my team and the key people around the Museum that we work with.
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Our experiment with the Commons on Flickr continues and barring a few hours delay we have managed to keep to our promise of 50 new images a week. We’re up to 400 images now with the most recent 50 going live this morning. 158 of these have been geotagged.
Some statistics:
- we’ve been added as contacts by 230 people
- our images have been viewed 39,685 times to yesterday. [Read more →]
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In the Australian cultural sector, one of the best examples of curatorial blogging is at the Australian War Memorial. In a few short years they have created a lot of blog content and blogging has provided a much more efficient way of creating engaging content for exhibitions than standalone resource-hungry web microsites.
[Read more →]
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We’re very excited that we’ve won the gold award in the 2008 AAM Muse Awards in the category of ‘Online Presence’ for our collection database.
It is particularly exciting because for the Powerhouse the collection represents our core reason for being. The collection is not only what differentiates us from other institutions, but also what differentiates us from other leisure venues and social spaces. In every museum the collection, traditionally, has been the preserve of scholars, researchers, and experts and in most museums the only time it appears on show is through the highly interpreted space of exhibitions, or limited run print publications. Online, the traditional way of presenting the collection has also been highly interpreted - specialist microsites, ‘virtual galleries’ for the ‘general public’; and for the researcher - collection databases overloaded with complexity only an information scientist would appreciate.
We took a different approach - one that placed the casual user at the core, and attempted to simplify and inject a degree of pleasure into the experience of navigating the collection (much like the pleasure we hope that visitors through our doors experience in browsing our showcases). Behind the scenes we also broke the unsustainable level of ‘extra interpretation’ (additional curation, editing, etc) that we applied to collection microsites - opting for a direct publication of as much of our raw content as possible. Far from undermine the Museum’s ‘authority’ the exposure of this rich but uneven data has enhanced the Museum’s reputation and brand (”oh I didn’t know you had such a wonderful collection of . . “), as well as lay bare the reality that any museum’s collection is always a ‘work in progress’.
Judges said:
The Powerhouse Museum’s new relational search and collections database is a model for organizing, exhibiting, and promoting museum collections. Alongside detailed traditional search functions, the site invites users to add their own metatags (folksonomy), search, and browse by tag cloud, by “relatedness” of items/objects, or by special collections in an easy-to-use, transparent interface that offers consistent and near-instantaneous feedback and results.Beyond the metadata and search functionality, the depth of database entries “opens the bank vault” of the museum to visitors, enthusiasts, and researchers as many entries are presented with not only tombstone metadata, but article-style contextual information and one or more images — with three-dimensional objects photographed from multiple angles and accompanied by an indication of scale/size. This not only makes the site rewarding to casual browsers and researchers alike, it provokes thought about the function and purpose of museum collection and preservation. The Powerhouse has already begun to to realize the value of lay expertise via its embrace of folksonomy (an innovation alone worth emulating throughout the museum community), as online users have brought to the museum’s attention objects for potential physical exhibit that were previously considered to be only of ephemeral or specialized interest. An exemplary site.
When we first made our tentative steps with our new collection database that some readers might remember went public as a ‘beta’ site in mid 2006, we had no idea that it would be the success that it has been. We are continually astonished by the volume but more importantly the diversity of use the site gets. It is this evolving usage that drives our continual addition of new features, and hopefully ‘improvements’ to the site.
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