Museums and the future (2)

I’ve blogged before about the Center for the Future of Museums report Museums and Society 2034. Such publications take a bit of time to filter out and debates around them to start. So there is now some interesting discussion getting underway, such as:

- The Report picks up on the aging of western society, with people staying fitter longer, and due to current economic necessity, staying in jobs longer, thus causing the risk of a generation of talented individuals not gaining employment in museums. Is this not a broader phenomena and problem, I ask? Certainly I do hear that jobs in museums are very hard to come and I do wonder where graduates of museums studies courses are finding employment. But then isn’t it part of the attributes of Gen Y-ers that they are resilient and will find other ways to contribute? Certainly Museums and the Web 2009 was full of young people working in and around the museums sector and the web.
- Accessible design is something that keeps rearing its head – this is all about ensuring that everything we exhibit in museums can be accessed by 100% of the population whatever their background or physical state. Maybe by 2034 we will achieve this, but I can’t help feeling that in the process we run the risk of compromising the very things we are trying to make accessible.
- The Virtual taking over from the Real is another theme that keeps reoccurring. My view is this debate has been and gone. The virtual cannot supplant the real, and indeed if anything it enhances the experience of the real. The virtual makes access far more possible, but cannot provide the excitement and thrill of seeing the real in the flesh.
- Museums as energy hogs – now this one resonates with all that I blog about. We cannot sustain the current levels of environmental controls, and have to design museums that rely on passive climate control systems, with a whole new approach to operations.

As always reports like these are as useful at engendering debate around the issues as much as they are about really understanding what the crystal ball is showing us.

Using the museum building to its full potential

The role museums play in society seems to be much under discussion in these recessionary times. One US wag has suggested they should be turned into soup kitchens, using their generally large, warm and centrally located buildings to look after inner city down and outs. The interesting broader question is whether it is entirely ethical for museums to focus on ‘higher’ aesthetic/educational/intellectual matters whilst basic social needs go unmet.

I must confess to being a bit bored by such discussions, not because they are not valid but because they lead nowhere. It’s like discussing whether the NSW Government should have contributed $3 million to completing St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney a few years back to allow two spires to be erected. No benefit whatsoever to the adjacent down and outs but a mighty aesthetic improvement.

What DOES intrigue me is what more we could do with the spaces in museums by leveraging off the subject matter they contain. I’ve always loved the idea that the Royal Society for the Arts in the UK has had of setting up coffee conversations in Starbucks. As I understand it, they place a convenor/facilitator in a high street Starbucks at a regular appointed time, who choses a subject and invites the coffee drinkers to stay a while and get into a good debate.

Wouldn’t museums be such good places to do that, acting as convening places and drawing people into lively discussions, using one of their exhibits as a focal or starting point. It doesn’t have to be for ever – just something that is tried and if it takes off so much the better.

Recessionary effects on conservation

I have blogged before about the impact of the recession and the GFC on museums, particularly in the US, where so many of them rely on philanthropic foundations for their principal source of revenue.

But now out of left field has come news that Stanford University Libraries is laying off 32 employees. Now that is having a wide world ripple effect in the conservation profession because Stanford has for years published two of the principal communication tools that conservators rely on, namely CoOL (Conservation On Line) and the Cons Dist List.

Between them they have been one of the most important ways for conservators to share and find information. The former is estimated to provide access to some 120,000 documents, an incredible resource now at serious risk of being lost. The latter has been the meeting and stomping ground for a never ending range of issues that we as conservators seek to share and understand. Not to mention the fact that the ConsDist List has been the principal resource for advertising conservation job vacancies.

AIC and IIC have already waded in to express their concern about the potential demise of these vital resources, but it is difficult at present to see who is out there that is prepared to take them on.

Walter Henry, the organizer of both for the last 22 years, has some heartfelt comments to make as he sees all that he has worked on about to collapse:

"It has been a great pleasure and privilege to work with this community and I look forward to finding ways to continue to do so. I’ve always held that conservation professionals were, as a class, unusually committed to the cause they serve; we really do care deeply about the cultural materials we are lucky enough to work with, and that care takes form in a remarkable dedication to theprofession, to the ethical foundations upon which it is built, and to the community of practitioners from whatever discipline or specialty.

So, at the beginning of what would have been the DistList’s twenty third year it is with great sadness, but also with some sense of pride, that I finally give up this enterprise and that of Conservation OnLine as a whole. I don’t know exactly what will happen to the resources here but I have every faith that their fate will be in good hands.

I would like to thank, with all sincerity, Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, my own department, the systems and IT staff, and most of all the directorate, who have been unfalteringly supportive of my work all these years, and I know would continue to be so were the world in just a little better shape than it is now."

Tracking those visitors

Visitor evaluation is a significant part of the operations of any major museum or gallery these days. Understanding what attracts visitors, and most critically why they would want to come back or recommend others to make a visit has become a sophisticated process. Museum personnel now specialize in such activities, and the tools at their command have moved on from the simple exit poll and questionnaire, not that this is not a valuable part of such evaluation.

With the rise of Google analytics, we now know more and more about who visits museum web sites, which pages they go to and how long they stay on each page. But when it comes to physical museum visits, we generally know how many pass through the front door, but very little else about where they go or what they do, once they are inside.

I’ve long been interested in seeing how technologies developed in big sectors, such as retail, can be applied to our specialist sector, which will always have limited resources to develop its own technological solutions. To that end, I have become very interested in how the Shoppertrak retail traffic counting system can be utilized in our sector.

Shoppertrak is a Chicago-based traffic counting company, which has developed some very smart hardware and associated software primarily for the retail sector. They use stereophonic digital cameras to count traffic. This is not only the most accurate form of counting, but because it is stereophonic it can, through triangulation, work out the height of visitors, and thus differentiate adults from children. In addition the system can separate out staff from visitors, using RFID tags, and work out ‘dwell times’ in front of displays.

But it is the analytical tools that they have developed that really gives this data value. Shoppertrak suck all the data back to Chicago for analysis over night and then issue it verified and analyzed according to the client requirements. This could be as simple as the raw traffic data detailed hour by hour or as sophisticated as analysis of the data against trends over the past week, month or year, including ‘what if’ scenarios for working out anything from guide/attendant requirements to when and where the most dense visits are occurring, and what are the most popular exhibitions and indeed exhibits within them.

For an industry which still relies largely on manual clickers or simple IR beams to work out visitor traffic, we need to lift our game to get some more sophisticated metrics. After all government budgets can be determined by such. We at Smarttrack RFID are looking at what we can do to tailor this great technology to our sector.

Web 2.0 and the museum sector

The American Institute for Conservation has just held its annual conference in Los Angeles, around which there has been some interesting side discussions on the use of email and the web for providing information to AIC members. As one of the organisers has said "While some people are very comfortable these days with all their information being digital, there are others who still use dial-up connections (due to geographical limitations), are Luddites (not meant in a derogatory way) or just prefer paper and appreciate its longevity (understandable given our constituency)."

This has prompted some great correspondence, turning up some really useful information around the fundamental change that web 2.0 technologies is bringing about in the way information is shared, and how we communicate. Try:

"The American Press on Suicide Watch," by Frank Rich in the NYT

"The Death of Scholarly Publishing," by Larry Cebula in the Northwest History Blog.

"Why Blog? Does Blogging Matter?," Charles Ellwood in Ancient World Bloggers

"The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online," by Kevin Kelly in Wired Mag

Is blogging really making a difference, I ask myself, or am I just being self indulgent in writing about issues which interest me? My view is that I have spent my working life collecting and sifting information in all sorts of ways, a process which constantly stimulates me. Blogging seems to me to bring about a form of communication with which there is no other direct comparison. In particular it allows for the passing on of information as per the articles above in a way which no other medium offers. used to quite admire people who made a virtue out of not using email (or mobile phones), and their (possibly) calmer lives. Now I know they are missing out on too much. Roll on Web 2.0, I say.

Museums and the Web 2009 – the final word

And the final word, I promise on this. It’s always interesting to see post mortems on international conferences like this, because everyone comes away with a slightly different perspective. The UK is about to run its own one day version (World Wide Wonder: museums on the web) and Sara Wajid writing in the latest edition of the UK Museums Association Journal makes some succinct comments on MW2009. What she got out of it is that the web is moving from being a place where museums can dump their collection content and feel ‘ job done’ to a place which facilitates an online landscape, which is a fertile breeding ground for future museum visitors and donors. She cites the dynamic Nina Simon, who runs the Museum 2.0 blog who said at the conference that ‘ ...people in positions of power in museums are finally getting interested in the internet … as a starting point for innovations.. They are looking for information about how the rise of the social web will affect the business model and viability of museums”.

Sara also picked up how Google analytics are now providing more and more sophisticated data about web site use (incidentally now considerably better than physical visitor data), but that museum evaluation staff are reluctant to switch to it because it notoriously shows lower (although more accurate) figures. Don’t think that response is going to hold water much longer.

Queen Victoria rises again on the Tamar

Just back from a quick visit to Launceston, where exciting things are happening at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. The Museum extended itself onto the Inveresk Railyard site 8 years ago, and since then there has been some pressure to relinquish the original Museum site in Royal Park to avoid the ineffiencies of a dual campus. However Patrick Filmer Sankey, who was appointed director in 2008 has conceived of the idea of clearly separating functions, so that the fine and decorative art and design collections (the Gallery function) are retained at Royal Park and the historical and natural science collections (the Museum function) are exhibited at the Inveresk site.

The active support of the City Council and the State Government has quickly seen $7m thrown into the equation, and the Royal Park site has now closed for its revamp with a late 2010 opening planned.

The even more exciting thing about this plan is that it will allow all the internal additions and linings from this late Victorian /Edwardian purpose built gallery to be removed and the original spaces reclaimed. I had a dusk tour with project development manager Glenda King yesterday showing me tantalizing glimpses of what is going to be possible.

So with the revamped QVMAG , probably the country’s finest regional gallery, coming on line next year along with the privately funded MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) at Morilla on the outskirts of Hobart, Tasmania is going to be a significant cultural destination.

Museums and the recession – the lipstick phenomena?

We all know about the theory of people turning to things that make them feel good in trying economic times – the so-called ‘lipstick phenomena’ driven by increased sales of lipsticks in recessions.

But now comes news from the UK that it appears museum visits may fall into the same category, with a recent Art Fund museum survey showing that over 35% of museums recording an increase in visitation, and 38% managing to hold numbers stable. Ok, that still means that over 25% saw a drop, but the overall picture is more positive than negative.

Unfortunately the funding picture is nowhere near as rosy, with 65% of museums suffering a budget cut, and 60% expecting further cuts. That is resulting in direct reductions in staff, ironically just as the rise in visitor numbers requires more staff resources. One of the consequences is that staff are being diverted to front of house duties away from curatorial and other functions. There is also pressure on volunteers to fill broader roles.

More broadly the health of the sector is difficult to read. On the one hand it appears that shop sales and charitable giving (where applicable) are holding up reasonably well. And one small silver lining is that reduced market prices are allowing acquisitions to continue with some gems finding their way into public hands at bargain prices.

On the other hand it is clear that corporate spending in the form of direct giving and venue hire for corporate entertainment has died. The fall in the value of investments for charitable organizations is also clearly going to effect the funds they have at their disposal.
And the biggest impact of all, which I have discussed in a previous blog, is still to be felt, when the claw back resulting from the current government spending begins. That is when the sector is really going to have to be on its toes as funding cuts bite.

If that is the UK story, how is Australia looking? Difficult to tell is my view. There are funding cuts occurring at major institutions, but it appears that contract staff rather than permanent staff are being effected. And whilst the economic picture here is not as serious as in the UK, there is no doubt that the same overall scenario holds.

RFID solutions for tracking collections

I have long been a fan of the application of new technologies to the museum sector. The fact remains that the sector is too small in most instances to invest in developing its own, so must rely on other large industry sectors to undertake the R&D and then see if there is application to our own world.

RFID or Radio Frequency Identification has been around for some years now primarily in the warehouse and freight tracking sectors. The original concept was that RFID use would take over from bar codes, as it offered not only the opportunity of storing increased data but also no requirement for line of sight reading, i.e. RFIDs can be read through packaging material. Supermarket shopping could dispense with the check out person, and rely on a portal scanner.

The stumbling block however has been the cost of the RFID tag, which as it contains both a microchip and a small antenna costs in the region of US20c as against a bar code which cost US.01 c.

The reality therefore is that we are unlikely to see rollout into the supermarket shelves until the price can be reduced to a viable level, but to give some idea of how fast this technology is taking off, UPM, once of the largest tag providers in the US is printing 400 million tags this year and expects this figure to be over 1 billion by the end of 2010.

The library sector is already using RFID technology extensively, though mostly using the older High Frequency (HF) technology. The museum sector is only just beginning to see its benefits, which are considerable, and can be summed up as follows:

• line of sight not required, so objects/artworks can have their accession number read whilst in crates or on the wall
• tags can be read up to 5 m away
• multiple tags can be read at one time, when groups of objects are being moved
  the data, and the personnel moving the objects, can be directly integrated into most collection management systems
• misplaced objects can be found
• audits and stocktakes can be fast tracked
• collection preservation is improved through reduced handling
  

Frustrated by lack of any RFID providers who are seriously looking to work with museums and galleries, we have set up a company to provide this service, Smarttrack RFID . We are using the more advanced technology of Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags, which now have a global standard. We are already running pilot projects in Australia and the US, and finding considerable enthusiasm for the accuracy and cost benefits of the technology.
Come and see us at the Museums Australia National Conference in Newcastle from May 17th to 20th, where we have a stand.

Final thoughts from Museums and the Web 2009

The Museums and the Web 2009 conference provided much food for thought as to where the online world for museums is heading, some of which I have covered in other blogs. Some final thoughts from a couple of the more thought provoking speakers:

Maxwell Anderson - Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA):

• The web provides great tools for accessing the back of house operations of museums, including the on-average 95% of the collections which are not on exhibition at any one time.
• How can web technology seek to emulate the thrill of proximity, i.e. achieve elements of the real in a virtual way?
• The IMA has established substantial transparency of operations using its ‘dashboard’ component of the web site to put up a wide range of internal information, such as staff numbers per section, visitor numbers, value of its endowment by quarter ( not pretty reading at present, I imagine), objects proposed for deaccessioning, annual report, tax return. Not sure what this really achieves, beyond making them feel good that they ARE being transparent.
  

Dan Zambononi – Box ( interesting web site by the way):

Dan reported on an interesting exercise his company undertook, which involved collating collection data that was readily accessible on the web, using screen scraping and spider technology. The driver was that there are currently multiple one stop shops for collection searching from the massive Euro project MICHAEL, to Australia’s own CAN ( Collections Australia Network) project. Whilst this might not exactly be allowed under current copyright rules, he was able to use the existing data and re engineer it to make it more useable. I drew from his paper a couple of issues:

• Lots of technical variations and inconsistency in the way information is presented, particularly over the format used for dates and locations
• Ultimately there was not much improvement in the quality of the collated data than that which a well worded Google search could achieve
  

And my final thought - the conference was full of lots of highly stimulating chat about what is happening in this space and where it might all be going, but the practical driver for evaluating it must continue to be asking the question ‘is it ultimately useful in supporting the building of knowledge and improving access to collections?’. Because what came clearly out of the conference is that there is certainly no pot of gold sitting at the end of the process – the golden grail of seriously monetizing on-line collection data remains as elusive as ever.