Bowie, ACMI and the Verbaliser

I’ve finally cracked my long standing inability to understand song lyrics – I’ve discovered most of them are nonsensical anyway! This revelation comes courtesy of the V&A’s exhibition on David Bowie currently showing at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Federation Square, Melbourne.

From the early 1970s Bowie conceived of an idea of mixing random phrases together mostly taken from short news clips. He co-authored a smart piece of software known as ‘the Verbaliser’ which rearranges words to make this happen and create some of his lyrics. I think the technical term is ‘cut-ups’ and it’s a technique that went on to influence Kurt Cobain's songwriting. I guess we would call it a mash up these days, but one of the highlights of the exhibition for me was hearing Bowie talk about how he used words in this way. 

Whilst this is not an exhibition I would have rushed to see based on its subject matter, I came away having thoroughly enjoyed it and seeing Bowie in a completely new light as an extraordinarily creative person. It’s slick and well presented, with a clever Sennheiser audio system (headphones are provided as part of the ticket price) that responds to where you are by playing songs and information relevant to what you are viewing. There’s a great review at dotsanddashes.co.uk. Sadly, I understand Sennheiser is not interested in replicating the system for other exhibitions.

This is all part of a big V&A push into Australia with no less than three of their exhibitions currently touring, David  Bowie is…. at ACMI, Undressed at the Powerhouse, and soon the Queensland Museum and Bendigo Art Gallery and Inspiration by Design currently at the State Library of NSW and soon to be at the State Library of Victoria.

ACMI is a bit of a hidden performer in Australia's cultural sector. It's been around now for over ten years in its current location, though it actually dates back to 1946 as the Victoria State Film Institute. In 2013 it attracted over 1.15 million visitors. That's an impressive statistic, and based on the current offerings it deserves to do well, and can only play a bigger role.

This is going to be significantly helped by the recent appointment of Seb Chan to a newly created role of CXO - Chief Experience Officer - a position he takes up this month, returning from 4 years in New York at the Cooper Hewitt, where he was the Director of Digital & Emerging Media, and the lead player in the development of their new interactive pen (see my blog from June 2015 for more information). Listed in 2009 as amongst Australia’s 100 most influential people (see my blog from January 2009), Seb is not going to sit quietly in his new role. Watch the ACMI space!

Conference time and the museum of the future

Back to back conferences on like themes are always interesting, if only to see how much stamina is required to keep engaged. Sydney has just hosted the Museums Australia Conference, followed by Remix Sydney.

The former is self explanatory, the annual get together of the local museum fraternity, always useful for catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, but this year a bit predictable and uninspiring in programming and discussions. Highlights for me were:

• Xerxes Mazda, formerly of the British Museum, currently at the Royal Ontario Museum and about to be head of collections  for National Museums of Scotland. Xerxes is always worth listening to on how to maximise the visitor experience, by integrating exhibitions, education, web, publications, design, front of house, visitor research, marketing, membership, volunteers and programming.
• Mega museum project updates with Gunther Schauerte from the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and Michael Lynch on M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. Large though these are, we should not forget the New Museum that is arising in Western Australia. I blogged about this when it was announced in July 2012, and amazingly the monies ($428m) still seem to be there and the project is gaining significant momentum with an opening scheduled in 2020. 

I gave a paper boldly entitled 'Conservation in Museums – Whereto from here?', inspired by my own perception of the journey that conservation worldwide has undergone between the ICOM CC Conference in Sydney in 1987 and 27 years on the same conference in Melbourne in 2014.

And interestingly it was Remix that turned out to be in many ways a more appropriate forum for this discussion with the first session asking ‘What functions of museums are best served by external providers?’ Remix is a series of global summits on the future of cultural industries currently taking place annually in London, New York City, Dubai and Sydney, which aims to pull together cultural leaders, corporate directors, technologists and entrepreneurs.

It was a buzzy place to be around, reinforcing how the world of social media is fracturing at an ever increasing pace. With ever more platforms and media to share content on, the move to video as a medium, and mobile as the principal point of access, museums are scrambling to understand how to respond. Inevitably the focus on providing digital content continues to drive decision making on funding, but with it came reinforcement of the urge to see and value the real thing that is continuing to bring people into cultural institutions in increasing numbers.

Pick of the conference for me was Seb Chan’s keynote on the Future of Museums. Seb was at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for many years before taking up the role of Head of Digital and Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, which has just reopened after a $81 million refurb. Described in the Atlantic as the museum of the future, Seb has lead the charge at the Cooper Hewitt on integrating the digital and the real seamlessly. He and his team have done this by ensuring:

• Everything on exhibition is also online, i.e. not just a representative proportion
• The online data provides a rich array of extra information, so offers significant extra value that can be accessed later
• Visitors select objects they find interesting by touching the label with an interactive pen they are provided with on entry
• These selections are then downloaded upon exit and can be accessed, researched and manipulated at home via a unique url on each ticket
• No time consuming downloading of an app, pre visit or upon arrival
• No privacy issues over requiring an email address
• This is a REALLY NEAT solution

What I came away with is that we are now seeing the next iteration of visitor access through technology, the leader until now being MONA and the O. The ground breaking nature of the O is reflected in how long it has taken to see it superseded, but look to the Cooper Hewitt for the future of this aspect of museums. Read all about it at Museums and the Web 2015. 

QR codes, RFIDs and Goggles

Responding to the challenge of how to impart 'rich media' to visitors is gaining pace. This is all about how we can provide more than just text on a label and perhaps some video on an adjacent screen. I'm doing a quick circuit round the world to check out the latest (amongst other things. such as attending the IIC Council meeting in London).

But first up, as so often is the case in the museum technology world, our own Powerhouse Museum is trail blazing. Their newly opened 'Love Lace' exhibition is using QR codes to provide further information on each of the 120 objects in the show. You need: 1) a smartphone and 2) to download the appropriate app, and then 3) to scan the bar code on each label to access this further information. There is not a lot more information you get, but it is proving the point that this is a valid way to deliver rich media. Check out Seb Chan's blog post to read about the initial take up. And whilst you are at it, do visit the exhibition. It is a stunning collection of objects, the unifying theme being some reference to lace or the patterns thereof. It's even got a big article in the latest edition of the Qantas inflight magazine.

Two other technologies I shall be looking at. The first is the use of NFC (Near Field Communication) functionality on some Nokia phones, which is being used to deliver rich media at the Museum of London. Nokia has funded this rollout at the Museum to help promote NFC, and I shall be most interested to see what take up is like.

The second is the Google Goggles technology that the Getty Museum is using (see my blog post), which utilises visual recognition technology to connect via your smartphone to an array of rich media.

Interesting times and I shall report back shortly.  Got to run - my flight is being called!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Understanding our visitors - the loyalty program concept

I hope I am consistent in pushing the line that I am interested in technology for what it can do to improve the museum visitor ‘offering’ (to use a good IT word), rather than getting too engrossed in the technology itself. That’s where my interest lies, which is not to down play those who are more focused on the technology, as we need them exploring what can be done with new technologies. This year’s Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia, judging by the last one I attended in 2009, will be dominated by the latter group, with the value to me being the insights that can be drawn by such people as Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum who is tasked by the Museum to ensure it is at the cutting edge of technological implementation.


And one of my particular interests is seeing how technology developed in larger sectors, e.g. visitor counting and visitor tracking in the retail sector, can be applied to the museum sector. Zoos and aquariums sit in a sector of their own (as do Botanic Gardens), personnel from which we rarely meet at conferences. But not only do they share many common issues, they also draw generally larger numbers than museums – in other words their ’offering’ is more attractive than the museum one.

So I read with interest on how the Cincinnati Zoo has been tapping analytics to improve attendance, as this is an area where museums are not strong, as I have blogged previously. We tend to know a great deal about our web site visitors, through such tools as Google Analytics, but very little about the patterns of physical visitor behaviour. The Cincinnati Zoo happens also to include a Botanical Garden, and is the number one attraction in the city with 1.1 million visitors per year.

Concern about operational efficiencies prompted a review, with a couple of interesting outcomes:

1) Centralisation of revenue operations: Membership, ticketing , food service and merchandise were all operating as stand alone entities, with 16 food service locations and 51 point-of-sale (POS) locations on the site. By consolidating all services using POS software, all revenue generating transactions can be tracked through one point. The result – reduced operational expense and increased revenue by, for example, ensuring staff levels are in tune with actual needs.

2) Understanding member behaviour better: Members are asked to share essential information upon joining the zoo membership program, and then as they visit the zoo they leave a trail of behavioural information by using their bar coded members cards to take advantage of member discounts and special offers. This is analysed to understand attendance and purchasing patterns, and this in turn drives email campaigns based on visit frequency and spending patterns.

Museums obviously have far less of a focus on revenue generation, but retail and catering are an increasingly important part of their operations and their potential for helping the bottom line needs to be maximised.

But it was another feature of Cincinnati Zoo’s focus on a different type of visitor that struck me as having particular application to museums. The Zoo has identified that there are a proportion of visitors who come more than once but are not frequent enough or are averse to becoming members. For these they have instituted a loyalty program, a first, they believe, amongst zoos or museums. By asking for an email address and a post code, they have found a way of getting to know a broader group of visitors and reward good visitors (by discounts and early notification of events) without the upfront cost of membership. The Zoo’s modelling suggests they could gain an extra 50,000 visitors per year this way.

Given that museums typically struggle to build large membership bases, this could be an interesting initiative to watch.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Tracking visitor numbers – metrics rule

‘Metrics’ seems to be the new buzz word around town. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science. Check out a rather cynical article about their pervasiveness in the New York Times November 20th 2009 edition.

Like almost everything, such matters seep through eventually to the museum and galleries sector. By the way, I used to refer to this as the ALM sector - for Libraries, Archives and Museums with museums of course covering art museums otherwise known as galleries. But the acronym increasingly in vogue seems to be GLAM - for Galleries, Museums, Archives and Museums. I like it and will run with that form from now on.

So where is the GLAM sector on metrics? The answer is two part, as the level of metrics varies enormously between the real and the virtual. Let me tackle each in turn.

On the real, namely how many visitors come through the physical doors, where they go and what they do once inside the institution, there is an embarrassing lack of knowledge. Almost all museums have some form of counting system, either through ticketing, or in the case of free entry museums, through counting systems. However even these are invariably inaccurate. There are many stories of attendants with hand clickers clicking away at random to ensure the visitor quota is achieved. Automatic counting systems give better accuracy, but still have difficulty distinguishing between visitors and staff ( and indeed inanimate objects like strollers or boxes). And once inside the institution there is no tracking of visitor paths, establishment of time spent within the institution or dwell times in front of exhibits quantified. One friend of mine admits that the closest he gets to this is sending staff out with a felt pen and a floor lay-out of the galleries, and tracking the route visitors take by hand. When they dwell in front of a particular exhibit, the felt pen is left on the paper in that spot, leading to a bigger splodge of ink. See my blog from June 2009 on the issue.

On the virtual, things are a little more advanced. We all know the power of Google Analytics, which is giving considerable granularity to web site metrics. But the Powerhouse Museum is now doing great work and mining more deeply into what their visitors do on the Museum’s web site. Read Seb Chan’s most interesting latest thoughts on the matter. Seb reports particularly on the issue of repeat visitations to web sites and understanding who is coming back, how often and why.

All is not lost on the real side of things however. We are looking at a mobile phone technology which allows tracking of visitors (all within privacy requirements) , with the added benefit it can reveal how long each visitor stays in the museum, where they dwell, whether they have been before, and, in the case of international visitors, which country they come from. We need to catch up fast to the same level of understanding that Google Analytics can provide for those web site visitors, and in due course work out the crossover.

Museum and Gallery visitor profiles

Great to read in the Sydney Morning Herald that a survey of visitors to art galleries has shown that 33% are aged between 15 and 34 (and that excludes school groups) and only 16% over 65. The survey has been undertaken by Museums and Galleries NSW, an organization I have a high regard for (and the CEO Maisy Stapleton). It is focused on delivering services to the smaller and regional museums and galleries around NSW, but they also run excellent ‘current issue’ workshops in conjunction with the Museum of Sydney. I remember one particularly memorable one where they asked a selection of museum directors to sit on a panel together and discuss what made the job pleasurable and not pleasurable. Most of the responses were predictable, but I do remember Peter Watts, then head of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW saying the hardest part was giving eulogies at staff funerals, a process he unfortunately had a done a couple of times too many for his liking. Ironically on the panel was Seddon Bennington, the head of the Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand, who died whilst hiking north of Wellington last month, and whose loss to the Australasian museum scene is significant.

However back to those stats. Are our museums and galleries really getting a third of their visitation from the 16-33 age group? My guess is that galleries may be but that museums definitely are not. And that comes back to museums unfortunately being less cool than galleries. The Powerhouse in Sydney is trying hard to overcome this especially through its focus on design and fashion exhibitions and events, which do draw a good young crowd. And more broadly their work through the inexhaustible Seb Chan in the use of the net and social media is giving them a profile which galleries have less leverage to achieve. That is, although gallery web sites may have great images to look at, the way in which museum web sites like the Powerhouse can create links and tell stories about their collections generally means such sites have more depth to them. And that in turn is where our 15 to 34 years olds are living their lives. Seb’s latest blog indeed talks about their ability to reach people who would never cross the threshold of a museum but having become engaged with the Museum’s web site are drawn to physically visit.

Collection data on line or Seb Chan in action again

I have blogged before about Seb Chan and his pioneering work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in understanding how people use information on the web. I was part of a seminar in Melbourne last week on the broad story of museum communication via the web, and Seb was in full cry.

Seb as always was full of new ideas, one of his latest being an interesting one about how to screen out noise on the web. It has been a recurrent theme that I have heard from museum and gallery curators that they do not want to post information on the web as all it will do is create more work for them in responding to queries. The underlying theme is also that they are concerned that the information itself will have, god forbid, errors in it (this is particularly a gallery curator concern) and that the gallery’s scholarship will be shown up as a result. There is an associated (and reasonable, in my view) concern that the data is ‘dirty’ i.e. it has been misinterpreted during the process of digitization and is factually wrong.

In reality we are moving inexorably towards a moment when all collection data will be on line (alright, perhaps not all the donor information and financial values) with a rough date of 2020 likely in Australia. We shall therefore reach a stage where collection data is in the public domain, and being constantly reviewed and added to by the public.

Now back to Seb’s point that this will create a fair amount of noise (read idle comment) of no value to the collecting institution and which they need to screen out to get to the stuff of real value. The Powerhouse Museum is currently getting 50 email comments/queries a day as a result of web searches on their site. These are currently going to curatorial staff to try and answer. Seb showed how Flickr can help to screen some of this noise through self comment, i.e other Flickr participants answering the query.

And whilst I am on the seminar, do have a look at the Brooklyn Museum’s on-line crowd curated exhibition, entitled CLICK. Shelley Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum took us through this extraordinary event where 389 photos were taken of the Brooklyn area by local photographers, and then evaluated on line by anyone interested. The most popular 70 were then exhibited with their print size dictated by their popularity. Fab work.

Seb Chan - a person of influence

It was great to see Seb Chan recently listed in the Sydney Morning Herald’s 100 most influential people. Seb is head of web services at the Powerhouse Museum, and those of us who have been lucky enough to work with him know how justified the inclusion is. Seb is an extraordinary resource both for the Museum and the wider community.

The Powerhouse Museum has taken the view that their online presence is not just about getting collection information up on the web, it’s also about allowing the casual user to have easy and pleasurable access, and to build on that experience by tracking and monitoring how information is used. They recently picked up a gold award for online presence in the 2008 Muse Awards from the American Association of Museums – a major achievement.

Anyone who has experienced Seb’s unique style of powerpoint presentation in seminars or workshops will know it is characterised by a fast peppering of essential facts and figures, which leaves the audience exhilarated and inspired.

Travel to any international museum conference which includes people involved in web services and you will find they speak in awe of his ideas and abilities. Or you could read some of the posts on Seb's blog, Fresh + New(er).