Museums, mobiles and apps

I often find that the full impact of a conference, especially one so immersive as Museums and the Web 2011 , only really hits home a week or two after the event is over. So, in promising not to mention the conference again, here are my considered thoughts on where the world is in this corner of the museum sector.

1. The museum in a mobile world was the primary focus of the conference, by which I mean that although tons of other issues were discussed, it is the potential for how mobile technology can significantly change the museum visit, whether through content delivery, visitor interaction or way finding that kept appearing as the most exciting current opportunity. And what became clear is that, just as there is no one single mobile platform (e.g. Android, iOS ( iPhone operating system) etc, there is no uniform way of using mobiles in museums. Indeed as David Bearman, the conference convenor, said the landscape reminds him of the late 1990s when museums were debating whether or not they should have a web site. Now they are debating whether or not they should have an app, and what it should look like. It is going to take some time until an element of uniformity arrives with a ‘standard’ app platform.
2. Apps are not going to be the latest iteration of audio guides. Not only is the business model going to be different, with museums choosing to do part of the app development in-house, depending on internal capacity and strengths (typically audio guides have been put together by external companies (e.g. Acoustiguide or Antenna) who have then leased the equipment to the museum), but the use to which they will be put is quite different. Using audio guides is essentially a passive activity. Apps are active encouraging interaction both with other users, but also the museum and in some cases the exhibit itself.
3. This new world of mobiles is going to need some significant organisational change within the museum profession. Mobile use is about a collaborative rather than authoritative approach to learning from exhibits. This is a challenge to the traditional view for museum staff. Social media programs are currently being run by the marketing/PR part of the museums, but it must draw in staff working in cross disciplinary groups from across the whole museum, with more face to face conversations for its opportunities to be maximised.

For a great example of what the world of the app in museums looks like, from internal cross disciplinary involvement to external marketing go no further than the Explorer system at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2011 – the web site picture

One of the highlights of the annual Museums and the Web conference is the Best of the Web awards. Museum web sites are submitted from all over the world and vetted by a panel of web developers, museum professionals and general tech heads. It is peers critically judging the work of their peers, and the awards are highly valued within the museum community.

So it was great to see Australia doing well with Museum Victoria taking out the award in the Audio Visual/ podcast category, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) getting not only the award in the education category but also the best web site overall – quite an accolade.

More broadly what I came away with from the papers I heard on web site issues is the depth of thinking now going on in the museum world about how web sites are used and the opportunities they provide for creating a quite different experience from the museum visit. I would particularly highlight:

1. The work of the National Museum of Denmark in bringing art stories alive (including an innovative and embedded use of what conservators do and what they can contribute to art stories). Read the paper here.
2. What the Tate are up to in rethinking their web site as a result of a massive four year rebuild. The Tate has always been at the forefront of web site development being one of the first major art museums to place their entire collection of 60,000 artworks on line. They realised that the budgetary and cultural restrictions imposed on museum websites was holding them back from competing in terms of leveraging the power of relational databases in a way their commercial rivals do, and that their website displays artworks on line in the same paradigm as print publishing – namely as reproductions. No real surprises there but the conclusions they come to are worth reading.
3. And finally the Smithsonian. They are engaged on a collaborative project across the whole Institution to review their web strategy, which involves a series of staff workshops open to all staff . Each of the workshops includes a real-time transcription of the proceedings posted to a wiki, where it can be openly evaluated, sifted, weighed, and considered by all. The project has very clear goals namely to define the optimum role for the Smithsonian in the next 100 years by:

• Embracing new models of knowledge creation and dissemination
• Providing better access to knowledge for geographically and demographically diverse audiences
• Providing richer, more engaging means (storytelling) for different types of audiences to engage with our knowledge assets
• Creating opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaboration and learning
• Identifying new revenue sources to support the ever-growing programs

It is a great model for where the museum web site is going. Check it out here.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web – in praise of Google Art

I was rather dismissive of Google Art when I blogged about it a few weeks ago, principally due to the fact that I could not see what it was offering beyond promotion of Google that what was not already available on line.

Our final session at Museums and the Web 2011 involved a Q&A session with representatives of institutions who are part of it plus a member of the Google Art team. And I must say that their comments, along with a further play I have had with the web site, has turned me into a bit of a fan.

First up, a bit of background. Google Art is a project developed in house by Google staff in their 20% time (the day a week all Google staff are given to pursue their own ideas). It involved 17 art museums in Europe and the USA allowing Google’s ‘street-view’ technology to document their principal galleries along with each museum providing Google with 35 high res images of key artworks. In addition each museum had to choose one artwork for Google to photograph at super high res (gigabyte level). The project cost the museums nothing beyond their own staff time.

In good Google fashion each museum was locked into a very tight non-disclosure agreement so that for the two years the project took to develop, each one had no idea which other museums were involved. It’s clear that some museums had reservations about this and pulled out and are now regretting doing so.
And the reaction now that it is up? High praise from the museums that were represented on the panel, complementing Google on how good they were to work with, pleased with the results, and all of them citing massive increase in web activity on each of their sites, and significantly increased visitor numbers (which is why they did it in the first place). Concerns over copyright were allayed by artworks being blurred out in gallery views (particularly noticeable in the National Gallery, London’s site), and the potential loss in revenue by giving away high res images, which they normally sell, compensated by the higher visitor numbers. The representative from the Tate made the interesting observation that many of their curators who have tended to dismiss the internet were now excited about it and finally understanding its power in their sphere.

And the downside? I had sensed during the conference that amongst the museum web site fraternity there was some unhappiness. This manifested itself during the Q&A session in questions about Google’s lack of openness. Why could not the statistics on Google Art visitors be made public, why could not the ‘street-view’ sequences and technology be made available for the museums to use as tours themselves or for recording temporary exhibitions, and why did they not undertake the whole exercise as an open collaborative exercise with the museum sector?

The Google Art rep’s answer to each was politely circumscribed but was clearly that this is ultimately about driving traffic to the Google site as cost effectively as possible.

For my money, the end justifies the means. The project has created a significant new asset for the museum sector.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2011

I am in geek land surrounded by shiny new iPad 2s and a sea of tweeters - to be precise I am at Museums and the Web 2011 in Philadelphia, the annual get together of those of us interested in this space. There are apparently nearly 700 of us here from 23 countries. It has a similar buzz as my last attendance in 2009 in Indianapolis, the difference being that this could almost be called Museums and Mobiles, such is the focus on where mobile technology and use is taking us.

Lots to comment on, but I will confine this blog to the opening plenary this morning from Kristen Powell of the Pew Research Centre talking about their Internet and American Life project. Kristen's mission was to update us as museum folk on the latest data on the rise of mobile internet use and social media to help us to identify how these trends are shaping the way that content orientated organisations like museums interact with our audiences.

What came out of her presentation is best summarised in bullet point form. Bear in mind it is US data, but the trends it indicates are in my view global:

• In 2000 46% of adults used the internet and 53% owned a mobile phone. There was no social networking. Those figures in 2010 were 74% used the internet and 85% owned a mobile phone (surprisingly low in my view). 25% of households do not now have a landline.
• 69% of internet users, which is half of all American adults, watch videos on line and 14% have uploaded their own video content.
• Those going on line daily from their phone rose from 36% to 55% last year alone.
• A typical teenager sends 50 texts a day with 33% of teenagers sending over 100 texts per day.
• 40% of internet users access social networking sites (SNS) daily with older adults (those over 65) the fastest growing sector, partly because younger adults are already at a very high percentage use.
• Only 8% of internet users use Twitter compared to 61% for other SNS, i.e. Twitter is not that popular particularly with teenagers.

There were lots more stats, but in summary the emerging themes are that information gathering is becoming portable, participatory and personalised.

So what Kristen sees our role as museums as increasingly being is:

1. A filter - providing trustworthy information, that is relevant and directly accessible, e.g. by app.
2. Curators - collecting all relevant material and linking to primary and secondary sources.
3. A node in a network - making it easy to network, and being prepared to loosen control of content.
4. Community builders - sharing experiences and listening to feedback.
5. Tour guides - connecting content to real world locations, using such tools as geo location and augmented reality.

More from Philadelphia shortly!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

The Ice Bear cometh to Sydney

As a conservator I have long been of the view that the main purpose of our work is not the conservation of artworks and objects per se, but rather providing through our conservation work the ability for those items to tell their stories. So it is not a long leap to my latest project, the Sydney Ice Bear Project, which uses an artwork to metaphorically tell a massive story, namely the impact of climate change on the environment,

I first met Mark Coreth, the artist behind the Ice Bear Project, four years ago, although I had been aware of his work as one of the UK’s preeminent animal sculptors for some time. A number of his wonderful life size animal bronzes are in private collections in Australia, which we look after. Mark has long been a keen environmentalist, but a visit to Baffin Island to sculpt polar bears led him to want to do more to promote awareness of their plight.

So he came up with the concept of creating a polar bear in ice, and then letting it melt to reveal a bronze skeleton as a metaphor for the melting ice caps and the impact on the polar bears, and indeed more broadly on our planet.

The first ice bear was a centrepiece of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) stand at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, with the second following in Trafalgar Square, London.  A travelling ice bear was carved in early 2010 in Quebec, before moving to Ottawa and finally Montreal where it melted, and then another in Toronto in June last year. The latest was carved on 31 March in Manchester. Check out this video from the BBC of last week's carving.  The Ice Bear is a highly dramatic artwork, and has received much media attention at each venue.

Anyway, I have been keen to see the Ice Bear in Australia ever since I heard about it. The Ice Bear team have been working to bring it here for the past year, and finally we have the funding for it to take place around World Environment Day on June 5th on the forecourt of the Customs House, Sydney.

Mark will be carving the ice bear over 6 hours from dawn on Thursday June 2nd and the bear will then start melting (we reckon it will take 4-5 days at that time of year) with a major public event around the melting sculpture to be held on Sunday June 5th involving some leading climate change experts. WWF, 1millionwomen and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition will all be project partners.

The frozen ice bear, encased in a large box and weighing over 9 tonnes, actually arrived in Sydney late last year, and has been in cold storage since then.  International Conservation Services are managing the logistics for the Ice Bear Project in Sydney, so we shall be placing it in the forecourt pre-dawn on June 2nd ready for Mark and his team to carve away. I will keep you posted on progress as the time nears.  Put the dates in your diary now, and come and see it if you are in town.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

A non-political project, Ice Bear made its world debut at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009, attracting global attention.  Sydney Ice Bear will encourage the public to visit and touch the sculpture and learn more about the impacts of climate change.  It will be on display from Thursday 2 June to Friday 10 June 2011.

Sydney Ice Bear has been made possible with the support of the Purves Environmental Fund.  Additional support has been provided by the City of Sydney, public and fine art conservators International Conservation Services and social marketing and communications agency Momentum2, as well as Aurora Expeditions.  WWF Australia, 1millionwomen and AYCC are partners in the project, and all funds raised locally will go to support these partner organisations.

Visitor numbers as a chart of success

“Attendance at LA Museums lags behind” states a headline last week in the Los Angeles Times. It’s the familiar issue that, like it or not, those visitors coming through the door are the fundamental measure of a museum’s success. In the article Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum in LA bravely states in response to a question about visitor numbers: "We care about it certainly, but it is not at the top of our list of measures of success. When attendance figures are overvalued in museums, it can lead to mediocrity in programming".

Nobody disputes the latter comment - it is just that those that pay the bills, whether they are governments or philanthropic foundations like to see visitor numbers on an upward curve.

Check out the article that prompted all this breast beating at the Art Newspaper
The top ten art museums world wide in 2010 are as follows and there are no surprises here:

8,500,000     Louvre Paris
5,842,138     British Museum London
5,216,988     Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
5,061,172     Tate Modern London
4,954,914     National Gallery London
4,775,114     National Gallery of Art Washington
3,131,238     Museum of Modern Art New York
3,130,000     Centre Pompidou Paris
3,067,909     National Museum of Korea Seoul
2,985,510     Musée d’Orsay Paris

And critical to drawing those crowds are the temporary exhibitions. The article details a most interesting range of statistics drawn from a comprehensive survey of exhibitions around the world listed in order of daily attendance including:

• The top 30 exhibitions (the top two are both in Tokyo and drew over 10,000 people per day! Not sure what anyone could see at that density)
• The top ten Decorative Arts, Antiquities, Impressionism, Old Masters, Mediaeval and Thematic exhibitions
• The top ten 19th Century, Asian, Architecture and Design, and Photography exhibitions
• The top ten exhibitions in Tokyo, London and Paris
• Comparisons with previous years

So it looks as though the blockbuster is alive and well and critical to keeping those numbers up. But before we all get too disheartened about this being the only way forward, bear in mind the phenomena of the response to British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s radio program in the UK. Broadcast three times daily on Radio 4, MacGregor gave a series of 15 minute lectures on 100 objects in the BM’s collection. Not only did this result in an extraordinary 20 million downloads from the Museum’s web site, but attendance jumped by 250,000.

What I particularly love about it is the medium MacGregor chose to use. No visuals, just people’s imagination as he described each object and the history behind it. Perhaps that is what largely drew people to explore the Museum’s collections further

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Curators, curation and opinions

I have been intrigued this week by an article entitled ‘Why curation is important to the Future of Journalism”. Check it out here. It refers to the rise of a new role: the journalistic curator.

For us museum bods, a curator refers to the person holding that critical position of looking after a collection. Indeed the word is derived from the Latin ‘cura’ meaning ‘care’. In Australia it is also used for one who cares for a sports ground, e.g. the curator of the Sydney Cricket Ground. And just to confuse us all, the French term for curator is conservator, e.g. conservateurs du patrimoine or heritage curators.

I have blogged before about the increasingly marginalised role that curators have in museums, and it occurred to me that this article might provide some guidance on what the future for museum curators might look like. I quote:

• “Curation (not a term we often use) gathers … fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content”.
• "Good curators know where to find interesting things, because they know the paths and can provide a knowledgeable voice to make things a little easier to parse”
• “Curators help navigate readers through the vast ocean of content, and while doing so create a following based on several factors; trust, taste and tools”.
• “Part of the appeal of good curation is that it carries the person’s footprint. Opinion isn’t really a bad thing, and in fact gives the content shape in this context.

It was the last point that particularly caught my attention. I recently enjoyed the excellent Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the MCA in Sydney. I had only thought of Leibovitz as a portrait and landscape photographer, so I was particularly interested in her work in Sarajevo during the Balkan war. As she said she went there as a journalist, but became frustrated by having to be impartial, and chose to take sides as a photographer (i.e. have an opinion) and document Serbian atrocities.

Should museum curators have opinions? Should their curation reflect a particular viewpoint or expect to provide a balanced and impartial view? I am reminded of the National Museum of Australia controversy over their Australia post-1788 exhibition, which espoused the so-called black armband view, that eventually resulted in the non-renewal of the director’s contract. The NMA clearly had an opinion but was it necessarily a bad thing? John Howard’s advisers thought so.

I turned to the latest edition of the UK Museums Journal to check out their exhibition reviews section. In the first review (“Extraordinary Heroes” at the Imperial War Museum, London) the curator does not even rate a mention (and this at a major national museum), the exhibition designer holding pride of place. However both the next two exhibition reviews list the curator above the exhibition designer, the latter being an exhibition on the Chartism movement at the Newport Museum. It praises the exhibition as ‘treading delicately, balancing the exposition of an important piece of social history…succeeding in producing a display that is both respectful and thoughtful in equal measure”.

So it seems that the mark of a good curator in the modern museum exhibition is a) either to be so impartial as to disappear from the name board, or b) to provide a balanced view. It sounds as though the journalistic curator is a different breed. A pity in my view, and perhaps indicative of why the museum curator is a dying breed.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Google Art and the power of the real thing

I have been playing with Google Art on and off since it was released a month or so ago, trying to get excited about it. Certainly the technology is amazing and the ability to walk round 385 galleries in 17 world museums and zoom in on the paintings within them impressive. But it comes down the same thing I have commented on before namely, the technology taking over from the art appreciation itself. Check out a similar view in the Boston Globe by art critic Sebastian Smee.

But as Smee points out the reason the 17 museums have allowed Google into their hallowed halls is to encourage more visitors to come and see the real thing. Does one naturally follow the other, i.e. does investing in your on-line presence as a museum pay dividends in increasing your visitor numbers? I used to cite ‘French research’ as proving that it did, which was sloppy as I could never actually source that research.

However I have recently come across a study undertaken by IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) in 2008 on precisely this issue. Interviewing over a thousand people on the statement: “The Internet does not kill libraries and museums”, they came to the conclusion “Internet use is positively related to in-person visits to museums and libraries”- I never realized that my museum visiting was actually an ‘in-person visit’, but now I know!

What they really mean is that adults who use the internet are more likely to visit libraries and museums. Indeed they manage to put a figure on it, namely that in 2006 internet access increased adult visits to museums in the US by 75%. They go further by coming to the conclusion that in-person and on-line visits to museums serve important and complimentary roles in supporting a wide variety of information needs. By looking at information needs addressed by the two types of visits (in-person as distinct from on-line) , the study identified that 94% of the in-person visits are about informal learning and recreation (as against formal education or work-related issues) whereas this drops to 83% when on-line. Another interesting fact that came out of the IMLS study is that the more on-line visits that are made, the more that person is likely to visit a museum.

So now I feel better about Google Art! And to add to that, as a conservator, there is no doubt that its ability to provide such detailed analysis of the paint surface is a useful addition to the conservator’s tool kit, when seeking to understand comparable painting composition and potential deterioration.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Remedial vs preventive conservation

One of the hats I wear is co-editor of the AICCM ( the professional body for Australian conservators) Newsletter. In the latest edition we sought responses from a number of senior Australian conservators on where they stood on the remedial versus preventive conservation debate. This was prompted by an interview in a recent edition of the Getty Conservation Institute’s own newsletter Conservation Perspectives in which my friend Stephen Rickerby of the Courtauld Institute in London was frank about where he stood on the issue:

I had greater faith in remedial intervention. That faith has been lost—for me and, I suspect, for many others in the conservation profession. There’s a global trend toward preventive conservation and site management and away from remedial intervention. While we all still practice remedial intervention, we now have doubts about its efficacy, and we place it in a context of wider conservation measures. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we believe those other measures are going to save paintings. I think there is a more realistic view of what we can and cannot do. The best we can do is to slow deterioration. We’ve hopefully lost a lot of our hubris in terms of what we think we can achieve.

The reality is of course that it is artificial to see the issue as remedial vs preventive, as each serves a different purpose. Remedial conservation is generally about active intervention - ‘doing’ if you like - whereas preventive conservation is about context - ensuring the conditions are appropriate for extending the life of the object as far as possible.

But in asking the question of others it has prompted me to question where I stand. Working in private conservation for most of my life has meant that there has been a lot more doing than preventive work – we get asked to ’fix’ things much more than to consult on their environment. And that is undoubtedly one of the attractions of private conservation. Too many of my public sector colleagues seem disillusioned with the profession, saying they spend much of their time in meetings or on condition reporting rather than working on things.

But as I get older, do I have less faith in our ability to intervene successfully? No, I believe that our interventions continue to be justified, the difference being that the experience of years mean I know more about the likely outcomes. What I can see is that I have less faith in modern materials, or to put it another way, err towards using traditional materials wherever possible as we can predict so much better how they are going to perform.

So what did other senior conservators have to say on the issue? Opinions varied ranging from David Hallam at the National Museum’s forthright comment that “Preventive conservation is a great ‘cop out’ for those who do not have the science basis or practical skill to carry out successful treatment” to Sarah Clayton at the Australian War Memorial questioning the success of some remedial conservation “Over the last 20 years I have seen too many interventive treatments that have not lasted the distance”, whilst David Thurrowgood at the National Gallery of Victoria stated that remedial skills are at the core of the conservator’s work “The skill of remedial intervention, the ability to sensitively and intelligently intervene in the care of an object, is central to what many conservators need to be able to undertake with confidence”.

In all we solicited almost a dozen responses from senior conservators. It confirmed that one size does not fit all, and that different approaches for different objects is vital. It highlighted to me that, like so much in life, experience and perspective counts for a great deal.

In conservation it gives us the confidence to do little or nothing where that really does appear to be the most effective option for long term preservation of an artwork or object. Barbara Applebaum’s seminal book on this issue ‘Conservation Treatment Methodology’ Elsevier 2007 is a must-read if you want to learn more.

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