Mobiles and museums - the next stage

The UK Museums Journal latest edition devotes its Museum Practice section to exploring mobile phone usage in museums. This comes off the back of a Fusion MA Mobile Survey which sought to assess how cultural organisations in the UK and US are using mobile technology to:

• extend audience research
• increase visitor engagement and participation
• provide potential new revenue channels

The report is a vital litmus test to my mind of where museum thinking is currently at or going to be shortly on the use of mobiles. My takeaways are:

• mobile usage in museums is going to expand commensurately with the wider take up of smartphones (90% penetration by 2015 being talked about)
• museums are managing many of their mobile programmes in house, i.e. they are being very hands-on
• that said only 5% of UK museums surveyed had a developed mobile technology strategy, i.e. nobody quite knows what they are doing
• QR codes already top the list of mobile features and are set to expand as fast as apps
• revenue opportunities through social media or by allowing purchase of online merchandise are very limited.

In summary the report reflects a very fluid situation at present with everyone feeling their way, but one where the role mobiles play in visitor access is only going to get greater and that at speed. From the feedback I get, the most sought after feature is going to be way finding, the bug bear of many a great US and European museum, i.e. visitors get lost or don't explore the museum fully through fear of getting lost. Analytical capacity of smartphones is a nice-to-have but not a driving force.

So what comes out of the Museums Journal articles?

On apps versus mobile friendly sites, each have their benefits, with apps having the advantage of operating independently without an internet connection, but mobile sites are generally much cheaper to develop as they can draw on the website framework, and they don't need Apple store approval or cross platform (Android, iOS etc) development.

On the role of audio guides, it is clear that  buying and maintaining devices is a thing of the past, and that visitors are going to use their own phones or tablets.

On strategically approaching mobile projects, key themes are keeping it simple, involving cross departmental teams (especially curatorial, education, visitor services and digital media) and developing a marketing strategy to encourage visitor use.

This is going to be a subject that is going to take up an increasing amount of museum magazine column inches.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

The real via the virtual – Google Art expands

When I was at Museums and the Web 2012 last month, a number of museum people had come direct from the launch of the second round of the Google Art Project in Paris. Google Art, to remind you, was launched in early 2011 with 17 museums participating. At Museums and the Web last year there had been a somewhat hostile reception to the concept, alleviated by the participating museums all saying it had been the best thing for them in terms of driving viewers to their web site and thence through their doors to see the real thing - see my previous blogs on the issue.
Such has been the success of Google Art that a number of museums were feeling a bit miffed that their directors had turned down the initial overtures from Google on the grounds it might cheapen their offering. Now Round Two with 134 new museums on line has hit the web, in great secrecy as all participants, as with Round One, were under incredibly onerous contracts not to reveal they were in cahoots with Google. And it appears there will be more to come, but now with the ability for museums to self nominate for inclusion.

With a total of 30,000 artworks on line, almost all the big hitters are part of the project including a number of Australian museums (AGNSW, NGV and the National Gallery of Australia). Interestingly the offering has also expanded into three dimensional collections, including those of Museum Victoria. I even see there are a couple of the more quirky small collections that I have been involved in from around the world including the Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul and the Ayala Museum in Manila. And the good news is there is more to come.

With such a richer bank of information now available, the ability to cross search is much more rewarding. What I particularly like is the User Galleries, where individuals can aggregate and share artworks that appeal to them into their own collection. Check out particularly Just Something in my Gut and Mick’s Pics.

Which leads me to an interesting article that appeared in The Guardian ten days ago reporting on a Guardian Culture Professionals Network online chat on ‘What’s next for Museums? In it Jim Richardson, founder of MuseumNext, the European equivalent to Museums and the Web, which took place last week in Barcelona, painted a picture of a ‘hyper personalised museum of the future where you can learn what you like as you browse the galleries, understand the level of information you’d like about each piece and then tailor that for you. I also think the museum experience is becoming increasingly collaborative. Museums are becoming more comfortable with letting audiences have a say.”

All this activity bodes well for an ever expanding opportunity for access to collections, whether real or virtual, with the two now increasingly inseparable.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Labels or no labels

Should galleries allow the art to speak for itself or should they provide information and interpretation for visitors? asks an article in the December 2011 UK Museums Journal.  It’s a question that is as old as art itself, with two components.The first is how much interpretive material should be provided, the dilemma described by Nicholas Serota of the Tate as that of ‘experience or interpretation’ i.e. either helping visitors experience a sense of discovery in looking at artworks or leaving them to find themselves ’standing on the conveyor belt of history ‘ (great quote!). 

The second component is how that interpretation is physically imparted. The common label is under some threat at present, witness the label-less MONA (see blog) and experiments that National Gallery in London has been trialing (having no labels but a pocket size guide book for visitors), and the Getty in LA (exhibiting a room full of Rembrandts with no labels for 4 weeks before they put the labels up). Whilst the National Gallery speaks favourably of visitor reaction to their trial, the Royal Academy note that  visitors struggle without them. Kathleen Soriano of the RA noticed that ‘ the absence of labels can make audiences quite nervous. They tend to walk past more quickly’. 

And of course this is also where technology is making serious inroads in offering new ways of ‘seeing ‘ art.  Whilst the Getty substituted no other form of interpretive material for their label-less Rembrandts, MONA provides a highly sophisticated iPod touch info package. 

In between there are lots of new techniques that can be tried. I visited the National Gallery of Denmark over Christmas where in their splendid newly refurbished European galleries, they have included as well as labels;

a)         a large touch table in the first gallery where the highlights of each successive gallery are able to examined in  detail as a taste of what is to come

b)         each gallery has  a small ‘break out’ area, literally an open topped cubicle, where one painting only is hung with a seat to contemplate and earphones for audio information

c)         a series of desks with board games for kids down the middle of one of their major galleries, with the games answers derived from the surrounding paintings.

Museums and the Web last year concentrated on the critical role the mobile was beginning to play in museums .  Much of course has happened since, and it seems amazing that we were discussing then how some art museums still did not permit mobiles. Smartphone use has now passed 50% of all mobile use and web access via mobile overtaken desktop access.

So a number of papers at Museums and the Web 2012 last week looked at strategies to deal with this fast changing world.  Messages I picked up from them included:

• Know your audience and environment – mobile delivery of content via smartphones or multi media devices is not always applicable. Some visitors choose to come as a fun family outing, and accessing content whetrhe visual or audio through mobiles  can provide solitary experiences that do not enhance this.

• Awareness of apps that can be downloaded onto your own smartphone is still low (people imagine that the museum’s equipment has to be used as at MONA) or visitors can be wary of app use (they presume it will cost them as part of their plan or can expose them to viruses).

• Be aware that no one has quite sorted out the business model, i.e. whether apps or providing iPod touchs should be free

Check out particularly relevant papers at:

You've Gone Mobile, Now What?

and

What's On TAP ? Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

But returning to the label debate, we will never completely ditch them, but I continue to believe that hand held devices as the principal interpretive tool are going to be the way of the immediate future.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Measuring online activity

Much has been written over the last few years about how to measure online metrics, with Seb Chan’s Fresh and New blog and dynamic presentations helping to set the benchmark. But not a lot has been written about what those metrics tell us. So it was timely for the UK’s ‘Let’s Get Real’ report to be presented at Museums and the Web 2012 last Friday. Undertaken through 2011 the project sought to benchmark common online activity amongst 17 UK cultural venues, including Tate, the British Museum, and the National Museums of Scotland and Wales, to generate practical outcomes to inform the cultural sector as a whole and improve working practices.


The key ‘take aways’ I got from it were:

• Don’t let’s kid ourselves about how much online activity the cultural sector generates - the combined traffic to the partner organizations (which included most of the UK majors) was 0.04% of total UK web traffic in June 2011, equivalent to just one site that provided info for expectant parents

• Understand how to use Google Analytics and undertake a ‘health check’ to ensure consistency of results. This should include segmenting traffic between internal and external visits ( the British Library for instance generates 7% of its traffic internally – staff, and visitors to the public reading rooms), and understanding how Google Analytics calculates time on site.

• Be clear what you are trying to do online and who the content is for

• Recognise the limits as well as the value of social media

• Engage with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – a process that is fundamental to commercial web sites but under used by cultural organizations

• Ensure digital activities are not separate to physical ones and linked with your overall strategy

• Ensure your website is mobile friendly given mobile access to the web has now overtaken desktop/laptop access

Check out the whole report on line - it makes for interesting reading.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2012

I predicted a couple of weeks ago that the underlying theme of Museums and the Web 2012 being held here in sunny downtown San Diego would be digital leadership.

Well after the first day of proceedings I can report that this issue is certainly on the agenda, but I think the bigger issue is actually going to be about whether this conference (now in its 17th year) should be renamed Museums and the Digital World.

Few of the papers mention the web, and papers this morning by Bruce Wyman and Rob Stein pushed hard the concept of the necessity for museums to have a digital strategy. No longer is this strategy just about how a web site is used to benefit the museum but it is about the integration of everything digital from digitisation of collections to building apps and the onsite and offsite presence of the museum.

Bruce sees that everyone in the museum should be aware of the need to produce digital content with three roles critical to this:

1. The content creators - they need to be aware that all content will be picked apart, mashed and reused in ways they never envisaged. Alongside this, accurate metadata, as the conduit to much content, is more important than ever before.
2. The constructors (i.e. those that build the content) - be aware that consumers want to interact with content on many different platforms, and find it transportable easily between them. Interestingly Bruce straw-polled the conference delegates to show that the vast majority have iPhones not Androids, reflecting his view that iPhone users are much more engaged with content than Android users (who he claims tend to buy their phones largely as clever phones rather than a window to the world). The usage flies in the face of the stats published in USA Today this morning which showed that 2011 global smartphone sales were powered by 49% Android operating systems as against 19% iOS.
3. The consumers - be aware that data is everywhere for consumers, and the museum data needs to stand out and where possible link back to the museum, as it will invariably not be accessed via the museum's website.

Rob summed it up well I thought by saying that we need first and foremost to be museum experts not technology experts if we are going to convince and engage with our consumers. More soon.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums and the Web 2012 and digital leadership

It’s that time of year when Museums and the Web fans start to get excited as MW 2012 (April 11th -14th in San Diego) looms into our immediate consciousness. This will be my third (I was at MW2009 in Indianapolis and MW2011 in Philadelphia).

Each MW has an informal theme which either becomes apparent in the blogosphere before the conference or during the conference itself. 2011 was clearly about mobile platforms. And if there is one that I can spot for 2012 it is going to be around digital leadership.

Rob Stein’s paper is already being widely commented upon. Rob is a key person in this debate and we are all watching to see what he does in his new role in Dallas as the Dallas Museum of Art’s Deputy Director, where he has been head hunted by Maxwell Anderson. Max is the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and has enticed Rob from Indianapolis Museum of Art where he is the Deputy Director for Research, Technology, and Engagement. Max was formally the Director there. It was in that role that Max gave the opening address at MW 2009 in Indianapolis, an eye opening moment for me as there was a live twitter feed being displayed behind him to which everyone was glued at the expense of his presentation. The Indianapolis Museum of Art has been pioneering the role of museums in the digital age, and presumably Dallas will now lead the next stage of the journey.

But all this is particularly relevant to Rob’s paper which essential posits a new view of the type of leaders that museums need. This has prompted a wave of comment, from The Art Newspaper to Susan Cairns writing in the Museums Association UK comment page (‘Can a technologist get ahead in museums?’) saying “If we have museum directors who understand museums but do not understand (and commit firmly to) the altered technological landscape, how can museums possibly adapt to changing expectations”

I would suggest that the problem is not unique to the GLAM sector – witness the latest survey of PR agency Eurocom Worldwide which showed that 57% of CEOs had no idea how to quantify the effect of their social media presence (and more worryingly that 1 in 5 job applicants were failing to get hired because of content in their social media profile! - cited in BRW March 22nd 2012 edition).

But I would also suggest it is not the problem that Susan thinks. Maxwell Anderson has shown convincingly that you do not need to have encountered computers after formal schooling still to be able to get what current technology can do for the GLAM sector.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Polar high-jinks

I spent four days in Hobart earlier this month hosting the 2012 conference of the ICOMOS International Polar Heritage Committee (IPHC) of which I have just become President. I say it as one how probably shouldn’t, but it was a great event with 50 polar heritage experts from all over the world present. Lots of highlights helped by the wealth of local polar links – check out Hobart’s Polar Pathways for a great self guided tour around the city.

Stand outs were:

1. A reception kindly hosted by the Governor of Tasmania, Peter Underwood, a role with many polar links. Sir John Franklin held this role from 1837 to 1843 – disappearing in the late 1840s in the Canadian Arctic whilst trying to reach the North Pole. Ettie Scott, Capt Scott’s sister was married to Sir William Ellison-Macartney, who was Governor from 1913-1917 before moving to the same role in WA. Scott’s mother and unmarried sister both lived at Government House, Hobart at the time, perhaps helping the British Government fulfil Scott’s dying plea ‘For God’s sake look after my people’.

2. Michael Morrison’s paper 'The Whaling Station of South Georgia' on the whaling stations of South Georgia. These five sites, Leith, Stromness, Prince Olav, Husvik and Grytviken between them processed an astonishing 175,000 whales in their life time before closing in the 1930s. They now represent a massive environmental and heritage conservation challenge. Check out the images (including the whales) at the conference proceedings on the IPHC site under here, but also look at this extraordinary picture of the process (apologies to the squeamish):

3. The main reason for holding the conference in Hobart at this time, namely the centenary of Amundsen announcing he had reached the South Pole from the steps of Hobart GPO on March 9th 1912. This was re-enacted complete with huskies, sledge and a look-alike Amundsen amidst general jollity as follows:

Meanwhile of course a hundred years ago Scott and his three companions were still fighting a losing battle against the odds on the Ross Sea ice barrier trying to get back to safety. I have been reading Scott’s diaries on a daily basis for the past year, which has given me an extraordinary sense of how their journey unfolded. It was 100 years ago today that Titus Oates walked out of the tent with the immortal words” I am just going outside and may be some time’

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Viewing art

"Art museums have become pointless: they should learn from Christianity" states Alain de Botton in a recent ABC religion and ethics program.

His point is that:

1. art museums have become our new churches
2. art has become revered and in doing so displaced a role that religion used to serve
3. but neither the art nor art museums are providing church functions as places of consolation, meaning and redemption

He therefore suggests that art museum curators should set aside the ‘high’ interpretation of art accessible only to the elite, and help the visitor to access works of art in a way that they can help us get through life.

He sees Christian art as being aimed at teaching us how to live, so that pictures of Mary at the foot of the Cross teach us tenderness and courage and images of the Last Supper train us not to be a coward or a liar. As an avowed atheist de Botton, in my book, is missing the point of Christian paintings (namely that they are all about the message of Christ), but his point is an interesting one, namely can secular art teach us about life values.

First up we need to know how to look at art, and I refer you to a previous blog of mine on this issue citing Kenneth Clark’s methodology.

Setting aside the truism that art speaks to everyone in a different way and that no one reaction to an artwork is more valid than another, how then can art be used?

I am in the midst of a review of university museum collections and it’s fascinating to look at how some of them are being used beyond just a primary source of knowledge. University College London has just started an object based learning course using the UCL’s unique collections as a primary focus and encouraging a process of interrogation, research, documentation and presentation to develop research and practical skills.

Both Harvard and Oxford expose their medical undergraduates to art as a means of enhancing their powers of observation.

But perhaps Barbra Streisand in a moment of considerable clarity should have the last word: “Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.”

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Archaeology and climate change

IIC (the International Institute for Conservation) has been pushing the line that climate change will effect collections just as much as buildings for some time. I helped organize their first dialogue on the issue at the IIC Congress in London in 2008 (Climate Change and Museum Collections), most memorable to me as the occasion when Nicholas Serota of the Tate pronounced that he expected visitors to have to wear overcoats in the Tate in winter as they no longer would be keeping the Tate toasty just for visitor comfort.

Three weeks ago IIC ran another dialogue in conjunction with University College, London looking at the issue of preservation of archaeology in a time of climate change. It was facilitated by Dr May Cassar, Professor of Sustainable Heritage at UCL, and a guru in this area. The two dialogue respondents were Andrew Curry, an archaeological journalist and Wouter Gheyle, a practising archaeologist.

A range of sites were discussed by the two of them where rising seal levels and changing weather patterns are threatening insitu archaeology, including:

• Pinnacle Point in South Africa, one of the earliest settlements of modern humans
• Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, containing 120,000 years of human history and the last traces of Neanderthal presence in Europe
• Santa Rosa Island in California where 16,000 year old middens are being washed away
• Dead Man’s Bay in Greenland where 3,000 year old excavated houses are being lost through coastal erosion
• Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, containing 5,000 year old underground preserved houses and contents
• The Altai Mountains on the Mongolia/Russia border where the melting of the permafrost is thawing frozen 2,400 year old Scythian tombs

You get the picture, and this is of course incremental, whereas Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away an estimated 1000 archaeological sites in one fell swoop.

Following the presentations by Curry and Gheyle there was an opportunity for open dialogue, and there was the inevitable question as to whether global warming is anything new in the history of the planet. As Curry responded there have always been natural weather changes that happen over thousands of years. But what we are seeing now is much faster and more destructive, and therein lies the problem. Weather patterns are becoming more extreme and unfamiliar. Some moderately hot places are becoming deserts and others where moderate rain used to fall, are now experiencing torrential rain and flooding.

As Australia experiences a wet, wet summer with extensive and damaging flooding, the climate change deniers are claiming they are right and there is no global warming evident in this part of the world. In reality it is precisely because the planet is warming up that we are getting these extreme weather patterns.

It’s an issue that is effecting us all, like it or not, and we in the conservation world need to start prioritising what we can save.

Check out the dialogue online.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Mobile connectivity and museums

I sat through a highly thought provoking talk last week by Craig Rispin, a self acknowledged ‘futurist' (apparently there are 25,000 of them around the world).

Along with a pile of interesting insights into where current research is going (did you know that the Chinese have developed a way to store data in E.Coli bacteria, and that one gram could store as much as 90gb of data?), I was particularly struck by the research data he has sourced from Morgan Stanley on the inexorable and stunning rise of mobile internet use take up.

I have blogged before on how mobile access of the internet is already greater than any other form of internet access. This research shows graphically what this looks like.

The first image shows the 15 million units of iPads (blue) shipped in the first three quarters after launch, compared to the 3 million iPhones (orange) and the 100,000 iPods (green) .

But what have all these iPads been used for?

One answer is connecting to the internet. The following graph shows in green the take up by subscribers (120 million of them) of mobile internet via iPad, iPhone and iTouch after 13 quarters of launch of the service, compared to the equivalent time after the launch of AOL internet in red or Netscape internet in blue.

But look at the same graph after 14 quarters (380 million subscribers)

And 15 quarters (468 million subscribers)

                                     

It is the relative take up of the technology which is so stunning, and which is going to have such an impact on how museums harness this new level of connectivity. Of particular interest to me is the opportunities that iPads are going to provide in terms of allowing shared access to information between visitors, particularly families – something a smartphone struggles with due to the small size of the screen. But more of that later.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices