Creating compelling collections

An interesting older article (via Mia Ridge) on 'Understanding Compelling Collections'. In it, John Coburn talks about the experiments the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums did in 2010 with sharing their collections online.

Coburn writes eloquently about facing the challenge of finding audiences and attention in social spaces. What will be compelling?

The short answer, in my view, is anything that How To Be a Retronaut would share.

The site defines itself as a time machine with ‘capsules’ of historic image collections uploaded every day. The capsules are carefully curated. They are era-specific, event-specific, moment-specific. Abandoned New York movie theatres. Mug shots of destitute Victorian criminals. 1920s Egypt in colour. Yugoslav war memorials. The last surviving witness of the Abraham Lincoln assassination.

It’s a popular site averaging 30,000 visitors a day, and over a million a month. Each capsule is generally shared a thousand times by viewers. The likely reach for each capsule is beyond calculation.

These images are the stuff museums and archives have in abundance. So neatly sidestepping the interminable question of copyright, why are many museums reaching only a fraction of this audience with our collections online.

Chris Wild of How To Be a Retronaut suggests the following “(Museums and archives should) forget about history and think about imagination. (Focus on) the images that tap into magic and the sublime. The images that disrupt people’s model of time, fracture it, break it apart. Looking at these images, viewers should encounter eternity and their own mortality”.

I agree with Coburn. I think digitisation should be promiscuous. I think people should be just flinging this stuff through the digitisers (by which I mean, whatever machine they're using) and bunging on the minimum amount of metadata, and then getting them up online. Stop agonising over the quality of your descriptions, over how to prioritise your programme, and just get the presses rolling. Digitise old stuff, so you don't have to worry about copyright so much. Take a risk and put stuff up; clearly post a take-down notice in case anyone objects. Allow people to add information to improve searchability - not squitty little tags, but proper big text fields. Even better, if you have the resource, do something like Brooklyn Museum's Posse and let QA'd contributions enter the metadata.

Making these collections compelling takes a lot of work though. When I was working at the National Library, getting our collections up on The Commons on Flickr was such a rush - so many barriers jumped in such a small amount of time. But the stuff we could share was so carefully vetted that we were (initially at least) restricted to innocuous landscapes and photos of ships - i.e., anything that didn't have people in it. We did the best with what we had, but it hurt knowing what great stuff - what magical and sublime things - we had in the collections.

Even now, I'm entranced on a regular basis. Photos of instructions for a wool-processing machine. Of awkward looking wanna-be models in the 1970s. Of a display of tire treads, or lightbulbs, or lampshades.

Or my recent obsession, photos of children from the 1870s and 1880s taken in the Whanganui studio of William James Harding. The children change, but the two rockinghorse props stay the same (I'm also beginning to suspect the beret and boater were studio props as well). And the children themselves, solemn, rarely cracking that cheeky, knowing grin of children who grew up with little cameras in the home. Often doughy, lumpen. Wearing these voluminous clothes, petticoats poking out, big black boots on their small feet. I've started a little board on Pinterest for my favourites, just to see if other people find them compelling too.

Pinterest and museums

After dismissing it for several months (on the basis of adorkability overload), I've started playing with Pinterest.

If you've been hiding under one of those handy internet-rocks for a while, Pinterest is a social sharing site on which members create 'boards' of images gleaned from around the web, which can then be followed and liked by other members; individual items can also be 'repinned' from another member's board to your own. The site is very popular with designers, stylists, crafters, and the kind of people who tumble pretty shiny things. Like Tumblr, there's a certain element of look-at-me-and-my-exquisite/quirky-taste.

I started using the site because I wanted to see how heritage items would fare on it. Would they pique the curiosity of members? What would prove of the most interest (pinterest?)? Could pinning an item from a website lead people back to the source? Might all this lead people to start investigating heritage material for themselves?

More than a year and a half after leaving the National Library, where I worked on several channels aimed to open up the collections to a wider online audience (like the @NLNZ twitter account, and getting the Library on Flickr Commons), these are questions I still spend a lot of time thinking about. And, to be honest, I spend a lot of time scouring the collections, through Digital New Zealand and National Library Beta. I constantly find things that tickle my fancy, start a Wikipedia trawling session, puzzle me, move me: above all, I find things that require sharing.

So, I have started using Pinterest.

I'm only a couple of days in. I've set up boards for old photos of hats and hairstyles, beautiful commercial and social marketing posters, Kobi Bosshard, Karl Fritsch, and hotties from history (because I'm still disappointed about not being able to add Bob Semple to My Daguerreotype Boyfriend). From the little bits of activity I've seen so far, graphic design is by far and away the most popular content, and colourful also attracts attention (so more Karl Fritsch, less Kobi Bosshard).

If I were still at the Library, and not doing this myself, I'd be far more active - searching the site, following boards, repinning and commenting away merrily. As it is, the site's content is by and large not to my personal interest: I'm not going to while away time as I do on Goodreads.  I have started following a couple of existing (real world) friends, and following SFMOMA's It's hip to be square board (totally to my liking).

From my brief experiment, I'd say Pinterest is definitely worth collecting institutions' attention. It's easy to sign up (although it's interesting that you create accounts by authorising connections to your Facebook or Twitter account: you're a bit buggered if you haven't started taking those basic steps) (also, you have to wait days to have your membership activated - WTF?). The bookmarklet tool is convenient to use (and highlighting text on a page automatically inserts it into the item's description on the site). And maybe most importantly, copyright seems to be well managed.

The community rules encourage good acknowledgement of sources and accurate links back to the original item.  Individual items display their original source prominently. You can tailor your description to include all the source acknowledgements you like. There are ways of seeing all the items from a specific site. The Copyright page has clear instructions for anyone who feels their work is being misused. This won't be nearly enough for some institutions, but really - it's time to come play in the real world.

This blogpost has (painstakingly detailed) instructions for getting started on the site; this one identifies a couple of museums that are already on there. I feel like my (aging now) questions you should ask yourself before setting up one of these channels for your organisation still hold pretty firm:

• Why do you want to do this? What's the big good reason for doing this, and can your aims be achieved using any existing tools?
• What are you offering? Where will the content come from, and is there anything you have to do to ensure you can use it or make it?
• Who is this for? Who is the audience you're reaching out to, how will you engage with them, and do they want to hear from you?
• Who will be doing this? Any form of outreach needs staff with some time allocated to the endeavour, and a knack for tweaking people's interest.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's had a good (or bad) experience using Pinterest from an institutional point of view.

Weekend reading

The New York Times yearly museum special section is a special treat (especially when it appears in the same day that the NYT reveals its paywall plans - woe, woe, woe). Here's what I'll be reading this weekend

The Spirit of Sharing, by Carol Vogel: about the ways museums are reaching out, and starting off with a profile of long-time hero, Shelley Bernstein

A Growing Use of Private Art in Public Spaces, by Judith Dobrynski: about the tensions of staging exhibitions of private collector's work.

Supplementing a Physical Collection, Online, by John Hanc: about hybrid museums that are more event and online-focused than centred on their buildings

Scent of a Museum, by Carol King: Chandler Burr curates a perfume exhibit (I bet you'd break out of the 'women, 45 plus' bracket if visitors to the show really did experience it by sniffing cute women)

Speaking digitally about museums, by Jennifer Preston: I'm hoping this isn't just a standard how-museums-use-social-media story

And the one I'm most excited about - An Interactive Exhibit for about $30, by Nick Bilton - using Arduino to make cheap in-gallery interpretative materials.

Social media, museums & artlovers

If you're an early riser, you might like to participate in a live Twitter session tomorrow morning (6am New Zealand time), organised by the New York Times and featuring the following luminaries:

• Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum @shell7
• Rob Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art @rjstein
• Ian Padgham, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art @origiful
• Erin Coburn, Metropolitan Museum of Art @metmuseum

The hashtag is #nytmuseums. If, like me, you're unlikely to be glued to the screen at 6am, you'll be able to recap the conversation in this chat room.

culture club

The Transformations in Cultural Communication conference and masterclasses are running again in Melbourne next April. Now that the first wave of enthusiasm and experimentation with social media inside museums has crested, the conference is moving on to look at how these tools and platforms can be used to serve culturally diverse audiences.

Featured speakers include Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, Nancy Procter from the Smithsonian, and Caroline Payson and Mei Mah from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, backed up by Lynda Kelley and Angelina Russo.

The conference registration is a very friendly AU$180, and, well, what need I say about the allurements of a trip to Melbourne?

Ask a curator

Last Wednesday was Ask A Curator day on Twitter - the above was the first question I put out (for the record, @ChchArtGallery and @CityGalleryWgtn said Fiona Connor, @WallaceArtTrust wasn't keen to pick, and I didn't hear back from @Fresh274 and @AucklandArtGal didn't reply to any of my questions).

Ask a Curator was run by Sumo, an English company that works a lot in social media with museums and galleries. It followed on from Follow a Museum day, run by Sumo in February this year.

My own experience of Ask A Curator day wasn't that much different from my average day on twitter, although I enjoyed the backchannel chit-chat with @tinks03 and @cherylbernstein as we talked about the event and the answers. But then, I'm lucky, If I have a question for a curator, I can generally drop them an email and expect an answer. Ask A Curator day wasn't really about or for me.

The point of the day was to start new conversations. The following morning I asked a few institutions whether they'd had conversations with new people, or just the usual suspects.






So, can the event be judged a success? It's hard to tell. Because New Zealand started the event early (due to timezones) we missed the spam attack that took place when the hashtag started trending, which was a bonus for us. Do 10 extra international followers equal a success? Maybe, if you keep talking to them (even more I guess if they all jump on a plane and head over here....). 'Success' is a surprisingly difficult question: one of my favourite exchanges of the day occurred when @tinks03 asked


'Success is a topic I'll be trying to tackle in a panel discussion about social media at the National Digital Forum in Wellington in October - earlybird registration has just been extended until this Friday. I'll be joined on the panel by Renae Mason from the Powerhouse Museum: you can read their account of taking part in Ask a Curator day on their Fresh and Newer blog, and their reasons for hacking the event and using Facebook instead of Twitter.

Other round-ups of the event:

Ema Tavola (Fresh Gallery) and Neil Semple (Christchurch Art Gallery) on the NZMuseums site

An American perspective from Carolina Miranda (aka C-Monster)

Jim Richardson from Sumo (covers the spamming that occurred)

Danny Birchall gives the (professional) participants view

EYC unconference this weekend

Briefly summarising a post I've written over on my work blog: the Engage Your Community unconference is happening this Saturday. It's a *free* day-long event for people working or volunteering in not for profit, community or voluntary groups, who want to learn about web stuff, and meet other people working in the sector.

Quoting myself:

An unconference is like a conference, in that it’s a gathering of people interested in a particular topic, who come together to share and learn. An unconference is unlike a conference, in that it doesn’t have a preset schedule of talks that you sit through: instead, the agenda is built on the day by the people who attend. Anyone can run a session, whether it’s to share something they’ve done, ask for help with something they’re trying to do, or just to kick some ideas around. The EYC unconference site has a list of topics people are interested in talking about on the day.

There are still places available - it'd be great to see you there, whether you're learning or sharing (or both).

My So-Called Life*

My Life as an Object is one of the more interesting social media/museum outings I've seen in a while.

Each week, a collection item from Nottingham City Museums and Galleries is 'brought to life' through a social media channel. First up was a Raleigh Chopper with its own Twitter stream; this week it's Tea at Englefield Green, a painting by Paul Sandby, which has been opened up for collective story-telling on Flickr.





The project has been commissioned by Renaissance East Midlands (an organisation that supports museums in the East Midlands region of England) and is delivered by Rattle, with the redoubtable Frankie Roberto at the helm. (You can see his write-ups on the Chopper and the painting on his blog)

What I like about the project is its focus: time-bound explorations of single items. It's a canny project-based approach which could be continued, but could equally be abandoned.

People might object that the Chopper only had 53 followers, or that the painting only collected X comments and Y notes, and does that all seem worth the effort? To which I'd respond - how much effort went into that floortalk that only 12 people attended? And was that a waste? Genuine enjoyment on the behalf of the people taking part in the activity, and genuine enjoyment and learning on the behalf of staff seem more important to me than raw numbers.

This leads me to a few concerns I have when I look at the project so far. Staff from Nottingham City don't seem very involved in what's going on. The Chopper was voiced (really well) by a hired writer; there aren't comments from identified staff members in the Flickr stream (although admittedly it's early days). Nor can I find any trace of the project on the Nottingham City website, and the online activities aren't linked to from the collection items (although god knows I know what an easy request that sounds like, and how hard it can be in practice).

In fact, when you start picking things apart, there's still some work to do in tying all this back to Nottingham itself - for example, putting the name of the work and the artist, and a link to the collection record, on each image on the Flickr stream - or noting whether it can be seen in real life.

But perhaps I'm being too literal and a little premature. As Roberto notes

this project is all a bit of an experiment. You could consider it a small-scale prototype. It’s not being widely promoted or marketed, instead the aim is to test some ideas, and see what works.

This is one of those few projects where it’s okay if things fail. Which is liberating and exciting in equal measures.

And how refreshing is that?


*Please don't take the post title as a slight on the project. It's just that it made me think of the short-lived TV show which I loved, but am too scared to revisit in case it doesn't live up to my memories.

Let me be your fan (Part 1,000,000)

Yesterday I went along to the first day of the Engage Your Community conference (this afternoon I'm delivering a 3-hour workshop on using social media as part of the conference: my slides & resources are available here but you'd need to be at the workshop for the really juicy bits).

Many of the speaker touched on themes I harp on about a lot: Colin Jackson noted that the Internet has always attracted and fostered community; Chris Brown argued that social rules and mores are as important online as off; Nathalie Hofsteede talked about the web and transparency, and how it can work for you or against you. It was really interesting though to hear the issues, strategies and experiences I live and work with discussed through the lens of another sector.

Andrea Walker is the Online Communications Manager at Oxfam NZ. In her presentation she talked about Oxfam's experience of using social media sites, focusing on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the stories she told was about their Twitter account.

When the Twitter account was launched, Oxfam mostly focused on ways to drawn attention to our spread their key messages. Then one night the partner of one of the team came along to team drinks, and said that he thought the stream was good, but he'd like to know more about what's happening in the office. He thought he'd find this interesting.

Now Oxfam does tweet about workplace stuff - like birthday cake - in a way that still subtly draws attention to key messages (birthday cake made with fairtrade ingredients). It adds personality to their stream - it brings out the real people behind the brand, and it encourages real, human connection.

I enjoyed Andrea's presentation, and I was really glad she made this point. It matches with a point I feel like I keep banging on and on about - that people *want* to be your fans.

As an example; I've recently become a little bit obsessed with Berg's weeknotes blog posts. Berg is a London design consultancy who do things that are, frankly, a little magical and (often) a bit beyond me. [Tangent: Berg's work reminds me of Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic only it's not just technology, it's the thinking and the way they communicate those thoughts]

Back on track. The weeknotes posts are recaps of what everyone in the office is doing. For example:

I’m liaising with builders to get quotes for the conversion of the new studio space, with accountants to answer queries on the year end and move to better book-keeping software, and researchers for: Ashdown; Silicon Roundabout; cybernetics. There are two contracts to chase and two proposals to complete. I know I say this every three months or so, but I’m busier and more productive than I’ve ever been.

I love this kind of detail. It's a little irrational (I'll never work with these guys) but I do. The same could be said for Stamen. I guess the nub of this is: I'm interested in their work, and they give me stuff to be interested in - not just the final ready-to-ship product or campaign, but the human side, the stuff that explains what they do and how they do it. The stuff that makes me feel involved.

Why can't more museums and galleries do this? Some people would doubtless argue that they're to busy working to blog or tweet about it. To which I'd ask: are you really too busy to engage with the people who you're working for?

Art is the event

I made a tactical error in my Easter reading mission, and started off with the thickest book on my pile, instead of the thinnest. Thus by the end of the weekend I had polished off Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but only got to chapter 3 ("The Fair") of Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.

The division between practice and theory, do-ers and thinkers, in Anathem got me thinking about Barnett Newman's epigram “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.”* I've yet to have that kind of connection through Thornton's book - and I think I may it to the end of the book without doing so, much in the way I enjoyed but didn't have to think very hard about Adam Lindeman's Collecting Contemporary.

However this morning I stumbled over a link to this 2005 piece by Philip de Montebello in the comments on a blog post, and had one of those reflecting moments, much like the Stephenson/Newman one, where someone says or writes something that sits you back on your heels:

Another reason art museums matter is that, unlike historical facts and events, works of art exist not only in the present, but also in the past, the past that transmitted them to us. Events, on the other hand, can be retraced but they have no presence; we can't experience them. Archives and documents refer to events but are not they. However, the work of art, as Bernard Berenson put it, is the event.

Aptly, the blog post in question, by Nina Simon, was an argument for why cultural institutions should be taking a measured, but serious, approach towards social media:

Whereas the Web of the 2000s was dominated by search, we are entering a time when more and more people are using social media as their gateway to the Web. Ask a college student what her homepage is, and you are likely to see Facebook, not Google, pop up on her screen.

... For people who are deeply immersed in social media, social networks are already a much heavier influence on personal choices--where to visit, what concert to attend--than traditional advertising. Which means that your organization's website--a brochure out in the wilderness of the Web--is only going to remain relevant and useful as a marketing piece if it is being referenced in the social context of your users' lives.

*It was a bit of a relief to find out that this quip was a honed version of a much longer statement - I'm always reading interviews and memoirs and being bewildered by the elegant bon mots that people apparently toss off unthinkingly as they saunter through life. It's nice to know we can edit for posterity.

So so so so busy

Okay, readers. I do my best, but November is a busy month in Best of 3's real life. So posting this month is going to rely on me pointing you to things that I wish I had time to read more closely, mixed with some random observations.

On that note - if your institution is still struggling with the why-tos and where-fore-art-thou's of getting involved with Flickr, check out this great discussion on the Ideum blog, with their thoughts on understanding the platform, making time estimates, working with the community & planning for problems.

You might like to follow that up by revisiting Nina Simone's thoughts on how much time Web 2 takes.

Nina also has a valuable guide to developing social media guidelines within your organisation. What I like about it is that it focuses on providing guidance and resources, rather than telling managers to freak out in case their staff are doing a Virgin Atlantic.

Go there, do that

If your institution's web presence currently consists of a website and an e-newsletter and you're wondering how to step outside the boundaries of your URL, look no further - do I have the conference for you.

The Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference is being held in Melbourne, 5-6 March 2009. The conference is chaired by Angelina Russo, who works closely with Seb Chan (who's a bit of a rockstar, really, from where I sit).

You can see what the 2008 conference covered on the Social Media and Cultural Communication blog. The themes for the 2009 conference are:

Digital Change Promotion organisational change and new business models
Branding the Cultural Experience interactive strategies for brand building
Implementing a Networked Communication Strategy increasing participation through social networks
Social Media and Public Programming communicating discipline knowledge online.

If you want to get a feeling for the kind of things that are likely to be discussed at the conference, I'd take a look at the following:

> Shelly Bernstein (Brooklyn Museum) on the Museum's Web 2 activities

> Seb Chan on using social media, social media & web strategy, and resourcing for social media

> Seb and Angeline's slides from their Museums & the Web 2008 social media workshop (PDF)

And if you're not sure what I mean by 'web presence' as opposed to 'website', here's a couple of examples.

MASS MOCA, like a number of other American institutions, has a Flickr pool.

Kaliman Gallery in Sydney has just announced their Facebook presence. (BTW, Julian Dashper's show at Kaliman finishes this week).