Making Museums More Mobile

At what stage of an exhibition's development do you start to think about including digital content? Is it primarily a way to add movement & sound to a static collection of objects, or do you consider it integral to the design, presentation or functionality of an exhibition?

Digital elements such as downloadable content, interviews, social networking or games, can replace other traditional aspects of an exhibition to create a dramatically different look and feel.

With so many people carrying smart phones these days, mobile device tours are a new take on the traditional audio guided tour. I've often spoken about the suitablility of the Public Art Collection for this type of tour, well now there's an accessible mechanism to help us build one! The My Tours site lets you easily build your own mobile application for the public to download onto an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Whilst this doesn't cater for all visitors, a few iPod Touches could be made available for use within the exhibition space, with other visitors using their own device to navigate through an exhibition, or around our venues.

Caz has shown us some examples of Brooklyn Museums iPhone apps. The American Museum of Natural History have also developed one. Another site of interest discussed at a recent Culture Victoria forum on the topic of mobile tours includes this beautiful interactive soundscape developed for a sculpture park.

How social are you?

You may have noticed that we now have a sign in the 'Rock Chicks' exhibition to let people know they can leave a comment on the Arts Centre's Facebook page. While we are not exactly being deluged with comments I think it's a good first step to improving our social networking presence. All we have to do now is start engaging!

Social networking in a museum context has come a long way since 2008 when many of the bigger institutions in Australia starting developing their social media policies and in April next year we'll have a chance to hear from some of the pioneers of  'the first wave' at the Transformations in Cultural Communications Conference. The focus of the conference is on developing and supporting culturally diverse audiences and will feature speakers from the Smithsonian, Powerhouse, RMIT, MOV, ACMI and Australian Museum.

If you feel like you've missed the first wave entirely don't worry it's not that hard to catch up. A few people have asked me to re-post the details of the Licence 2 Test Drive site I mentioned way back in January. You may recall that it's an easy self-guided, six lesson course that will have you up to speed in no time. If you'd like any help getting started or you think it might be fun to do a few lessons as a group just let me know and I'll see what I can organise.

Friday links

It's been a while between drinks but here are a couple of interesting projects and sites I've come across lately...



Have you heard about this exhibition? We're quite excited about it in Collections. It's called 'Move: Choreographing You - Art and Dance' and it's on at the Hayward Gallery in London. Using interactive sculptures and installations this show explores the intersection of dance and art over the past 50 years by encouraging people to actually dance there way through the exhibition.You can check out more about the show at this great microsite.

Caboodle is a fun kids/museums/digital project.You can read more about it here and here but basically it's a great way of getting kids invloved with collections by visiting museums, talking to curators, taking photos and uploading them to the Caboodle site. They can also become part of an online club and it is used both by schools and individuals. Kids don't have to interact with collections they can also draw, build, find something they want to photograph and upload.

The site where I found out about Caboodle is also worth a look. It's called Culture24 and it's run by a not-for-profit group working across the areas of arts, heritage, education and tourism in the UK. If you haven't come across it before it's definately worth exploring and being inspired.

Floorplanner - free exhibition layout tool.

Exhibition designer Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has hit upon a great easy, free online tool for producing 3D exhibition layouts. It's called Floorplanner and you can read a post about it here. It looks like a great tool for mocking up exhibitions/events/displays that don't necessarily have their own design budget but that need that little bit of extra visualisation. 

Did you know that the 1st of September (Wednesday just gone) was 'International Ask A Curator Day'? It's not quite clear who made it so but 17 Australian museums and galleries seem to have jumped on board joining 100s of other organisations from 22 different countries to answer any questions the general public wanted to throw their way.

The aim of the project was for the public to have access to curators via Twitter for the day. Some organisations like Powerhouse decided to use Facebook instead as it let them answer questions more fully and is already their most active social networking platform. (This interesting post from the fresh + newer team gives you more insight into their involvement and how it fits in with their overall social media strategy). It's a bit early to tell yet how successful it was but if it becomes an annual event perhaps we could jump on board next year?

How to Make History Interesting...

It's not always easy to think of ways to make history engaging for kids...

Tate Online

While we await the new version of our EMu Intranet site, it may be useful to take a look at The Tate's online database. This operates in a very similar manner to the IMu set up we will be using, and includes many similar design features.

Have a test drive here

The overall look and feel will obviously be different, but the built-in functionality is very similar; simple search and advanced search tabs, and the saved objects (known as My Collections in our version).

Tate also use a really interesting Subject classification page - which allows users to browse without any prior knowledge of the collection content. Our "Browse Collections" functionality will be implemented using the Narratives records to provide multiple ways for users to discover our collection overviews.

Also of interest on the Tate website is a detailed explanation of their ongoing digitisiation project - Insight: digitising the Tate Collection - which is well worth a read.

Experiments with Learning

Whilst exploring the Powerhouse blog Fresh + New(er) on a boring tram journey, I stumbled on another interesting post by Seb Chan on their recent experiment with using QR codes on Object labels. Similar to barcodes, QR codes are those little square pixelated codes which are used by mobile devices to photograph or 'scan' an embedded code which looks up an URL (much easier than typing a hideously long url).

What struck me in this post was the powerhouses willingness to experiment and test a new process so that the organisation can learn from the mistakes they may make - rather than just outsourcing the mistakes and the learning... read his comments here.

As Nick recently suggested, it might be useful for us to include Registration Numbers on our Object Labels, and in time when the whole EMu catalogue goes public on the Web, we could consider adding URLs to the labels as a way to provide visitors with access to more detailed information. This would also help redirect people to our website and raise awareness of our collections online facility.

Key to the City

Photo: Louis Armstrong House Museum

Key to the City is a clever project created by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. To be part of the project members of the public are invited to go (with a friend) to a kiosk in Times Square. Here friends bestow keys on each other and the adventure begins. The key may be for a back door, front gate, community garden, graveyard or museum in all five New York buroughs. The keys open spaces usually not accessible to the general public.

Imagine all the interesting doors you could open in the Arts Centre?

fresh + new(er)

This is the blog I mentioned at the staff meeting this morning. It's called Fresh + New(er) and is written by Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse. If you have any interest at all in digital media and museums then this is a great place to find out what's happening at the cutting edge. If you want a short-cut into the site use the 'Categories' on the right sidebar to dip into areas that interest you most or check out this post about the digital strategy for The 80s Are Back exhibition.

Fresh + New(er) was originally set up as an internal 'repository and sounding board' and is now one of the top 10 most visited sections of the Powerhouse website. I think the disclaimer from the organisation is also an interesting feature allowing Seb and his team the freedom to talk about things that may never happen, went wrong etc without it reflecting on the 'brand'.

If you like what you see why not subscribe by email (also on right-hand sidebar)? It is not a daily or even weekly blog so you won't be bombarded with emails and you can save them or print them out to read later.

Reference Library now in EMu

As I write this post, over 5000 records for our Research Library Collection are being imported into the Bibliography Module of EMu...at last!

Our books have recently been catalogued in Libraries Australia, the National Library Database. These same records are also displayed to the public via the free online combined libraries portal called TROVE. These records have now been imported into the EMu Bibliography Module to enable the physical location of the books to be tracked - as the Library Books will be divided between the Collection Store and the Research Service in the Ballet Centre.

The EMu Bibliography Module has been designed to support citations and references of any sort of material (websites, maps, aerial photography, catalogues, journals) - and not just the material which we hold a copy of.

Each type of publication has its own tab, so choosing "Book" will activate the Book tab, and choosing "website" will activate a different tab with the necessary fields to reference a website.

It is important to understand that all items held in the Reference Library are all classified with the publication type "Archived Resource / Library Holding".

The information that could be imported into EMu was quite minimal: Title, Author, Call Number, ISBN, Publication and Imprint data. Although the EMu records lack some of the additional details that would make records more easily discoverable (no Subjects or Keywords) this has been overcome by providing a hyperlink to the full TROVE record. You can activate this from any Archived Resource Record by choosing the Tools Menu > Resource > Search Trove. (EMu has been configured to copy the Title field to Trove and search for a match). Trove is still the most appropriate place to search for books unless you know the title or author.

So in summary -

• Trove should be used to browse or search for records if you are not sure what you are looking for


• Everything in our library is treated as an Archived Resource / Library Holding in EMu Bibliography


• All other Types in Bibliography are for referencing externally held material


• Library Holding records contain a direct link to the full Trove record (Tools>Resources)

And as always, I'm happy to show anyone how to use this module

Rowena

'Object of the Week'

Image originally posted on Powerhouse's 'Object of the Week 'blog

In the last post I mentioned the Powerhouse blog 'Object of the Week' and recently they had a very interesting post on Lady Sonia McMahon's famous dress that got me thinking. There are so many instances when we could do this sort of thing to make our collection relevant. When 'Hey, Hey It's Saturday' was re-launched we could have done something on Ozzie; we could something on Lauris Elms as the winner of the Green Room Awards; something on Robert Helpmann, Kristian Fredrickson, Bell Shakespeare the list goes on...

In many instance the text is already written (as captions etc) and increasingly we have good images on EMu so something like this would be very achievable. I know that Ro has been working very hard on the new version of EMu which makes web publishing much easier so perhaps that might provide some opportunities. What do you think?

Social media and its impact on curators...

Late last year Erica Dicker of the Powerhouse undertook an international survey on the question of 'social media and its impact on curators'. The results are now in and make for interesting reading. In her paper she discusses how the Powerhouse built up a 'team of curatorial bloggers' to create the museum's first blog 'Object of the Week'. She then goes into some detail about how the blog was conceived and executed and what lessons they learnt along the way (lessons for us all).

The second part of the paper is focussed on presenting the results of the survey which includes insights into curators' understanding of social media, the reasons they do/don't use it and the ways in which it is changing the traditional role of the curator. The paper is longish but I think it's worth reading.

Erica will be presenting her paper in April at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

Caz

PS: The second anonymous quote in the paper is from me!

Online Collections - Opening the Floodgates

As a follow up to Rowena's post below you should check out this interesting post from Brooklyn Museum which helps to explain the philosophy behind releasing all possible records even if they are of varying quality.

Caz

Demystifying the Collections

For over a year we have been trying to get some momentum behind a new Intranet site for the Collections catalogue, and it looks like we are getting very close now!

Our aim is to create a simple online search environment (google-style if you like) that will enable the rest of the organisation to explore the contents of our collections without the need to use the relatively complex EMu interface and without using up our limited number of licences.

Significant resources were put into establishing a basic catalogue of skeleton records during the Electronic Cataloguing Project. We've now got alot of basic information about most of the collection. This approach - a little bit of information about the majority of things - has been a major shift from our previous focus when it came to electronic cataloguing - earlier web projects had focussed on creating complete information about a few selected things.

So what exactly is a "skeleton" or Collection Management record?

• Who did it come from? (Collection Name, link to full Accession Lot details)


• What is it? (Classification, Type, Name, Title )


• Who, What, Where does it relate to? (Keywords)


• What does it look like? (Description, materials, dimensions, reference image)


• Where is it? (Current & Permanent Location)

In a nutshell, the skeleton record should provide staff or researchers with enough basic information to know if an object is relevant to their needs, and provides a path to find out more detailed information about an item should you decide it is relevant.

Having a dedicated web environment for staff to browse a read only limited view of our catalogue will help to demystify what is held down in the archives. Another aim of the Intranet site is to test our skeleton data on real users. Only a few fields will be published through the closed staff network, which helps reduce copyright complications as we are not making images available to the public.

Knowledge Engineering, (aka KE) have developed some really useful new features in the web package that we'll be implementing - they've also jumped on the bandwagon and called it iMu (aka Internet Museum). The most useful change in functionality is the overall use of the Narratives Module to link records together and provide a context. So rather than just publishing individual catalogue records and expecting them each to contain enough information to stand-alone, records can now be grouped into relevant themes for browsing using the Narratives Module. Much more useful from a users perspective...



I'm hoping to have a demo version up and running soon to show you all what is possible.

Mashups

Is this term still troubling you? Does the word 'mashup' still conjure up images of inappropriate heads stuck on inappropriate bodies? Well think again. There are lots of different types of mashups and these are just a few examples.

This project by VJ Sustenance was part of Allsorts Online: the collecting sector, academia, the arts and the media in Adelaide last year. VJ Lynne Sanderson used the Australian Newtork for Art & Technology Collection to create a digital work inspired by and shown in the Mortlock Chamber of the State Library of South Australia.

Another exciting site for mashup artists is the ABC Beta site 'Pool'. 'Pool' is a participatory site where the public can upload, download and mashup their own content with that of the ABC to make interesting new work. It is a bit hard to describe but if you have a bit of a poke around on the site it will slowly start to make sense!

The other site that has interesting mashup projects is the Federal government site MashupAustralia. This site was set up to encourage people to make use of the datasets which government are currently putting on open access. Check out the Powerhouse's Flip Explorer on this page. I put 'dance' in as a search term and ended up with some lovely 1930s glass-plate negative images of Sydney ballrooms.

Some of the other mashups on this site include a collating of various datasets to create a map you can use interactively to find your nearest toilet, doctor or school so you can see that once the basic data is released people find all sorts of interesting ways of using it!

Caz

Of Love & War

Uploaded to Flickr Commons on November 12, 2009by Australian War Memorial collection

As we have a wartime exhibition idea on the books I thought you might be interested to know that there are a number of new exhibitions about on this topic. They are not performing arts related of course but they do examine the social impact of war. The first is Of Love and War at the Australian War Memorial. The exhibition features photographs, artworks, letters and keepsakes and looks at the impact of war on relationships and 'the ways in which Australians incorporated affairs of the heart into their wartime lives'. If you can't make it to Canberra it is worth checking out the photostream on Flickr Commons.

Closer to home you might like to see Over-Paid, Over-Sexed & Over-Here? at City Gallery in the Melbourne Town Hall (this link takes you to the associated website). This exhibition explores the myths surrounding the American marines stationed in Melbourne during 1943 and has been curated by Kate Darian Smith of Melbourne University who worked with us on the Andrea Lemon Circus Project.

The last one is in the Western Visitors Centre at the Shrine of Remembrance. Threads of Connection looks at the orginality and creativity behind the many embroidered textiles created both on the homefront and on the frontline from World War I to today.

Enjoy!

Did You Know?

Claude the Crow, Performing Arts Collection, the Arts Centre. Gift of Richard Bence, 1997

Did you know that before his work was exhibited by the NGV or by Charles Saatchi in the 'Sensation' show, Ron Mueck was the voice of Shirl's Neighbourhood's Claude the Crow?

Mueck not only provided Claude's voice (and personality) but modelled all the puppets including Greenfinger the Garden Gnome whose face is based on producer Richard Bence who visited the Research Service this week. Greenfinger's voice was provided by Julian's step-father Christie Cooney who was also a member of the folk band, The Cobbers. Talk about seven degrees of separation!

Caz

Licence 2 Test Drive

Last year I spoke to some of you about an interesting article I read on maNexus called 'Back at Reality Ranch: Social Media Pioneers and Defenders of the Fort'. It discusses the gap between the Government's position that all government departments should be embracing social media as part of their normal work practices versus many museum workers (especially curators - his words not mine!!!) reluctance to get on board.

As an example of an organisation that is getting on board he cited the State Library of Queensland who have encouraged their staff to complete a program they have set up known as 'Licence 2 Test Drive'. Basically this is a six step self-guided online course that takes you through lessons and activities on blogging, RSS feeds, wikis, photo sharing, social networking and tagging. The course is set up to be completed in 1 hour per fortnight over 12 weeks.

I have had a little explore and think that it is a really great way to get quite a lot of knowledge under your belt very quickly. Obviously we would have to customise the rules a bit for ourselves. For example, in the first lesson you have to create your own blog on the Web but there are simple steps you can take to make it private. We would also not be saving things to the Licence 2 Test Drive site but rather monitoring things ourselves.

Even if you just take the time to watch the videos and click through all the links I guarantee you will learn the answers to many of those questions you have been too afraid to ask! There have been discussions about putting this activity on our Performance Plans when we re-assess them in the coming months so you will also be getting brownie points there too!

In the meantime, have a peek and start the New Year by exploring some unknown territory.

Caz