We are conducting the first comprehensive survey looking at museum blogs and blogging practices. If you write for, or operate a museum or museum-related blog, please fill out the survey on the Museum Blogs website.

Seb Chan (Powerhouse Museum) and Myself (Ideum) are the conducting the survey. The results will be presented in a session, Radical Trust: The state of the museum blogosphere at the Museums and Web Conference in San Francisco in April 2007. We will also link to our paper from both the Ideum blog and the Powerhouse’s fresh + new blog.

The purpose of the survey is to capture a snapshot of the technologies, aims, policies, uses, and impact of blogging in the museum sector. 2006 has been an amazing year for the field, what were 20 blogs back in January is now a community of nearly 100 museum-related blogs. The results from the survey will help organizations plan and justify future projects utilizing blogs and other social technologies. Please feel free to repost or otherwise pass this on.

Update (12-19-06): There’s a a discussion forming over on the fresh + new blog where this story is cross-posted.
Update (12-21-06): We have 31 responses to the survey and there is a running total of the multiple choice questions. If you run a museum blog and haven’t filled out the survey please do. Update (01-31-06) We are not longer accepting survey responses.
(04-09-07) There’s more on the paper and the presentation for Museums and the Web here.

Gyroscope, an exhibit design firm based in Oakland, CA has just released a report on how museums are using “new communication technologies to enhance and extend the visitor experience.”

The paper Museums in Transition: Emerging Technologies as Tools for Free-Choice Learning was commissioned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Based on reviewing available publications along with interviews of twenty-four museum professionals (including myself), the report takes a comprehensive look at how museums are using Web 2.0 technologies, handheld devices, and other innovations. Museums in Transition is available as a PDF file on the Gyroscope website.

As museums and other informal educators continue to experiment with Web 2.0 technologies, the concept of “colonizing” existing social networking spaces is emerging as a viable option for institutions both large and small. Back in October at the Association of Science-Technology Center’s conference, we discussed the concept. More recently, in my course at University of Victoria and then at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand, I’ve come across more interesting examples. In addition, I’ve begun to compile some of the benefits and drawbacks of such an approach.

The benefits
There are literally hundreds of millions of visitors and active users in various social networking sites on the Web. On Wikipedia there is a List of social networking websites which includes a User count. Even with MySpace’s claim of 100 million users in dispute, 43 million users is impressive and hard to ignore.

Almost all of these social networking sites are free to join and very easy to use (no technical expertise required). Many of the sites include younger users, which many museums are trying to connect with. Although, it should be mentioned that this is changing fast as we’ve seen from a recent study on MySpace users. Also, entering these spaces and being successful in them, can help promote the museum and drive visitors to the main web site.

Drawbacks
There are some serious challenges for those institutions brave enough enter these spaces. First of all there are serious identity issues, ads (some of which might be considered inappropriate), and the issue of resources in maintaining multiple web identities. The fact that many of these sites may be short-lived is also a concern. In looking beyond the more established spaces, how much time would you want to invest in start-up social networking site?

There are copyright issues: who owns the content that is posted on these sites? Finally, there is the persistent issue of measuring success. I think the museum field does a fairly lousy job of measuring the impact of our various websites and online exhibits. How do we measure the success of a presence in Flickr, YouTube, or MySpace?

Pioneers
There are few very interesting examples of museum’s who’ve taken the plunge and jumped into these social spaces.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) has a MySpace page. MOCA’s Web Generalist, Bret Nicely recently shared MOCA’s experience in developing and maintaining their presence in MySpace. They have a phenomenal 6,377 friends at this point. MySpace being an Los Angeles start-up contacted MOCA, so they have a more “formal” arrangment than other museums who apparently have followed their lead. MOCA has been in MySpace since June of this year. They’ve used their MySpace page to promote many museum events, in particular their Night Vision series of concerts, which explains how Z-Trip, The Crystal Method, and others are listed are their “friends.” In recent weeks, the numbers of friends have jumped with a few hundred being added each week.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Zeke’s Gallery has a list that includes about two-dozen other Art Museums with pages in MySpace. It was just updated on November 27.

The Ontario Science Centre has begun posting videos in YouTube, take a look at the Plasma Ball video. Posted as an experiment two months ago, the Plasma Ball video is fairly popular with about 1000 views, the others have anywhere from a couple dozen to a couple hundred views. Columbus Science Center has followed and have created their own channel just three weeks ago. The Tech Museum of Innovation has a channel too, and Ideum helped add the videos from the Future of Science Conference a month ago. So far we’ve haven’t had very many visitors.

The National Library of Australia’s project PictureAustralia makes extensive use of Flickr, visitors have contributed over 12,000 images through the online photosharing site. Their People, places and events group is worth checking out. Tony Boston from the National Library presented at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand. The library has a formal agreement with Yahoo! in Australia, who helped promote their relationship on the Yahoo! Website.

Currently Ideum is working on a project with the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. We’re using a Flickr mashup to create a gallery and online activity. The site focuses on the 20th Century American photographer, John Collier Jr. The Maxwell will be posting around 500 high-resolution images to Flickr. At the moment, you can visit a John Collier Jr.’s Flickr site and see a test-bed which includes around 40 images.

The choice to use Flickr was an easy one. All of the photographs are in the public domain and were taken for the Office of War Information (OWI) in the 1940s. Flickr will allow us to connect with a new audience on their site. Plus, we don’t have to build and host a database, we simply connect to the images on Flickr through the mashup. On our own site, the gallery section works much like any collection we might have developed, except it was easier and cheaper, allowing us to put resources in other activities. We’ll have much more to report about this project later this month and in ‘07.

Finally, back in October there was the first museum meeting in SecondLife at the International Spaceflight Museum (the first museum in SecondLife?). It will be interesting to see what happens in this unique 3D environment.

What’s Next?
We’ll continue to see more examples as museums experiment in these spaces. I think museums will increasingly use mashups to add value to their own sites. Still, there a some various serious issues to work out. This approach isn’t for every museum, the particular social networking site needs to be the right match for the project and the institution. Copyright and identity issues along with a lack of “trust” in these communities will continue to hold many back. There are no universal solutions or “best practices” to follow here.

If anyone has additional examples of museums entering these spaces please feel free comment. It would be great to see how others are approaching this. I hope to post more on our own efforts later in the month.

This is going to be my last post on sessions from the conference. There were a lot of other very interesting speakers, I’ve just run out of time and need to catch my plane back!

Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented on the Steve project. Susan is the General Manager for Collections Information Planning for The Met. Steve for those of you not familiar is a social tagging project involving mostly American Art Museums. The impetus for the project was that visitors were having trouble finding works of art on the Met’s online collection. Susan mentioned, the “semantic gap between the public and scholars” that descriptions written by the museum didn’t, in some cases, match the ones that visitors were looking for.

Susan gave an example of renaissance painting that a visitor emailed an inquiry about. The visitor could provide lots of detailed information, but none of it matched the descriptions the museum gave to the painting. Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project was developed to help address problems like this one.
Steve is a collaborative project, and the product is an open source software package. Currently, version 1.0 is available and apparently some developers are beginning to modify and expand Steve’s features.

Susan continued by mentioning that the group has received funding to conduct two years of research on social tagging. They are going to be looking at questions exploring the nature of tags: “Are tags real words?” “Do they match existing descriptions?” “Are they terms that searchers use?” “Are they appropriate to the work? Accurate?”

The group is going to share the results using the “open data model” –providing all of the materials to anyone who is interested. I look forward to seeing what they come up with. There’s lot’s more about the project on the Steve website and even a discussion list that you can join.

In the afternoon of Day 2, Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney presented on their innovative collections database. Seb started out by taking about visitor expectations have changed when comes to what they might be able to find on museum website and how they might browse collections.
Seb cited Amazon and Last FM as examples of sites that provide visitors with “recommended” items, assisting users to browse materials within a collection as influential sites in developing their own collections database. The Powerhouse’s early experiences in developing electronic exhibits on the museum floor which accessed their internal collections database also helped move their thinking along.

The Powerhouse Museum Collection 2.0 employs social technologies such as tagging and as well as search tracking. The search tracking feature is perhaps the most interesting one, providing “similar searches” for visitors based on the keywords that other visitors have used in accessing the collection. (This is a feature that we may want to incorporate for the ExhibitFiles project to help visitors find records in what will eventually be a very large collection.)

Since the Collections launch in June 14th 2006, the traffic to the Powerhouse museum website has nearly doubled and amazingly 95% of all available objects were visited at least once in the first month. Users have added 3,000 user tags of which about 100 tags had to be “moderated” mostly for spelling errors. In addition, the Powerhouse has seen tripling of public inquires including the correction of old records.

Seb finished up by showing Powerhouse’s Design Hub website, which has design-related objects at its core. Currators provide narratives discussing items in the collection. The search function brings back articles, collection items, and even items from other collections. They hope to add 30 new collections from other museums to design hub by 2008.

If you read this blog regularly, you might remember that Seb presented via video conference in the New Web course that I taught in Victoria, BC a couple of weeks ago. Jim Groom did a great job of summarizing the presentation and discussion on his bavatuesdays blog, The Powerhouse Museum: The Name Says it All.