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.

The second session on day 2 at the National Digital Forum here in Wellington, NZ focused mostly on the use of portable devices in museums. A highlight was the presentation by Hiroyuki Arita-Kikutani from the National Science Museum, Tokyo. His presentation was entitled, Mobile guide systems in museums through the use of portable game devices.

Developed as part of the “e-Japan Stratey,” he discussed a trial using PlayStation Portable (PSP) devices. Between PSP and Nintendo DS, there are over 4 million of these devices in use in Japan and both devices have built in wireless capabilities. In the trial, the Museum used standard HTML pages (with graphics) to create custom content pages, optimized to fit the 4″ screen of the PSP. The trial was conducted in the museum’s New Annex in the The History of Life on Earth- Human Beings in Coexistence with Nature exhibition space.

The results of the trial were mixed. While some found the devices helpful others found the devices too heavy, hard to operate, or they found the text on the screen too small to read easily. Visitors who were surveyed, said that they would like to see more interactive content (games) and video or audio clips. They also expressed a desire to to use Nintendo DS, which apparently is a more popular device.

I have to say, I’m not much of a fan of devices that come between visitors and the objects and other people found in museums, but as these devices become more popular it makes sense for us to experiment. I haven’t really thought much about PSP or Nintendo as web-platforms before today. There could be a lot of possiblities here.

A packed day today at the National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ. Here’s the first of probably a couple of posts as I’m going through my notes.

This morning’s keynote was delivered by Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled, Let’s see what happens if … Experimenting with emerging technologies on the V&A website. Toby presented the story behind many of the innovative things the museum has been up to over the last few years. Perhaps the most compelling part of this very interesting presentation focused on the Design Your Own Arts and Crafts Tile interactive.

While it was designed as a creative tool to allow visitors to create their own tiles, it wasn’t long before visitors began to use it to connect with each other. The Design Your Own Arts and Crafts Tile interactive provided only a limited text area for adding titles to tiles that users created, but over time some visitors used these text areas and their tile designs to communicate with each other. In one instance, after a few exchanges, a visitor passed along their email address. Since the title text area doesn’t allow “@” symbols and allows for a very limited number of characters–this had to be creatively communicated. It’s a great example of how even a limited suite of (interesting) tools can still allow for innovation, and how visitors will use your site in ways that you can’t always anticipate.

Toby wrapped up by talking more broadly about the how other museums in the UK are using (or not using) Web 2.0 tools. A highlight here was the Institute of Contemporary Arts which is making extensive use of blogging. Apparently lots of staff, everyone from the Director of the museum, down has been blogging at the site.

A lively Q & A following Toby’s presentation focused, not surprisingly on internal issues of institutional support and sustainability, as well as the moderation of user-created content. These are topics that many museums (and others) are struggling with as they begin to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is hosting the Digital Forum here in the capital city of Wellington. It’s a beautiful space, although honestly, I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to check out the exhibits (perhaps today). From what I’ve seen the museum contains a mix of art and artifacts with a focus of the taonga (“treasures” in the Maori language) of New Zealand. They also have a Kid’s Zone which contains hands-on exhibits and programs for early learners.

The first day of the Digital Forum focused mostly on collections and archives. I presented the keynote, Museums and the Web 2.0 in the morning and then caught a few of the sessions later in the day. I missed a few sessions and haven’t have much time to blog as my luggage (with my camera) showed up three days late! So that’s kept me rather busy.

In the morning I saw Virginia Gow from the National Library of New Zealand present on Matapihi, which allows visitors to search for multimedia (mostly photos) from across heritage collections.

In afternoon, there a was a session that focused on various Maori information initiatives. Te Anau Tuiono presented his experiences at on the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. He talked about the importance of including the needs of indigenous peoples into a UN Declaration. Teanau Tuiono also mentioned someone closer to home, he cited a summit address entitled, “Information is not Knowledge” by Joe Shirely Jr. (the PDF is here) who is the President of The Navajo Nation.

In the same session, Haami Piripi from the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori (The Maori Language Commission) shared with us an amazing open source Maori dictionary, matapuna.org. The idea of this unique database is ensure that the Maori language is one of use. As Haami explained the Maori language is still in danger, as the strongest Maori speakers tend to be older and geographically dispersed.

Today, there are a number of interesting sessions with more of a museum focus. I will post some of the highlights from these presentations soon.

Tomorrow I’m off to New Zealand for the National Digital Forum 2006: Participating with Communities: Digital opportunities, collaborations and celebration. I’ll be presenting a keynote entitled, Museums and Web 2.0.

Other folks from abroad such as Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, Toby Travis from the Victoria Albert Museum, and Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will also be presenting, along with a number of speakers from New Zealand. It should be a very interesting week concluding with an “unconference” of informal interactive sessions.

My speech will focus on some of the same issues I presented on back in February in Ottawa for the Canadian Heritage Information Network. However, the changes in the field since then have been remarkable and there are many new developments to talk about.

As the year began, there were only about 20 museum or museum-related blogs. Now there are nearly 90 listed in the museum blogs directory. In general, museums seem much more interested in the potential that social websites and other Web 2.0 technologies present. Also, we are just starting to see museums entering into existing social spaces such MySpace, YouTube, SecondLife, and Flickr. Obviously these new developments raise a host of new issues for the field.

I’ll post next from New Zealand and share some of the findings from the conference. You may want to check out Fresh + New blog next week too, as I imagine Seb Chan will be posting during the conference as well.

I’ve finally found the time to put together quick post about the course I taught last week at the University of Victoria up in British Columbia. The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World focused on Web 2.0 technologies and techniques and their potential uses in the museum world.

While the heart of the week-long course was comprised of face-to-face discussions and small-group design “challenges,” we utilized a number of Web 2.0 technologies as well. Of course we had a blog (The New Web), a flickr pool, a set of del.icio.us bookmarks, and even a Shelfari site for reference books. (The bookmarks are perhaps one of the more interesting resources that came out of the course, over 100 links in all.)

Also added to the mix were two guest speakers joining us via video conference. Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum talked about their exciting Collections Database, which includes the ability for visitors to tag objects in the collection. Seb also shared with us the story behind their growing collection of blogs; fresh + new, Great Wall of China Blog, Views from the Sydney Observatory, and Free Radicals.

Kevin von Appen who helped develop the Ontario Science Centre’s innovative RedShift Now website explained the connection between the museum floor and the RedShift site. (Kevin is presenting in the picture at the top of this post.) We also discussed the Science Centre’s recent posting of videos on YouTube (check out the plasma ball video). They are one of the first science museums in the world to do so.

One the course participants, Jim Groom has put together a couple of detailed posts about each of these guest speakers in his Bavatuesdays blog. Take a look at The Powerhouse Museum: the Name Says it All and The Ontario Science Center’s “RedShift Now” Jim describes each video conference and discussion much better than I could.

It was great to get away for a week and to have the opportunity explore and discuss some of the profound changes that are happening on the Web and what it means for museums. Having a mix of museum professionals, educators, and students made the experience all the more enjoyable, and the discussions and presentations were quite lively and interesting.

I hope to post more about some the ideas that came out of our week together in the next week or so, but for now I’m busy getting ready for the National Digital Forum in New Zealand. More on that very soon.