Streaming and downloadable video clips from the National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand are available on their site. Both days from the conference are covered, so there’s a lot of material here that’s relevant to museums, libraries and archives. My keynote speech, Museums and the Web 2.0 is included, along with those from other international and local presenters. I summarized some of the highlights from the sessions that I attended back in November, check out the National Digital Forum category to see all of the postings. Seb Chan over at the Powerhouse Museum’s fresh + new blog also covered the forum.

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.