AAM Goes Virtual!

by Allyson Lazar

Can’t make it to this year’s AAM conference in Los Angeles? Never fear–this year AAM will also be hosting a virtual conference!

The two-day online conference will consist of nine sessions selected by the Standing Professional Committees (SPCs) on technology, couriering, visitor experience, planning, exhibition development and more!

But perhaps what is most exciting is that, despite the fact that access will be remote and virtual, attendees will still have opportunities to meet peers, share information and expand their networks, including through virtual happy hours at the end of each day. So what are you waiting for? Sign up now!

Travel is so broadening…

by Alice Parman

A few years ago some University of Oregon students and I worked on ideas for an exhibit on the history of law enforcement in Lane County. This was part of an annual Interpretive Exhibits Studio course held at the Lane County Historical Museum.

Lady Justice figured prominently in our exhibit plans. She once stood inside the Lane County Courthouse in my hometown, Eugene, Oregon. Sadly, this historic building succumbed to urban renewal in the 1960s. Fragments (the courthouse bell, the judge’s bench, a staircase, and Lady Justice) are part of the museum’s collection.

Our Lady Justice looks like a second grade teacher dressed up for Halloween, right?

Imagine my astonishment when I recently encountered a very different Lady Justice in front of the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio, Texas.

Who else out there has a Lady Justice in your collection, or in front of your county courthouse? And what does SHE look like?

Going Mobile, 2: Technology with Titus Bicknell

The Balboa Park Online Collaborative hosted a workshop on February 16 and 17, 2010 on mobile interpretive tools and strategy. Day Two on technology featured Titus Bicknell, Director of Information Technology for Experius Academy. You can find a detailed wiki page for this workshop here, including all of Nancy and Titus Bicknell’s slides. See this post for Nancy Proctor’s presentation and video interview.

Here’s my interview with Titus, that helps give an overview of his talk (minus the highly technical content):

Titus suggested that you begin with what the audience requires in terms of content, and balance that with your technology infrastructure and business model. Do you have in-house capabilities? A central technology resource (like Balboa Park does)? Will you be using external consultants or services? Are you for-profit? Nonprofit? Do you have to demonstrate ROI? (Later, he talked about the importance of understanding your technology infrastructure if you are going to create a mobile tour or app. If the digital assets your tour needs to display are located in servers off-site, it might take forever for those assets to load on a phone in the gallery.) All these questions should feed into your decision-making process.

Titus offered a complex diagram for helping you decide on choosing a platform. (Slide 21 of his slide deck.) First consider: Is the visitor going to provide the device, or is the museum?

If the visitor provides:

• No device with them (they visit your website and possibly download something in advance)
• Stupid phone (they can do a cell phone tour)
• Smart phone (they can download/play a podcast, use an app, or visit your website in mobile view)

If the museum provides:

1. No-tech (map, wall text)
2. Low-tech (provide a device with a pre-loaded audio/video tour)
3. Hi-tech (wi-fi hotspot for downloading apps, tours, using social media, etc)

The goal is to find the perfect match for your site, given all these factors.

Keep in mind that visitors will judge you on what you offer, not what you don’t, and that they expect 100% accuracy. They won’t fault you for not having an iPhone app, but if you provide one and it doesn’t work, they’ll be unhappy. They don’t expect you to offer a wand or iTouch with a mobile tour loaded on it, but if you do, it has to work properly 100% of the time.

Now for some tech stuff, Titus’ Manifesto for mobile platforms:

1. Content should not be required to be altered or created for a platform. That is, your assets (video, photos, etc.) should not have to be customized to fit a specific device, because the device will change.
2. Assembly of assets should be managed by a metadata layer. This metadata layer can easily change for a new platform.
3. Platforms should manipulate assets for optimized display automatically, filtered to ensure a good viewing experience. For example, a photo in your collections management system would be resized to fit an iPod screen if that’s what the user is holding, without affecting the original in your system.
4. Store assets in the most appropriate way for the asset, not the end content. For example, keep the original photos as raw files or TIFFs, so you always have that high-quality image to go back to.
5. Be technically promiscuous to achieve the best solution for managing and presenting content. (Don’t use only one technology, as that may not be the best solution for you.)

Make the most of what you already have in your collections management system; it’s low-hanging fruit that can be turned into mobile content fairly easily.

Use as much off the shelf as you can (for 80% of the work) and then customize the remaining 20%. You want your customizing to show on the front end (to the visitor). Don’t customize the back end, as it slows down your staff members who have to re-learn the interface. This is one example of why WordPress might be a good platform for you, as many people are already using WordPress for blogs and are familiar with the administrative panel and how it works.

If you are doing things in-house, document it. Don’t assume people know how to do it. It’s very easy to cut this step and you WILL regret it later. If you have a tech firm or consultants doing it for you, make sure that full documentation is part of their scope of work.

Two platforms he recommends are Drupal and WordPress. They are both powerful, widely supported, and open source. If you’re just getting started, start with WordPress. You can migrate it later into something more powerful, like Drupal. There’s been a full discussion of the relative merits of Drupal vs. WordPress on the Museum Computer Network’s listserv.

He then built a quick WordPress site while we watched (in about 15 minutes), including the plug-in for the mobile view, which people could then see on their cell phones as he worked. The advantage to this is that you can get it up quickly, keep customizing, it works on any PDA, and it doesn’t have to go through the iTunes store approval process like an app does.

This was a terrific two days and gave me some useful tools to think about incorporating technology and media into museum visitor experiences. My thanks to Titus for taking the time to do the video interview, and to Rich Cherry of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative and Paige Simpson of the Balboa Park Learning Institute for bringing such stellar speakers to San Diego.

Going Mobile in Museums: Nancy Proctor

The Balboa Park Online Collaborative hosted a workshop on February 16 and 17, 2010 on mobile interpretive tools and strategy. Day One featured Nancy Proctor, head of New Media for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nancy manages the Museum Mobile project, a blog and wiki for collaborative work on mobile interpretation in museums. You can find an exceedingly detailed wiki page for this workshop here, including all of Nancy and Titus Bicknell’s slides.

Nancy began by reminding us that it’s not about the technology, a sentiment that Titus echoed the next day. The goal is to go from headphones to microphones, from a one-way broadcast to a two-way dialogue with visitors.

Why mobile? By 2020, it’s estimated that most people’s primary access to the Net will be via a mobile device, not a PC.

Her strategy:

1. Define your target audience
2. Look at your mission and key messages
3. Define your outcomes: what do you want visitors to know, feel, and do?
4. What platforms are they already using?

All of this should sound very familiar to anyone involved with interpretive planning, and I loved to see how she integrated best practices into the notion of mobile interpretation, incorporating possible mobile interpretive tools alongside ones that are already in place and already working. Nancy credits Kate Haley Goldman of ILI for her early ideas on this methodology.

Early in the day, we paired up and pulled out a significant object that we were instructed to bring from home. [Note: the "significant object" discussion exercise is one used by SmartHistory's Steven Zucker & Beth Harris when they do workshops with people on their dialogue technique.]

Without telling our partner about our object, we listed as many questions as we had about theirs. Then we asked, and answered, the questions. We grouped the questions into formal, functional, relational, and emotional categories, and discussed how this got us thinking about the objects. We used this warm-up for the question mapping exercise.

Nancy also introduced the notion of soundtrack vs. sound bite, which was an interesting way of looking at chunks of interpretive content. See the video below for her definition of each.

She introduced us to a useful tool called question mapping. We were sent out into Balboa Park after lunch and asked to find (or draw) a map of a museum space, then write down every question we had on that map, locating the questions on the map. Here is a portion of my map, done at the San Diego Museum of Art:

Some of my questions were:

• RE: nude sculpture: Does she mind being naked?
• Why is this room peach?
• Why did he use turquoise in a winter painting?
• Why all the dead birds?

Then we came back and created a very large matrix, which incorporated our questions as one of the columns. (See an example of a completed matrix on Slide 62 in her slide deck.) Other columns include: target audience, key messages, themes, location (in the museum), type of interp (soundtrack/soundbite/link), voice, feedback option, platform.

While this 11″ X 17″ sheet was a little unwieldy to work with on our laps, I found it to be useful in helping me think through possible themes, as well as getting creative with potential voices, links, and possible ways to get visitors involved.

One example I came up with is the theme of the use of color by artists. This theme could lead you throughout the museum via podcast, audio tour, iPhone app, labels, scavenger hunt, etc. Voices on audio tracks could include painters, curators, exhibit designers, color designers, and someone from the Pantone Color Institute, who forecast color trends each year.

Possible ways to get the audience involved might be “name that color,” vote on your favorite color, colorize a digital painting, try another color in this painting, send a postcard of this painting, or (this doesn’t exist) create your own custom color nail polish in the museum store.

Here’s my interview with Nancy:

If you are interested in the potential of gaming in museums, including the game the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted called Ghosts of a Chance, as well as a compilation of recent alternate reality games (ARGs), see this blog post. If you’re interested in the potential of gaming in museums, read this article about Columbia College’s work on constructive/collaborative gaming.

All in all, this was a terrific first day and gave me some useful tools to think about incorporating technology and media into museum visitor experiences. My thanks to Nancy for taking the time to do the video interview, and to Rich Cherry of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative and Paige Simpson of the Balboa Park Learning Institute for bringing such stellar speakers to San Diego.

Helping Others Help Us: More on AAM L.A. and Amy Tan

Networks improve when they echo each other — more copies keep things safe and when you help others, it helps you.  So WMA is pleased to keep posting on the upcoming AAM Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.  Allyson Lazar put up the Mountain Plains survey; because WMA’s recent survey was so important for us.  And we will post more on the upcoming California Association of Museums Meeting.  Here’s more from AAM’s Dewey Blanton on one of this year’s keynote speakers:

Amy Tan Sees Museums as Keepers of Our Heritages

The AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo™ is yearly treated to the wisdom of extraordinary keynote speakers. This year is no exception, as celebrated authors Julia Alvarez and Amy Tan will serve in that capacity in Los Angeles.

Tan is one of the most acclaimed novelists of the last decade, whose works include The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. Tan has also written successful children’s books, as well as an honored memoir, The Opposite of Fate. Born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, Tan’s work often delves into her Chinese culture and its embrace of ancestry and memory.

In a recent conversation with Museum magazine, Tan explained how museums can be integral to her inspiration.

“Whenever I go to a museum, it’s as though I am there with the people who lived at that time,” Tan said. “It’s almost as though I entered a time machine, especially when I see very intimate, very intricate little details of their lives. I often take those details and put them in my books. It may not be specifically the same detail I saw at the museum, but it triggers in me an element of memory, which . . . is what my fiction is often about.”

Amy Tan will share similar insights when she addresses the general session on Wednesday, May 26 at 10:30 a.m.

BIL and the Future

by Allyson Lazar

Thank you to the Museum of Latin American Art for hosting this year’s BIL conference last weekend!

Wait, what’s BIL, you ask? Ever heard of TED? No? Well, let’s start with TED.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and it is an annual conference that, to use its own language, is dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Each year, TED brings together some of the most eminent, prominent and impressive minds in the areas of technology, entertainment and design and gives them a strict 18 minute limit to share their ideas with the world. With the world? Yes, because even though actually attending TED is prohibitively expensive, the talks are disseminated for free via the Internet. The goal, again in the words of TED itself, is to build “a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.” Some of this year’s speakers include Bill Gates, Jaime Oliver, Sheryl Crow, Jane McGonigle, James Cameron and Sarah Silverman.

So that, in a nutshell, is TED. Big names with big ideas, scientists, artists, leaders, innovators, activists, thinkers.

BIL is a response to TED. Where TED costs a lot of money (registration is in the thousands of dollars), BIL costs $20 to attend. But the principle is still the same. BIL is about bringing people together to share ideas and innovations that are changing the world–or that will change the world–but it works on a smaller scale. So that is BIL in a nutshell: like TED, only affordable and with names you haven’t necessarily heard of…yet.

BIL calls itself an “unconference.” Having attended last weekend I can tell you that an “unconference” looks a lot like a regular conference, with speakers up on a stage, most of whom used PowerPoint. Since there was a strong emphasis on science and technology, there were very few technical difficulties and that was a nice change, but hardly the trademark of an “unconference.” What really made it an “unconference” is that the speakers list was apt to change and morph and grow because anyone can speak on any topic. They just have to sign up. Or not. They just have to be there and be willing to speak, really.

Each speaker has 20 minutes, period; if a speaker uses up his/her entire 20 minutes talking, then there is no q&a. Or, at least not in the main lecture room. People were encouraged to wander in and out throughout the presentations and strike up discussions outside in MOLAA’s lovely sculpture court.

Another big difference between BIL and more formal conferences (such as AAM or WMA) is that there were no lunch meetings, no business meetings, no formal evening events. There was no-host getting together at a bar afterwards for food and drinks to continue conversations, but no buses to transport people to and from the venue, no conference hotel. In addition, the final day of the conference people gathered in informal groups to enjoy local offerings such as hiking or whale watching and, again, keep the conversations going.

Since these extracurricular activities were all optional and pay-as-you-go, and the cost of the conference hall itself was donated (thanks, Microsoft!),  that is how BIL was able to keep the base cost of registration down at the unbelievably low price of $20. Less, if you were a speaker.

So why would museums and museum people be interested in all this jabbering about BIL and TED (yes, the naming of BIL was intentional) and unconferences? Two reasons.

The first is that information sharing and dissemination is changing. After all, this is a blog post. Five years ago, it might have been in an entirely different format. Ten years ago it certainly would have. Information sharing is transforming and we need to be thinking about how we want to share information in the future, about what kinds of formats are most effective and digestible. Do we value in-person information exchange or virtual? Perhaps some combination? Do we prefer formal twenty-minute presentations or perhaps pecha kucha style rapid-fire presentations followed by in-depth discussions? We should be thinking about these questions so that we can work together to shape optimum strategies for efficiently and effectively sharing information and engaging in professional development.

The second reason why museums and museum people should be interested in BIL (and TED) is because of the content. There were game designers, performance artists, rocket scientists and all kinds of speakers–and most of them were talking about the future. The future affects us all.

One speaker talked about the rising trend of people relying exclusively on their mobile devices for their computing needs. What will that mean for museums if, in the not-so-distant future, all of our visitors are walking around with their computers in their pockets? At the very least, it means that museum websites will have to be optimized for mobile viewing. But think about the possibilities that mobile computing can offer for museums and their visitors. MOLAA is already taking advantage of the fact that most visitors carry cell phones by using Guide by Cell for their audio tour. I made use of my own cell phone in the MOLAA galleries a couple of times and was really glad that I did!

Another presentation was on the topic of “immersive storytelling.” Isn’t that what we do in museums? Well, instead of exhibits and material culture, these guys talked about Operation Spy-like experiences such as The Tomb and MagiQuest. These are experiences that we can learn from–or watch out for as potential competition. The presenters talked about establishing permanent facilities for temporary experiences to cycle through–sound familiar?

So I’ll be blogging in the near future about some of the specific talks that impact museums, but first I just wanted to introduce you all to BIL and get you thinking about unconferences and the future!

Important New Survey Courtesy of Mountain-Plains

The Mountain-Plains Museums Association has put together an important and timely survey for ALL museums in ALL regions regarding museum advocacy. Please take a moment to fill it out by Monday, February 22nd.

And if you haven’t already done so, please also check out the AAM advocacy site for ideas about how to make your voice heard in Congress.

Museums Advocacy Day will be March 22-23, 2010. Speak up for museums.

Western Wisdom Predominates at AAM Annual Meeting in LA

By Dewey Blanton

When the 104^th AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo convenes in Los Angeles May 23-26, the 5,500+ attendees will benefit from a big dose of Western wisdom.

Of the more than 160 program sessions on tap for the event, 60 will be chaired by museum professionals and experts representing the nine-state region. Of course, geography plays a role in this large Western presence ─ to a point.

The selection of program sessions is based on merit, and Westerners have demonstrated their knowledge and expertise to the independent (and discerning) Program Committee for the LA gathering.  Those in LA this spring will indeed learn from the masters: your Western colleagues.

For a complete list of program sessions and registration information on the AAM Annual Meeting, visit www.aam-us.org/am10.

Comfort and the museum visitor experience, parts 3-6

Sorry for the delay on this final post! Click here for part 1 of this post. And here for part 2.

As I’ve thought about this workshop, which grew out of a session that Steve Tokar and Beth Katz put together for WMA in Anchorage (2008), I was happy to participate. I think both the museum and the participants got a valuable experience out of the workshop, which allowed them to experience the host museum wearing a number of different visitor personas (hosted by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park).

While we can never truly know what it’s like to have a physical or cognitive challenge that we ourselves aren’t currently experiencing, going through the process of viewing a museum through that lens can be illuminating. Elaine Bentley at Chicago Children’s Museum said it best: “We’re all just a banana peel away from having a disability.” And we all age, people can be with someone with a physical or cognitive challenge, or we can have a temporary disability.

My 8-step process addresses comfort in Step 4, seeing it as a critical part of an overall great experience. Comfort sets the stage, allowing visitors to engage and absorb our content. And often, it’s these very comfort items (not finding a bathroom, or needing a drink of water) that are easy to fix but often overlooked by museums. Universal design goes far beyond that, creating environments that work for everyone.

I look forward to seeing how Steve and Beth’s process evolves, and thoroughly enjoyed working with them and Paul Gabriel, our “cognitive challenges” guru, Vivian Haga from MOPA, and Kenshi Westover, our outstanding videographer and editor. I have a couple of articles by Paul Gabriel available here for free download, if you want more on cognitive disabilities and the museum environment. Here’s the video:

If you’re interested in seeing my take on comfort, here’s the link to my recorded class on Step 4.

We look forward to reading your comments on museum comfort! Where has it supported or hindered your museum experience?

More Good News from WMA!

WMA President Aldona Jonaitis

Dear WMA members-

The WMA Board just met up in Portland for two days of planning sessions at the Doubletree Hotel, site of this fall’s 75th meeting of the Western Museums Association.  The Board Meeting followed the Program Committee meeting that had met the two days before.  The Board Meeting was a truly wonderful meeting, for several reasons.

One, and perhaps of most immediate importance, is that we ended 2009 in the black.  We avoided the significant deficit we feared and thus are stable financially now and for this coming year.  Thanks for your support!

Two, we have been able to run the organization on a purely volunteer basis for several months.  Memberships are coming in, the conference is shaping up brilliantly, and the website is functioning well.  Let me once again thank our dedicated board for their work in keeping WMA going.

Third, we engaged in a good brainstorming session on the future of WMA.  A major result of this process was our decision to reinvigorate our efforts at reaching out to the state associations as well as other museum affiliated groups in order to learn how we can serve them better.  That will be a major goal this coming year.  We will need your help and your feedback.  And I look forward to the involvement of many WMA members in this effort.

Please visit this website frequently over the next months, as we post more information on our conference as well as our service to the museum community.

Warmly,

Aldona Jonaitis

President, WMA Board