A Local Event: Cultural Connection’s “Feast of Ideas”

by Katherine Whitney

For their annual “Feast of Ideas” session, December 9, 2009, the Bay Area’s Cultural Connections experimented with a new format. Traditionally the December meeting is more social than other programs, focusing on gathering and exchanging information from many participants rather than a single speaker or topic. This was the case this year as well.

The broad theme was Technology and Inspiration in the museum world and there were five speakers. The format was the fast-paced “PechaKucha,” which allows each presenter just 20 seconds per slide, and a maximum of 20 slides each. This was a big experiment – neither the participants nor Cultural Connections had ever done this before, and the audience was the great beneficiary of their bravery. Though there are some kinks to be worked out, I think this is a good model for future programs.

Follow Sorel Denholtz on Twitter

The five speakers, all doing creative and innovative work with internet technology, included: Sorel Denholtz, Social Media Marketing, California Academy of Sciences; Perian Sully, Collection Information Manager and Web Programs Strategist, Judah L. Magnes Museum; Jordan Klineman, President, Virtual Gallerie; James G. Leventhal, Director of Development and Marketing, Judah L. Magnes Museum and Mandy Smith, who presented Antenna Audio’s Create Your Own Audio Tour Contest.

Speaking rapidly as she fired off her slides, Sorrel Denholtz gave us a quick rundown on the rapidly evolving world of social media, and described how the California Academy of Sciences is modifying their web site to become more interactive with, first their members, and eventually the general public. Their web site has evolved from a brochure about the institution to something much more engaging.

For starters, the Academy currently invites visitors to post photos of their visit on Flickr in an effort to foster community beyond the museum visit.  Then there’s Live on Line, Scientists’ Spotlight, where members can ask questions of Academy scientists. To prevent the scientist from being overwhelmed by a huge numbers of questions, members vote to rank the questions, and only the top-ranked questions are submitted. The scientist then responds on-line, extending a dialog about science beyond the four walls of the institution. Members also get to share their suggestions about future exhibits at the Academy in an on-line discussion which, according to Sorrel, results in conversations that are both lively and profound.

In her general remarks, Sorrel touted the importance of Facebook Connect, now a year old. This service lets users log in to third-party sites with their Facebook credentials and bring their social identity with them. (In the meantime museum professional can join the very active Western Museums Association (WMA) Facebook page to keep up with what regional professionals are doing.)

Find Mandy on LinkedIn

Mandy Smith presented Antenna’s “Create your own Audio Tour” contest in which 13 different museums submitted audio that they created in house, with no professional assistance.  The presentation included snippets of each museum’s self-produced audio, and highlighted the winner: Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor, Washington. Their prize included 15 brand new XP-classic™ MP3 players Headsets, a 15-unit charging rack, a 12-month license for Antenna Audio’s XP-classic Updater™ software, access to the Omnimusic Library with 1-year license and a 1-year warranty on equipment. This is an annual event that Antenna publicizes on its web site, as well as on Twitter. Bits of the winning audio can be heard on Antenna’s web site as well.

Perian Sully has the awesome title of “Web Mistress” at the Magnes Museum. She has taken up the challenge of “creating a sense of wonder” around the museum’s collections through social networking. Perian began by introducing us to several different institutions that are successfully engaging visitors and would-be visitors around the world in conversations about museum collections. Art Babble is a video sharing site that, according to its website “…is intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives.” The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley highlights one object per day through a Twitter feed.  The object is thematically tied to the day it’s featured. For example, on December 11th the object was a survey of El Rancho del Rinconada in Santa Clara County, filed with the state of California on December 11, 1860.

Follow Perian on Twitter

At the Magnes, Perian has, among other things, posted digitized versions of vintage Rosh Hashanah postcards from the Magnes collection. People can comment and converse about the cards, and also send digitized versions of the postcards to their friends and family.

Jordan Klineman demonstrated his proprietary Virtual Gallerie software that allows museums to create virtual, 3-D exhibits.  This software can be used as a design tool before the construction and installation of an actual exhibit. It can also be used by museum goers to visit an exhibit that is no longer extant (an “artchive.”) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently experimenting with Virtual Gallerie. Museum visitors can check out a PDA, at no charge, before visiting the collections. While browsing through the galleries they use the PDA to call up information about different artworks, and/or bookmark works of art they like, saving them to a customized account created automatically when they check out the PDA. Then when they get home, they can log on to lacma.org and enter their own three-dimensional virtual gallery, already stocked with the artworks they’ve selected.

Find Jordan on LinkedIn

James G. Leventhal presentation was about the “poetry of process” or “the beauty of bureaucracy,” which touched on technology as a constant innovation cycle. Even if a person manages to get technology into the work cycle of an organization, the work involved in pushing that innovation through the system is never over. And, once that innovation has been adopted by the institution, it’s no longer innovative. Due to the nature of technology, something new is already emerging.

Follow James on Twitter

The highlight of James’ presentation was in fact how he dealt with a failure of technology: some of the graphics in his slides refused to load, so he stood in front of the glare of the slide projector and made huge windmill circles with his arms, demonstrating with great dynamism the innovation cycle. As soon as you think you’re finished, it’s time to start over again.

What was refreshing about the PechaKucha presentation format was that the speakers had to be brief and focused. The slides were for the most part visually interesting and engaging. And the things left unsaid became fodder for the question/answer session that followed. Prompted by specific questions from the audience, speakers elaborated in more detail on a particular point, like how to demystify technologically-phobic staff of the importance of Web 2.0 while simultaneously convincing them that it’s not a 40-hour per week job.

It would be great to see more of this PechaKucha format, with an emphasis on creating time and space for conversation among presenters and audience members. PechaKucha can serve up rich fodder for social networking in real time and space, conversations which no doubt will continue in the virtual world.

Morning Coffee and On-Line Metrics

By Susan Spero

Susan Spero

As I sit with my cup of coffee this morning and think through yesterday’s tour de force by Seb Chan,  I too realize that like a tweet on #sfmetrix stating that a tornado of ideas was spinning through the tweeter’s mind, mine too feels like it has been hit by a storm.

Tremendous kudos are in order for the organizers for sponsoring a great day:  the National Arts Marketing Project, Theatre Bay Area, American Express, The San Francisco Foundation, the Wallace Foundation,  SFMOMA, AAM Museum and Technology, Museum Computer Network, WMA, along with other organizations and certain individuals.

The star of the day was Seb Chan who literally held the podium for the entire day showing how the team at Powerhouse Museum (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/) have, through time, built a smart online system.

Their considered online philosophy and care has given them results:  the Powerhouse collection has been pushed to the forefront of their visitor’s online experience. A larger percentage of visitors spend time on pages that have to do with the collection more than with any other offerings.  Their visitors engage and use the collections information available: from the fabric swatches for creating a new issue of the designs or even as insights into objects for an ebay transaction (buying or selling, who knows).  The Powerhouses’s willingness to share incomplete material from their collections data base has even triggered new knowledge about the collection based on interested visitors sharing what they know.

Seb walked us through the choices their producers and in-house developers make as they consider open options for looking at the collection. Simple things like visitor language tags, and statements of significance as to why and object is important help make the objects relevant for an online visitor (scroll down on the link and browse through these amazing book dresses).

Over and over Seb implied that the Powerhouse philosophy is to listen, learn and seek ways to understand how their audience uses and/or wants to use their collection.  The team constantly wonders: What is the relevance of the collection and how can digital tools let us serve that need?

Go to where the audience is already living, is a key phrase for those who promote social software, and the Powerhouse museum understood this idea from the get-go.  They were the first museum on the Flickr Commons, and by putting their Tyrell Collection of  historic photographs of Sydney on board early, they increased awareness of the Powerhouse museum with the community that cares about photography.  What intrigued me is that this intense audience-interest in photography online has had an impact on the curatorial choices the Powerhouse Museum is making; they are going to (or have) hired a curator that can support the photographic collection.

Additionally, Seb noted that, at least in his mind, curators now and in the future need the skill sets to be able to work in the digital realm. In fact as part of their official curatorial responsibilities all  Powerhouse curators blog.  The web is a communication platform and everyone on staff needs to know how to use it to help audiences connect with museum resources.

The afternoon session was a geek’s dream in that it focused on the many metric systems that can be used to analyze just who uses your website and how they use it.  What was most telling though was how Seb admitted up front that many of the numbers tell you nothing when thrown out as just numbers.

Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum at the podium at SFMOMA

The key, as with all statistics, is that you know how to read them so they can influence future actions.  Find patterns over time.    So, for example, is there an upward trend when you open an exhibition or open up registrations for summer camps?  Is there a downward trend on holidays (usually, weekends are evidently down for all internet users: guess what we read while we are at work).  And look at how others in your area are doing:  if a competing institution has a sudden spike in their numbers and yours are flat, can you figure out why and how that happens.

You want to know how many people touched your content.  Let the analytics help you understand this.   If not already known, concepts like dwell time, bounce rate, and ISP logs are now a part of the mindset of every listener in the Friday’s room .  Dwell time measures how long visitors stay at your site, but even then those numbers have issues since you can only measure how long someone was at the second to last page they were on while visiting your site as there is no way  (yet?) to account for how long a person is on the last landed page of a session.  So you could discover that the average time spent on your site is four minutes, but who knows what amount of time passed when visitors finally found that great educational video you produced. Bounce rate is how quickly someone is in or out of your site; you want bounce rate to be low on education pages, but high if you are buying tickets for an event (get in and get the sale done quickly).

And ISP logs help you gain a finer grain view of your visitors, although the privacy invasion is real and alive on the web;  you can be tracked for where you’ve been browsing, and while I have always understood this, Seb’s reminder made me pause.

One of the most solid pieces of advice Seb offered is for institutions to use freeware for online analytics, but PAY someone to help you customize your specific number crunching.  You need to understand what the numbers mean, and HOW they will impact your future behavior   The twitter #sfmetrix site notes that there were tons of free “Kewl Tools” out there for the using (search twitter for #sfmetrix and you can read through the tweets of the day).

There were many big take-away thoughts:

1. Beta Test:  Don’t hesitate to beta test your site putting it online sooner than later: it doesn’t have to be finished before you go live.  In fact some of the things you learn that are most valuable are when you go live and real visitors are using it. Seb thinks we should also try to work the same beta testing for some exhibition efforts.

2. Be Adept Enough to be Relevant:  Web thinking, with its open, speed driven approach needs to work backwards into how our institutions function. Remember the photography curator story developing from increased interest built in Flickr commons.

3. And finally: Note to self.  Scour the Powerhouse’s web site.  I mean really look at it very carefully.  There is much to learn about collections access and smart web design.

Lastly, Seb has a blog that presents many of the ideas and projects seen yesterday: it is a great resource.

Others of you were there. What are some of your biggest take-aways? And those of you who were not, any thoughts on collections access or museum metrics? Great examples or challenges in practice?

Looking for Loci: a mobile museum experiment

by Maria Mortati

“Have you ever found a place in your home, neighborhood or city, and felt an invisible energy, almost like magic? In Roman culture, this was called “Genius Loci”, which referred to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or spirit. In our urban environments these places can be more difficult to find, or lost altogether– but they do exist.

Locate a special place in your city and create a visual tribute to the genius loci of the spot. It can be part of your home, in a park or garden, on a street corner, or just a forgotten place in the alley.

Artifacts can take any form; photos, drawings, handmade sculptures or totems, a written account – anything that shares the essence of the place.”

This the challenge that co-curator Jaime Kopke (of Denver Community Museum fame) and I developed for “Looking for Loci”, a mobile, collaborative exhibit about place that toured this summer in Denver, and is opening here in SF on Friday, Aug. 28th in the Mission.

We asked 37 citizens of San Francisco + Denver to locate these special places and create a visual tribute to them. The results from the challenge have been delightful- I can’t decide which I like more, the contributions made by people, or the descriptions in their own words.

Now that it has come to the Bay Area, it’s part of a museum experiment called The San Francisco Mobile Museum. It’s an exhibit platform that was designed and built to be reconfigurable, and adapt to a variety of environments indoors and out.

I’m starting with this exhibit and adding to it by inviting visitors to add their stories about place to a large map of the Bay Area. These will show up on our blog, and likely evolve into a larger piece geo-tagged artwork that will live online. We’ll also have a phone number where folks call in and leave messages of their favorite places.

The folks who made the boxes in Denver are going to be writing about their experiences on the blog, as will the SF participants over time.

My plan is to host openings in Bay Area neighborhoods this Fall: open on a Friday night with an event where the community can come and add, as well as throughout the weekend– and then move the exhibit to the front windows while I am… at work during the week.

Since this is a personal project, time is limited. However, I’ll be iterating it and adding to it as I learn from the process and the public. Feel free to keep track of future openings at our blog or website.

If you’d like us to appear at your institution, please contact me at info [at] sfmobilemuseum [dot] org.

…and come to the debut this weekend and add your thoughts to this experiment!

Maria Mortati
San Francisco Mobile Museum