Fishing for Fresh Ideas in San Diego

Rachael Faust is a JFKU museum studies graduate student. Previous to her academic studies, Rachael worked at the University Art Gallery at UCSD and at the Portland Art Museum. Since moving to the Bay Area, she has volunteered at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and has been an intern at SFMOMA and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

By Rachael Faust

After completing my first year at John F. Kennedy University, I spent the summer coping with the fact that I would soon be faced with the daunting task of undertaking a thesis project. Summer came and went, and at the end, I found myself without a revelation of what this dynamic topic would be.

As fall quarter quickly approached and as people began to inquire about my amazingly innovative thesis topic, I quickly devised plan B: crashing the 2009 Western Museums Association annual conference in San Diego where I hoped to find a veritable assortment of fresh ideas and topics just waiting for further exploration. Plan B turned out to be far more effective than plan A (waiting for a revelation). I encourage my fellow grads who are still on plan A to stop waiting and quickly sign up for a museum conference.

Of all the conferences I could attend, I chose WMA because of the interesting and diverse session topics and the manageable size and length of the conference (the student discount price was also rather alluring). A preconference workshop titled, “Navigating New Media In Collections without Going Adrift,” caught my attention because my current studies focus on collections management and I have become particularly interested in the care and preservation of time-based media works.

San Diego. Image courtesy of Lydia Johnson.

The presenters for this session included registrars from MOMA and LACMA as well as LA MOCA’s media exhibition technician and an LA based freelance media specialist. I hoped that the information they presented in this session as well as the questions raised by the museum professionals in attendance would point to areas that needed further investigation (read: my fingers were crossed in hopes that they had an extraordinary thesis topic for me).

The preconference workshop not only gave me a handful of possible areas to research that could lead to relevant thesis topics, but also gave me an opportunity to test out a few of my own ideas.

• Is it possible for museums to share or loan exhibition media equipment to one another?
• How are museum staff being trained to handle, install, preserve, and repair media works and their related equipment?
• What happens when artists don’t want to migrate their media-based artwork to newer formats? The work will eventually die. Should museums collect works with such short life spans? Do museums continue to store the remains of the dead artwork?

I was able to ask these questions and others to a captive, knowledgeable audience that I may not have had access to otherwise; the dialogue I enjoyed with museum professionals at WMA could not have been easily facilitated on my own.

In the proceeding days at the conference, I ran into several of the speakers, and they all went out of their way to stop me and say, “hey, I was thinking about your questions and….” Everyone I introduced myself to at the conference was excited that I was a student and was eager to learn about my potential thesis work.

The WMA conference exposed me to new ideas, expanded ideas I had already been tinkering with, and provided access to museum professionals from a diverse range of museums. I left the conference with a direction for my thesis work and at least a dozen business cards of museum people who said they would be more than happy for me to contact them in the future.

Engaging Diverse Audiences

Margaret Kadoyama's thirty years in the museum profession embrace extensive experience in audience development, community involvement and education strategic planning.

by Margaret Kadoyama

I was fortunate enough to attend the recent WMA conference in San Diego.   The conference provided at least one significant outcome for me — the discovery of a new report on engaging diverse audiences from the Japanese American National Museum, published in August 2009.

I attended a session on programming for Latino audiences.  The session, Museum Mission and Audience: Tips from Collaborations with Latino Communities, was moderated by Elizabeth Morin from Youth Arts and Education for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

The presenters were Lisa Sasaki from the Japanese American National Museum, Lorraine Yglesias from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and David J. de la Torre from La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.   The session provided many great tools and tips for engaging Latino audiences, from David de la Torre’s articulate and compelling list of strategic issues (focus on mission, diversification of board and staff, marginalization, and cultural insensitivity, among others) to Lorraine Yglesias’s focus on marketing.

Lorraine shared some great resources, including the tip to subscribe to email reports from www.mediapost.com, which provides current information on marketing for different audience segments, including Latino audiences.

Lisa Sasaki shared tips from the JANM’s Boyle Heights project, and included information on museum attendance before, during and after the project.  Lisa also shared information about a white paper that JANM recently published called The Cultural Museum 2.0: Engaging Diverse Audiences in America.  It is available to download at http://www.janm.org/projects/innovation/.

The white paper is the result of a three year project, funded by The James Irvine Foundation, in which JANM was able to holistically reassess itself and its relationship with its audiences.  I read through it and found it articulate and very timely, focusing on the issues that culturally specific museums are grappling with right now.

The section on essential questions was particularly significant.  During the course of the project, the Museum began looking closely at the interests, wants and needs of its potential audiences.  According to the report (pages 12-13), the Museum addressed questions such as:

• To what extent is the visitor experience influenced by cultural or ethnic self-identification?
• What is the relevance of the Museum to younger, multi-ethnic audiences?
• How can the Museum develop programming to engage and sustain these audiences?
• How can the Museum engage new audiences while sustaining and satisfying its current constituency?
• What impact does engaging these audiences have on the ability for the Museum to sustain itself in the future?

These essential questions mirror concerns voiced by many museums, and the report goes on to include the results of the project’s research and recommendations to address these issues.  It is timely and relevant.  I teach the JFKU Museums and Communities course, and this will definitely be required reading for the spring M&C class!

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?

Rockin’ the Mint: WMA in the House

The vaults downstairs at the Mint were lit up and the spaces were packed.

Last night in San Francisco Standing Ovation productions put on a huge party and fundraiser for The Mint Project.

Click here to see a lot of familiar Bay Area museum faces who are working on the Mint Project — many of whom were in attendance at last night’s event, including Nina Simon, Debbie Frieden, WMA’s own Susan Spero and Ed Prohaska and, of course, Erik Christoffersen, Director and Master of Ceremonies.

Gypsy McFelter, Development, The Mint Project, James G. Leventhal, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA, Susan Spero, JFKU Museum Studies and advisor to the Mint Project, Elida Zelaya, Executive Director, WMA and Ed Prohaska, Monterey Bay Aquarium and advisor to the Mint Project.

Also in attendance from the museum world were Kelly Brisbois and Kevin Consey, formerly of BAM/PFA now leading the life of an international scholar, adjunct professor in Curatorial Practice at CCA and nature activist.  Lots of other familiar friends were there, including Leah Garchik and her husband Jerry, but we are just focused on the Museum folks here.

This is a truly awesome project in scope scale and implication.  The whole event felt very San Francisco.  To quote one of the evening’s honorees Paul Kanter of the Jefferson Starship, San Francisco is “49 sq miles surrounded by reality.”

Jefferson Starship wrapped up the show

“Jump and the net will appear.”

By Kristen Olson

Risk.

When I was 10 and he was 14, my older brother would follow me around wanting to play Risk. Ten-year-old me would shriek, “NO. It is boring. It takes forever. I never win.”

I literally feared Risk, (conveniently brought to you by Hasbro), because I did not want to fail.

On Saturday, May 30, 2009, I went to the Helzel Colloquium, “Risk and Reality” hosted by the John F. Kennedy University museum studies department. Walking in, I expected the day to be filled with cloudy conversations just out of reach, but all about defining risk. I expected us all to be encouraged to take more risks in our professional lives to benefit the field; you know, heady conference-y type stuff that I would put in my back pocket and let gestate until I would need to use it later. Smartly, organizer Susan Spero (with Brianna Cutts and Gail Anderson) pushed past the diffuse toward two goals of the day: understanding and tools. We’d all walk out with a clearer understanding of risk, as well as gain – or just see – new tools to use when confronting or initiating something institutionally (or personally, or field-wide) risky. This was one of those days when I wanted to go right back into the office and get to work. Exciting stuff. I hope to post this entry, then invite others in attendance today to add their two cents.

Though I’m still processing, I’ve realized how personal risk-taking is. Everyone has different levels of comfort, and as Robert Garfinkle from the Science Museum of Minnesota appropriately posited, almost everyone feels like they take a good amount of risk in their lives. How many would characterize themselves as complete sticks-in-the-mud in all aspects of their life? We all have our own comfort level, and sit in our own specific platform to allow for creative freedom. I, for example, feel very risky writing this blog entry. I fear harsh critique by those in the field more experienced and smarter that I. I am not quite comfortable having my words on unlimited display. I fear future-me, looking back and thinking, “oh geez, you really rambled there, didn’t you?” However, the way to make a break from that limiting behavior is to just jump in, I think. The benefits outweigh the detractors. Anyway, enough about me.

Well, not really. Jonathan Katz, CEO of Cinnabar, said this very short sentence early on in the day: “It is not personal.” I’ve heard it before from colleauges, and I’m still trying to wrap my arms around it, mostly because it is a break from how I think about my career. I care and am passionate about museums. I’ll venture an easy guess, and say we all are. I take it personally when I hear a harsh critique about the place I spend my days. I wince when I see cell phone commercials that have someone in a gallery…but the person is texting. (I should be happy they are in the gallery, right?) Is that a risk I shouldn’t be taking? Should I take myself out of the equation when thinking about taking a professional risk? (Here I go being diffuse.) Like I said, I’m still processing.

Thoughts that are still rolling around in my head and in my notebook:

1. The disconnect between feeling and cognition. (My gut says yes, my brain says “are you ******* kidding me?”)
2. Risk takes tenacity.
3. Risk takes patience.
4. “It is not personal.”
5. Know what you don’t know.
6. Make plain your risk factor: if it is fear of the unknown, be okay with that. Own your risk factors. Be authentic.
7. Change happens on the fringes; museums used to be on the fringes. Some still are, and have that freedom.
8. There has to be a strong goal in order for risk to be worth it. (Risk without reason is silly.)

So I ask you, dear readers, what are your risk factors? What nets need to be in place before you jump? When did you take a risk and it failed? How long did it take you to admit it? When did you take a risk and it was a wild success? How long did it take you to admit it?

Kristen Olson is a second year masters student in museum studies at JFKU, and the Academic and Educational Technology Liaison at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She is laughing while writing this in the third person. She blogs irregularly at koko500.wordpress.com and rambles more often on twitter.