Adam Yauch Makes Me Wanna Holla: Generation X Session at #AAM2012

By James G. Leventhal

Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch and The Venerable Palden Gyatso, Tibetan Freedom Concert, SF, CA 1996

So quotes my friend Jennifer Caleshu:

These times especially call for more than mere incrementalism. Let’s demand that our leaders get in over their heads, that they remain a little bit naive about what they’re getting into.

It’s from WIRED.

And my friend Erin Potts wrote about Adam Yauch, our “MCA”:

He was deeply strategic–most of the time–always passionate, and always welcoming. He believed in our team of inexperienced but determined 20-somethings, and our ability to do the impossible. And with that belief in us and in nonviolence, together we DID do the impossible. Never before has more fun been had while changing the world!! Yauch’s work for Tibet helped jumpstart and nurture an international youth movement for Tibet and nonviolence–the best example of which can be found in Students for a Free Tibet, our sister organization and partner during all of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. That this organization and movement is stronger today than when the last Concert ended is a testament to Yauch’s vision, leadership, and belief in young people.

Adam Yauch died last week at the age of 47.

Jennifer Caleshu, Director of Earned Revenue and Project Management, Bay Area Discovery Museum at the podium at AAM in Minneapolis, MN

At the tailend of last week’s American Association of Museums meeting in Minneapolis I had the good fortune to be part of a panel about Gen X leadership in museums.

It was on honor to be there with you on stage, Amparo Leyman Pino and Stacey Swigart.  And it was fun.  Were we the only session with a DJ?!  Thanks, Scott Stulen…and what you do at the Walker rocks our worlds!  Thank you, Jennifer for bringing us all together.  To see the slides, please click here.

This post is intended as a rally cry, a gathering place and a link garden.  Were you there?

With the passing of Adam Yauch, I am overwhelmed at the need to plant this seed as a tribute, without a ton of exposition.

Please can I encourage others who weren’t at the podium to craft longer posts or comments and submit them here? @Louiseoffcourse? @jolifanta? @bathlander?

And a more cogent post with more links and documentation is forthcoming.

‘Til then let us celebrate our own potential, in life and what’s next.

Social media strategies for museums

By Stephanie Weaver
San Diego hosted this two-day conference, sponsored by the Balboa Park Online Collaborative and funded by the Benbough Foundation. This was an amazing opportunity to hear some cutting-edge experts on museums and social media, and organizer Rich Cherry did a fantastic job bringing them all together.

Speakers included Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Interpretation for SFMOMA, open content expert Susan Chun (founder of Steve, the museum social tagging project), Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology for Brooklyn Museum, and Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. For a wonderful analysis of Seb’s content, read Susan Spero’s blog post here.

I had the chance to interview some of the speakers during the day, and ask them a few questions for people who weren’t able to attend. First, how do you go about creating a social media strategy for a museum?

I was especially interested in how they’ve gone about creating the cultural shift necessary for integrating social media (including open content) into their institutional cultures.

One issue that comes up a lot is who gets to speak for the institution? Who becomes the voice? How do you define it? And, how do you integrate this entirely new set of tasks into people’s already-busy work loads?

Last, I asked them to comment on the benefits of using social media.

Thanks to Peter, Susan, and Seb for their time, and the San Diego Hall of Champions for hosting.

A response to “More thoughtful learning”

Dear Leslie,

"Those About to Die Salute You," hosted by Queens Museum; artist Duke Riley. Photo by Frantz Vincent courtesy of Flickr

Thank you for the fantastic post. I too am approaching professional development through social media, as a consultant who serves this field. I wrote this post on my blog about how four museums in New York staged an art event using Twitter. I think it’s a dynamic example of what you’re talking about.

I began my museum career 20 years ago at Chicago Children’s Museum. I was lucky enough to receive my first professional development at the Midwest Museums Conference. Over the years I began speaking at conferences: always a prerequisite for being able to attend a conference. Some employers paid my way, others allowed me to attend on the clock if I covered the costs.

I managed to get to at least one conference a year, which I found stimulating and enriching. One of the rules at the places I worked was that you had to do a presentation for the staff when you returned, so early on I began synthesizing the conference experience for my peers. [I don't know if this is common practice but I highly recommend it as a way to foster an atmosphere of professional development, as well as getting the most bang from your conference buck.]

It frustrated me that one association, like attendees at NAI , often had no idea about resources available through another, like VSA. I made it part of my core message to cross-pollinate ideas so that people weren’t reinventing the wheel. Social media is ideal for this.

In the last five years I’ve heard these messages loud and clear: Conferences are expensive. Front-line staff can rarely afford to attend. Small and rural museums have a tough time ever affording consulting… maybe once in 25 years if they are doing a capital campaign or get a huge grant from IMLS or NSF. And when the economy tanked, so did conference attendance.

Dena'ina historian Aaron Leggett at the spirit houses in Eklutna at WMA '08. Online learning can't replace experiences like this, but used well offers great value.

When I was at WMA in Anchorage last year, I thought about all the museum staffers from Alaska who were able to make it to Anchorage, but aren’t able to come to the Lower 48. While of course there is huge value in face-to-face interaction, I do believe there is a role for online experiences and training.

I hope I can encourage the field to utilize online learning and social media, as I think it’s an incredible way to deliver assets, affordably, where they are most needed.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s responses.

• Are you willing to try online learning?
• Have you attended a webinar? What did—and didn’t—you like about it?
• What kinds of topics would you like to see offered in tech tutorials or online classes that relate to the visitor experience?
• What guest speakers would you like to hear from?

I am very open to everyone’s thoughts and comments, as this is a new venture. It’s such a privilege to serve this field. Leslie, thanks again for your thoughtful post. Sincerely,

Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver is the author of Creating Great Visitor Experiences: A Guide for Museums, Parks, Zoos, Gardens, and Libraries (Left Coast Press, 2007). She is a WMA professional member and visitor experience consultant based in San Diego, and is excited to be part of the WMA Host Committee for this year’s conference. Her online learning website is experienceology.com/classes, and you can email her at sweaver [at] experienceology.com

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?

SFMOMA Social Media Happenin’: Who’s Doin’ It?

Sebastian Chan, Manager of the Web Services Unit at the Powerhouse Museum

Tomorrow there’s the free strategic social media seminar for the cultural sector, feat. Sebastian Chan @ SFMOMA.  It all came together, beautifully, pretty quickly and through a small social network.  The twitter hashtag’ll be #sfmetrix.

Who is doing it?

Sebastian Chan leads the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies department at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. His teams include the museum’s web unit, audio visual and photography, rights & permission and the photo library, the research library and Thinkspace, the Powerhouse’s digital media teaching laboratories. He is a researcher in several Australian Research Council Linkage projects researching social media, museums, and technology; and speaks internationally about the use of cutting edge technology in the cultural sector. He is on the international programme committees of Museums and the Web (USA), Digital Strategies for Heritage (Eu), the Horizon.Au New Media Consortium, and is an International Steering Committee member of Culturemondo, an international group of representatives of cultural portal strategists. Seb is also a member of the Australian Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce examining ways of improving citizen engagement with government and opening access to public sector information.

Rich Cherry is the Director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, whose mission is to facilitate and execute a fundamentally change the way museums, cultural arts and science institutions in Balboa Park San Diego use of online technology.  Formerly he was the director of Operations at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where he oversaw Information Technology, Operations, Admissions, Facilities, Security, capital projects and more than $70 million in ongoing construction.  His has also held positions as the CIO and Director of Facilities at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the CIO of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He has also taught New Media theory, web design and animation in the Media Studies department at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He is a board member of the Museum Computer Network serving on the finance committee and as chair for vendor relations, serves on the advisory panel of Fluid Engage, a Mellon Foundation funded project involving an international group of designers, developers, volunteers, and advisers who focus improving the user experience of community and open source web applications with an emphasis on addressing some of the challenges faced by museums and cultural institutions as they work to incorporate new technology into their web, mobile, and physical spaces and he is a founding member of Steve.Museum.

James G. Leventhal is the Director of Development and Marketing for the Judah L. Magnes Museum (Berkeley, CA) and is responsible for all fundraising, public relations and marketing for the Magnes. He worked for eight years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, first as a Research Intern in the Museum’s Department of European Paintings, then as a manager in the development of the Ratti Center, and the Museum’s first consolidated, digital inventory and image management system that was the springboard for one of the now museum-industry standard software solutions TMS.  James went on to spend six years as a lead technologist and Senior Development Officer in the Museum’s Executive Offices at the time when the Metropolitan was first embracing web strategies and the development of the Museum’s first site.  Before joining the team at the Magnes, James worked most recently as a fundraising consultant for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to help the Museums wrap up the Campaign for the New de Young. He completed his undergraduate studies in Art History, Anthropology and Studio Art at NYU. James has done Master’s work in Art History and Museology at the City College of New York and has an M.B.A. from John F. Kennedy University, with a specialization in Museum Studies. James has also worked as an educator at the Baltimore Museum of Art and at The Phillips Collection.  Since joining the Magnes, James has served on grant making panels for the San Francisco Arts Commission and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Museum Loan Network. He has also presented nationally on the use of technology for audience development and engagement in museums. As a member of the Western Museums Associations (WMA) Programs Committee, James helped WMA launch a digital presence through Facebook, LinkedIn and its blog http://westmuse.wordpress.com.

Dana Mitroff Silvers is the Head of Online Services at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For over twelve years, she has worked on the design, development, and production of large-scale educational websites, including sites for the UC Berkeley Interactive University project and Computer Curriculum Corporation. She recently led the multi-year redesign of sfmoma.org, and oversees all aspects of the public-facing SFMOMA website.  Dana is on the international program committee of Museums and the Web, and is a frequent presenter and moderator at the annual Museums and the Web conference.  She has also presented at the annual conferences of the Museum Computer Network, IMLS Web Wise, and the American Association of Museums. She is a past board member of the Museum Computer Network, where she directed the redesign of the MCN website.  She has taught and lectured at both the undergraduate and graduate-level for numerous local institutions, including the University of San Francisco, JFK University, Cal State Monterey Bay, and San Francisco City College. Dana holds an MA in art history from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Southern California.

Perian Sully is the Collections Information Manager and Web Program Strategist for the Judah L. Magnes Museum (Berkeley, CA).  She holds a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies, Interdisciplinary concentration (Collection Management and Technology) from John F. Kennedy University. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art (sculpture) at University of California, Davis and began her museum career at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at Davis. Perian has a deep interest in the intersection of technology, culture, and the arts, particularly as they relate to museum collections and emerging technologies. She is a contributor to the Musematic blog (http://www.musematic.org), a joint venture between the American Association of Museums Media and Technology Standing Professional Committee and the Museum Computer Network, and she is on the board of the Media and Technology SPC as Programs Chair. In addition, she is an active member of the American Association of Museums Registrar’s Committee. In her free time, she researches and recreates 18th- and 19th-century costumes and makes her own modern clothing designs.

THANK YOU, National Arts Marketing Program! The National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) is a program of Americans for the Arts and is sponsored nationally by American Express. In the Bay Area, these free workshops are further supported and developed with a grant from The Wallace Foundation in partnership with The San Francisco Foundation, Grants for the Arts/ San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund and Theatre Bay Area.

MASSIVE “RT”

Sebastian Chan, Manager of the Web Services Unit at the Powerhouse MuseumSome clarifications on our experience with ‘free’ content

[This Friday Seb Chan will speak at SFMOMA at a sold out symposium that WMA has helped to arrange, with thanks to Rich Cherry and others.  As a bit of a preview of what's to come, we have taken one, big-ol', whole post from Seb's professional blog as one massive "retweet."  I started to pull out highlights, then realized the whole thing shimmered.

Seb's fresh + new(er) is a "must read" add it to your feeder!  It is a "sector resource."

*respect* - Editors]

Some clarifications on our experience with ‘free’ content

August 14th, 2009 by Seb Chan

Over on the Gov2 blog a comment was posted that asked for more information about our experience at the Powerhouse with ‘giving away content’ for free.

I’d be interested to know more about your experience with Flickr and your resulting sales increase. Are these print sales or licensing sales? And are they sales, through your in-house service, of the identical images you have on Flickr, or are you using a set of images on Flickr as a ‘teaser’ to a premium set of images you hold in reserve? How open is this open access? I am trying to understand the mindset of users in an open access environment who will migrate from ‘free use’ to ‘pay-for use’ for identical content, as this makes no sense, either commercially or psychologically, unless there is additional service or other value-add.

Whilst I communicated privately a lengthy response I think some of it is valuable to post here to clarify and build upon the initial findings published by my colleague Paula Bray earlier this year.

Here’s what I wrote. Some of this will be familiar to regular readers, some of it is new.

(Please also bear in mind that I am focussing here on predominantly economic/cost-related issues. Regular readers will know that our involvement in the Commons on Flickr has been largely driven by community and mission-related reasons – don’t take this post as a rebuff of those primary aims)

First a couple of things that are crucial for understanding the nuances of our situation (and how it differs, say from that of other institutions, galleries, museums)

1. The Powerhouse is, more or less, a science museum in its ’style’ (although not by our collection). Our exhibitions have traditionally, since our re-launch/re-naming in 1988, been heavy on ‘interactivity’ (in an 80s kind of way), and ‘hands on’. We aren’t known for our photographic or image collections and we haven’t done pure photographic exhibitions (at least for the last 15 years).
2. Consequently we have a small income target for image sales. This target doesn’t even attempt to cover the salaries of the two staff in our Photo Library.
3. In 2007/8 around 72% of our income was from State government funding.
4. The Powerhouse has an entry charge for adults, and children aged 4 and over. In 2007/8 this made up 65% of the remainder of our income. Museum membership (which entitles free entry) added a further 8%.

(You can find these figures in our annual reports)

So what have we found by releasing images into the Commons on Flickr?

Firstly we’ve been able to connect with the community that inhabits Flickr to help us better document and locate the images that we have put there. This has revealed to us a huge amount about the images in our collection – especially as these images weren’t particularly well documented in the first place. This has incurred a resource cost to us of course in terms of sifting responses and then fact checking by curatorial staff. But this resource cost is outweighed by the value of the information we are getting back from the community.

Secondly we’ve been able to reach much wider audiences and better deliver on our mission. The first 4 weeks of these images being in Flickr eclipsed an entire year’s worth of views coming from the same images on our own website. Our images were already readily Google-able and were also available through Picture Australia which is the National Library of Australia’s federated image and picture search.

(I’ve written about this quite a bit on the blog previously.)

Thirdly, we’ve found that as very few people knew we had these images in the first place, we’ve been able to grow the size of the market for them whilst simultaneously reducing the costs of supplying images.

How has this ‘reduced the costs’?

What Flickr has done is reduce the internal cost of delivering these images to “low economic/high mission value” clients such as teachers, school kids and private citizens. Rather than come through us to request ‘permission’ these clients can now directly download a 1024px version for use in their school projects or private work. The reduction in staff time and resource as a result of this is not to be underestimated, nor is the increased ease o use for clients.

At the same time, Flickr’s reach has opened up new “high economic/low mission value” client groups. Here I am talking about commercial publishers, broadcasters, and businesses. Commercial publishers and publishers want a specific resolution, crop or format and we can now charge for the supply in these formats. At the same time we are finding that we are now getting orders and requests from businesses that had never considered us as a source of such material. We are actively expanding our capacity to deliver art prints to meet the growing needs of businesses as a result.

It is about relationships and mission!

At the same time, we can now build other relationships with those clients – rather than seeing them only in the context of image sales. This might be through physical visitation, corporate venue hire, membership, or donations.

Likewise, we know that the exposure of our public domain images is leading to significant offers of other photographic collections to the Museum alongside other commercial opportunities around digitisation and preservation services. Notably we have also been trying to collapse and flatten the organisation so that business units and silos aren’t in negative competition internally – so we can actually see a 360 degree view of a visitor/patron/consumer/citizen.

[NOW GO READ MORE SEB!]

Free Strategic Social Media Seminar for the Cultural Sector featuring Sebastian Chan @ SFMOMA

Social Collections, New Metrics, Maps and Other Australian Oddities

A Free Strategic Social Media Seminar for the Cultural Sector featuring SEBASTIAN CHAN

August 28th, 2009 – 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM PHYLLIS WATTIS THEATER at SF MOMA, San Francisco

Sebastian Chan, Manager of the Web Services Unit at the Powerhouse Museum

In a free flowing day of provocative presentation and Q&As, Sebastian Chan will take participants through a range of proven projects and experimental prototypes. These will raise questions about the role of collections and collection data in the digital age; new ways of engaging with communities; and experiments for using mobile technologies in galleries and out in the world around us. It will also address issues around how to better measure digital initiatives and also address philosophies of open access and emerging business models around open content.

RSVP (required) at www.theatrebayarea.org/digital