Museum as Platform: some answers to your Tweets
- By Matthew Fisher
- May 4, 2009
At AAM this weekend, I was on a panel session Museum as Platform, discussing the use of social media tools fostering and enhancing the dialog between museums their visitors. The session explored various online museum projects that encourage visitors to be creators and contributors in the online museum exhibit.
During the session, attendees were invited to tweet their thoughts, feedback and questions, but we didn’t have an opportunity to respond afterward- here are some thoughts that I have, and I will encourage my fellow session panelists to respond here as well.
SophieBegonia: Q for Mus/Platform panel: How much resistance do you get from curators, historians? Is this approach embraced? Seen as off-mission?
Absolutely. In our experience, curators and historians have MAJOR concerns about and resistance to these types of approaches. This is a classic top-down versus bottom-up argument. And even curators who eschew top-down approaches and have embraced more bottom up approaches – such as folklorists and ethnographers to name a few – even these folks have some serious concerns about the wisdom of the crowd and collective intelligence. And even if curators accept the validity of these more collaborative approaches in certain instances, they are often quick to suggest that they are not appropriate for their institution’s mission. I believe it is critical for each and every organization to assess its mission relative to the new trends in social media. If your mission is akin to that of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“…to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art…”) then perhaps these approaches are not for you – at least right now. I say perhaps, because the Met is actually doing some pretty cool stuff with visitor participation. But if your mission is more in alignment with that of the Art Gallery of Ontario (“We bring art and people together and boldly declare Art Matters”), then these more open approaches to visitor participation and voices seem essential to your mission.
Nrichie: Is interested in learning more about ‘astroturfing’ to get bloggers to promote your website.
I think I owe Bill an apology regarding how I defined this term for him prior to his using it in our presentation. When I used the term with Bill I was referring to the marketing efforts that the Rosenbach’s team should make to reach out to the news media and the blogosphere and promote awareness about the 21st C Abe site. In discussing these efforts we touched on astroturfing, which I understood to be the process of commenting on other’s blogs and sites about the 21st C Abe site. While we agreed that this was a valid way of getting the message out, we all agreed that it should only be done with complete transparency. No one doing the commenting would misrepresent their relationship with the 21st C Abe site in their promotional efforts. In many cases, as can be gleaned by reading Wikipedia’s definition, this process takes on a much more nefarious connotation when people falsely represent themselves for some political or promotional gain. So it was probably not the best term to use in representing what was actually done to promote the site.
Here is what was done, to my knowledge: Basically, what Bill was referring to was the concerted effort of social media outreach conducted in conjunction with the launch of 21st C Abe. The team first researched a variety of online outlets, from traditional online newsmedia to bloggers both independent and associated with like-minded institutions. Once we gathered this list we composed a letter that went to each of these outlets, which was painstakingly customized to appeal to whatever specific interest we felt the blogger or newsmedia outlet might have in the project. Unlike conventional PR campaigns, this process was less about producing a standard PR blast as it was about making genuine, personalized connections with individual bloggers and news outlets, suggesting they might enjoy the site and share it with their readers for specific reasons. This took time and energy beyond a typical PR effort. I can’t say much more about it as this was managed and conducted by the Rosenbach’s marketing team, not by Night Kitchen Interactive. But that is my understanding of what occurred.
kwheelr: Are visitors afraid to be creators and contributors because they don’t have the tools and museums are usually the "voice of reason?"
These are excellent concerns. First off, I would agree that visitors often do not have the same tools that curators and their online exhibit design teams have. Nor, in fact, would they necessarily want to use them if they did. Tools suggest work, and museums are not work for visitors. They are work for us. So in encouraging visitors to contribute creatively we attempt to provide fun yet educational activities for visitors to engage in. In some cases these are more about the learning objectives for the visitor than they are about creating content on par with the museums’, although there have been some wonderful surprises where visitors have surpassed expectations.
In other cases, such as with the SI NMAH’s Star-Spangled Banner website and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative (SPI), very specific creative submissions were solicited with varying degrees of success. With the National Anthem singing contest the motivational factors were high (grand prize, travel stipend, spotlight at the Baltimore Orioles game) and the tools (ability to sing, videotape and upload to YouTube) were available to everyone. In the case of the SPI, the motivation factors were relatively low (being featured on the Click website) and the tools (unique expertise and/or viewpoint on Photography and the time/resources to write a 500-1000 essay) were not as easy to come by. Visitor participation was understandably high with the singing contest and low (so far) with the photography essay submissions.
As to the “voice of reason”, this echoes my point in the presentation about trust. The public trusts museums to provide the definitive word on their collections, and often visitors do not question the museum’s word. But I think this is shifting, as it is with the news and reference arenas. A few years ago no one would have believed that the public would turn to blogs as readily as they do newspapers for their news, nor would we have believed that the public would put trust in Wikipedia over more traditional reference materials. As institutions that arguably maintain higher levels of trust than even newspapers and encyclopedias, museums have much to lose if the public begins to turn to other sources for their cultural narratives. But we cannot rest on our laurels and continue to assume that museums will maintain this trust into the future if we don’t embrace the value that the public has begun to ascribe to more crowdsourced and dialectical frameworks.
rkvaron: Getting visitors to contribute content is the big challenge. Do we really just crave the curator’s voice?
Certainly we have found that getting visitors to contribute is not always easy, and even when it occurs it isn’t always in alignment with curatorial goals and standards. But I would certainly argue that visitors do NOT only want to hear the curator’s voice. Online visitors want dialog. By that same logic we would be content with TV and not crave YouTube, We would be content with online newspapers and not crave blogs. We would be content with Encyclopedia Britannica and not crave Wikipedia. What I DO think visitors crave is a genuine connection and dialog with the museum and its curators. So the optimal approach is to set up blogs and participatory online exhibits facilitated by social media, in which meaningful dialog occurs between and among curators and visitors.
dklevan: Nurturing online communities requires substantial ongoing work. Can/shld most museums devote scarce resources 4 this?
Great question. I recognize that at a time of belt-tightening people often question their capacity for innovation and experimentation. But I have a serious concern that with the current economy, many conservatively-minded museum folks will see this as a time to circle the wagons and stick to what they perceive as core competencies and traditional approaches. While I think this is sound in many respects, I would argue that the museum’s core function is to constantly be innovating in bringing collections and curatorial narratives to the public. Falling back on old methodology and tired frameworks because they are comfortable and (coincidentally) reinforce curatorial authority is not the way to go. Certainly we cannot overextend ourselves. But approaches to public involvement that encourage visitor participation, while still experimental, have tremendous potential.
Consider Effie Kapsalis’ point that the Smithsonian has literally millions of objects in their collections. They cannot begin to provide rich, well-rounded authoritative narratives around all of these objects with their limited curatorial resources. And I would suspect most museums, while not responsible for such vast collections, have even fewer curatorial resources to expend on this then the Smithsonian. So looking forward, I think its best for museums to consider a model of shared authority, of shared narratives and shared experience. A model that leans more toward Wikipedia than toward an encyclopedia. And museums must recognize that regardless of their resources (and museums have always had to manage on limited resources), their online visitors have come to expect a more participatory role in their online community. So not only does it benefit the museum to bring their visitors on as collaborators, but it will better serve the needs of their audiences. We certainly have a responsibility to not waste precious museum resources on models that are not sustainable. And certainly any time museums employ experimental approaches there are lessons learned. But I would argue that employing aspects of the “museum as platform” model, even if it’s as simple as sharing collections on the creative commons in flickr, is an essential step toward staying relevant online into the future.
In addition I’d like to thank others on twitter for their shout-outs, particularly in relation to the 21st Century Abe site, and encourage you all to share your comments on this evolving topic.
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