The post has been live for little while now, but it was the second comment that immediately grabbed my attention. I’ll post it in full, so you have the context, though the emphasis is mine.
Of course museums and museum leaders should engage with new technology and digital media, but this is not going to lead anyone to a holy grail. It is a medium not a message, and useful though the web and social media may be they will not guide anyone to run a great museum. I suspect the ultimate aim of museum technologists is to run everything virtually. You could digitise everything, keep it on a cloud, dispose of the real stuff, close the museum down and tweet all day to your virtual friends. How relevant is that? Well at least it wouldn’t cost anything, so it might catch on. But wait a minute…aren’t museums supposed to be looking after and presenting collections and getting people engaged with real things or is that just too tediously old fashioned for the twitter generation? I hope there never are career paths for museum technologists who love their i-pads more than their collections.
Oliver (MA Member), 21.03.2012, 18:19
Now, it turns out that what motivated this comment was (at least in part) a lack of familiarity with the terminology, and the lack of clarity of what a museum technologist actually is (nb – can we come up with a better term to describe someone who deals with – or even thinks about – the implications and applications of technology in a museum context?).
However, even if it was written to provoke, Oliver’s response reveals insight into what could be legitimate fears for some people working in museums – that museum technologists (however they are conceived) have no respect for the ‘real thing’.
Maybe such people have happened across Seb’s post advocating for born digital collections, or my own questioning about whether museums should still consider the physical space as the most important one, and assumed that by arguing for digital we were simultaneously arguing against the physical. I don’t know anyone in this field who would honestly advocate getting rid of collections (do I?). If anything, there is a general desire to make museums more – more useful, more connected, more relevant.
But what if we aren’t communicating that? What if there is a sense from those who aren’t part of our discussions that technology (and technologists) actually presents a threat to collections specifically, and museums more generally? What if the greatest common misconception about museum technologists is that the long tail consequences of what we do and advocate for leads to the end of the museum itself?
Obviously I am overplaying this a little bit. It’s likely that Oliver is an outlier, and that his expressed views are more extreme than his real ones. But it still provokes the questions: as a museum technologist, what misconceptions have you faced? Have you been confronted by attitudes like Oliver’s, or struggled to communicate with more traditional staff because they misunderstood your motivations? And if so, what did you do about it?
***Bonus points to anyone who can give me a better term to use than ‘museum technologists’, because it’s likely that at least part of the problem is a semantic one.
One of the things I love most about spending time at the Powerhouse Museum is the conversations that occur. Last week, the Registrar for Collection Management Systems, Lynne McNairn, and I had an interesting discussion about CMS’ and their ease of use. In response to that conversation, she has written this post with some of her thoughts.
Lynne McNairn
Could a Collection Management System be like Facebook?
Lynne McNairn
Registrar, Collection Management Systems
This post is partly written in response to recent posts about museums making the digital shift, and partly some observations from working in a museum.
One of the major tools in museums is the Collection Management System (CMS). These systems are very much about the object as a single item– they come from tradition of small white cards in wooden cabinets. But what could happen if a CMS was more like Facebook?
One problem faced by CMS administrators (I’ve spent many years plugging away at this) is that many people – particularly content providers such as curators – hate using the CMS. At the Powerhouse our CMS feeds directly to the Web as our Collection Search 2.53. When this was implemented (now 8 years ago), I thought it would be the answer to this problem. Surely when content providers could see their work posted online they would now be delighted to use the database! Sadly, although Collection Search has had an enormous positive influence on documentation at the museum, it is still the case that a great deal of useful and interesting collection research and documentation is undertaken that never reaches any sort of central repository and ends up being lost to the organisation.
What is it, then, that curators do with their documentation? I’m of course making sweeping generalisations but a look at an average curator’s PC will reveal many Word files and good number of PowerPoint presentations, as well as an overburdened Inbox. These files contain articles, publication manuscripts, exhibition ideas and the talks they give to groups.
So are there lessons in the huge popularity and ease of use of Facebook, which could make CMS a better tool for the work of interpreting museum collections?
There is no getting around the need for a detailed set of fields that record the acquisition, administrative and storage locations of an object, in order to manage the individual objects in the physical collection – but where does the interpretation of the collection fit?
Here is one idea for a ‘Facebook’ style CMS.
Each object gets its own profile (a subset of the fields we have in a CMS).
Users have options similar to “Create photo album” (remember all those PowerPoint presentations). This feature could prompt users for some overall contextual information such as Title, Date Range, and Places etc, and ask them to state “What this presentation is about?”
The photos (or videos and other content) are loaded and the user adds the captions. At this point (as in Facebook), the user can tag the photo with any other relevant object profile. This content would not need to be restricted to “official” images of an object. It could include ‘happy snaps’ which a curator may have taken with a donor or maker etc as well as related material which supports the story being told.
Much like Facebook, this ‘photo album’ could then appear on the profile page of all the objects that have tagged.
The public could also be given access to comment and even create their own slide shows using our objects.
This idea could obviously be developed further. However, I think that for museums to really make the ‘digitisation shift’ there need to be new tools that make it easy for non-technical users to do their traditional work of interpreting and presenting the collection. Facebook has made it so easy for non-technical users of all types connect to their social networks. How could a museum CMS built on the same principles allow for easier capturing and linking together of museum objects and their interpretations?
museumgeek thoughts: Lynne’s post makes me wonder if there are any museum CMS’ that take this kind of social and non-technical approach to capturing collection information? Do you think this approach would work to better capture all that fabulous interpretative information that gets lost when individual curators leave an organisation?
The museum blogosphere has lately been enlivened with posts about risk, leadership and incorporating digital into core museum operations – all questions that relate to the problems of dealing with institutional change in museums in response to the changing social/technological environment.
Last week, I had coffee with Janet Carding, Director of the Royal Ontario Museum, and she too mentioned the widespread acknowledgement within the sector that this is a time of paradigmatic shift for museums. The theme of MCN2012 also reflects this. The Museum Unbound: Shifting Perspectives, Evolving Spaces, Disruptive Technologies “focuses on exploring how the quickening pace of technological innovation is expanding the very definition of what it means to be a museum”, and the discussions of the Program Committee certainly revolved around these issues.
Changing a culture is not a top-down or bottom-up proposition: It’s a dance between leaders and their organizations… Leaders must examine their own actions carefully to determine what they reward and what they punish, what the day-to-day routines of their organization reflect, and how best to create an environment in which open and constant communication is a priority. They must develop concrete reward systems that encourage risk and help employees make digital duties as much a part of their routines as the traditional…
…One daily newspaper of less than 50,000 circulation we studied struggled with the change to a web-first organization because, though its leaders acknowledged the importance of the new medium, they did not reinforce that desire through their reward and accountability systems. Print revenue and circulation remained the benchmarks of success, not digital revenue or pageviews. As a result, newsroom staffers struggled to develop the kind of online content needed to expand the web audience…
…[M]any of the people executives dismissed as anti-change curmudgeons were often much more thoughtful and accepting of new digital strategies than expected when asked directly. While they had concerns about change, the root of their trouble was lacking clear, specific goals from on-high. Staffers hungered for specific direction on how to reprioritize their workloads, which had increased substantially as staffs shrunk and responsibilities increased.
The application of these lessons to museums seems straightforward. For digital work to be incorporated into core museum business, staff need clear goals and guidelines for doing so. Museum workers right across the institution – and not merely those working in web/technology focussed departments – need actionable and clear benchmarks for success that include creating digital and online content, pageviews or revenue. And once these benchmarks are set, staff then need guidance for reprioritising their normal workloads to account for the changes.
The key to building trust within the organization is beginning to build internal confidence among staff and to demonstrate the success of metrics that are important to the whole organization…
… If your museum’s strategic plan does not have clear metrics that help you know what success looks like, then a document that describes what they are and how they are measured would be much more useful to the museum than a technology strategy. If your strategic plan talks about reaching new audiences, how will you measure whether or not they are being reached? If the plan seeks to improve access to collections, then the ability to measure that access is crucial. Once those metrics are known and accepted by the staff, creating technology strategies that enhance those metrics is a much clearer task. Rather than debating whether a particular effort was “worth it”, such metrics can clarify the discussion about how museum resources were spent. The impact of technology then becomes less about opinion and more about whether or not the museum’s goals were met.
He’s right. Having clear metrics is important for defining what success looks like. However, once those metrics are defined at a strategic level, staff right across the institution whose work could (should?) intersect with the digital world need to be given their own benchmarks for digital success, along with specific directions as to how to incorporate these new accountabilities with their already-existing work. Large-scale strategy is important, but so are the individual strategies that are built into it.
Has your museum developed any clear goals and guidelines to help staff incorporate digital work into their routines? Do staff (including curators, marketers, educators etc) across the institution have concrete, actionable and specific benchmarks for digital success, as well as guidance for how to reach those goals? If so, who has driven this process within the museum? And has it made a visible difference to the incorporation and acceptance of digital into core museum business?
Seb Chan has just written a great post positing the idea that museums will not truly begin to incorporate the digital into their core operations and institutional DNA until they have significant born digital collections. He writes:
Born-digital no longer requires ‘buildings’ and that’s when things becomes interesting.
He’s right – it is interesting. However, I think it is only scratching the surface of the question, because in order for most museums to view born-digital as being significant for collection, the very art/artefact market likely needs to change. (Note: I am mostly thinking through this issue with the art market in mind.)
Somaya, a commenter on Seb’s post, writes:
Born digital suffers from both impermanence and the ability to be everywhere all at once. Either there is only one copy (which is lost easily) or millions that are everywhere and likely to turn up in collections multiple times (not a good approach of every organisation is spending their resources preserving the same thing).
Until there is a basic shift in fully embracing digital collecting plus preservation, management and provision of access – through policies and strategic directions of these organisations – digital will slip to the side of other more traditional collecting workflows.
Her point, that the born-digital artefact is both impermanent and able to be everywhere at once, seems to run completely counter to the way art markets create value, with their emphasis on rarity, longevity and physicality (and therefore, good prospects for return on investment). A 2008 article from the NYTimes on the sale of a version of the Magna Carta exemplifies this sentiment.
Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
The object, thus, potentially could become more valuable for museums in the short term, and in fact until museums begin to build the digital into core operations and value. There could be both a backlash against the potentially ubiquitous nature of born-digital art/design/architecture etc, and an urge to cling on to what museums have that is different from that which is available everywhere else online, particularly because there is a known and quantifiable value that can be placed on objects in a way that has not yet (to my knowledge) been defined for born-digital artefacts.
Beyond this however, museum collections are undoubtedly influenced by the art market and the interests of private collectors, whose willingness to spend money on acquiring works of art by particular artists will often drive the reputations and careers of those artists (and therefore make them valuable for museums, too, to collect). Such a system is thus a kind of informalised method for vetting those works or artists that a museum should seek to acquire, because those objects (should) have a more likely ROI.
The art market has a unique talent for promoting art about the market. Since exhibition history enhances value, the collectors of what we might call “market art” have a vested interest in seeing their work take up space in traditional public collections. They often have the financial leverage to make it happen. In this way, the hedge-fund collector Steven A. Cohen could place Damien Hirst’s shark tank on temporary loan at the Metropolitan Museum. The oversized trinkets of Jeff Koons start appearing at the same time in the museum’s rooftop gallery.
Curators defend such expensive contemporary work as relevant to the commercialism of the age: the market gives meaning to the art.
A quote from Leo Steinberg in the article is also useful.
Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash. The whole of art, its growing tip included, is assimilated to familiar values. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.
What we don’t yet have, then, is the way for equating born-digital art/artefacts with hard cash, and a proven sale/resale history to demonstrate ROI.
In some ways, I am sure this cannot be far away. In the Internet age, information is becoming valuable in ways that were previously unimaginable. The Real Time Report recently reported that estimates put the market value of a Facebook user at between $89-$118. Here, the seemingly intangible has tangible or real value. What the art market, and museums, haven’t yet done is find ways to assess/communicate the intrinsic value of born-digital materials. We don’t yet know what the ROI is, either for private collectors or institutional ones.
And there’s the rub. While Seb is probably right, and it’s not until institutions hold substantial born-digital collections that they are likely to build digital into core museum practice, it might not be until the art/artefact markets begin to intrinsically value born-digital artefacts that they will become a collecting priority.
As regular readers would know, I (semi-)regularly like to ask fellow culturegeeks how on earth they ended up working in museum tech. It’s not a straightforward career path for most people, and frequently involves chance and changes of direction along the way.
Today Matt Popke from the Denver Art Museum has agreed to tell his story. I first met Matt at MW2011. In fact, he was the first person I met at MW, but despite talking a number of times at the conference, our conversation remained fairly shallow. However, Matt has become one of my favourite blog commenters, and always adds thoughtful, eloquent and useful ideas to the discussion. He is certainly not the only person writing such comments – only this week a fellow museumer mentioned how impressed they were at the thought and effort that people put into the discussions here at museumgeek. But I thought this geek speak, it would be lovely to get to know Matt’s story a little better.
Enjoy.
Matt Popke
I was one of those kids who had so many different interests when growing up it was nearly impossible to predict what I’d want to do with my life, but certain interests wound up having more pull than others. Thanks to video games, William Gibson and early Wired magazine, I somehow landed on computer science as a primary major in college. I also decided to pursue a degree in philosophy at the same time, hoping I would extend my worldview beyond my small town upbringing. In my pursuit of new ideas I ended up taking the philosophy classes that interested me rather than the courses that would actually earn me a degree, so I only graduated with the bachelor’s in computer science.
Initially, I wanted to go to grad school and research artificial intelligence, but I needed a source of income to pay my tuition. In late 1997, through random chance I got a job working for a small web design consultancy where I learned, much to my surprise, that I actually liked design a lot more than science. That shaped the rest of my career, and I have pursued design in one form or another ever since, including going back to school to study industrial design focused on interaction design.
In spite of my change in direction, I have always maintained a strong interest in the hard sciences, and I approach design with a working knowledge of the underlying craft. I think of myself as a software developer as well as a designer, and I maintain and use both sets of skills because together they are the core of my work. Web design is a hybrid occupation where success requires equal parts science, engineering and design process.
Serendipity has played a significant role in my career, and my current job is no exception. It was only through luck that I even knew the Denver Art Museum was hiring a web developer. I was freelancing at the time and was starting to get tired of working on my own. It’s too easy to become complacent or fall into the trap of habit when your only real critic is yourself. Working with a team forces you to challenge yourself and exposes you to more critique than you might get from clients or stakeholders who often don’t have the domain knowledge to challenge your ideas and suggestions. I missed the dynamic of working with other people.
Though I had looked for jobs for a while, I found no mention of the DAM’s opening anywhere. It was only through a friend of my girlfriend that I knew of the opening. It seemed like it would be an interesting place to work, so I applied and made it through the hiring process without really knowing what kind of work I would end up doing. I knew it had something to do with a website redesign and relaunch, but the real scope of the project(s) would not hit me until after I had started. That was almost exactly a year ago.
Museums are in the midst of an interesting transition now during which the audience is changing rapidly. It used to be that “generation gap” was a term used to describe a slightly different taste in music or clothes between children and their parents. Occasionally a generation gap signaled a new ideology or slightly evolved social attitudes regarding civil rights, but those have been more the exception than the rule. The generation gap today is characterized by children who communicate with other people in vastly different ways than their parents did, and who define themselves and their relationships with the outside world using a completely different set of assumptions and values. It might not be long before children and their parents are almost literally speaking different languages, perhaps using the same words but with completely different meaning. I often think this is already the case, where the savviest of our children today are effectively bilingual, capable of communicating with their parents but immersed in an entirely different mode of thinking which is their true native territory.
I see shades of this already in my relationship with my parents. I can’t imagine how big the gap must be for parents whose children are in their early teens today. Those kids were born in the territory I migrated to, and they have no direct experience of the culture we came from. They’ve known from the beginning that information about a thing is at least as useful and as valuable as the thing itself, and sometimes it’s more so. They’ve known their whole lives that information is infinitely copyable, infinitely shareable and impossible to contain once it’s been shared. They have completely different assumptions than the ones I was raised with, when knowledge came from limited sources and required significantly more time and resources to acquire, when the term “expert” had an implied meaning. Kids today are used to the idea of communicating asynchronously with many different people simultaneously. They have a totally different social experience than I did, when most people engaged each other one on one in synchronous exchanges and only addressed large groups if they had the resources or some kind of acclaim.
These, of course, are generalities. There is no real thing called a “generation” that you can safely and easily wall off from other generations and say, “This is a different group of people.” Part of the real challenge with our current generation gap is that it so unevenly distributed. There are kids in their teens today that match the description above, but there are just as many whose attitudes and experiences match their grandparents’ more closely than they do other kids who live only a half-hour’s drive away from them. But I talk about the “current generation” of kids anyway because it seems that’s where we’re all inevitably headed.
What purpose does a museum serve for that generation? When you possess a half-dozen different devices that can answer any question you could possibly imagine at just about any time, what function does a museum serve? What role does it play in their lives? Is it a place of quiet reflection? Is it a place to experience first hand those things you read about on a screen? Is it a place to gather with others and share those experiences? Is the museum an important piece of the fabric of that generation’s lives? Or is it just a big building filled with the physical manifestations of cultural trivia?
I don’t personally believe that museums are, or should be, trivial collections of accumulated cultural trinkets. But what I believe isn’t that relevant in the grand scheme of things. What will today’s teens think when they’re old enough to support or not support museums? What value will a collection have to them when the same information can be gathered instantly and for free from just about any place on the planet? I believe that museums will have to be places of experience. Museums will be places where people can go to experience something first-hand that they can’t get through an incredibly detailed and complete description that is always accessible. Museums need to become centers for shared experiences and not just collections of objects.
What kind of experience should museums offer? I don’t know. I have ideas, but I really don’t know what museums are going to do ten years from now. Answering that question is going to require a lot of trial and error. We’re going to have to experiment, and we’re going to have to do it very quickly and with lots of iterations. We’re going to need to be much more agile and adaptive than most of us currently are. But before we can do that successfully, we need to build a stable platform on which to create those experiments. We need a set of services that will enable us to redirect our resources quickly and efficiently in whatever direction they are needed today or tomorrow.
And right now, that’s my job. I’m building one of those platforms—the online platform for the Denver Art Museum. It’s going to take some time, but when it’s finally ready for launch, we’ll be able to experiment with it quickly and easily. Once all the core pieces are in place, we’ll be able to move them around and reconfigure them. We’ll be able to add new pieces easily and quickly, and we’ll be able to drop or abandon the pieces that aren’t working without impacting everything else. The initial launch of our new web site may not feel like we’re redesigning the wheel, but it’s only the beginning of a much longer process of constant experimentation and reinvention. The hardest part of iterative design is getting off to the right start. But it’s the most important part and, unless they’re one of the few that has already started, it’s what every department in every organization should be focusing on today.
Matt Popke is a web developer at the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado. Working with a cross-departmental team, he is responsible for the design and implementation of the DAM’s online presence and services. His interests are legion but his current obsessions include games and game design (all kinds: board, card, dice, role playing, tactical miniature and videogames), applied aesthetics, procedural rhetoric, and more recently, kites.
A couple of weeks ago, The Art Newspaper published an article on How to get ahead in US museums. The article addressed the increasing call within the museum sector for curators to take on management positions, focusing on the New York-based Center for Curatorial Leadership. It mentions fears of a leadership crisis occurring in the field in the US, with 60 or so museum directors expected to retire by 2019.
But I think the leadership crisis in museums might be bigger than this. It’s not merely about those museum leaders who might retire, but whether those coming through to replace them (and also those who are not slated for retirement) have an understanding of the emergent technological landscape in order to lead confidently in this arena.
Professional development is essential in new media, because most of us learned nothing about it. If you graduated from university with a museum studies degree five years ago, you wouldn’t have learned about Twitter. Youtube was a new thing and Facebook was moving out of colleges into the wild. If you graduated ten years ago, social media in general would be an alien thing. If you’re a late Cretaceous dinosaur like me, computers were a novelty, and if you’re older, say an early Jurassic dinosaur like many museum directors, computers in general are something that happened after formal schooling.
The implications of what this means for museum leadership as both museums and technology move forward are fascinating. If we have museum directors who understand museums but do not understand (and commit firmly to) the altered technological landscape, how can museums possibly adapt to changing expectations?
A natural answer that I could offer up to this problem would be to seek leaders within the museum technology field (something I would love to be seriously considered – I know some people who would be amazing leaders). However, I don’t think that idea is quite as simple as I would like it to be.
The museum sits, as we know, on a cusp between its nineteenth century beginnings, in which knowledge was made through expertise, vetting and reduction, and its twenty-first century present, in which knowledge is becoming networked, open and created by experts and non-experts alike. The philosophical differences between these two approaches are significant, and as much as I love the idea of a museum built for agility and responsiveness, it cannot be ignored that museums are somewhat change averse. The Art Newspaper article finishes with this statement:
Change is not what happens naturally in the museum world; the Met is a risk-averse institution and for good reason.” That is how it built its reputation as one of the world’s great museums[.]
If museums are risk adverse, and museum technologists are (often) those who advocate change, then putting a museum technologist at the helm of a museum might be considered somewhat risky by those doing the hiring.
I admit in writing this, I am assuming that leaders from museum tech would drive museums forward towards a particular philosophical direction – and that might not be entirely true. Still, this is an important issue to consider, if only because we need to think about career paths for museum technologists (how can we attract and keep good people if there is no real opportunity for career development in the field?). But beyond this, of course, there are questions about how museums will be able to continue to be relevant (and in fact, become more so) if leadership in the field does not engage with the issues that the changing technological landscape is bringing to the field.
What do you think? How can the sector approach these questions of leadership in the changing technological landscape? And have I correctly characterised the problem, or are there issues here that I haven’t yet thought of?
*NB – I made some changes to this post after conversation with Mia Ridge on Twitter, as I think my initial version was slightly convoluted in message. I will return to some of the other issues I raised in that first version in a later discussion.
museum geek 