Should museums just give up now and let Google take responsibility for knowledge?

Wow – so the introduction of Google Knowledge Graph today has some fascinating implications for museums, knowledge, and everything else. As the Mashable account of the new move by the company explains:

Starting today, a vast portion of Google Search results will work with you to intuit what you really meant by that search entry. Type in an ambiguous query like “Kings” (which could mean royalty, a sports team or a now-cancelled TV show), and a new window will appear on the right side of your result literally asking you which entity you meant. Click on one of those options and your results will be filtered for that search entity.

…In addition to the window which will help users find the right “thing,” Google will also surface summaries for things, which, again, will try to be somewhat comprehensive by tapping into the various databases of knowledge. A search for Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, will return a brief summary, photos of Wright, images of his famous projects and perhaps, most interestingly, related “things.” People who search for Wright are also looking for other notable architects. It’s a feature that may remind users of Amazon’s penchant for delivering “people who liked this book also bought or searched for this one” results.

And from the Google blog post on the Knowledge Graph, comes this little nugget:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him.

This is fascinating. And in some ways quite monumental for museums. How on earth can museums compete in such an environment? Why would anyone come to a museum (or at least, an online collection) for information when they can go to Google and get information that is likely to be tailored to their needs? And at the same time, how can we find information that runs against this “official” line? Is this simply grand narratives on a much grander scale, only controlled by a commercial entity? Google argues that this will lead to serendipitous discovery – but surely the potential for truly serendipitous discovery is actually reduced, not improved?

During Koven’s Ignite Smithsonian talk from 2011, he said

however you may feel about content farms like eHow, wikiHow, whatever, what they do do very well is they find questions that people are actually looking for, and answer them directly and completely. And so what we need to do is, by combining content from lots of sources, we can actually really focus on what people want, and worry just exclusively about making that content that’s unique to us.

But what on earth is unique to us? We aren’t the only institutions for whom history is our domain. Nor are we the only ones that tell stories. We have objects, yes, but objects maybe don’t mean all that much online, when all that they can present is a simulacrum of the physical. So what can we offer that Google cannot? Authority? I think that most people would think that Google was fairly authoritative for the majority of information that they are looking for (particularly if it does point to sites like museums and libraries).

So should museums simply give up trying to find better models for presenting their own collections, and work with Google? Or can we instead prove to be an effective counter-point to the global meta-narrative that Google is writing for us using algorithms? Does this move by Google have the potential to essentially change what a museum is or does online in the Internet age?

This is obviously a very quickly bashed out post, filled with first reactions rather than deep contemplation. But I would love to hear what you think about this more too. Lots to discuss on this issue.

What do you think? What could the implications of Knowledge Graph be for museums?

Do museum staff have the right to be offline?

There have been a number of interesting and important discussions taking place around the ‘Net in the follow up to Museum and the Web, and hopefully over the coming week or two we’ll get to explore a few of them. One post that I keep coming back to, however, is Koven Smith’s Leave tech in the conversation, in which he writes:

Technology (or, as I’ve said before, the set of practices and materials we currently define as “technology”) is the lingua franca of the world in which we now live. Museums resist acknowledging this at their peril. Any moment in which a curator/educator/director/CFO/whomever is allowed to continue to be ignorant of how a given pervasive technology works is just pushing your institution’s adaptation further down that timeline. Any method of working in which ignorance is allowed to persist is one that is, frankly, suicidal for institutions that are trying to figure out what their place is in this new world.

Not long after reading Koven’s post, I came across a post by Kate Carruthers, meditating on organisational changes surrounding technology, in which she asks about workers and their right to be offline in the new technological environment. It is with this question in mind that I want to address Koven’s post.

If we accept Koven’s proposition that technology is the lingua franca of the world in which we now live, and that a failure to accept this and act accordingly is suicidal, two questions emerge. The first is about institutions and whether they have the right to be offline. For me, this seems pretty clear cut. Not every institution in the world needs to be, or even should be, online. Small, specialist (volunteer-run) museums with a limited and clearly defined local audience may gain little-to-nothing from being online. For some of these museums, the cost in resources to be online will be far more than the benefit of doing so… joining a project like the Museum Metadata Exchange might be enough to satisfy the urge to digitally document the museum’s collection. The choice not to be online might threaten the longevity of that institution, but in some cases that might be ok and even appropriate (do all museums have the right or need to live on indefinitely?).*

But what about the people who work within institutions? Do museum employees have a right to be offline? Can they refuse to participate in an institution’s online engagement? Should they be able to? In Carruther’s case, she was thinking through the implications of our 24×7 social media culture, but I wonder if the question doesn’t extend beyond this into issues of digital engagement more generally. Can a curator refuse to participate in blogging? Can someone who has chosen not to participate in social media in their personal life similarly opt-out at work? Conversely, can an institution force someone to start a social media account if they have chosen not to do so previously for personal reasons?

Vickie Riley, a commenter on Koven’s post, writes:

I don’t know how it works in other museums but in mine, the curator calls the shots. I don’t. For me to expect that he’s going to embrace what I do is a bit naive.

I genuinely don’t know what I think about this. On one hand, if (for instance) a museum educator’s job description did not explicitly indicate that they would need to hold or develop digital skills, then surely they are absolutely at liberty to refuse to do online work (maybe by passing it off to another staff member?). But equally, the context of museum work has changed and is changing. Failure to engage online can impact not only the individual and their own career prospects, but also the museum’s ability to innovate and stay relevant online, and therefore an individual’s refusal to take part in online engagement could have greater implications than simply the personal. So, do museum employees have the right to be offline?

In the comments of Koven’s post, he writes:

…a big part of the problem is that many museum position descriptions haven’t evolved with the times. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but I can’t think of many curatorial job postings that begin with “please send a resume and link to your personal blog.” I fear that until this changes, we continue to send the signal that it’s okay to not speak this language.

This seems to be at the crux of the issue. As noted in the 2010 NCM Horizon Report – Museum Edition, audience expectations of museums online are changing, particularly with regard to “online access to services and information.” In the musetech world, too, our expectations of other staff and the way they should be engaging are also changing. But these desires are not necessarily being reflected in institutional position descriptions. And if those job descriptions are not specifically asking for applicants to be digitally competent, is it fair for those of us working in museum technology to expect that they will take on such duties? Realistically, it’s probably not. But how do we move forward from this?

Do you think that museum staff whose job descriptions did not specifically call for digital skills should have the right to stay offline? Have digital competencies started to become a core requirement of jobs at your institution? Do you think they should be? For which positions?

*(nb, I wonder whether this becomes any less clear cut if the question is whether public institutions have the right to be offline?)

Guest post: Could a Collection Management System be like Facebook?

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.

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?

Concrete, clear & specific: Practical ideas for building digital practices into museums

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.

As such, I’ve started thinking about the practical steps that institutions can take to build digital practices into core museum practice. This article – A call for leadership: Newspaper execs deserve the blame for not changing the culture (tweeted by Matt Heenan) – has some useful thoughts about the newspaper business that are applicable here. Obviously museums are different to newspapers, but the article by Jonathan Groves and Carrie Brown-Smith still has some instructive ideas (emphasis mine):

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.

In Rob Stein’s great MW2012 paper Blow Up Your Digital Strategy: Changing the Conversation about Museums and Technology, he writes:

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?

Can a technologist get ahead in museums?

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.

Ed Rodley recently posted on digital interactivity, new media literacy and skills development, and some of what he wrote is pertinent in this discussion. He wrote:

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.

What is your favourite museum tech idea or project?

I’ve just been asked to give a guest lecture at my university next week, which I am super-excited about. The talk will be a casual lunchtime lecture pitched primarily at Fine Art students, but will also include others from around the University. Because the talk isn’t for a particular subject, I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about all the interesting projects and ideas that are emerging out of the museum tech field.

Obviously I have my own favourite projects, ideas, blog posts, talks etc that I will be discussing, but this seemed like a really lovely opportunity to ask for your favourites too. Which muse tech projects are rocking your world right now? What is your favourite use of mobiles in museums, or your favourite website? Which blog posts should I direct people to, so as to inspire them to think further about the issues? Which talks/youtube videos have left you thinking and rewatching them time and again for inspiration? Whose work are you loving? Which books/journals etc are you reading?

With the nominations for Best of the Web closing last week, many of you will have already been thinking about some of these questions anyway, but if not, now is a great time. And although recent projects are great, I’d also love to hear about any older projects that inspired you and led you to rethink your work practices or your next project. Where have you drawn inspiration from? What work in other fields has influenced you?

I’d love to hear exactly what inspired you, in the hope that it can inspire other people to be excited about this field too. My hope is that by catching the interest of these hapless young university students early, I can convert them into being totally pro-tech museum-lovers, goers or workers.

So… What is your favourite museum tech idea or project? And what do you love about it?

One provocation for Big Data

I’ve started thinking a lot about Big Data and what it could mean for museums in a time when, as Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford write “The era of Big Data has begun.”

The two have put forward an excellent and provocative paper about some of the weaknesses and problematics associated with the use of Big Data, titled Six Provocations for Big Data. Chief amongst these is the idea that Big Data is changing the very way we research. They write:

Big Data not only refers to very large data sets and the tools and procedures used to manipulate and analyze them, but also to a computational turn in thought and research (Burkholder 1992). Just as Ford changed the way we made cars – and then transformed work itself – Big Data has emerged a system of knowledge that is already changing the objects of knowledge, while also having the power to inform how we understand human networks and community…

We would argue that Big Data creates a radical shift in how we think about research. Commenting on computational social science, Lazer et al argue that it offers ‘the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale’ (2009, p. 722). But it is not just a matter of scale. Neither is enough to consider it in terms of proximity, or what Moretti (2007) refers to as distant or close analysis of texts. Rather, it is a profound change at the levels of epistemology and ethics. It reframes key questions about the constitution of knowledge, the processes of research, how we should engage with information, and the nature and the categorization of reality. Just as du Gay and Pryke note that ‘accounting tools…do not simply aid the measurement of economic activity, they shape the reality they measure’ (2002, pp. 12-13), so Big Data stakes out new terrains of objects, methods of knowing, and definitions of social life.

This is merely one of the fascinating propositions that the two put forward, as they argue for a serious interrogation of the way Big Data will shape research, and problematise the problems of both the nature of the data, and the way it is used in analysis.

It is a very interesting paper, and one that discusses a very real issue that I think museums will more and more have to confront in coming years, vested as we are in “the nature and the categorization of reality.” Museum collection databases are a significant cultural resource – and a knowledge asset in their own right. However, to date, they have rarely been treated as such. Museum collection data is still generally considered as secondary to the object itself as an interpretive tool. It merely supports the object.

However, as we move further into this new era – an era when data can be related, mined and aggregated with new viscosity, when the value of data for knowledge production increases, then museums need to address this issue. We need to think about the quality of our data, and how we want people to be able to access and use it. We need to ask who should manage and take care of our data, and what data should be included. If it has the potential to be as valuable (maybe even more so?) to society as our objects, then surely it needs to be taken care of with the same level of priority.

In my recent post on whether museums should still be treating the physical space as the main one, Mia Ridge made the following comment:

And to play devil’s advocate… there are probably lots of people who can do more interesting things with museum content online than your average museum can currently manage. That might be because of resourcing or recruitment issues, a lack of imagination, because the organisation doesn’t know how to value or get excited about online content, whatever… but maybe if they’re not going to do digital well, then museums should just open up their data and let other people get on with creating the next wave of museums online.

This too raises interesting issues for museums about how to best make their data available for others to use, however, because effective data modelling is often complex. As Daniel W. Rasmus writes, in his article on Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty

Combining models full of nuance and obscurity increases complexity. Organizations that plan complex uses of Big Data and the algorithms that analyze the data need to think about continuity and succession planning in order to maintain the accuracy and relevance of their models over time, and they need to be very cautious about the time it will take to integrate, and the value of results achieved, from data and models that border on the cryptic.

So, if Big Data is becoming increasingly important in research and the constitution of knowledge, and yet museums are not themselves necessarily likely to be the ones using it internally (assuming that our expertise lies elsewhere) how can we then think of continuity and succession planning for our data, to ensure it is useful for other researchers? Is this something we can even achieve?

The Linked Open Data movement is obviously going to be a part of this, but I wonder how much further we need to go. Surely the notion of moving from object-based knowledge to knowledge that integrates Big Data starts to essentially change the very core of how museums function as a knowledge institution? And if it does, what does that mean? Is it even possible for museums to tackle this without knowing what an anticipated end result might be? Or is this something that is too complex to be dealt with for all but a very few institutions (if any)? And if so, do we just withdraw from what some believe will be the fifth wave in the technology revolution?

This zippy little article shows what 100 million calls to 311 revealed about New York. What patterns could emerge from our collections if we could analyse information about our collections on such scale? Would it become feasible to see both the trees and the forest of the museum collection – the objects, and the large-scale contexts in which they exist. Could utilising museum collections data in this way recomplexify museum objects and collections, adding new layers of meaning and reconnecting them back to the wider world of information?

I have no answers here. These are still ideas in sketch, and there is much more to be discussed as my ideas evolve on this subject. But I think it is something we should be talking about.

Biophilia – Björk

Björk’s app album Biophilia is pretty well the coolest thing I’ve come across in ages. I downloaded the app this afternoon, and promptly lost myself exploring music and music-making, games and visuals. Have a listen to David Attenborough’s introduction to the app/album below:

This is everything that an app should be. It just spills over with creativity, and invites participation and creativity from its users in kind. Through experiments with science, and essays enclosed within, the app promotes learning too. Mind you, if this is the start of a new wave of creativity in apps then museums and other institutions who pride themselves on making knowledge and education accessible could be left fighting for relevancy. Or maybe we should just be looking for awesome and creative new partnerships to explore.

The Internet, GLAMs and the production of new knowledge

In line with my involvement in the Digital Culture Public Sphere in the last week, one major question that has been surfacing time and time again during the discussions: How do we pitch GLAM organisations as being for the future, rather than simply about old things, and nostalgia? Or, in other words, how can we make GLAMs sexy to politicians?

Museums are often thought of as being about ‘old stuff” and stories. Much of our publicly recognised value still seems to be in the kind of nostalgia or memory arena. We can absolutely see this in the kind of language that was used within the National Culture Policy Discussion Paper, in which cultural institutions have the following “pitch”:

The Government also funds national collecting institutions which perform a central role in preserving and making Australia’s art and culture accessible. These institutions have traditionally centred their activities on collections management which includes documentation, conservation and exhibition. However, changing community expectations of access and service have created additional areas of common interest, including education, interpretation, regional delivery and digitisation of collections.

Even in this policy language, the view of cultural collecting institutions is really only about preservation and accessibility of art and culture. The value of our collections is seen to only reach so far as education and interpretation.

But right now, GLAMs have far greater potential in the creation of new knowledge, particularly with the incredibly rich data that’s held within and around our collections. In a data economy, we are actually incredibly rich with the sort of data that no one else has.

Ben Goldacre at the Guardian published an article on Friday, arguing for the incredible value of everyday government data. He writes

Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures. If you’ve ever wished you were born in the 19th century, when there were so many obvious inventions and ideas to hook for yourself, then I seriously recommend you become a coder, because future nerds will look back on this time with the exact same envy. But that leap forward will be tediously retarded if we don’t make the government allow us to use the pavements.

This is the same argument that I’ve started making in regards to GLAM collections. As I said in my Public Sphere presentation:

We cannot now even imagine the full possibilities that might come from the uploading of our collections to the Internet… Who knows what possibilities for new discovery, new knowledge and new insight lie hidden in the collections of our museums, galleries, libraries and archives? Digitising our collections and making them available online in usable forms… will lead to incredible new opportunities for cultural institutions to gain new relevance in the global knowledge economy.

GLAM collecting institutions have incredible information resources that can tell incredible, and hitherto hidden, stories about the development of society and of the natural world. We should be partnering with researchers, scientists and data visualisation specialists. Although we might hold expertise on our collections at an object level, or even a collection level, there is new knowledge that is held within our collections that will be liberated when we can pull together the individual pieces of information, and find new meanings.

The Internet, and Linked Open Data, really do liberate our cultural institutions to be more than just the sum of their parts. Now might be the time that GLAMs really do come into their own, as public institutions that truly serve the public both off- and online.

“All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are” – Did Facebook just become a social history museum?

Wow. So Facebook just took an interesting step into the memory market, didn’t it? In launching Facebook Timeline, Mark Zuckerberg made the statement “We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life.”

Fascinating. It’s not a massive surprise to see Facebook trying to stake out more territory in the memory and identity market. The more they become associated with people’s memories, the less likely it is that people will jump ship like they did with social networks like myspace. But this move could have some really interesting implications for the way for both the way we use the site, but also for the way we record memory.

Lately I’ve been talking to a number of curators at the Powerhouse about how they conduct collection-related research, and more than one has indicated that the required fields in the museum’s collection software in part dictate the information they seek out. That’s only natural – there are fields that need to be filled in, and therefore no research feels complete until all are populated. But I wonder whether Facebook’s moves into the (commercialised) memory market could have similar effects. Will people start locating their old photos (such as ones of their parents when they got married etc) simply because Facebook gives them a box to fill out? I think they will.

Belinda Barnet makes a really interesting point in her 2003 article, The erasure of technology in cultural critique. She writes:

There is no lived memory, no originary, internal experience stored somewhere that corresponds to a certain event in our lives. Memory is entirely reconstructed by the machine of memory, by the process of writing; it retreats into a prosthetic experience, and this experience in turn retreats as we try to locate it. But the important point is this: our perception, and our perception of the past, is merely an experience of the technical substrate. It is a writing with traces, a writing of traces.

This binding together of memory and the prosthetic way it is constructed external to ourselves is something addressed by José van Dijck in her 2004 paper Memory matters in the Digital Age. When discussing the choice of saving one of two types of objects from a burning building – a box full of pictures and memory objects, or a box of precious jewellery and identity papers – Dijck suggests that we have an attachment to the memory objects because they are an irreplaceable link to our past and who we are. She writes:

memory objects apparently carry an intense material preciousness, while their nominal economic value is negligible. The loss of these items is often equated to the loss of identity, of personal history inscribed in treasured shoebox-contents.

This is where the Facebook timeline starts to get a little interesting. In this digital age, our shoeboxes of memory items are not always tangible. I would guess that most photographs that people take don’t end up stored in physical photo albums any longer, but instead end up in digital storage spaces, on Facebook and Flickr! The traces to which our memory is attached are being stored by commercial companies, and we have no real control over how they could be used into the future.

But more than that, if Facebook continues to move into the territory of memories, I wonder whether it come become something akin to a universal museum that maps the stories of the world. After all, soon it will not only have hundreds of millions of users, but it will be able to map the relationships between them, and store their digital objects as well. By getting people so invested in the site, and being able to aggregate their data, Facebook is starting to do something that no museum has ever done in telling the stories of the world today. If Facebook timeline starts to extend all the way back into the past and people scan and post their memory objects of their parents and grandparents, and even their full family trees, it will have a really unique control over our historical information. For social history museums in particular, this could be an incredibly rich datasource. Maybe instead of teaming up with Google like art museums have started to do in Art Project, social history museums should be teaming up with Facebook?

In museums, we constantly talk about how objects are animated by their stories, and that stories are anchored by their objects. When, the way it looks right now, Facebook is making a claim for both. On the introduction page to Timeline, the tagline is “Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.” Soon Facebook could have our digital objects, and our stories. It’s a very interesting move.