Tag: Maxwell Anderson

Engagement analytics and lifelong engagement in museums

Does a repeat visitor to your museum have more value than a unique visitor? How often does someone have to visit your museum to be considered loyal or ‘repeat’? How do you know whether people are engaged with your museum? These are questions I’ve been thinking about since visiting Dallas back in April (this year is flying), and learning more about DMA Friends, the Dallas Museum of Art’s newly-launched free membership program. The program – which everyone who comes to the museum is invited to join – launched in January, coinciding with the DMA’s move to free entry.

Once signed up to the program, Friends start accruing points and badges in the museum by logging their activities – which galleries they visit, which programming they participate in – via SMS or at dedicated logging stations. Once acquired, the points can be redeemed for rewards like free parking, discounts in the shop or even (at the higher levels) qualifying to spend a night in the museum. In Nina Simon’s 2008 post on modelling repeat visitation, she talks about the importance of rewarding repeat business and letting people know you appreciate them, which is precisely what DMA Friends does. You can learn a bit more about it in the video below.

In exchange for giving away membership, the DMA gets something super valuable… information. The Friends program offers the DMA the capacity to learn more about existing visitors, identify potential new audiences, and make stronger connections with niche and micro-communities (like those who always come for particular types of events). As more and more people opt into the program, the DMA will have opportunities for understanding their visitors and the ways in which they engage with the museum at a scale that seems unprecedented for museum visitor research (please correct me if I’m wrong on that last point). And knowing this kind of detailed information about visitors and their visiting habits opens new windows for thinking about destination loyalty and the sustainability of the museum’s offerings.

What we’re ultimately talking about is engagement analytics
Consider the bank of information that the DMA will have on its visitors over the course of several years. How closely does repeat visitation tie to demographic proximity to the museum? How do you define a repeat visitor? Is someone who visits every year – but only once a year – a repeat visitor? What is the value of their engagement with the museum? How might you get them to increase their visits to twice a year? These visitors who are regular-but-not-frequent visitors might be an interesting place to start when thinking about trying to increase visitation, even though it will take some time to gather the initial data and establish those visitation patterns.

DMA Friends also makes it possible for the DMA to think about individual visitor behaviour and lifetime visitor behaviour. What happens when we start judging success as being about lifetime engagement rather than just numbers in the door? The scale and possible granularity of that measurement is staggering. In DMA Director Maxwell Anderson’s important 2004 paper on The Metrics of Success in Art Museums (PDF), Anderson writes that the first metric of success that museums should be pursuing is measuring the quality of the visitor’s experience.

A museum’s responsibilities to its public are many, and its success in fulfilling them is notoriously hard to quantify. The correspondence of visitor demographics with the demographics of the local population would be useful in pursuing a more representative result. One could continue not with the number of members but with the average number of visits by its members. As opposed to attendance, it would be useful to know the number of visitors who paid full or discounted admission to the permanent collection or special exhibitions. If the museum has no admission charge, then the number of visitors to the galleries (as opposed to the lobby, restaurant, gift shop, or party spaces) would be revelatory. The average length of a museum Website visit and the number of hours that galleries are open to the public are also indicators of success in the quality of the experience offered.

Running through this criteria, it strikes me that DMA Friends offers precisely the opportunities that Anderson was looking for when proposing these metrics almost a decade ago. The program will enable the Museum to see the correspondence between visitor and population demographics; to understand average visitation rather than just total visitation; to see how many visitors go into the galleries and which galleries they visit; and maybe even indications of how long a visitor spends on campus.

In addition, having this kind of information about visitors will allow the Museum to tailor specific experiences for Friends. In the paper Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman wrote on DMA Friends for Museums and the Web, the authors discuss ways that this might play out:

As visitors engage, new patterns quickly emerge showing how visitors use the museum and what sorts of programs are most valued. Ultimately, this pattern of data collection will allow more spontaneous types of programming, almost akin to a game of pick-up basketball: for example, a spur-of-the-moment docent tour around a critical mass of self-identified enthusiasts appearing in the same place at the same time.

Awesome right?!

But we’re not quite there, yet…
For all this potential awesomeness, there are a few things in the current execution of DMA Friends that prevent it from realising some of these longer term ambitions just yet. The first is that, as an international visitor with only limited phone use whilst in the States, I was never going to use the SMS codes to log my Friends points. That’s not a problem in and of itself. I could (and did) use the logging stations. But I only did this at the end of my visit. This meant a couple of things. The first was that I had to record the SMS codes as I passed them to ensure I remembered them all. Not a major pain, but a little one. It also meant that all the numbers I was plugging into the station came at once, so the Museum doesn’t really have a sense of my movements through the museum, like when I moved into each space and how long I took. It also means that, if other visitors are like me, then the idea of running a spontaneous tour for DMA Friends could actually be more irritating than awesome, if I was contacted minutes after I’d left the DMA, rather than in the minutes after I’d arrived. None of these are critical issues. They are just opportunities for further developing the concept in future iterations.

The badging system, which Elizabeth Merritt has touched on, also offers a lot of potential that isn’t being fully realised yet. Because the badges aren’t tied to earning particular rewards (although they do garner the visitor additional points) and there is no social component or way to share and show how many badges someone has earned – or compete against others for rare badges – I don’t think the badges are all that compelling right now. I do see opportunities with the badging program along the social dimension once they are sharable on social media, particularly if there is a competitive element – can someone be the Mayor of the European Art Gallery if they attend it more than anyone else? Would there be those who might compete for the honour of being at the Museum the most?

What I do love about the badges in their current state is the way Maxwell Anderson ties them to self-identification by visitors, in this interview. He says:

The one feature that I’m equally interested in is that people change. Their motivations change in the course of their lives or even their visit. So I think that it’s important to be flexible in presuming why somebody showed up and what they’re expecting to happen when they get here. That’s why [DMA Deputy Director] Rob Stein’s premise of badges has you self-identifying in as many ways as you want: a “sleuth,” you know, a “creative cat,” all these phrases that are tongue-in-cheek. And they’re meant to give people license to self-identify in a constellation of ways. And it’s playful, but it’s also, it gives us some clarity about why people are here.

The idea that visitors change over their visit, and particularly over their lifetime – and that it might be possible to track and tailor experiences to those visitors over that long period – fascinates me. Moves like this one by the DMA should prompt museums to think further about how they can measure and understand those changes, and use those measurements to provide more meaningful experiences for participants throughout their lives. What happens when we start thinking about the engagement visitors could have with our institutions as being (measurably) lifelong engagement?

What do you think about this kind of approach to membership and engagement? How might understanding the way your visitors engage with your museum over the course of their lifetime change the way you think about your work?

Floor staff and the guest experience @ the Dallas Museum of Art

If you’re anything like me, you probably keep a mental notebook of museums that seem to do consistently interesting work; it’s pages filled with the names of people you’d want to work with or museums you’d like to be at if the opportunity arose. My list has quite a few names on it, but one that has been near the top for a while is the Dallas Museum of Art, so it was enormously cool to spend a week at the DMA following Museums and the Web this year.

The DMA has been of interest to me for a number of reasons, but primarily because its mission and approach seems to align with much that I value in museums. It has an emphasis on transparency, dialogue and participation, ethical practice, scholarship, and even taking informed risks (yes! Risk is built into the mission). Under the leadership of Director Maxwell Anderson and Deputy Director Rob Stein, the museum appears progressive, innovative and interesting, and consistently looking to new ways of thinking about museum practice like opening up museum membership to anyone who wants to join it, for free – so it ticks all of my boxes.

So what did I learn from a week there? In short, a lot. As well as spending a significant amount of time with Rob, I had meetings with a number of high-level staff, sat in on general staff meetings, and lingered long in the museum observing visitors and thinking about the dynamics of the space. The takeaways are too many for a single post, so I’m going to run a short series of reflections from my week as museumgeek-in-residence at the DMA. This is the first.

DMA Reflection One: Confident, comfortable staff make for confident, comfortable visitors
While the DMA’s simultaneous introduction of free museum entry and DMA Friends were perhaps the most noteworthy moves it has made towards visitor engagement in recent times, they have not happened in isolation. A less-documented but equally interesting shift in the museum has been in the role of visitor services staff, who are no longer expected to simply guard the museum space, but to take a far more proactively open approach to guest engagement. A member of staff greets visitors upon entry to the museum; another waits near the sign-up stations for the Friends program to assist anyone who needs help. Floor staff through out the museum make eye contact and nod or say hello when guests approach. It’s an approach that reminds me of Disney’s concept of being “assertively friendly” to provide exemplary guest service.

This change in the manner of the floor staff to visitors dovetails nicely with the broader emphasis on relationships found in the DMA Friends program, but is also indicative of a more general cultural change in the institution. For staff who have worked on the museum floor for a decade or longer, the difference in attitude and expected actions is significant. Even the uniforms of floor staff are now different, with a move away from formal jackets and towards more comfortable polo shirts (something which has left some feeling a bit vulnerable without the authority of their prior uniform, but also more open). This change might seem superficial, but comfortable staff make for comfortable visitors.

Cultural change does not happen overnight. One of the most important elements for bringing in change is equipping staff with skills and strategies for coping with the new expectations of their new role; something the DMA and its Director of Visitor Services, and Visitor Services Staff Barbee Barber seems to be approaching proactively. Visitor services staff are given a 15 minute briefing before every shift, as well as attending weekly training. During the training session I sat in on, two members of visitor services staff – David Caldwell and Joe Delinski – had each gone out of their way to research a topic they were personally interested in that was also related to the DMA Friends program to teach other members of the team (itself a great idea for encouraging internal staff development).

Joe’s talk was on gamification and gameplay as they relate to DMA Friends, a subject he was passionate about because Joe is himself a gamer. David spoke on the datafication of concepts, and the idea of “quantifiable social opportunities” and the “cumulative quantity of positive impressions [on visitors]” that the DMA floor staff could make. His talk emphasised the importance of the visitor services staff in generating positive impressions to protect, generate and promote the image of the DMA. What was particularly lovely was the emphasis placed on respect and self-esteem of visitor services staff as well as others, in order that the floor staff could take pride in their work whilst impressing other people. David put forward the idea that while curators, educators and registrars etc have particular knowledge and training that makes them experts at their job, those who work consistently on the floor are the museum’s experts at making “positive impressions.” It’s an attitude and idea I’d like to see at all museums.

In an old post on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon wrote:

Floor staff may also be the most efficient vehicle for transforming museums into social spaces. Web 2.0 succeeds by focusing on the personal interests of users and connecting users to each other via their interests. If we truly want museums to become places for social engagement among visitors, why not re-envision floor staff, who are trained to interpret the collection, as community organizers, trained to encourage and support interactions among visitors?

My impression is that the DMA is on the way to doing just this. They aren’t absolutely there yet; cultural change takes time. But this approach to visitor services, which puts emphasis both on providing welcoming experiences for visitors, and upon ensuring that staff feel respected and gain self-worth from the role played in that experience, seems valuable and aligned with the museum’s approach more generally.

What role are floor staff expected to play in the visitor experience of your museum? And how are they supported in this role?

Process stories

In politics, the idea of a process story – the inside story about how policy is made – doesn’t always sit well. It’s The focus on what is happening behind the scenes, on the machinations that impact policy outcomes is often perceived to be a distraction from the political outcomes themselves. But I’m a sucker for stories that unpack how something happens rather than simply focussing on the end result or product. I like knowing why particular choices were made and by whom; it helps me understand the flows of power and influence that shape the world.

This emphasis on process instead of only the final product is an idea that I can see in a few different places in our sector too, and I’m really excited by it. Dan Spock recently Tweeted a link to imPERFECT CITY – a fascinating sounding project from Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA), which is “a conversation-based exhibition that evolves from an open call for proposals to conceptualize a utopian city within the DCCA’s gallery spaces.” Although the project has many layers and phases, what I am most interested in is the open processes the project purports to follow, which treats the creation of the exhibition as the exhibition. As the proposal by Maiza Hixson describes, “The exhibition “opens” during the planning phase to allow citizens to interface with DCCA curatorial staff who are present to answer questions visitors may have about curatorial process.” In other words, the exhibition is the process of the exhibition; it is not just the end result. imPERFECT CITY takes its form as a living process story. In addition, the whole project makes use of documentation (blogging, videos) as a means for exploring the issues raised by the exhibition, and creating parallel digital and in-gallery experiences.

I love this. There is something really compelling about the humanness of process that is visible in this kind of approach. The edges of the exhibition become permeable and uncertain; it is impossible to know exactly when it starts or ends. How reminiscent is this of so many digital interactions, which are themselves endless and linked to so many other things? The Internet is perpetually unfinished. It is about process because it is itself a process rather than a product; a constantly-shifting performative environment which demands that those who want use it must interact with it in order to experience it. Unlike most museum exhibits, which have a definite and pre-determined start and end date and typically exist within strictly defined borders, the Internet does not privilege time and space in quite the same way. This gives us a lot of space for publicly exploring and explaining how we do what we do.

Social media and digital publishing platforms open up a lot of potential for institutions that want to create compelling content and stories about their exhibitions that aren’t so strictly bounded by the dates and spaces of the gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia has made inroads in this area with their recent ePublication for Anish Kapoor, which was treated as a “living catalogue” and evolved over the course of the exhibition to include a Preview Edition, an Installation Edition, and a Reflection Edition. Rather than creating interpretive content prior to opening and never revisiting it, this catalogue continues to grow during and after the exhibition. The Installation Edition includes information about how one of the sculptures was installed in the space, opening up the mystery of the institution to the public and adding depth to the discussion about the exhibition.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s recently-announced plans for a conservation studio also offer an interesting take upon the emphasis of process in the physical space of the museum, since the studio will effectively turn conservation into an ongoing living exhibition. As describes:

[Director Max Anderson is] going to turn conservation into a public exhibit. Other museums hold the occasional tour through their work rooms. But this is different. Consistent with Anderson’s other efforts in making the DMA more accessible online, he will be, more or less, turning this internal museum function inside-out and putting a spotlight on it. Imagine a hedge fund putting the accountants on display.

Wild, right? There is a certain voyeuristic fascination we have with getting behind-the-scenes in someone’s life, in learning what goes on behind the closed doors. Opening up of parts of the institution to public view plays right into these feelings, and develops a very human understanding of what the institution does.

But this approach also shifts the focus away from the objects and exhibitions onto the human forces that impact them. Could this prove to be a distraction? This is how Australia political strategist Mark Textor describes the political process story:

One of the consequences of an increasingly expansive financial and political media field is the need for content to fill it. Some content is important. Most is borderline trivial, certainly irrelevant. But that has never discouraged the commentators. This search for content to feed the hungry commentariat has led to the rise and rise of the ”process story”. The ”process story” is about campaign mechanics, whether it be a political campaign or a big market offer, not about the issues of the campaign.

Could openly documenting the process of creating an exhibition or of an acquisition take the focus away from the exhibition itself? And is a focus on process worth the effort, or does it just promise to add to workloads whilst providing only trivial or irrelevant content? Would museum audiences be interested in gaining insight into what we do and why, or is this just be extra effort for little reward?

What do you think? Do process stories interest you? Could you see this kind of approach working in your institution?

Tell her she’s dreaming (or why my dangerous idea might never be more than fantasy)

All right. It’s time to get real.

My last post was pretty idealistic. It painted what I’d love to see for the sector in coming years – a confident, collaborative, energised sector. A sector that works together, in order to build something bigger and stronger than any individual institution can. Sounds great, right?! And while there might be some countries where this vision can come true (maybe your country already has this?), for the most part, I suspect its nothing more than a pipe dream in many cases. But why? This post is an attempt to answer the question Lori Phillips asks, when she writes:

I think what you’re describing is an environment of increased charitability and transparency between institutions; an environment in which we brag on one another’s successes more and act like competitive silos less… It’s a win, win, win. So why aren’t we doing more of it?

Why aren’t we doing more of it? Here are some of the reasons I can think of. No doubt there are many more too – let’s work out what they are.

Funding models, incentives, and the zero-sum game
Museums are competitive. They fight each other for funds, for audiences, for kudos. I don’t know if there are any countries in the world where financial resources for museums are effectively unlimited, and if they exist, they certainly aren’t common. Whether the main funding pool for museums in your country is private or public, chances are that there are lots of competitors for a pool that always seems a little smaller than it needs to be – particularly if it has been shrinking. Such limitations on resources creates the impression that museums are playing a zero-sum game. And it’s not just with money either. Access to other things is often limited (or perceived to be) too, such regional or state-wide tourism support (read Robert Connolly’s discussion on this issue here). So even when museums don’t seem to be in direct competition for a single audience, for instance, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t competing.

If there is only limited access to resources, to a pie that will be sliced up between museums within a particular geographic area, there is a great disincentive to being too proactive in your support of another organisation. What if doing so means that they get more of the pie than you do?! Why should we boast of the success of others? No doubt the divergent sizes/priorities between institutions comes into play here too. (As an aside, I think the perception of a zero-sum game around resources is also a reason why internal institutional silos are so often hard to break down.)

Seb Chan’s observations on the US system from his first year in NYC are telling. He writes:

The primary funding model (private philanthropists, foundations and big endowments) isn’t conducive to broad collaboration or ‘national-scale‘ efforts. Instead it entrenches institutional competition and counterproductive secrecy. A lot of wheels get reinvented unnecessarily.

My idealism aside, funding models and limited resources can create very real barriers to sharing, openness, and collaboration. What real incentive does a museum have to share its own resources (including time, knowledge, or staff) with another museum – or the whole sector – unless collaboration is linked to grants and funding or enabled by infrastructure organisations like the Collections Trust? Basically, unless collaboration is incentivised and simplified, there isn’t necessarily a persuasive business case for adopting it as a practice. Why help the ‘competition’?

Intellectual property
So this is an aspect of transparency that I hadn’t really thought about until recently, but it’s a big one and a real barrier to the open sharing that I often hear people wistfully call for. People are protective of their ideas. They don’t want them “stolen” by releasing them too early, as might be required in a truly collaborative setting. This is something that Maxwell Anderson discusses when asked his thoughts on people being transparent with their thought-processes in the question/response section of this talk on museums and internet-based transparency (about 1:14:00). Here, possibly the most vocal advocate for museum transparency hesitates, which says something significant.

There is something scary about sharing ideas – even with friends, sometimes – when you aren’t yet ready to act on them or share them more widely. I know that it’s something I haven’t yet overcome, and I’ve been thinking in public for 20 months. It is much more scary making them available to a competitor. Getting to a place where institutions feel comfortable sharing their ideas when still in conceptual stages, and trusting that doing so won’t lead to exploitation, is still probably a long way off. It may never happen.

Time
I was somewhat surprised at INTERCOM 2012 when I heard more than one museum director mention that the real resource shortage in their museum was not in money, but was instead in “days in the year, and space.” Time and available space are two of the biggest things that prevent museums achieving all that they might want to. And guess what? Collaboration takes time out of the day, and long-term strategies take time (as in, years). And in both cases, that means that working collaboratively is harder to prioritise, particularly when we are talking about sector-level collaboration that could take a number of years to achieve real results for the sector. The short-term time demands quite naturally end up taking precedence over longer-term idealism.

Sometimes it’s personal.
We all know of times when museum directors compete against one another for reasons that have very little to do with their institutions, and everything to do with their own personal histories and temperaments. It’s not glamorous, but it happens. Collaboration, working together and sharing resources occurs for all kinds of reasons. But it is less likely to happen when there are personal clashes between the people who can make the collaboration possible. And as we know, there is a strong link between the personal and the political.

Culture
Most institutions that I know of don’t have an internal culture of collaboration. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but if we can’t even get people collaborating when they are located in the one building, how can we create a cross-sector culture of collaboration?

Ownership of change
One of the emergent questions that came up many times at INTERCOM in November asked what cumulative or collective impact museums can, should, and do have? How can museums work to ensure their collective impact was greater than their institutional impacts? It was a question that seemed to be universally accepted as important, but we didn’t really spend any time looking for answers. I think that one reason for this was because no one person took ownership of this as a problem. We all agreed this was important, but it was seen as a sector-wide problem, rather than being “my” problem.

Daniel Ben-Horin, who ran Techsoup Global’s Contributor’s Summit, has some interesting thoughts on what does make collaboration possible. He writes:

There are a variety of necessary ingredients, of course. There has to be enough complementarily; identical actors compete more than collaborate. There has to be participant ownership coming in. There has to be dynamic facilitation. There has to be proactive documentation to establish a clear record of commitments. There has to be follow-up.

Mainly, though, there has to be a commitment to the need to take action toward impact… and to do so together (because we can’t get there separately).

Complementarily, participant ownership, dynamic facilitation, proactive documentation of commitments, follow-up, and commitment to the need to take action toward impact. Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It takes invested individuals who own the problem and see it through, because they absolutely believe that it needs a bigger solution than what could be achieved in isolation. And without that, all efforts likely come to naught.

These are some of the reasons why I think we don’t collaborate more as a sector, although I am sure there are plenty of others. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are there additional barriers? Are these insurmountable? Realistically, without incentives to collaborate, without compelling evidence that the current system is actually broken rather than just less-than-ideal (and I’m not sure we have that), it’s unlikely to change. Is that ok?

What do you think? Do limited resources create a zero-sum game for museums? Will collaboration within the sector always remain the ideal, but only rarely the reality? If not, what needs to change?

How is the world different because your museum is online?

“How do we measure for epiphany?” Rob Stein’s question from MCN2011 haunts me.

Measurement is on my mind. As a theorist, I don’t tend naturally towards the quantifiable. Neither do museums in some ways. Much of the value of museums is other-than-economic, and not easily measurable. But we live in a society that demands success in quantifiable packaging. We really need a Wondermeter, but since we don’t have one finding the right questions to ask, the right things to measure becomes critical.

It occurs to me, then, that changing the conversation on online collections or museum websites (or anything that we know is important) will demand that we have the right metrics; metrics that funders or board members can make sense of in order to benchmark new ways of thinking about digital against other priorities; metrics that alter the way we think about what we do, and why.

When I think about how I conceive of the online museum collection and its potential role in the broader information ecosystem, it doesn’t make sense to me if success is measured simply by numbers of object records online or visits to the website. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether new knowledge is being created using the collection, or how the collection records are meaningful beyond the museum – and I think those are much more interesting questions. As Jasper Visser put it:

I recently realised that we, cultural institutions, are using the wrong metrics to measure our online success, because we’re measuring just that: generic success. We’re using statistics and software that is perfectly fine when you’re selling Cokes, but might not be ideal for culture, heritage and the arts.

There are some important general questions that should be asked when considering digital success and metrics (Clairey Ross’ post following Seb’s MW2011 web metrics course is a great starting place here). But I’m going to imagine some new metrics, ones that measure the things I think are *really* important, beyond the basics. You might not agree with me that these are the right things to measure. That’s great. What is?

1. What new innovations, knowledge, and digital inventions have come from people using your collection/information?
Patrick Hussey recently considered how crowdfunding is changing culture, and asked “Is it possible that crowdfunding is telling us something rather profound – that the most important and popular form of creativity at this point in history is not ‘useless’ art, but digital invention?” It’s a question that recalls to me one of the conclusions that Koven drew from his unconference session on online collections at MW2012, that “The after-market for collections data may be the most important one.” What if making possible digital invention and new collection-driven discovery was the point of museum collections? How would we measure that? Would the right metric be measuring how many new inventions/innovations have come from people utilising collection data, or what new knowledge had come of it? And if that was a metric, would that change the way your museum acted? Would you run more hack days to encourage innovation around the collection? Would you make sure your data was available as an API? Would you change your image licensing allow image downloads for non-commercial and academic use as the UK National Portrait Gallery have just done?

2. How does your collection link to the broader information ecology?
If we were to start thinking of the online museum collection as a living historical document rather than a mere catalogue, one in which we can discover things about our collections that we’ve never known before, what would indicate success? Would we measure how many Wikipedia entries lead back to the collection? How many external links lead out from the collection to authoritative sources? As Nate Solas has reminded us previously, authority online is conferred by linking to the right sources and places, by making the information that people need and want findable and available. You only have to look at the Walker’s website to see how they are making use of this kind of thinking. What could we measure to encourage more of this?

3. How is the world different because your collection, your museum is online?
Ok, this one is getting more towards the esoteric end of things, but go with me. Maxwell Anderson, in You Get What You Measure writes of answering the question “how is the world different because your museum exists?” It would be interesting to try to find measurements that answer the question “how is the world different because your collection is online?” If we cannot find ways to answer that, maybe we aren’t really having an impact at all? In which case, why bother? Of course, this isn’t something that is easily quantifiable (I told you, I’m a theorist not an evaluator), but I’d love to find new ways to measure the real importance of a museum’s online presence, of its impact as an educational institution, and the impact of the online collection. As Jasper puts it, our significance, not just our success.

I want museums and collections to be meaningful, online and offline. I think they are; or should be; or can be. But maybe they aren’t yet as meaningful as they will be. It’s not quite measuring for epiphany, but maybe it’s not that far from it.

What do you think? Am I completely wrong with my imagined new metrics? What would be better? What crazy things would you want to measure, and how would you do it? Feel free to talk about your own area of fascination, right across the institution. Don’t just limit yourself to mine.

BTW – there are some good general posts about museum metrics that have recently surfaced. Worth reading too.