Last week, I returned home from attending Museums and the Web 2012 (MW2012) in San Diego CA – my eyes tired from a lack of sleep, and my mind abuzz with new ideas, new perspectives, and rich discussions with museum professionals from around the world.
Although the conference addressed plenty of technological questions, with workshops and sessions on social media strategy, web metrics, Augmented Reality for mobile devices, and the importance of analytics for continuous evaluation (see the Let’s Get Real report from Culture24), the discussions that dominated the event were less about technology, and more about what and how the museum should be in the digital age.
The name of Rob Stein’s excellent paper - Blow Up Your Digital Strategy: Changing the Conversation about Museums and Technology - captured this sentiment best. In a session on digital strategies, Stein implored all those in the room to “Be museum experts first, and technology experts second.” If the conversations at the conference were anything to go by, that is precisely what those at MW2012 were interested in doing, with the emergent issues including engagement and interpretation, leadership and institutional change and much more. Technology featured, but as a means and not an end.
A wonderful report from Rainer Mack, Manager of Education at the J. Paul Getty Museum, details this. He writes:
“Issues of interpretation and experience, visitor engagement, the broader social role of museums, and other topics close to the heart of museum educators were explored in ways wonderfully refreshing, vital, and new. What a delight! And what a conundrum. Why here? Maybe it's just that the field of museum digital media (is that a field?) attracts really bright and creative people. Maybe, too, it's that the pace of change in digital media means that you are constantly needing to think and rethink the why's and wherefore's of what you do. As new technologies bring new opportunities, so do they put pressure on taken-for-granted values, assumed constraints, and existing theoretical paradigms. If your tools are constantly evolving, your thinking about how best to use those tools - your meta-thinking - must constantly evolve as well. For digital media specialists, that means you are deeply involved with questions that are not necessarily digital at all, but common to all of us interested in how museums work for visitors (whatever that work, and wherever it "takes place")…
… If digital media started as a tech-y outpost in the corner of the museum, it's now - to judge from MW2012 - a whole lot more… If you all are taking up "my" issues in such novel and forward-looking ways, if indeed you are interrogating "my" taken-for-granteds in ways that are critical and constructive, then I'd better start paying attention. In short (and on the soap box), it made me feel that museum education needs to embrace digital media and the opportunities it presents for extending and enriching the work we do; and that it needs to embrace, in earnest, the ways in which digital media challenges us to think differently. We need to be part of your conversation.”
A session on Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art gained attention for the museum’s approach to audience engagement. As Robin Dowden from the Walker Art Centre wrote:
The museum’s unique take on audience engagement—including claims to remove the most popular work as evidenced in ‘O’ stats and restricting online collection access to visitors who have actually experienced the artwork—suggest this is indeed a museum visitors are unlikely to forget.
Meanwhile, the Walker Art Centre’s own approach to engagement online drew acclaim, with their new website winning both the Innovative/Experimental and Overall Best of the Web categories. The site draws news and content from sites external to the museum, taking a multifaceted publishing approach and acting as a hub for arts and cultural conversations. As popular museum Tweeter and blogger Museum Nerd put it on Artlog.
They’re not just positioning themselves as an arbiter of taste (the connoisseurship thing has long been in every art museum’s bailiwick): the Walker is also placing themselves at the center of the conversation that their mission is all about.
This approach to the museum website is a fresh attempt to make sense of the role and purpose of museum websites in the current technological landscape.
Similarly, Koven Smith, Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, ran an ‘unconference’ session that tried to deconstruct current thinking about online museum collections. His write up of the session included the fact that “the after-market for collections data may be the most important one”, that online collections should be attenuated to their audiences, and that online collection records should be actionable (shareable, comment-able).
The possibilities for the ‘after-market’ use of collections data was demonstrated in the MW “ hackathon”, a technology “build” event in which eager nerds mashed up collection data from cultural collections like the Powerhouse and Brooklyn museums with non-museum data to produce two games and a basic art-based music player.
The closing plenary of the conference – Epic Fail – was a closed-door session, with wi-fi turned off, and no live blogging or Tweeting allowed. This session explored a number of failures that can occur in museum technology projects, including poor organizational fit, feature creep, tech in search of a problem, no user research, no local context, no backup plan, and not knowing when to say goodbye. The session, which encouraged participants to “fail forward” and learn from their failures, was a cathartic way to finish the conference.
Although MW2012 is over, the conversations that started there are not. Read or participate in more reports and blog posts, or join the conversation on Twitter #MW2012.
Suse Cairns is a PhD Candidate at The University of Newcastle. She has been working in museums and galleries since 2008, and writes the museumgeek blog on ideas around museums and technology.
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