Touring the web: reflections on the Museums & Web 2008 conference

TitleGet the basics right

Collection records + digitisation + standards + onsite developers + teams = innovation + usable

TitleBryan Kennedy

“By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution. I fundamentally believe that at least in the museum world there isn't much danger of the technology folks unseating the curators of the world from their positions of power. I'm more interested in building skilled teams within museums so that the intelligent content people aren't beholden to external media companies but rather their internal programmers who feel like they are part of the team and understand the overall mission of the museum as well as how to pull UTF-8 data out of a MySQL database.”

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/guest-post-from-museums-and-web-bryan.html

TitleMuseums are inherently social, so now is the web

Fusion of physical and online offer: our paper

We don't control the space – we just provide the framework / platforms + content for people to make their own meanings

Title“Touring” the web (Mal Booth)

Museums and YouTube

Flickr Commons

Facebook

ArtShare

Brooklyn Museum

TitleOrganisational development

Cross-functional teams

Nimble structures that encourage collaboration and innovation

Web 2.0 = task (way of thinking & working) not technology

Where is the web strategy and who’s running it?

Titleaudience, audience, audience

Indigenous voice: Reciprocal Research Network

Teens: Walker Art Teens, States Museum, ArtPad

Education (and SlideShare!!)

Everyone else

Access to data

TitleFutures??

Experimentation

The mobile web

Semantic web, faceted navigation

Mash-ups

TitleWhat can we learn??

Sector-wide approach

Accessing funding – one voice, consolidate

Sustainability: open source, staff development, staff vs contract, changing the ways we work

Assess the risk (including the risk of doing nothing)

TitleFinal thoughts

The semantic web – the one paper to read(or read the workshop summary on Mia Ridge’s blog)

Information and data becoming more accessible with a low entry threshold – easier to use and express yourself

We don’t control it – we can only provide the platform

How ready are our organisations??

TitleThe Delphi project

Semantic search for museum databases• need to enable ways for users to investigate online collections

in ways that make sense to them• online collection use can be for curiosity, research or casual

interest• using museum-style jargon in online collections is unhelpful to

most users, so therefore merely uploading our collection records en masse won't work

• social media are effective tools, with the most successful focussing on the community, not the delivery mechanism - how do people want to use, reuse and share data?

• Identify range of users, then focus on a primary target• increased visibility of the collection brings increased scrutiny

TitleThe Australian Museum tours the web …

The Australian Museum YouTube Channel

Facebook Dinosaur Fan page

Facebook AMEP Fan page – aim to actually log how long it does take

Museum 3.0 network

Flickr – audience research results

Flickr – a visitor’s view

del.icio.us – social bookmarking

http.//www.australianmuseum.net.au/