UPDATE! Check out the slides and recap of our great discussion here.
The people who dream up, collaborate on, and implement social media initiatives in museums rarely have an opportunity to gather with their peers in one room. This session is our chance to see each other face to face and WORK.
We'll start out with a quick #musesocial year in review. You don't want to miss this recap of the top hashtags, trends, and challenges from the recent past.
Next, we'll break out into a mini un-conference based on social media topics YOU select for smaller group discussion. Let’s take this chance to debate, discuss, and find ways to work together!
Finally, we’ll regroup to discuss some of the key threads from our breakout groups with a focus on resources, solutions, and project ideas for us to collaborate on in the coming year.
Join us and let's get social together!
Libraries, museums and archives – so-called memory institutions – are undergoing intense technological transformations in the way they catalog, preserve and publish cultural heritage information. The timeline, scope, and outcome of this technological advancement seem to be very different in these fields, due to the different mission and structure of these institutions.
However, some of the underlying tools, specific goals, methodologies and data models seem to be shared among most of the cultural institutions who are invested in technological advancement.
In this informal, open discussion and Q/A among the panelists and with the audience, the participants will engage in an exchange of use cases in their own specific fields, trying to find a common ground where cultural heritage institutions can collaborate to establish standards that are valid for all cultural expressions.
Physical and online spaceQ: Which role does the physical space of libraries, archives and museums play in a social context, in contrast with their online presence? (see related article)
Q: How does the online LAM experience relate with the on-site experience and how are they both evolving? How can on-site technology aid or hinder a visit?
Mission: scholarly vs. broad audienceQ: How can LAMs fulfill their role of information providers by offering the highest quality information possible as well as reaching out to the broadest audience possible?
Materials collectedQ: Museums have publications, and sometimes libraries within them, as well as archives; libraries have special collections made up of unique or limited-edition objects. Are the two institutions closer than we think in terms of what they collect and how they catalog it?
Data harmonization effortsQ: Efforts to harmonize concepts between libraries and museums, i.e. map terms that are common to both, are underway (e.g. FRBRoo). Also, portals such as Europeana and DPLA are aggregating resources from libraries and museums alike, providing generic repositories ofcultural heritage. Who is implementing this at an institutional level?
Q: How can physical cultural heritage items be cataloged and published along with conceptual (immaterial, born-digital) ones? Are today's tools adequate for the task or are they still relying on a pre-1970s concept of culture?
User experienceQ: How important is visualization for LAMs, especially in regard to Linked Data and complex data sets? Which online and on-site efforts are most notable? What can we learn from non-cultural sectors?
Q: Image delivery is probably one of the main points of contact between LAMs. The interest around IIIF and related tools confirms this. Could this be one common ground for all CH institutions?
In this presentation—tailor-made for MCN—panelists will lift the veil to reveal the aspects of the development process for a handful of exciting interactive projects and offer a no-holds-barred tutorial on how your museum can create its own interactive. We’ll offer candid observations and revelations about what worked and what didn’t, what we’d do again or not—as the case may be—from the practical to the pie-in-the-sky.
Love them or hate them, BLE beacons continue to be an important tool to consider when planning your on-site mobile strategy. We will take a candid look at their relative successes and shortcomings across a number of projects we have developed and implemented. Included in the discussion: how beacons be used to increase and assist accessibility as well as be one of the primary triggers for content. Using 3-5 active mobile apps in which we have implemented beacons as examples, we will provide insights on how to plan for their inclusion (and installation), how to optimize their effectiveness, how they can affect and enhance narrative strategies, and some additional pros and cons.
Using discussion of beacons as the point of departure, we will then present an in-depth look at The Hunger Games: The Exhibition. Lionsgate Entertainment and Acoustiguide teamed up to create a mobile tour experience for the traveling exhibition of set re-creations, costumes and other artifacts from the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise. Like any museum exhibition, it faced the challenges of how to communicate with visitors, create content with a cohesive narrative flow and move people through the exhibition smoothly. It all had to be presented in the kind of shiny package HG fans would expect and let them share it on pretty much any social media platform.
With everything on the table from personalizing the tour, to Augmented Reality and Image Recognition, to high-end video, to games and quizzes, to hidden content – all triggered by BLE beacons - the sky was the limit. But then a funny thing happened… everyone took a step back to think about how all these things fit together.
Panelists will discuss the collaborative process and how technology and narrative interact, the ever-elusive balance between heads-up and heads-down engagement, as well as the in-gallery versus “real world” appeal of mobile apps. And by the time of this presentation we hope to share some of the reactions from the visitors.
Presenters will include Jeff Hunt, Creative Director, and Simon Dale, Chief Software Architect, Acoustiguide Interactive; John Simoniello, Senior Producer and Michael Suswal, Head of Strategy and Development, Entertainment, Acoustiguide, Inc.
How can you lead your museum to offer truly open access images of collection objects in the public domain? Sharing open images enables people to make new kinds of meaning from museum collections by freely using images as accurate representations of physical objects, or digital raw material to be transformed, or some creative mixture of both. This participatory session is for you if you want to open up your museum’s images, or you already have, or you’re just plain interested in open content. Please bring a question on the topic so you’ll be ready if we ask you!
We’ll play with MCN’s new 60-minute format by having super-brief presentations and then a longer conversation with everyone. After a brief introduction to the topic by Rob Lancefield, each panelist will speak for one or two minutes on how we led our museum to open up images—with a close focus on the “how,” especially in regard to cultivating institutional buy-in. We’ll speak in order of public launch of truly open images at our museums: the Yale Center for British Art (2011), National Gallery of Denmark (2011), National Gallery of Art (2012), Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (2012), J. Paul Getty Museum (2013), and Indianapolis Museum of Art (2015). Most of our time will then be an open conversation driven by your questions, obstacles, and dilemmas. We’ll tap the panel’s experience while keeping the focus on your concerns and how you might resolve them. This will build on recent discussions of open images, while not presupposing knowledge of them. Please join us, join the conversation, and lead your museum to join the move toward open images.
Although user-generated content continues to be a buzzword in online exhibition, it often amounts to nothing more than a glorified talkback board. Comments or stories are collected, but they are rarely integrated with curatorial content. We say we want to involve the public in telling their own stories, but by the time we give them an opportunity to participate, we’ve already written their story, printed the panels, designed the website, etc. However, the public often holds valuable information that could improve or even change the narrative of our exhibitions.
How can we create a more inclusive approach to historical storytelling? How can we better integrate user-generated content into our exhibits? How do we find these users? How do we sustain interest in project that may need time to change or evolve?
In trying to determine answers to these questions, consultant Elizabeth Hansen is partnering with the Texas Archive of the Moving to explore new approaches to the online exhibition of film. Using an episodic approach, the organization plans to roll out thematic content on a weekly basis allowing users to contribute and change the exhibit story as it develops.
Although these stories will have a global reach, a series of on-the-ground activities and events will work to sustain local interest in the stories and to discover new contributors. Locals will encounter the exhibit in places outside the web through the distribution of artworks, record albums, public performances and other curiosity building activities as well as partnerships with local media.
In this presentation, Elizabeth Hansen (Elizabeth Hansen Museum, Media and History Services) and Madeline Moya (Texas Archive of the Moving Image) will share their approaches to the projects, the tools they will be utilizing and their progress thus far. They will also be looking for input from the MCN community on how to improve the unfolding project.