Kolmapäev, 14, aprill 2010

Reaching and Including Digital Visitors: Swedish Museums and Social Demand

11.15

Tobias Olsson and Anders Svensson

School of Education and Communication,

Jönköping University

"Digitalisation offers a lot of opportunities to museums. These opportunities are, however, also challenging. Digitising collections are costly projects, digitally coordinating various museums’ activities has proven difficult in practice, and to really add something extra to visitors’ experiences by using digital media has very often become even too much of a challenge for museums. The latter challenge is made specifically obvious when it comes to making use of the possibilities for user inclusion offered by the increasingly interactive web.

As three out of four inhabitants have access to broadband connection at home, and with extensive use of digital services across both commercial and public sectors, the Sweden should be fairly well prepared for digitalised museums. According to a recent account from an insider within the area, however, this is not the case. In fact, it is quite the opposite: “Since 1995 Swedish museums have spent approximately one billion Swedish crowns on digitalisation, but so far the museums can’t communicate with one another, and to an even lesser extent with the general public.” Even though the amount of money spent is a very rough estimation, the insider’s point of view certainly suggests that there is potentially a lot more to be done in this area.

Drawing on the notion of social demand – developed by Canadian media researcher Mark Raboy – this paper will approach the latter half of the problem: museums’ strategies and practices when it comes to reaching out to and including digital visitors. More specifically we will present and discuss a research and development approach that is about to be put into use for analysing and developing a number of regional Swedish museums.

The approach – firstly – aims at being sensitive towards the web’s possibilities for user inclusion. The main strategy here is to analyse best web practices – i.e. websites that have been successful in including users – brought from various societal spheres: commercial, civic, etc. But an equally important part of the approach is, secondly, to both acknowledge and to account for users’ deliberate and reflexive preferences when it comes to museum’s digital applications. With an analytical eye kept on best practices a wide range of actual and potential users will be interviewed in focus groups aiming at grasping and analysing social demand in terms of museums’ digital applications.

The paper presents the project’s overall approach, its background, and its theoretical points of departure. Furthermore it presents an initial best practice analysis, based on the commercial website www.moderskeppet.se. What can museums learn from it? The purpose is not to offer museums an abundance of hands-on advice as a short cut to success, but rather to describe the company’s way of looking at their users and the following appropriation of different digital applications. In 2004 the website was a one-person project with a few thousand visits per month. Today the web site is the display of a company with six full-time employees and attracts 120 000 visits per month. What has made the company’s digitalisation that successful?

Digitization - Accessibility - Long-term digital preservation. Creation and maintaining virtuaalmuuseum.ee

12.15

Andres Uueni 

Conservation Centre Kanut, Estonia

Background

This paper is about the digitization, accessibility and long-term preservation from the perspective of creation and maintaining virtuaalmuuseum.ee - solution to provide direct and reliable access to digital collections of Estonian museums. Domain is developed in co-operation between  the Estonian  Ministry of Culture, MindBridge LLC and Conservation Centre Kanut (CCK). The first landmark to the accessibility of the museum items using virtuaalmuuseum.ee was 2006 when exhibition 'Estonian Modernism' was created.

The need of digitization

Digitization presents new opportunities for gathering materials and for the development of services, which applies across institutional boundaries, but because there is a very large quantity of different materials, digitization must be selective with clear selection principles and criteria.. Although digitization is based on international standards and good practice but at the present there the demand of accessibility is often ignored. There is little importance to the users whether certain materials have been digitized if they are not accessible to them - so it is crucial that the most important reason for digitizing analogue materials is to facilitate user access to them. There are different reasons why there is limited interest to create accessibility of digitized materials, but one of them is the lack of information about the possible users - it is essential to establish co-operation with users and other segments of society, especially the university sector and the sector concerned with conservation of cultural heritage.

Accessibility

Compared with archives and libraries there is only a little amount of digital information generally accessible in museums and there is great potential for improved access. The effective accessibility to, and dissemination of digitized materials, through the use of new technologies can prepare the way towards extensive transparency and increased use of these materials. virtuaalmuuseum.ee is one working solution to improve accessibility and sustainability of digitized materials. Domain is built up to provide access to a broad range of different types of information, adapted to suit different user groups. This initiative is related also to long-term preservation - all materials digitized in CCK are preserved at the  Estonian Central Digital Repository managed by the Estonian Public Broadcasting.

Long-term preservation

The long-term preservation of large quantities of digital material is a new challenge which requires high levels of both competence and resources. Preservation is often considered as some additional value and usually neglected. A successful preservation needs a systematic and structured approach - not only to preserve the information but also to ensure that it will remain accessible and readable in the long term.

Conclusions

Through virtuaalmuuseum.ee initiative CCK's aim is to ensure the accessibility and long-term preservation of the digitized materials and to facilitate their future use. The domain is offering to Estonian state museums to show collections and exhibitions. It is one example of co-operation of different institutions giving users direct access to the digitized materials and content increasing interest towards the cultural heritage. Access and further processing of digitized materials by users could create new content in the future.  

Trans/forming museum narratives: the accommodation of photography 2.0 in contemporary exhibitions  

12.45

Dr Areti Galani
International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies
Newcastle University, UK

Dr Alexandra Moschovi
Department of Photography, Video and Digital Imaging
University of Sunderland, UK

In spring 2002, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an “experimental” exhibition about the city of New York under the title ‘Life of the City’. Aiming to “explore the richness, diversity, and power of the tradition of photography in New York”, on a par with the architecture, landscape and buzz of the city, the 150 exhibits that furnished the first part of the show were drawn from the museum’s masterpiece collection. Next to the artworks proper, in an installation continuously changing throughout the duration of the exhibition, featured photographs contributed by New Yorkers and visitors who responded to the museum’s open call. Yet, the arresting centrepiece –of the show was the projection of a constant stream of professional and amateur photographs collected by the post-September 11 project, ‘Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs’ that was initiated, its instigators claimed, “as an alternative way of looking at and thinking about history” proposed “by the people for the people”. Without credits, titles or other information, taken by “everybody and anybody”, such un-authored imagery contradicts, by its very nature, the museum’s traditional canons of connoisseurship and ownership.

It is, however, within the changing digital media landscape, which has given rise to online social networks, citizen journalism and knowledge crowd-sourcing, that museums increasingly look at social media as a means to diversify their activities and to reach new audiences. In this context, museums such as the London Transport Museum and Tate Britain have favoured the familiar and ‘democratic’ medium of photography in combination with online image sharing applications to address these challenges and to increase their relevance to their target audiences. The exhibitions of ‘How we Are’ in Tate Britain in 2007 and ‘Suburbia’ in the London Transport Museum in 2009, have used Flickr not to publicise their content but to enable a process through which everyday users were able to contribute to the exhibition – an approach also explored in their forthcoming exhibitions.

We are currently witnessing a curatorial fascination with the amateur vernacular, generated and published through social media applications. So what makes today’s amateur imagery so appealing to museums? One might argue that the ‘amateurism’ of the immediate and accessible Web 2.0 photography affords the museum with a more credible and authentic record of the real that mediates life in a manner that professional imagery cannot. It may allow, therefore, the expansion of the dominant museological narrative by promoting what Andea Witcomb calls “unstable museum interpretations”.

This paper explores this hypothesis, focusing on the re-definition of existing tensions in the museum, such as the changing relationship between producers and consumers of meaning and the emergence of the ‘prosumer’; the diffusion of boundaries between canon, centre and periphery; and the renegotiation of authored discourse through the deployment of polyvocal narratives and participatory practices.