Apples to Apples? Users in Libraries and Museums

On Musematic, Holly Witchey has rigorously recorded her recent experience at WebWise, a "IMLS/RLG/OCLC/Getty sponsored conference" on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World that was held March 1-2.

While sub-zero degree collection storage may thrill some of you, I was most interested by Witchey's recap of Elizabeth Broun's (from SAAM) keynote address on "American Art 2.0." Broun talked about SAAM's initiatives both in the museum and on the web to open up their content base for visitors to use in their own ways. Physically, they've added to the viewable collection with their beautiful open storage area, and online, they are publishing and trying to make searchable as much as possible.

These initiatives are a start, and they are driven by a powerful concept. As Broun put it:

2/3 of our visitors don’t come for something we have shaped, they are coming to our core assets—a user-driven kind of traffic. They aren’t coming to hear what we want to tell them, they are coming to find what they want to know.

I wonder what the library people in the room thought when they heard this. To museum ears, this is fairly blasphemous--the idea that people want to use our content, not our exhibits. But to librarians, this is old hat. Libraries are the ultimate 2.0 content providers. Everything is available. Professionals aggregate content for maximum findability. Interiors are designed to facilitate diverse use of the content.

This technique isn't exclusive to libraries. Book, video, and music stores are 2.0 meccas. You can search in multiple ways, both directly (computers), and by wandering the aggregated shelves. Put on some headphones. Check out the staff picks. These retailers have found that it is good business to offer these multiple access points to their content. It doesn't confuse or turn people off; it keeps them engaged, exploring the content and hopefully getting hooked into buying something.

So how far should museums go down this path? Should we look forward to a time when we walk into the art museum, search for a painting in the computers at the front, find the painting, and sit down with it for awhile? Here are some elements--at the least--I think we should steal from the card catalog...

1. Users Have Clear Goals. When you go to the library or the music store, you probably have some clear intentions in mind. You have work to do. You want to find a particular book/vid/cd. You need to return something. All of these motivations are extensions of the fact that you are a USER of these institutions, not a visitor. When you go to a museum, what are your motivations? Do you have specific goals in mind? Recently, when I was stressed about how to look at art, a woman from the National Museum for Women in the Arts suggested that I enter art museums with the goal of seeing a single exhibit. I like this. I walk in, I'm confident about where I'm going, I get into the content, and I feel a sense of accomplishment when I leave. I don't feel like I missed stuff or didn't do it right. Of course, this leads to...
2. Users Come Back Again. I wouldn't feel comfortable visiting just one exhibit at an art museum if I didn't think it would be easy for me to go back to that museum again. When you walk into the library, you don't feel like you have to absorb all the best books they have there on that one visit. But...
3. Users Aren't Tourists. How often do you put a library on the list of "must sees" in a new city? (Ironically, because of cool exhibitions and fancy architecture--more standard museum fare--, I've been doing this more and more.) The fact that museums have specialized content contributes to their design as "destination" venues rather than user venues. Every town has a library; not every town has a science museum. (Though that's changing, as science and children's museums continue to multiply like rabbits.) Can you become a user of a non-local venue? Of course. I feel that way about every national park in the country. Non-locality isn't an excuse not to dip into 2.0 and try to attract users, because one of the best things about 2.0 is it allows you to...
4. Design Local, Access Global. Every image or sound file that SAAM publishes on the web in a searchable fashion is accessible to users all over the world. Heck, I go on the local libary's online catalog frequently before going to the library (usually because all the computers there are broken). The library offers me a resource to "plan my visit" so that I get what I want when I arrive. The content is extended from the local site to my location anywhere. SAAM is doing this with their searchable collection online. It's great--except they don't tell me where to find the piece in the actual museum. They don't even tell me if it's on display. They anticipate that I am only a web user. Which leads to one last thing...
   
5. In User Venues, Improvement Means Making Content Easier to Access. Record store managers aren't tearing out their hair trying to figure out what descriptive labels they should put above the classical section. They are concerned when they can't serve their customers' needs--when items are out of stock, misplaced, or unavailable. This doesn't mean pandering to fads or mass culture (necessarily), it means being oriented towards the user instead of towards themselves. Many library websites feature "Ask a Librarian." SAAM has "Ask Joan of Art."
   

This is not to say there aren't problems with the library/content vendor model. I've been led astray by the Dewey Decimal System on more than one occasion. But if, as Elizabeth Broun suggests, "they aren’t coming to hear what we want to tell them," then we better start preparing so they can "find what they want to know."

Game Friday: Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jane McGonigal

At the risk of sounding like the biggest dork on the East Coast, a few weeks ago I sat down with some friends to play the new Lord of the Rings board game. It’s a cooperative game, which means that all six of us worked together to defeat Sauron and destroy the Ring. We succeeded. It rocked.

There are millions of people all over the world obsessed with massively multi-player games like World of Warcraft. They form guilds, develop strategies, and hopefully, prevail. I’ve never been too excited about games like this, because the motivations and goals involved (slaying, capturing, questing) don’t resonate with me. But what if the goal was to band together to save the world from a real threat—like global warming, AIDS, or mass genocide? Or even simpler: what if the goal was to work together to advance knowledge, science, and human good?

Jane McGonigal wants to make it happen. She is an expert in alternate reality gaming (ARGs), the first woman to keynote at the Game Developers Conference, and she’s thrown down the gauntlet for a game designer to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences by 2032. She believes that people’s interest in gaming and in 2.0-style collaboration has set the stage for “Massively Popular Scientific Practice,” in which people work with real data to solve real problems through the harnessing of collective intelligence. It’s Citizen Science 2.0—connected, powerful, and possible.

How is this different from the other serious games that are out there? McGonigal comments that we need a new kind of serious game:

Games that are designed as functions with an end result that is a measurable difference in the present state of reality. Serious games now are viewed as “resources” (for education, training, instruction, simulation) or “platforms” (for messages, persuasion). We must start to create serious games as “generative processes” or “solutions to problems”

In other words, she believes that gaming can be more than a simulated tool for learning how to slay dragons, end global conflict, and splice DNA. Gaming can be a vehicle for people to attack real world problems.

I think about this a lot with regard to museums and data. There are many science museums that offer some way for people to get the feel for contributing to science by collecting and analyzing data—but most of these “games” are about exposing people to what science is LIKE, not giving them a chance to do science itself. Similarly, there are lots of museum exhibits that allow visitors to register an opinion or a sensation, but rarely is that data compiled and used for larger studies or work. McGonigal’s idea that massive data collection can be packaged in a way that people are compelled, and have fun, participating in REAL science resonates with me and gets me excited about the 2.0 museum, in which every time a guest hits a button their entry is recorded and used to create something great. All it needs is a strong game story, argues McGonigal, and people are hooked.

Of course, McGonigal credits science--and questing/learning itself--as the ultimate hook. It just needs to be packaged in the right contemporary story. She quotes Sean Stewart, ARG storyteller, as saying:

"I do NOT assert that [alternate reality gaming] is the first, or greatest, example of massively multi-player collaborative investigation and problem solving. Science, as a social activity promoted by the Royal Society of Newton's day and persisting to this moment, has a long head start and a damn fine track record.... We just accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment."

McGonigal has many excellent resources for your perusal. She runs a blog, has posted slides from a AAAS talk she did on the Massive Science concept, and here’s a little CNET article about her GDC keynote on “The future of collective play: Fostering collaboration, network literacy and massively multiplayer problem-solving through alternate-reality games."

Institutional Blogs: Different Voices, Different Value

Nik inquired as to how I feel about museum blogs. He asked:

Hey Ms. 2.0, what's your take on museums that keep blogs? Worthwhile? Any good ones out there? Or do they just become boring PR vehicles, due to administrative fears over message control?

And the answer is... it depends. In general, yes, I think that museums maintaining blogs is an effective, cheap way to get changing content out to the public frequently. However, there are many different approaches to take--as there are with blogs in general.

Do I have a personal preference among these approaches? That's not the point. The point is that you have to decide WHY your institution is starting a blog (and no, "all my friends are doing it" is not enough) and then find the approach that works for you.

With a nod to Seventeen magazine, here's a flowquiz to help you figure out what kind of blog might be right for your museum... (and here's a link to a downloadable version of this graphic)

And here's what those results mean...

Approach #1: Institutional Info Blog (star example: Eye Level from SAAM)

These are blogs that distribute news about the museum. At the basic level, these are little more than an alternative mouthpiece for the museum's calendar of events. In Eye Level's case at SAAM, there's a nice blend of museum announcements (exhibit openings, podcast postings, and events) and quirky commentary on museum goings-on (photos of the building's construction, answers to visitors' questions about how certain artifacts are maintained). How to maximize this type? Add a personal touch with accounts of the events and responses to guest inquiries, as SAAM does.

Approach #2: Aggregate Content Blog (star example: Food Museum blog)
These blogs distribute news related to the content of the museum. This is the 2.0 version of the news clippings tackboard on “Current Events” in hallways of some museums. They can serve as a “living” version of the museum collection, and are usually populated by short posts that link to other content sources for the full story. How to maximize this type? Provide content that no one else does--and lots of it.


Approach #2a: Community Content Blog (star example: Science Buzz at SMM)

These blogs take the content of the museum and try to open it up to community input. I say "try" because while many museums, such as the Science Museum of Minnesota, open up the authorship of blog entries to the public, my casual observations suggest that these blogs are still dominated by museum staff, at least as the posters. How to maximize this type? Actively solicit and cultivate a community of public posters by offering incentives to get involved.

Approach #3: Specialized Content Blog (star examples: Voices of Genocide from USHMM, Free Radicals from the Powerhouse Museum)
These blogs are typically linked to an exhibition or sub-specialty of the museum, presenting news about that content. These blogs occasionally showcase some institutional info, but primarily serve as a highly tuned news source on a particular issue. How to maximize this type? Bring in awesome experts to blog for a limited time period, and treat it like special public programming.

Approach #4: Personal Voice Blog (star example: Director's Blog at the Walters Art Museum)
Though this approach is the gold standard for personal blogs, it's incredibly unusual for institutional blogs. These are blogs in which individuals or a small panel of staff offer personal commentary about their museums. What more dangerous--or appealing--way to represent your institution? How to maximize this type? Hold a contest and select several bloggers from across the institution. This is my dream (and I haven't seen it yet): an aggregate blog of individuals, one from the floor staff, one from the store, one from security, one from marketing...

Maybe you come out of this thinking you can cobble together the best of each of these approaches to create a superblog. Bad idea. The best blogs aren't newspapers; they are more like specialty magazines with a distinctive topic, audience, and voice. If you want multiple approaches, follow the Powerhouse Museum's lead and create multiple blogs.

Want more on this topic? Take an armchair tour on museumblogs.org. And if you run a museum blog, get in touch with Lynn Bethke, who is doing her master's thesis on museum blogs and needs your help with a survey.

ISO Understanding: Rethinking Art Museum Labels

I don't usually fist-pump while reading the New York Times. But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. The review was harsh. And it ended with this:

No wonder it [MOMA] ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Art becomes a kind of one-liner. The viewer looks a little, reads a label, says “I get it” and shuffles on. If you are new to art, you don’t know what you are missing. If you aren’t, you feel had.

This post is a cry for help from someone who wants to love art. Half the time, I’m the one who doesn’t know what I’m missing. The other half, I feel had. And I don’t blame the art. I blame the labels.

I was at MOMA last week for the first time in their new site. If you haven’t been, it’s a fabulous building stuffed with heavy hitters. I felt like a Midwesterner at the Oscars. Turn left: there’s Picasso! Turn right: there’s Marky Rothko! The collection is disaggregated, grouped by floor (Painting and Sculpture 1) rather than artist, movement, time period, or geography. That was interesting and somewhat challenging in itself. But the thing that challenged me most were the labels.

MOMA has standard art museum labels. Most featured Name of Artist, Name of Piece, Year of Execution, Materials. Period. Is this enough? I constantly found myself standing in front of a painting, wanting to connect with it, and not knowing where to start. When I asked an art museum educator about this (“How should I look at art?”), she said that I had to start a conversation with the piece. Sounds great. How do I start? “So, how’s it hanging?” I found myself listening to the audio pieces not so much for the information as for an excuse to keep standing there, to combat my body’s readiness to “shuffle on.”

How can labels help people have a deeper connection with art? Here are a couple of things I’d like to see:

1. Labels that instruct you where and how to look. Sometimes I listened to the audio pieces meant for visitors who are blind. Those audio descriptions were lovingly detailed, and listening as I looked, I saw more and grew more interested. Most people aren’t educated in how to look at art. Should you take it all in at once? Should you read it like a story? Should you move around to see it from different angles? Many labels just give you more complementary information about the piece/artist rather than promoting looking more deeply at the piece. Perhaps a successful label is not one you read all the way through, but one you use like an IKEA manual, looking quizzically from it to the art and back again.
2. Labels that answer the stupid questions in our heads. How long did it take this artist to make this piece? Did the artist like it? What do people love about this piece? When did the artist make it in his/her career? Who’s the girl in the painting? Why is there a weird smudge of red in the corner—is that a mistake? Why did the artist decide that this side is up?
3. Labels that expose the curator’s thought process. One thing I wondered about a lot at MOMA was how they decided which pieces of art to put next to each other. Was it about color? Diversity? Space? I also wonder about how they choose frames for paintings, and the biggest question, how they decide which pieces to include at all. Is there some wacky donor behind it? Or something a curator advocated for against all odds? I loved the story I heard about how complex it was to house a painting that had been painted in chocolate. How about the challenges of putting up controversial pieces?
4. Labels that tell contextualized stories and involve visitors. Both 2) and 3) above are really about this. At MOMA, sometimes I listened to the “teenager” and “kids” audio and enjoyed it more than the “adult” selections. When producing for/by kids, there was more of an emphasis on giving the feel of the piece—with music, stories about the artist, comments about other art the artist produced—and those context clues helped me step into the art more emotionally. Also, the teen selections often featured teenagers interviewing visitors about their reactions to the pieces. I loved that. Just hearing other people share their impressions stimulated reactions of my own. They gave me voices to discuss with and helped me start interacting with the piece.

There are surely other tools and methods beyond labels that could improve my art museum experience. But the labels are already there, and for the most part, they’ve been the same for so long. Please. I’m begging here. I want to fall in love with art. But right now, I’m fidgeting in the corner of the bar, unsure how to strike up that first conversation.

Game Friday: Two Artful Games... and the Score Widget of My Dreams (UPDATED)

This week, two lovely games from the annals of Casual Gameplay. If you want to curl up with some classical guitar and scroll your mouse lovingly across the screen, check out Maeda Path. It's a really, really simple game in which you stay within the lines and generate music and pastel bricks as you move along. Very zen.

Second, for the hipster set, a puzzle game with edgy graphics called The Machine. Ever wondered what your computer would look like if an art major made it explode? Check it out. I still don't understand the subliminal messaging about the Windows operating system, but still a great visual interface for a few games.

And third, the blog widget of my dreams has been invented. It allows you to rate blog posts after reading them and view the averaged score over raters thus far. I love ratings. They are an easy way to participate and give feedback based on gut reaction. They will be a good way for me to understand what's working for you and what isn't, and for new readers to check out old posts that may be "greatest hits." I went back and added this html to all the old posts, so if you feel a need to judge something, please, go nuts. And let me know if it doesn't work. I can't test it because it registers each IP address only once, so it froze me after creating the widget.

UPDATE: I now understand that each post needs its own individual widget. So, I have to go back and change everything. I'm going to change this widget to a "rate this blog" for the sidebar; you are welcome to rate things, but until I fix it this weekend they are all linked. Sorry about that.

Quickie Event for Folks in DC Today (Feb 27)

AAM is sponsoring an "Emerging Museum Professionals" happy hour tonight at Saint-Ex (1847 14th Street NW at U Street) from 6-8pm. I don't know how they identify "emerging" (was it when I got out of the shower?) but they say "all are welcome."

I Think You'll Like This... Staff Picks

staff picks
Originally uploaded by BrianDamage.

What’s the most endearing part of your local book/music/video store? The cats lounging in the corner? The old laminator busily baking your membership card? For me, it’s the staff picks. Handwritten, full of enthusiasm and occasionally useful information, these little notecards or placards provide two essential functions: they introduce me to some potentially interesting content, and they reveal something of the soul of the company.

Let’s deal with #1 first. This topic came to mind when I was writing the wayfinding post. I realized that my trip to the New York Hall of Science was significantly improved by the specific exhibit recommendations (staff picks) I received before visiting. My first two questions (What do they have? What do I want to see/do?) were answered before I ever walked in the door. But if I hadn’t had that inside track to staff there, how would I have decided where to go first? I probably would have wandered for awhile. Maybe I would have found the two exhibits I started at. Or maybe not.

Staff picks are an easy, humanizing way to help people discriminate in a sea of content. And it’s good business. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore, wrote a great book called The Paradox of Choice, in which he talks about “excessive choice overload,” basically, the idea that you go into a store needing shampoo, get overwhelmed by the 87 varieties available, and walk out. When you walk into a bookstore without a specific book in mind, how often do you leave with a book? Simple indicators like staff picks may prevent you from throwing up your arms in despair and walking out.

And it’s easy to implement. You can put a display at the front of the museum. Or the front of an exhibit. Or, go for a human version. The Boston Library main branch used to have an “ask a librarian” booth in the front featuring a person sitting at a card table with some books. They weren’t there to tell you where the bathroom was. They were there to recommend books. It rocked. Or, drop staff and go for your visitors. The Santa Cruz Public Library has a corkboard at the front where users can write their own picks cards and post them up. You get picks from 8 year olds and 80 year olds. It makes you feel like you’re in a user community, and hopefully, it helps you find a good book.

And #2, the “soul of the company” part, isn’t trivial. Staff picks humanize and informal-ize the library/store/content experience. They make it clear that the institution values the contributions and opinions of staff across the board. They acknowledge that some of the content may be more interesting to you than others.

Negatives? I could see some people arguing that staff picks would unfairly bias visitors’ choice of content, or, more problematically, lead to crowding around selected exhibits. Or perhaps that it would be hard to come up with a system that would fairly reflect the diversity of staff/visitors. I’m not sure how the politics of staff picks work in bookstores, but it seems that many have good systems for soliciting useful, positive, and varied picks. I’d love to see some research on this, but I’d guess that staff picks keep people in the building longer, and encourage them to explore outside their comfort zone. So start picking.

Mapping Experiences: Rethinking Wayfinding in Museums

This weekend, I visited the New York Hall of Science. We had just finished perusing an excellent exhibit, “Places and Spaces,” pouring over a complex map of 1.3 million scientific papers grouped into scientific paradigms. Next, we wanted to see “Connections,” an exhibition on networks. We looked at the museum map on the wall. It had considerably fewer than 1.3 million nodes. And we could not figure it out.

There was a recent post on the ASTC listserv from a museum planning to revamp their wayfinding system. The wayfinding question in museums—or any complex space—is multifaceted. There’s the “I can’t read the map” problem. The “Where was that thing I liked” problem. The “How close is the bathroom my kid is having a problem” problem. But let’s step back. At a global level, there are three wayfinding questions that enter my mind whenever I enter a museum:

1. What do they have?
2. What stuff do I want to see/do?
3. Where is that stuff?

Interestingly, only one of these questions—the third one—is an explicit wayfinding question. But I think that a lot of the confusion in museum wayfinding stems from a lack of attention to the first two questions. Most museums aggregate their content, either by category (Impressionism, Dinosaurs, World War II) or by abstraction (3rd Floor, Green Wing) and the maps reference these aggregate names. This makes sense, IF visitors understand what those aggregate names mean, and IF visitors are primarily interested in the content available—as opposed to the experience available.

IF Number One. When the aggregate names are abstract, it’s hard to know what to expect. At the Spy Museum, our content is separated into two sections, School for Spies and Secret History of History. School for Spies (which features gadgets, interactives, and the tools of espionage) is further broken down into Cloak (disguise), Ninja (concealment devices), Dagger (concealed weapons), and Shadow (surveillance). With the possible exception of Dagger, none of these names helps you understand the content of that section. The names are evocative… but not useful.

And even when the aggregate names are clear, i.e. Optics, the experiences available in that section of the museum are not. This is the second IF, and in my mind, one that most museums don’t address. When I go into a museum, I’m rarely looking for specific content; instead, I’m looking for a specific experience. Maybe I want something contemplative. Something active. Something that will take about 30 minutes. Something I can share with a 10 year old. Right now, in most museums, I have to look at the map/aggregate names and guess where those experiences might lie. There are some rare aggregate names that are strong signalers; I feel reasonably confident that Bubbles will give me an opportunity to play with bubbles. But what about Chemistry? Will I do experiments? Will I see explosions? Will I learn about the history of the discipline?

Theme parks address this issue well. They have aggregated areas that are quite abstract (e.g. Tomorrowland) and within those, rides with only slightly more descriptive names (Space Mountain). But on the maps, alongside the names of the rides, there is shorthand information—what kind of ride it is, what age it’s appropriate for. Many theme park maps also feature pop-outs with lists of “must-dos” for visitors of different types–teenagers, people who only have 3 hours, etc. Theme parks are serious about helping visitors answer my second question: “What stuff do I want to see/do?”

Why don’t museums operate this way? Because unlike theme parks, which are focused on the visitor, museums are focused on their own content. Rather than addressing “What stuff do I want to see/do?,” museums tell you, “Here’s how we have chosen to organize our stuff.” Museums expect you to figure out how to interpret their institutional aggregation to create your own experience.

The map of science paradigms we were looking at had an interactive component in which you could select a particular scientist or subdiscipline (i.e. Neuroscience) and all the paradigms that your selection impacts would light up. Imagine museum maps in which you could hit a button that says “Toddlers,” or “Quiet Spaces,” or “Personal Narratives” and see all the places in the museum associated with that tag. It doesn’t have to be high-tech; even adding basic signaler tags like “interactive” or “adult” to the printed map can help. Then, I can spend my time with my quality map time trying to figure out which way is North rather than wondering whether the North Wing is worth my time.

Game Friday: Netflix and Other Games that Care

When we were kids, my dad invented a game he’d play with my sister and I called “yum/yuck.” He served as gamemaster, and would throw out names of foods: “Spinach!” “Cottage cheese!” After a food was named, each of us would make our pronouncement—yum or yuck. His goal: demonstrate how impossible it was to cook a meal we would both like. But it turned into an incredibly fun game for us, because it was about us. We’d already acquired that American (human?) taste for self-obsession, and yum/yuck let us revel in our particular preferences.

I was reminded of this game last week when I logged onto Netflix to update my queue and was prompted to rate the films I’d recently returned. I felt that same self-absorbed pleasure I’d felt during yum/yuck as I blithely doled out stars. What do people love more than being asked their opinion? And Netflix, like the best dad in the world, actually cares about your opinion. It cares equally what you think of Delicatessen and Tank Girl. And it wants to give you tailor-made suggestions based on your opinion.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago about Amy Jo Kim’s excellent presentation, “Putting the Fun in Functional,” in which she examines several “game metrics” and how successful sites like MySpace make use of them to promote stickiness. Among these metrics is personal feedback from the system. There’s something magical about a machine that cares about your inputs and responds accordingly. Most traditional games rely on the human players for this feedback; I move my rook, you move your knight. I say “cilantro,” you say “yuck.” Presumably, one thing that makes games fun is the expectation that the other player—or in this case—the system, will evolve its strategy based on your inputs. If your opponent is arbitrary or uninterested, you stop playing.

Perhaps the best example of a non-human opponent of this kind is 20q, an artificially intelligent game that is remarkably good at 20 Questions. 20q is an interesting application for other reasons, particularly how it learns, but the reason people keep playing is because it’s fun, not because it’s interesting. Because the game, on the surface, doesn’t care about its own growth. It cares about you.

Netflix isn’t selling movies; it’s selling the activity of movie-watching. To do so, Netflix assumes the persona of an interested opponent who has one goal: to find out what you like to watch. Just by providing a platform for you to rate movies, Netflix celebrates and ascribes value to your preferences. Sure, Netflix gives you access to critics’ opinions as well, but it’s your stars that show up under the movie title.

Like Netflix, museums are portals that offer access to a wide range of content. But museums usually work the other way. Rather than selling museum-going, they sell the content. Instead of privileging visitor opinions, the experts are on display. If you like the content, you can play the role of the 20q machine—asking the museum questions, probing for the answers. But that’s work. Most people prefer to be polled.

Providing a forum for the expression of visitor preferences doesn’t require that museum content fall mercy to the whim of the visitor. Netflix doesn’t change its content based on your reviews. They don’t dump movies that get rated poorly. But they do give you a fun way to express your preferences, and they try to reward you for doing so. They make a big, impersonal repository of stuff something personal and fun to interact with. What more could museums ask for?

Who Owns Visitor Content?

The Tug-of-War - IMG_3934
Originally uploaded by jeroen020.

Pop quiz: You’re developing a traveling exhibition on climate change. You have a kiosk in your museum where visitors can record 30 second videos of themselves sharing their personal opinions on global warming. Can you use those snippets in a set piece for the traveling exhibition?

OR

You have an exhibit that takes photos of visitors and lets them manipulate them. Can you use those photos in a montage on your website? Can you broadcast the photos to the web to be manipulated by web visitors in an “online exhibition”?

OR…

Media release form to the rescue? Not likely. Media release forms are (typically) used in formal situations—promotional shoots, program recordings—in which the museum, not the user, dictates the circumstances and use of the content. Exhibits and programs that invite visitors to contribute on a more informal basis are a new conundrum. Most museums are playing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” assuming visitors will accept the interaction as part of their museum experience and not think about the ownership of what’s made. But if we’re moving towards more integration of user content in museums, ownership can’t be swept under the rug. Should every interactive begin with a “click to agree” release listing potential uses? Should staff resolve never to use the content for purposes outside the exhibit at hand? What’s expected, and what’s appropriate?

The first thing that made me really think about this was Christine Roman’s talk at ASTC 2006 about a novel podcasting program at the Saint Louis Science Center, in which youth in the museum develop their own podcasts. IF this was a program that was web-based (instead of happening in the museum), there would probably be some boilerplate content on the website explaining the museum’s rights of use. But these boilerplates aren’t common in physical exhibitions. Who owns those podcasts? At the time, Christine wasn’t sure.

Let’s explore some of the potential approaches to this issue:

1. Full Disclosure. Every museum element that allows visitors to generate content has explicit labeling about ownership and potential use of the content. I’ve never seen this approach, but I can imagine some museums going for it, especially those in which children make up a sizeable chunk of the visitorship. It seems like the most iron-clad, clear approach for a risk-averse museum, and it promotes awareness of privacy issues. On the other hand, it’s clunky, promotes a culture of fear, and may turn a lot of people away from individual activities unnecessarily.
2. Restricted Use. The interactive “owns” the content. Visitors can’t walk away with it, but the museum can’t export it for other uses. No explicit labeling. This is the way I assume most museums currently deal with video kiosks and the like. However, my guess is that the thing that holds museums back from exporting the content for other uses is lack of quality and lack of flexible technology, not a concern for visitor ownership/privacy. In a world of 2.0, this seems like an inadequate approach, both for the visitors and the museum. The visitors may want a personal webpage of their content that they can access later. The museum may want to share that content with virtual visitors. I’d love to see a video kiosk that directly feeds each entry into a YouTube account, so that virtual visitors can view and curate the content (heck, I even wrote a post about it). But I can’t imagine a museum doing that in good conscience without informing visitors of the literal world-wide audience for their cinematic expression.
3. Visitor Owned, Museum Operated. The interactive is a tool the visitor uses to create content that they then own. Another common approach, especially when the content at hand is physical stuff. If you make an origami box at the art museum, you get to take it home with you. There are also some museums offering computer stations at which visitors can use the web unrestricted—which means they can also create content outside the museum’s purview. But this approach limits the museum to being a generic platform for creation, rather than connecting visitors to museum-owned or –licensed artifacts.
4. Umbrella Policy. The museum develops and clearly posts one policy towards content generated in the museum, physical, virtual, or media. This is the most obvious way to go, and yet, I’ve never seen signage of this type in a museum. I’ve seen plenty of signage telling me what I can’t do with the museum’s content (i.e. take photos), but I’ve never seen signage telling me what I and the museum can and can’t do with my experience. Website privacy policies are not on the hot-for-summer reading lists. And yet every museum and institution that solicits any kind of user content on the web knows that they must have one.
   

It’s not trivial to develop a policy that covers all kinds of data collection, user creation, and content sharing under one roof. I counted six related documents on Youtube’s homepage—a code of conduct, safety tips, copyright notice, privacy policy, and terms of use. It’s not just about legal use (both of user information and museum properties), it’s about informed use. Despite whatever 14 years of military law might suggest, “don’t ask, don’t tell” ain't enough.