Countering prejudice: Activism and agency in the museum

Here's my notes from the talk by Dr Richard Sandell, Head of Museum Studies, Leicester University:

• Looking at social effects of museums and how audiences engaged with particular public programs
  
• Project: rethinking disability representation opened nine different interpretive projects across nine cultural institutions – wanted to challenge visitors' preconceptions about disability, gave examples of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery where had four different points of view about works in collections that represented disability on some way; Imperial War Museum programs with secondary school students about disability representation and war
  
• Context of project came from few trends:
  
  • growth in numbers of specialist museums, such as Lower East Side Tenement Museum who are using historic collections to frame debates around contemporary issues
    
  • widespread interest in diversity, cross-cultural understanding and inclusion, but growing claims that museums have role and are playing roles in these debates – are they really? Little evaluation of what they are doing and how they're doing it
    
  • what does the 'active audience' mean? We know that people come to museums with their own ideas, needs and interests
    
  • much of the work looking at examining prejudice is cognitively based – you are either prejudiced or not, compared to a discourse approach which acknowledges that prejudice is part of everyday life
    
• Researched social agency of museums via Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art as case studies
  
• Research methods – focussed on visitors, open-ended interviews, talking openly about what they liked and disliked and how they responded to exhibits, as well as investigating written comments in visitors' books and comments cards that became part of the exhibition themselves
  
• Findings: drew on sociological studies of media about how people read different media forms. Used framework of confirmatory readings, oppositional reading and negotiated readings
  
• Bulk of readings were confirmatory; negotiated reading focus on those groups (for example) that should be taken out; oppositional readings – identify message and say they disagree either directly or indirectly. Found that sometimes these were fluid within their responses
  
• Other responses fell into categories of dynamic (moving their position as a result of what they'd seen in museum) and dialogic responses
  
• Also found people felt museums were a trusted resource – drew on museum to help make sense of issues in their daily lives, see museums as "unconstructed" and not biased compared to other media. Visitors were more open to what they found in museums – didn't "read" it with the same filters that they do when "reading" other media (we found this in our work too – see this paper for some data)
  
• "Museums frame, inform and enable the conversations which society has about difference"
  
• Tensions, dilemmas, challenges:
  
  • Taking sides? St Mungos very transparent about their aim, but does that counteract the idea that museums are seen as impartial and not taking sides? Tension between helping people make meanings and being clear about the museum's moral position
    
  • Recasting cultural authority? Not telling people what to think, but to invite debate and their comments become part of the exhibit, tension between authority and inviting different views
    
  • Engaging with contentious and unresolved issues? What kinds of interpretive devices can we use with issues that are less clear-cut? Gave example of Insights online program at the Holocaust Museum that enables people to chat about issues
    
  • Moral leadership? His future research is looking at how far should museums go in leading debates about issues where there isn't consensus or an agreed moral stand within the museum
    
  • Museums and social responsibility – what responsibly do museums have in leading and heading us towards a just society??

The Digital World and Museums

This from Zahava Doering, Smithsonian: Hi! On a short fuse, I've been asked to identify museums that are using technology in INNOVATIVE ways to enhance, inform, and guide the visits of their visitors. I'm lost as to where to begin... I know that the Exploratorium is using RFIS technology, but... COULD YOU suggest places/people to call? THANKS, Zahava.

Zahava, it's hard to know where to start with this query but I'll try. I've looked at two things – those museums that I know of using technologies in their physical experiences, and those who are doing interesting things online that often intersect with the physical.

Regarding physical experiences, the Tech Museum of innovation uses technology called tech tags where (I think) visitors can tag exhibits and make their own website from that. The Churchill Museum has an extraordinary exhibit called Lifeline "... a fifteen metre-long interactive table, which dominates the Churchill Museum space. By using a simple touch-strip, visitors can access information from a computerised 'filing cabinet' of Churchill's life, divided into years, months, weeks and even days. The Lifeline
also refers to major national and world events in order to give a sense of the times in which Churchill lived". Launchball at the Science Museum got 1.3 million online visits before the physical gallery even opened and is a great example of converging physical and online visit experiences. The North East Regional Museums Hub in the UK have a nice set of resources and tours, called i like museums... that visitors can download before they visit and also contribute their own tours. Now that the International Spy Museum and Newseum have opened I would imagine they would have many interactives using technologies that you could ask them about. I was really impressed with the Newseum when I visited them several years ago and I'm sure the revamped one is even better. I'm sure there are also many other examples that I have missed.

When it comes to online experiences a good place to start is the Museums and the Web Best of the Web awards which list finalists and winners including the people's choice award voted by us. Another first resource is a blog post I did explaining Museums and Web 2.0 that gives examples of museums doing things in the digital world. So, as to others:

User tagging – steve.musuem project and Powerhouse Museum OPAC 2.0 project, with some blog posts documenting their experiences here.

Use of YouTube – a range of museums reported on their YouTube experiences at the recent Museums and the Web conference and the paper – Beyond Launch: Museum Videos on YouTube – is well worth a read.

Use of Flickr – the Powerhouse Museum recently joined the commons on Flickr with images from their collection. Picture Australia has involved a range of cultural institutions to contribute to an online images archive. There are many, many other museums using Flickr in interesting ways.

Facebook – I was impressed with the Canada Science and Technology Corporation who have been experimenting with Facebook for membership and feedback as reported at Museums and Web 2008. This is a conjunction between the physical and online worlds and I think has potential to grow even further. The ArtShare application on Facebook is another example of joining the physical and online (you may need to be a member of Facebook to use this link).

Blogs – the Town Hall Gallery blog from Melbourne is an easy way to keep people updated about its activities. The Walker Art Centre has a variety of blogs for a range of audiences. Again, there are now heaps of museums blogging – one that struck me was the Exploratorium Explainers who blog about their experiences and answer questions as well.

Educational programs online – the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum has an innovative way of involving teachers to provide online educational materials via their Educator Resource Centre.

Finally, anything that the Brooklyn Museum is doing is worth looking at.

Zahava, might also be a good idea to subscribe to a couple of blogs that are reporting on the digital world and museums. Two I've found useful are fresh + new(er) from Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum and Museum 2.0 from Nina Simon. You can also join us on the Museum 3.0 ning group where plenty of others are available to add their insights and wisdom to a wide range of topics and queries from members.

Best of luck with whatever it is you are doing!

What do visitors want to know about objects??

Spent a few interesting days with the folks from the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, VA. We spoke about the kinds of questions visitors have about objects. Across a few studies now I have found rather consistent questions that keep arising for natural history and anthropological objects.

From natural history specimens people want to know:

• What is it?
  
  • scientific name
    
  • everyday name/description
    
• Where did it come from:
  
  • and when was it found
    
  • distribution
    
• The 'museum' things:
  
  • how is it preserved
    
  • why is it in a museum? what is it used for?
    
  • is it real?
    
• What is it related to that's familiar to me?
  

From anthropology objects they want to know:

• What is it made of?
  
• How is it used?
  
• What is it used for?
  
• How often is it used?
  
• What is the symbolism of it?
  
• How old is it?
  
• Is it still used today? If not, what is?
  
• Who were/are the people and what are their stories?
  

Madge showed me a document she had worked on for an art museum that had also looked at this issue. The Harvard MUSE project (Museums United with Schools in Education) suggested a framework for classifying (and therefore writing labels about) artworks which I think translate across a wide range of museums:

• Logical – how was the object made?
  
• Aesthetic – how does it work together with other objects?
  
• Narrative – what are the stories surrounding the object: social, historical and personal (I would also add perhaps scientifically for natural history objects)?
  
• Foundational – what are the big philosophical questions that place the object within a context?
  
• Experiential – what can be created in response to looking at the object (I would also add what new information, connections and meanings can be made in response to the object)?
  

While all the above are useful as ways of thinking about placing objects in physical exhibitions, they also have relevance I believe to how a museum might "display" their object online via their websites or through Flickr – perhaps a set of guiding principles??

Designing for Teens: MW2008 Day 3

Went to this really fascinating session this afternoon (after shopping!!). The points that were raised were how important it is to work closely with teens when designing websites for them. Also teens really wanted to use a range of media (although not podcasts of artists' talking!) and have two-way conversation, with the instituting and each other.

The first paper about a project called ArtPad at the Glenbow consulted teens by showing them works of contemporary art and finding out what questions they had. They found that the front-end evaluation really challenged their assumptions and informed the process.

Anne Neilson from the Statens Museum for Kunst worked with 90 teens over 400 days! They now have 500 profiles on-line and they also use these as a laboratory – a way to see what their audience

Advantages of their site:

• It's not commercial
  
• It's in Danish – important for them to express themselves in Danish
  
• It's democratic
  
• It's a small and safe community – and exists on-site too
  
• It's not just flashy show off – it's serious, you can really discuss and engage with each other
  
• There's room for different kinds of users and user behaviour
  
• The context of the Museum – gives some authority and identity
  

Challenges:

• Education – teachers aren't that keen to use it
  
• Continuum from museum to community
  
• Community member grow "too old"
  
• Resources –time and funding
  
• The internet ecosystem – at moment doesn't link well into other sites and how should this be done? The audience wants to keep it for themselves – it's a safe place for their inner art nerd
  

Walker Art Centre project have a WalkerArtCentreTeenArtsCouncil (WACTAC). They started with using this group as way to talk to teens about what they're doing online:

• Messaging each other privately and publicly
  
• Links to other cool thing they've seen
  
• Shows/events
  
• Videos, YouTube
  
• Showing their work (art, videos, etc) and posting to their pages
  
• Customising their profiles to show their identity and be different from others
  

What is the Walker doing that works?

• Have a good set of blogs that people are actively using – institutional acceptance of blogs and how to use and maintain them
  

What else do they need?

• Institutional program info
  
• Maybe enticing teens into doing reviews and criticism?
  
• Public face of WACTAC?
  
• Should be an open-vessel – ready for expansion
  
• Teens want to be more playful and fun, fresh set of views
  

The new site for teens is divided into business side and teens side of things – looked a bit too busy for me but I'm definitely not the audience and they obviously like it! The backgrounds can be customised by the user and they demonstrated a slideshow of designs – this enables people to design their own look and take ownership of it. It's also clever how they have used outside services like delicious and upcoming (an events calendar feed).

What did they learn:

• Make teens part of the process, not just part of the product
  
• With great power comes great responsibility! But by giving them ownership they take responsibility
  
• Thinks about the site as an educational program – don't focus on marketing
  

Overall I think the session should have been called designing with teens, not for teens as that's what really came out. Here's a link to the educational websites study we did some time ago that found pretty much the same thing.

Beyond launch: Museum videos and YouTube

A range of museums talk about their YouTube experiences and lessons.

Hirshorn and YouTube:

• No money, no people, no tome therefore needed to be very resourceful
  
• Lesson learned – time to get creative! Use interns, start out small, show there is some demand then resources will follow
  
• Contract restriction as – part of the Federal Government and had some existing contracts but are working around this
  

Exploratorium and YouTube:

• Took some footage of an exhibit on the floor which is one of the most popular
  
• Teasers and trailers for events coming up – not their primary focus
  
• Involved their Explainers– training them, giving them cameras and mikes and sending them out on the floor. This has worked very well and well-polished videos were the resut
  
• Learned need to have person to keep an eye on the channel and the social networking – one of many things they do
  

San Jose Museum of Art and YouTube:

• Viral marketing – used bloggers that picked up the video and started a life of its own
  
• Embed videos wherever you can – throughout your site, not just one area
  

Indianapolis Museum of Art and YouTube:

• Started two years ago with marketing video/trailer, always have one that accompanies an exhibition
  
• Instructional videos have been the most used- they are a series and target a relatively small but very specific audience
  
• Not searching for art museum or the IMA – they are searching differently (e.g. calligraphy, origami)
  
• Finding blogs and linking to them helps, finding other videos on YouTube that deal with similar content
  
• Instructional videos are very easy (and cheap!) to produce
  

MoMA and YouTube:

• Register your name as it may already be taken!
  
• Started with an intern and borrowed camera – you don't need a lot to start with
  
• Comments allow visitors to share experience and expertise in an open environment – although they may not be what you want to hear!
  
• Started with an open policy and allowed everything there (except spam)
  
• Enabling expression and dialogue
  
• It's so easy – but is it?? The technology is getting better
  
• makeinternettv.org is a helpful site when making videos
  
• Numbers of views is not the only metric to use- need to get quality numbers, understand that people don't read online and YouTube in particular
  
• Put links on top of video description rather than below
  
• Also have a good comment policy

Why metrics suck – Seb Chan, MW2008 Day 2

Attended Seb's talk today about metrics. Points and my interpretations:

• Start with asking why do we have a website?
  
• We want to engage audiences – but how
  
• Need to build metrics for each reason
  
• Metrics don't calculate return on investment (ROI)
  
• People don't come in through the front page, come via Google which has changed the way that people can search (see example of search for Powerhouse Museum) – there is a basic search problem here
  
• Lot of metrics that measure time spent often used to buy ads on commercial sites
  
• Need to track email users – what links do they click on, what are the read rates, asked how are museums segmenting their audiences? (only 2 did!)
  
• When developing email campaigns need to think about how you're going to track subscribers – should be segmenting them too
  
• Reinvigorate – a view of the site in real time
  
• AttentionMeter – compares different counting systems (I think? Got lost at this point...)
  
• Compete is another comparison site
  
• Hitwise actually gives more data than I was looking at each month
  
• Flickr commons measures – how many people favourite them and how many tags, how many "sensible" comments
  
• egosurf – fun site to see how popular you are!!
  
• Citation analyser – Domain Tools
  

Also refer to the post I did on measuring "online" success. I'm still unconvinced as I think we need to do more talking to people – when we evaluated educational websites, museum sites that we thought were good the students often hated! Seb did state that while we need to do qualitative research we need to segment the audiences first – I'm still not sure about this...

Museums and Web Day 2: Breakfast Roundtable Research Group

Sitting with Jen and various others at a roundtable discussing our research projects and issues arising.

• How do you share results? Conferences, publishing, workshops
  
• How to avoid research being done to you and not with you? Often the learning along the way of the project rather than the end product is the benefit. Need to keep the conversations going
  
• Doing research makes you ask questions about the nature of the institution, people no longer so respectful of boundaries of the institution in a Web 2.0 world – how does the museum find its niche?.
  
• At Australian Museum we thought very carefully about who to get involved – involve both staff we want to influences and those who are influential across the museum
  
• Research engages with the messiness – recognise and celebrate that
  
• Find an influential person within the institution to champion project – they need to be located at the highest levels
  
• Research needs to be part of the institutional culture –social research methodologies is not always understood within the organisation
  
• How to manage/keep going when people on the project move on? Need a central person that works across institutions for large [projects, build sustainability within the organisation for smaller projects
  
• People doing research into new media/social media should also actively use the tools to communicate – but what happens when there are contentious issues that arise? This can be tricky – comes down to the nature of the relationship and putting out there lessons learned and what we'd do differently again next time
  
• Ethics of research especially with on the fly research – how do you get informed consent when you are taking advantage of a situation and documenting it – can use a simple form, at Australian Museum we work with the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools and ethics is taken care of that way. In our work with very young children we got them to give consent (as well as their parents) through using a simple form with smiley faces that they could colour in to show if they agreed.

User-generated content session: MW2008 Day 1

Several sessions that looked at case studies at a range of museums. One thing that struck we was the ways that visitors' voices are being incorporated into the physical museum using on-line tools. The Denver Art Museum has a live feed into their foyer with Flickr fotos that visitors have updated. The Art of Storytelling project at the Delaware Art Museum engaged visitors with the art by enabling them to tell their own stories about the works of art and making new works from existing ones. The evaluation showed that those who had participated reported feeling more connected to art in general.

The Living Museum project is an interesting experiment and the lessons learned from their earlier work was quite instructive. They have decided to have a set of guidelines for exhibitions that can be put straight online, such as spelling and grammar, relevance to the actual content (Jewish heritage), clear fotos, complete labels, etc. Challenges: resources, small number of current users, average exhibition is 21 artefacts and they post them up within a week so that people remain engaged. How to help users contribute quality content – constantly convey expectations, email and phone support, consider different user needs, continually review and make recommendations about how users can improve their exhibitions in future.

In Your Face, The People's Portrait Project: invited people to submit portraits with three provisos - original portraits, copyright waiver they sign off, 6x4 inches. With no advertising in 12 months they had over 17,000 submissions! Gave them a very good idea of the audience who is interested in and cares about the AGO. Created a Flickr group also, but still figuring that out regarding copyright, although group has continued. Lessons learned and questions asked:

• How do you balance museum's agenda with visitor expectations?
  
• Is it possible to assert control and foster programming that is open-ended? Tension between running open-ended programming and standards, expertise and quality
  
• How do we think about expertise quality and standards?
  
• How do we integrate and manage creativity in ways that are dynamic and long-term?
  

Lessons learned:

• Take risks, experiment and be willing to make mistakes
  
• Museums as catalysts for creativity
  
• The critical mass of creativity asserts its own kind of aesthetic
  
• Value in generating user-generated content that is actual as well as virtual
  
• Ultimately it is about people
  
• Public invested if programming is authentic and they feel respected
  
• Buildings and collections only part of the story
  

Question arose about motivation: why would people want to engage with a museum through user-generated content? People find something that's relevant to them; people become part of a whole and being engaged with each other as well as the museum. For teachers it was that something was missing from their curriculum that the museum could help with.

A really interesting session. Another thing that keeps coming up is the work that museums are doing with Flickr – seems this is a tool that many have found useful (and my post on Flickr and audience research also generated quite a bit of discussion), obviously there's something there. The Powerhouse Museum announced its participation in the Commons on Flickr website, which is something we could be pursuing further I think.

Museums and the Web Conference Day 1

The opening plenary, Hands On the Internet, was presented by Michael Geist, from the University of Ottawa.

Internet 2008: what does it look like?

• Blogger has now overtaken CNN website, subject matter experts bringing their voice to their subject area
  
• Rise of Facebook and other social networking sites, talked about a Facebook group they set up Fair Copyright for Canada, which now has over 40,000 members
  
• Podcasting
  
• Postsecret – place for people to connect and talk anonymously about their secrets. Has become a supportive network
  
• Elephant's Dream – worlds first open movie
  
• New ways to distribute TV in shorter segments and across new platforms and websites - nature of broadcasting has fundamentally changed
  
• Tetesaclaquestv channel
  
• Creative commons licences
  
• Wikitravel – a comprehensive online travel guide community and collaboratively developed, is written in real time, able to personalise
  
• GlobalVoices – give voice to people wouldn't usually hear form, often at great risk, learn what's happening on the ground in those countries
  
• Using mapping technology to map events to share with the world, gave example of Usahidi that maps examples of violence in Kenya
  
• LibriVox sire to convert books into mp3 files
  
• Public Library of Science – peer reviewed open access peer-reviewed science journal. Met with much scepticism but now can't keep up with demand
  

Overall theme is the way web has encouraged collaboration, sharing and community, using open-source approaches to share information, and enabling the community to participate and take action.

Internet 2018: what should we be actively engaged in?

• Broadband for all
  
• Net neutrality
  
• Intermediary liability – third party content that may be hosted by you, need to be protected
  
• Privacy – need to make sure protections are robust
  
• Fair dealing/fair use – need for copyright balance, under and over protecting
  
• Digital rights management (DRM)
  
• Public domain – how long to extend rights protection?
  

Future of the internet is ion our hands.

Measuring “success” in the on-line environment

Been thinking quote a bit about this topic as we go into rebuilding the Museum's website. When doing my doctorate came across a quote that nicely encapsulates the focus we should be having: not asking how many people visit, but how valuable are their visits (reference to follow – can't lay my hands on t at the moment).

In our Museums and the Web paper Angelina and I look at different ways on-line users have been classified, and report on studies at the Australian Museum that have attempted to unpack these findings further. Seb Chan's paper, Towards New Metrics of Success For On-Line Museum Projects, argues for a more holistic way to look at on-line visitation, using new tools and broadening the segmentations first proposed by Peacock and Bronwbill.

My Museum colleague, Russ Weakley, set out some ideas about ways to measure visitor engagement with our new website which seem to be quite useful on a broader scale. Here's some text from an email he sent about this issue:

We need to look at methods that measure quality rather than quantity. We may have 2 million visits a year (for now), but how many were satisfied? How many got what they wanted. How many engaged? ... More importantly, we will soon be focussing much more on HOW people are using the site and if we have made any financial gains, not how many people visit. This means looking at things like:

- how many comments?
- how many tags?
- how many discussions between users?
- how many questions have users answered for themselves?
- how many images have users uploaded?
- how many members do we have?
- how active are these members (do they join and never return)?
- how many people are being converted from free to paid membership!!!
- how many products have been sold?
- how many event pages have been visited due to site-wide advertising?
- how many real donations have been made via the website and why?

Russ also pointed out that we need to go beyond comparing ourselves to other museums and galleries to looking at how we compare to sites like Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. More importantly, is how we compare to other sites that are producing similar nature focussed content (for our Museum) within the commercial and private sector.

So, much food for thought and I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

Exhibition Evaluation Surveys

This from Marian Steinberrg, Director, Visitors Research, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG): Lynda, The folk at Environmetrics say that the Australian Museum, National Gallery of Australia and the National Library and Australian Museum use a standard core structure for exhibition evaluation surveys. Would it be possible to get a copy?

Hi Marian. Several years ago the Evaluation and Visitor Research Special Interest Group of Museums Australia (phew – there's a mouthful!) undertook a study to look at standardising our questions, mostly in the areas of demographics. You can find the reports on the EVRSIG website. Regarding exhibition evaluation, there is an information sheet on my website about exhibition evaluation (scroll down to the Methods section. The recent post I wrote about Beginning Audience Research may also help.

Feel free to share your experiences with us, especially as TMAG is going into a redevelopment phase as I understand it?

Use of puppets in museum education

This from Fay Tsitou, Museum Educator & PhD student, Drama and Theatre Department, Royal Holloway University of London (via my CECA contacts): Last September I managed to start a PhD on the way puppets could be used in museum education in Royal Holloway University of London, and this blog address can give you an idea of the whole project. I am interested in doing research internationally and I would like to welcome contact with puppeteers or museum educators working in this area of museum education.

Hi Fay, I don't know of any research specifically in this area – sounds absolutely fascinating and I really liked your blog. The one thing I was involved in some time ago was in the use of persona dolls to research very young childrens' responses to museums. The Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood at the University of Melbourne was involved at that stage. The research didn't go very far as we didn't get funded, as well we felt there were better ways to talk to children about their museum experiences (and we found the persona dolls themselves rather scary!).

Beginning audience research

This from my dear ex-Museum colleague Gary Morgan: Dear Lynda. I am at a small cultural centre and museum in Malawi as a volunteer. I have set a research project on audience evaluation for one of the staff who wants to do research but has no training. We are assessing impacts of the museum on audience learning. Can you send any reprints you may have spare? We have nothing much on audience evaluation or museum learning other than what I have been able to get off the web. Our address is KuNgoni Centre of Culture and Art, PO Box 41, Mtakataka, Malawi. We don't have email on site so I can't respond quickly over the web.

I think it's inspiring that a small, tucked-away place like that is doing audience research and on museum learning no less! Thought I'd blog my response so that others can add to my list (plus so I'd remember what I promised to send). I have also posted Gary's address so others can send things – I would imagine samples of surveys and questions would be the most help.

So, Gary I will send you:

• My doctorate – I have a spare marking copy. The literature review on learning (Chapter 2) is helpful as is Chapter 3 (method) and the appendices that have my questionnaires. These are also on my audience research wiki. I also just uploaded my Stage 2 questionnaire which I used to look at learning in more detail (both Word and pdf formats)
  
• Surveys from the MARVEL project that looked at a variety of ways to uncover learning outcomes
  
• Families and Museums research project report
  
• A copy of Paulette McManus's article: Towards Understanding the Needs of Museum Visitors (1991), which is a good resource about the types of questions that could be asked. It's also on my list of audience research readings which can be downloaded from my website here
  

Gary, there are a number of questions I have found work really well when looking at learning:

• The dinner party question: Can you think of one thing that you found particularly interesting in the XXX exhibition that you would be likely to tell other people about, say at a dinner party?
  
• The Project team question: This exhibition has been developed by a team of staff from across the Museum. What do you think were the main messages they were trying to get across to visitors?
  
• The MARVEL list (they answer this by Yes/alot; Yes/somewhat; No/not really; Not at all; Don't know):
  
  • I discovered things I didn't know
    
  • I learned more about things I already knew
    
  • I remembered things I hadn't thought of for awhile
    
  • I shared some of my knowledge with other people
    
  • I got curious about finding out more about some things
    
  • I was reminded of the importance of some issues
    
  • I got a real buzz out of what I learned
    
  • It was pleasant to be reminded and to learn more
    
  • It was all very familiar to me
    
  • Some of the things I learned will be very useful to me
    

Best of luck and please keep us all informed of how you're going.

Researching museum learning

This from Karen Koch in Germany: I got to your homepage by searching for museums evaluations and think it is a fantastic way to communicate with other people in this field. I am an education student from Germany and am writing my diploma thesis about a study done in 12 childrens museums (total 1350 kids). The topic is "Learning in children`s museums". We asked the children "what do you remember from your visit? What did you like best? What didn`t you like? What did you learn?" My work now is to investigate quality criterions about what children want in museums and how learning will be better working. (a basic example: a lot of the kids love to do something, so we need hands-on exhibits) In Germany there was no evaluation like this before even though we of course now about the theory in the children`s museums field. I am looking now for evaluations in this field to compare them. Unfortunately I haven`t found anything like that yet. Do you know if there was an evaluation like this in Australia, the USA England or somewhere else? It would really help me out a lot!

Hi Karen, I don't know where you've been looking but there is an enormous amount of material on learning in museums and quite a lot in children's museums. The best place to start is to read Chapter 2 of my thesis which can be found on my audience research wiki. The bibliography is very comprehensive (even if I say so myself J). Other good references to start with are the following:

• Leinhardt, G., Crowley, K., & Knutson, K. (Eds.). (2002). Learning Conversations in Museums. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  
• Paris, S. (Ed.). (2002). Perspectives on Object-Centered Learning in Museums. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  
• Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2004). Measuring Learning Outcomes in Museums, Archives and Libraries: The Learning Impact Research Project (LIRP). International Journal of Heritage Studies, 10(2), 151-174.
  
• Griffin, J., Kelly, L., Hatherly, J., & Savage, G. (2005). Museums actively researching visitor experiences and learning (MARVEL): a methodological study. Open Museum Journal, 7
  (Note: I have added this link even though it doesn't work because it should work soon I hope…)
  

The Association of Children's Museums has online resources about learning and their Hand to Hand publication has good articles about learning in children's museums.

Effective communication in developing new audiences

This from Evangeline Reed:
I am currently a graduate student at the University of Southern California. I am getting my Master of Arts degree in Communication Management, and I am in the midst of deciding on a topic for a research paper. I have always been fascinated with the museum/nonprofit-audience relationship, and I have a general sense of what my paper may focus on. Here are the abstract questions that I used to brainstorm my topic (in no particular order):

• What are the most effective forms and/or uses of communication for arts organizations to build and develop new audiences?
  
• What is the role social media plays in arts marketing and communication and how large is this role?
  
• How are arts organizations/non-profits communicating to America's youth in order to attempt to attract future loyal patrons and donors?
  

I will be focusing on young professionals between the ages of 22-34. As of now I am planning on conducting various surveys and research methods to find out how this demographic uses social media, what social media they use, and for what
purposes. These questions will hopefully lead me to find out if social media is a main channel for cause-related information. After conducting my research my goal is to have a fully developed resource of the most efficient forms of media in order to reach my target demographic.

Wow! What an important set of questions. Evangeline, there is quite a lot of work going on in this area. I'm giving a paper (with my colleague Angelina Russo) at Museums and the Web 2008 on this very topic (well kind of). The paper, From ladders of participation to networks of participation: museums and social media, discusses a variety of evaluations I have conducted. One specifically targeted adults aged 18-30, what they were doing online and how museums might want to engage them via social media. Due to (umm) "technical difficulties" the paper isn't on the M&W website yet but can be downloaded from my audience research wiki. In that paper we also report data on how Australian use the Internet and compares usage to the US, drawing on information from a Forrester Research study that Seb Chan blogged about on fresh+new(er).

My initial reaction to your methodology is to actually use the tools of social media to conduct your research. There are some very interesting things happening on Facebook with a range of museums and galleries trying it out as ways to both engage and promote themselves with current and new audiences. I'd encourage you to join up, become a fan/join some groups and see where it takes you. I also found quite an interesting group on another social networking site called ning. The Dallas Museum of Art Junior Associates Circle is "... an exciting, under-40 group that hosts an exclusive set of social events and educational programs throughout the year."

Also, just as I was about to upload this post, my colleague Janet sent me a link to what looks to be a very interesting review – Tools for Culture: The Resonance & Use of Online Tools in the Cultural Sector – which may be relevant to your study? I haven't looked through it in any detail yet.

And another article from the New York Times I was just sent (gosh I'm glad I didn't upload this post earlier) – Museums Refine the Art of Listening which talks about the new tools art museums in particular are using to listen to their visitors.

Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums

This from Rama Lakshmi in India: Let me introduce myself. I am a journalist who writes about India for The Washington Post. My other big professional path is museums. I was a student of Dr Jay Rounds in St Louis, Missouri. And have worked at the science and history museums in St Louis and at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Indian. I am going to begin teaching the MA museum studies class at the New Delhi-based National Museum Institute (which is a deemed university). And I am going to teach visitor studies. Dr Jay Rounds adviced me to write to you. Could you kindly send me your article "Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums"? I would like to read it and also have my students read it. Do you have it electronically? I am also interested in your web discussion forum. How and where can I access it?

I get so many requests for this paper that I decided to post it to my audience research wiki (you need to go down the page a bit). Basically, this paper "... outlines the development of audience research in museums, the context within which it operates, and describes the processes of audience research through a series of case studies drawn from the work of the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre. It is argued that the shift in museums from mission-led program development to balancing content and audience needs through a transaction approach requires a broader research-focussed agenda. While traditional ways of conducting evaluations are necessary and useful, to remain viable audience research needs to be more strategic, working across the sector in new ways and utilising new methods. How programs impact on users and facilitate learning about a wide range of key issues that museums are concerned with is a leadership role that audience research can take across both the cultural sector and other free-choice learning contexts."

Rama, to access other resources there is this blog (naturally!), my audience research wiki mentioned above, and a new social networking group I have started called Museum 3.0 where all kinds of people can discuss all kinds of things. I'll be teaching audience research for Museum Studies at Sydney University this year also and have set up a discussion group specifically for that – it would be awesome if you and your students joined us. Please feel welcome to join up – I'll send you an invite (or click on the Museum 3.0 link at the top of my blog).

Photographic research

This query from Elena Miles, Master's student studying at Nottingham Trent Uni in England: For my undergraduate dissertation I explored literacy in children's everyday lives by distributing disposable cameras to a group of 8 year old children and asking them to photograph what they deemed significant. I am keen to develop with this method of research for my museum studies thesis. I am thinking of something along the lines of providing 15 children with disposable cameras during a museum trip and asking them to document the highlights of their visit. Aside from the obvious issues of multiple gate-keepers and other sensitivities I was wondering if you knew of any previous research along similar lines. I am aware of the flickr application and of visitor response cards, but it is the photographic research which I would particularly wish to focus on.

Hi Elena. This is a fertile field for study I believe. We did a study in 2003 called the Museum I'd like. In that young people from a number of the schools across Sydney were introduced to concepts of learning beyond the classroom and subsequently photographed aspects of, and experiences in, the Museum that "helped" or "got in the way" of their learning. Photographs were assembled in annotated posters that were subsequently analysed across the sample in order to unpack the major themes. I don't have that report to hand but will add a summary here when I get to it. I can send you the paper given at the British Educational Research Association Conference about the project. Subsequent to this I uploaded photos of the posters to my Flickr site to see if that way of sharing would work. I have blogged about Flickr as an evaluation tool which is the third most read post on this blog and the one with the most comments. This is one area I intend to be looking at in more detail this year as I think it has great potential.

I had a look around all my research reference books this morning and couldn't find any that specifically related to using photographs. I did a quick Google and found some things:

• Creative documentation: Using photography as a tool in action research, Maya Haviland (2004)
  
• Visual ethnography: Using photography in qualitative research, Dona Schwartz (1989)
  
• Using Photography in Art Education Research: A Reflexive Inquiry, Iona Cruickshank & Rachel Mason (2003)
  

Elena, if you have anything to share, especially a literature review, I'm sure readers of this blog would be really grateful (well, I would be anyway!).

Informal learning session

I have Tim's ppt slides and hopefully will upload them when i can figureb out how to! The film shifthappens is here.
A reminder that my paper is on my wiki.
Glad it's over - i think i need this!

Social media conference: Friday 29th February

Here we are at the Museum of Sydney getting ready to speak, argue, engage and have fun with a packed house of 125 people or so.

Kevin Von Appen: What are we doing is communicating, collaborating, connecting, collecting, co-creating, colonising. Noted websites that I already uploaded links to in my earlier post.

Also remembered the post I did on what is Web 2.0 which you can access here.

Some other sites he mentioned (I'll upload the links later):

Climatexchange, questacon

Collection x, Canada

instructables.

Brooklyn museum

Tech.org

Need to think about impact: what do we look for and how do we measure it, what should we value.

Seb inspired us all to remember that social media is hard – the technology is not. It takes a mind-shift across the whole institution (I think we're all going to be saying the same things today! We need to make strategic choices – the right choices. Social media is a website strategy. Social media strategy includes other websites you don't have any or little control over. Hopefully I have capture the major slide in this foto. Seb also talked about the stuart site – he has blogged about it here.

Social media conference special presentation: Kevin von Appen and Caroline Payson

Today we were fortunate to have Kevin von Appen, Ontario Science Centre, and Caroline Payson, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, talk to a group of staff about what they do. These are my very rough notes.

Some points from Kevin’s talk:
• Social nature of Australians makes us prime candidates to uptake social media
• 1 in 6 teens in Australia has their own blog (I suggest this figure is higher give that MySpace and Bebo have their own blog function)online experiences are rooted in the physical (i.e. the stuff we have – I found this strongly when talking to students at e-kids’ college)
• Museums – we’re all in this together
• Web allows museums to react quickly to big issues (and invite others to collaborate I would suggest)
• One way to get content out there is to colonise virtual communities (e.g. YouTube and Facebook)
• Video is an increasingly popular tool (more downloads of videos from their site than everything else put together)
• Operated in a skunkworks kind of approach – created sites outside of the corporate site in order to experiment – challenge now is to bring these all together
• Rapid idea generator (RIG): process to generate lot of ideas around a specific topic, challenge or opportunity and to physically manifest ideas in unexpected ways to create unexpected dialogue
Websites presented:
• SFMOMA podcasting and Vox Pops
• steve.museum
• Ilikemuseums
• Science buzz (Science Museum of Minnesota)
• Redshift Now

Caroline’s points:
• Had to think about conjunction between physical presence and web presence – how to make the best of both?? Used a problem-solving approach to come up with ideas and approaches
• They do have access to great people
• Can’t be all things to all people all the time – this is unachievable
• They decide to focus on one group and branch out from there
• 9 online visitors to 1 physical visitor – mostly clicking on the educational aspect
• Teach teachers how to think like designers to take back into classroom to go through processes of design – design as a process is a great way to work together and create knowledge and is relevant across other disciplines apart from just design
• Site focusses on process not objects – they consciously made this decision
• Design for the other 99% exhibition had a bigger life after the physical exhibition closed
• Emphasised the casual nature of the blog – it’s not an academic treatise
• Their Director made them work differently – you won’t have three specialist meetings each week, you’ll have two and spend the other time on your blog
• There’s’ a community out there no matter what you’re interested in (even knitters who watch Law and Order and have cats ... umm, I tried to find this blog but got led on an merry adventure by Google, can’t say any more than that!)
• Caroline’s “butt rule”: should be able to get everything you need (i.e. resources) without moving your butt
• The Educator Resource Centre site is well worth a good look and play
• Conversation strand – has become the place for design teachers across US to talk about design education, also searchable and can upload fotos and video
• Did a lot of user-testing with teachers
• Have paid teachers to post, write materials and moderate (in future)
• Online visitation has increased 9-1, more visitors than the museum shop
Web philosophy – embrace collection and get more online, everything online supports the mission, reach other audiences, one site will meet the needs of all areas of the museum.

Overall an exhausting, yet highly productive and stimulating day. Kinda looking forward to another full day tomorrow!