About This Guest Blog Post

As Curator (Collections Knowledge) at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery I’m keen to explore ways we can use web 2.0 again after trialling Facebook, Flickr and MySpace with our Designated Challenge Fund ‘Opening Up Collections’ project for 2006-2008. I was invited to share my experiences of this at the Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 UKOLN Workshop for Renaissance West Midlands at The Herbert, Coventry on 26^th February 2009. In this guest blog post I describe this work for those who weren’t at the workshop.

Catherine English, Curator (Collections Knowledge), Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Background to the ‘On the Pull’ project

The On the Pull project was an exciting opportunity for Brighton Museum & Art Gallery to work with target audiences and new ways of researching our collections. Funded by the Designation Challenge Fund (DCF) the project was themed around courtship, attraction and the quest to find the perfect partner, drawing on our Designated collections of World Art, Decorative Art and Natural Science and exploring our Fashion, Local History, Media, Film and Fine Art collections.

Six ‘Researcher/Interpreters’ were recruited to carry out new research and give innovative and creative responses to the museum collections through music, film and writing, teasing out the hidden histories.

Each stage of the project was guided by focus groups comprised of under represented groups in the museum’s visitor profile. They informed research sub themes, gallery interpretation, signage, design, web content, marketing and a programme of events.

The result was a light-hearted look at love and attraction, in terms of both the human experience and in the animal world. In addition to a series of small displays, there was an accompanying programme of events, an interactive area and the use of social networking sites. Visitors could take time to relax in the ‘chill out’ area, record their first dates on a local love map and make their mark in the kissing photo booth.

Using Social Networking Sites

Using social networking sites was not an initial goal. There was a commitment to providing additional interpretation on our museum website but meeting the focus groups made us begin to think about other ways we could give On the Pull an online presence, with the feeling that maybe our collections website would not be the most appropriate place. The first session with the focus groups explored preconceptions of museums and barriers to visiting. The response was that they were thought of as dusty, boring and intimidating places. In this same session we looked at how the members spent their spare time and where they found out about things to do and what was going on around the city. The younger age group (18-24 year olds) spent considerable time looking on line and using sites like MySpace and sending information on word of mouth to friends. We wanted to tap into this and having a MySpace page about On the Pull seemed to be a good place to start.

The ethos of On the Pull was about taking a step away from the traditional museum exhibition to encourage new visitors/target audiences. We began to explore the idea of using social networking sites as a marketing tool and get away from the associations with the word ‘museum’ as a way of breaking down barriers and the connotations the word held to our focus groups. Consequently our marketing was carried out with the web address for the MySpace page, www.myspace/brightononthepull, rather than Brighton Museum. It had links to our main Web site (www.virtualmuseum.info) and links to On the Pull Flickr and Facebook pages too. The focus groups gave us their opinions on colour schemes, designs and also helped choose the title, On the Pull, which we hoped would be something a bit different, short and catchy, and again stepping away from the traditional museum exhibition.

Myspace

Our MySpace page let us add the music and films (linked from YouTube) created by our researchers which were not included in the final displays. We encountered some problems with the subject matter. One of our researchers had produced a film about lobster mating rituals developed around specimens in our natural science collections, when it was added to YouTube it automatically extracted links to similar films to view on YouTube. Some of these were politically problematic, so in the end we had to remove the film.

We included images of the objects the researchers had looked at and used the blog facility to add details about events which were happening throughout the six months On the Pull was up.

We created a persona for our page, which reflected the younger target audience. We became a female, age 22, single, Aquarius, ‘here for networking and friends.’

Flickr

As we were exploring romance related themes we had a photo booth style kissing booth in our interactive area, which visitors could have their photos taken in. These photos were uploaded onto the Flickr pages with a link in the myspace page. I created and monitored the Flickr site. We decided to use Flickr because of its ability to manage many photos. We did not encounter any problems setting up the account with our ICT team as we’re on an open access network with our museum and library service, it also gave us access to Yahoo as you need a yahoo account to open a flickr account. This is something to be aware of when deciding to use these sites.

The photo upload averaged at 1000 images per month, this meant we had to upgrade to a pro account. The pro account gave us unlimited uploads and access to statistics at the cost of $25 a year. It was quick to upload the photos to the site but downloading them manually from kissing booth took time. We encountered some data protection and consent issues which were unique to this project and the images being taken. We had signs up saying the booth was for over 18s only and a message on the screen. You had to agree to the use of your photo on Flickr before the picture was taken. I had to manually upload pictures and use my own judgment over the people’s ages. In a way, as one of the age groups we were targeting were 18 year olds it was a bit of a shame that we may have been excluding their pictures and could have been contradicting what we were trying to do in the first place.

We added keyword tags to all the pictures and arranged them by date in sets. As there were so many we felt this was the best way to organise them, so that people searched through the date they visited the museum to retrieve their picture.

Facebook

We used Facebook in the same way as MySpace as a marketing tool. We advertised our events programme, ran competitions to win free event tickets, displayed promotional images, images of objects from the collections and played music.

We had reservations about using Facebook as you have to join up to use it. However some staff were particularly keen to exploit this as it would allow us to tap into the local networks and our target audience groups, with thousands of members in the local geographical area. We had our own ‘Brighton On the Pull’ group which was open to the Brighton & Hove network; anyone could join and invite others from the local network to join too.

Our overall challenges came from museum management who were concerned about giving us permission to use these sites in the beginning, mainly because they were not sure about how they worked and particularly with the romantic subject matter. It took a lot of effort from me and the project manager to convince them to go ahead. The discussions took up a lot of time and caused some delays on the project.

We weren’t able to add to it all of the time due to staff and time limitations. I think it is important to be quite active and dedicate a lot of time to updating the sites, or maybe have more than one editor, in order for it to evolve. During On the Pull we recruited some volunteer gallery assistants to be meeters and greeters and the friendly face in the gallery our focus group wanted to see. More importantly they were our younger focus group age (18-24 year olds) and most likely used Facebook in their spare time. It would have been great to have them helping out as editors to send out messages in their own voice, keep the pages up-to-date, get people to recommend it to friends and allow it to grow but that meant giving up quite a lot of control of what went on the site. Therefore, we didn’t really have many friends on Facebook, we had slightly more for MySpace but quite a lot of these were local businesses, and a few museums, using these sites in the same way as us.

Focus Groups Feedback

Our focus groups thought that the marketing generally oversold what was on offer and thought it sounded like a single’s night or dating service. Some of the younger group members also said that our MySpace page looked a bit amateurish compared to other MySpace pages.

Because there was so much else happening during the project I feel we didn’t really get the opportunity to evaluate this aspect as much as we would have liked to, maybe because it was a bit of an addition to the main outcomes. We did monitor the amount of friends we had and hits – we had about 6000 hits on the MySpace site for the duration of the project. Flickr was much more popular with 3500 in the first month. The older focus groups (60+ year olds) thought that the MySpace site was for much younger people, but loved the mix of people on Flickr and really welcomed that.

Just as we may have been excluding the younger age group by not adding their kissing booth photo on Flickr, if we had added much more online we could have been excluding the older groups, as they are less likely to use such sites. Flickr was by far the most popular out of the three sites; I think people enjoyed the interaction and being able to look up their photos.

In summary, I’m glad we had the opportunity to explore and experiment with these sites and in the future I would like to see us being a lot more object focussed with using sites like Flickr more proactively to encourage more interaction and social comment on the collections.

I’ve just added a new resource, a Blog Directory to the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Web pages. As I discovered when I started looking for blogs to create this, there are increasing numbers of blogs out there in the cultural heritage sector. Not only are there lots of blogs, but they are very varied in both scope and viewpoint. Some are corporate, while others are personal. The focus might be on news or topics or it might be more reflective. Some blogs contain only text, while others include images and video clips.

For this Blog Directory the decision was to list blogs which in varying ways deal with using Web 2.0 within the cultural heritage sector. The process of deciding what to include left me with other blogs that didn’t fit those parameters but which demonstrated the reasons why organisations might choose to set up blogs and which I felt it was useful to list in some way.

Rather than simply extending the Blog Directory, I decided to try out a service called Dipity. This is an aggregator service for blog RSS feeds; a widget enables you to embed clusters of RSS feeds into your web page. There are other aggregators available, so why choose Dipity? Well, typically aggregators display lists of posts, but Dipity displays the entries in a graphical timeline format, and as the posts are displayed chronologically, the ‘list’ order mixes up posts from the various blogs.

I’ve selected groups of blogs that demonstrate the use of blogs for specific purposes – news, reading groups support, etc. Equally, if your organisation has a number of blogs, then you could provide a Dipity timeline view of all your blogs from somewhere on your Web site.

This whole process has thrown up some issues.

To start with, Dipity is an external service. There are no service level agreements, so we can’t guarantee that the display always appears – the service might go down for a period, or even disappear entirely at some point in the future. On the plus side, my colleague Brian Kelly, who also uses Dipity, noticed a problem, reported it to Dipity and it was quickly fixed – see his post about this.

The Dipity display also poses accessibility problems due to its graphical nature, so we’ve included a list of the blogs below the display, together with URLs.

A further issue is that the content shown in the displays is drawn from external content sources – i.e. the blogs themselves – over which we have no control. And, as with Dipity itself, we cannot guarantee that the blogs will continue in the long-term.

So why go ahead? Well, the Dipity displays provide useful information now so the decision was to go ahead with using Dipity, and find easy ways to addressing the problems we identified. So the supplementary list of blogs provides an alternative route for anyone who finds the display inaccessible, and adding a bit of text that mentions potential problems, and identifies potential reasons for them, means viewers have some idea of what’s gone wrong if the display is not functioning.

So I’ve learnt that the trick here is to evaluate the potential problems of using an external service and what impact each will have, and explore the possible fixes and work-arounds; if you decide to go ahead, then provide some useful information for the viewer.

On Thursday 26^th February 2009) I’ll be running a workshop on “Exploiting the Potential of Web 2.0 and the Social Web” on behalf of Renaissance West Midlands at The Herbert gallery, Coventry. Everything had been planned: the handout had been printed, the slides updated, travel and accommodation sorted. And then I received an email: “The council blocks access to social networking sites and you will be unable to access any of the sites that you want to use!” The email went on to say “I can see no option but to cancel Thursday’s workshop“.

Now as well as being an inconvenience to me this would have also been very frustrating for the workshop participants who, I was told “were keen to participate“. And cancellation at such short notice would no doubt have irritated staff at The Herbert (and possibly could have resulted in cancellation fees).

My response to the email was a speedy telephone call to say “This isn’t a problem; this is an opportunity to explore the reasons for council policies which block access to social sites, to gain a better understanding of the rationale behindsuch policies and to explore ways possible solutions to the tensions which such policies cause“.

I believe it is possible to change such policies. Look for example at a recent announcement made by Portsmouth City Libraries:

New Internet access policy for children
From December 2008, children will be able to enjoy improved Internet access in all Portsmouth Libraries. The current “Walled Garden” arrangement will be discontinued. The Internet access offered will be similar to that provided in Portsmouth schools but we will also be allowing access to games, Web chat and social networking sites.

I’m looking forward to Thursday’s workshop and having the opportunity to explore strategies for enabling such change. And I’d welcome comments from others in similar situations, especially those who may have been successful in liberalising conuncil’ policies.

Do you have a Wikipedia entry for in your museum, library or archive institution? The most likely answer is yes, if it isn’t then maybe you need to thing about getting one?

As the Wikipedia site explains:

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau (a combination of portions of two words and their meanings) of the words wiki (a type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia entries are easy to create and provide high-profile information that is Google-friendly. It’s a great way to get your users to know more about your institution. Wikipedia is collaboratively created and so also allows the community to enhance and develop content.

Content Control

In the past Wikipedia has suffered at the hands of vandals. Oner of the most prominent cases to date was journalist John Seigenthaler’s entry in Wikipedia. One user edited the entry to claim Seigenthaler was connected with the Kennedy assassination, an allegation that Seigenthaler obviously took very seriously.

This week, after a trail run in the German language Wikipedia, Wikipedia has announced that there will be more stringent controls over the biographies of living people. In a recent BBC Radio 5 interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explained that they were planning to implement a software change that would mean certain areas of the site would be reviewed before they went live.

Such a move by Wikipedia might lead many to ask will increasingly more control taken over content? Will the site eventually be locked down? Is this moving into the arena of censorship? What will be the implications of this be for those of us interested in the changing role the Internet plays in our culture?

What is your reaction to a new technology? Some people with tend to react positively, feeling that innovations can provide benefits; others, however, tend to be react dismissively to new technologies, arguing that they are irrelevant or counter-productive.

How do you tend to react to innovation, generally? And what are your views on the Twitter micro-blogging service?  I suspect Twitter has provided a good example of how perspectives may be polarised along the lines I have suggested.  Indeed a search for Twitter on the MCG JISCMail list reveals a series of interesting comments since the first reference in July 2007.

The discussion in July 2007 initially addressed the potential of Facebook for use in museums. Graham Turnbull (SCRAN) agreed with comments made by Mike Ellis (then at the Science Museum) which discussed some of the potential benefits which Facebook (which had just announced an opening up of the Facebook platform). And Graham went on to say that

All the evidence seems to point to activity within the rules of the medium being the attractor. For example, twitter [www.twitter.com] works if u want to regularly post one-liner updates
but is hopeless for a static description.

This seems to have been the first mention of Twitter on the list.  And although Graham appeared to have been the first on the list to predict an interesting use case for Twitter it was Mike Ellis who, the following year, announced his Onetag Twitter aggregation tool for use at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.

Around the same time Rhiannon Looseley sent a message about the new British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) Wiki in which she described that she is “particularly keen to find ways of making the most of Wikis’ potential for collaborative work“.

This message quickly led on to a lengthy discussion about the appropriateness of models like social networking and participative media to the delivery of museums online. But rather than repeat the discussions which took place (if you are interested in the details see the threads “British Postal Museum & Archive Wiki “, “suggestions that museums should use Twitter or Second Life … are ill-advised” and “Re: The speculative aspect of using Web 2 [was: British Postal Museum & Archive Wiki]” in the archives for July 2008)I would like to revisit the particular case of Twitter.

I think there is a tendency for innovation to be treated by some initially with scepticism as to whether the innovation is feasible and then, once tangible examples are demonstrated, by attempting to laugh at how it could be used. Here’s an example of this:

“Imagine a world in which Twitter did not exist (give it a couple of years…) would you really invent a constantly-updated trivia machine as the best way of communicating with museum audiences?“

Recently, however, we have seen a number of examples of Twitter becoming mainstream.  A good example of this was the BBC News item on “Tweet smell of success over Digg” which described how “Use of Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1,000% in the UK over the past year, according to industry analysts HitWise“.

But what is the evidence suggesting about use of Twitter by museums? I recently created a search of Twitter posts (or ‘tweets’ as they are often called) for the term ‘museum’ in my Tweetdeck desktop Twitter client. And, as can be seen from the accompanying image, the Twitter community are using the service in a variety of ways:

User feedback: A tweet by PTG described how this museum visitor was in the Natural History Museum’s new, and great, Darwin exhibition. Wildlife Photographer o f the year next“. Gareth described how he “enjoyed a weekend in London. Visited Greenwich and the Science Museum. The Listening Post was particularly interesting!“

Events: A tweet by spjwebster described how he “and @njwebster will be going to the Science Museum Lates session on Wednesday, for ejamacational thingamabobs“.

Promotional activities: A tweet by canongatebooks urged people to “if you love Robert #Burns, raise funds for the Birthplace museum in Alloway: http://tiny.cc/6dV1U“.

In addition to these examples I am very aware of how Twitter is being used to provide peer support, community-building and community discussions. Indeed suggests that Twitter has a role to play in marketing activities are sometimes met with concerns that this type of use will detract from the original role in played in community support such as, for example, the use of Twitter at conferences for museum professionals such as the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.

I’m not too concerned, myself, as I feel that the different uses can coexist. What we will need are mechnnisms for sharing examples of the different use cases and the associated best practices.  UKOLN has published a number of IntroByte briefing documents, including three (so far) covering micro-blogging.  We hope that these documents will prove useful to organisations which are thinking about making use of services such as Twitter.

I’d like to conclude with one specific example which illustrates the benefits I have gained from being able to tap into the expertise on my Twitter community. Catriona Cardie, Marketing Director, Our Dynamic Earth commented in a recent guest blog post:

“Personally I was astonished at the speed with which specialist could exchange information through a blogging network, and make this specialist knowledge widely available. This was clearly evidenced when Brian asked a question on his blog. Within seconds a really useful response, with further web references, had been returned.“.

I actually asked the question on Twitter and received a speedy response from Mike Ellis.  It would be nice to thing that the huge growth in the popularity of Twitter was due to such examples. However I have to admit that I suspect that the growth in popularity is more likely to be due to articles on its use by celebrities such as Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry. Not that I would be dismissive of such uses – after all celebrities also have Web sites too

During 2008 UKOLN ran a whole series of workshops for the museums, libraries and archives community which were aimed at familiarising the sector with the key Web 2.0 and the Social Web concepts, providing participants with an opportunity to try out some of the key services and to provide an opportunity for practitioners to discuss ways in which such services and approaches could be exploited. The sessions also explored some of the barriers to effective use of Web 2.0 and outlined ways in which such barriers could be best addressed.

A number of the workshops were hosted by MLA Regional Agencies and others by professional bodies (i.e. the Society of Archivists), cultural organisations in Scotland (ASVA) and Wales (CyMAL) or accompanied large-scale international conferences aimed at the sector (the ILI and the Museum and the Web conferences).

• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries & Archives” for MLA East of England held at Villiers Park, Foxton, Cambridgeshire on 27^th November 2008 (which was reviewed recently in a guest blog post).
• Workshop on “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations” held in Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh on 12^th November 2008.
• Workshop on “Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach To Social Software” for CyMAL which was held in Bangor on 6^th November 2008.
• Workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” which was held at the ILI 2008 conference in London on 15^th October 2008.
• Workshop on ”Sharing Made Simple: an Introduction to the Social Web” for CyMAL held in Newport on 10^th September 2008.
• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries & Archives” for MLA London which was held at CILIP headquarters, London on 14^th July 2008.
• Workshop on “Web 2.0 and Social Networking For Museums, Libraries And Archives” for MLA Yorkshire held in Sheffield on 12^th May 2008.
• Workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation” at the Museums and the Web 2008 Conference held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 9^th April 2008.
• Workshop on “Sharing Made Simple: a Practical Approach to Social Software” for the Society of Archivists held at the University of Manchester on 10^th March 2008.

It is important to note that the workshops did not provide a simple one-way transfer of experiences and expertise.  Although the workshop facilitators (which included myself and my UKOLN colleagues Marieke Guy, Stephanie Taylor and Ann Chapman) were able to share our experiences and advice on best practices, we were also able to tap into a wealth of related expertise from the sector, through invited co-facilitators and contributors including Mike Ellis, Paul Bevan, Andrew Eynon, Mia Ridge, Ingrid Beazley, Ian Thilthorpe, Victoria Godfrey and Natalie Jones.

And as well as such formal contributions to the workshops, the workshop participants also actively engaged with the workshop activities, sharing experiences of local uses of Web 2.0 and discussing further ways in which Web 23.0 could be used in a cultural heritage setting.

These discussions played an important role in shaping many of the IntroByte briefing documents which were either initially evaluated at the workshops or were developed in responses to areas of interest which were identified at the workshop.

It should also be noted that we made use of wikis to capture feedback from the various discussions groups at many of these workshops. This has provided a valuable resource which contains useful information on the variety of ways which were identified on how Web 2.0 might be used, as well as information on potential barriers to use of Web 2.0.  Over the next few weeks we will be analysing this information and providing a summary of the recurring themes.