Matthew Boulton 2009, Joomla, and ways of sharing info.

Is there a shortage of scholarly online resources?

Late yesterday afternoon I send out emails on the Elearning Group and GEM mailing lists asking if anyone would like a copy of our Audience Research report for the Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource development. I’ve had about 40 requests for the report so far which seems to demonstrate quite an interest. Some people appear to be interested in what students want from the web, and for others I seem to have hit a nerve saying that they didn’t appear to want Web 2.0 features. But this is research with a specific group of academic students and lecturers and for a specific project, so I do hope that people can do some research for their own projects rather than decide to ditch plans they had for enabling user generated content, etc because of this report!

I was thinking about the report again (it can take a while to digest research findings!) and one of the most interesting things to come from it is that there is considered to be a lack of trustworthy, reliable websites that are suitable to support academic work. Is this lack of ’scholarly’ online resources a worry? The research also showed that there was a reluctance by both students and lecturers about sharing their thoughts and work online - they were worried about giving away their intellectual property. Perhaps this reluctance to invest in creating scholarly content for the web at least partly explains why there is a lack of such resources, but with the number of excellent universities, courses and research that exist it does seem surprising that there isn’t more scholarly content on the web that is freely available to everyone. I realise I might think that there is less than there actually is as I don’t belong to a University and therefore can’t access resources that aren’t available to the general public. I think it is a real pity that this is the case - surely knowledge is better shared than locked up in this way? Yes I am an idealist who knows nothing of university politics!

When it comes to museums we are far more likely to create resources for the general public/lifelong learners or schools than for FE & HE.  I have a suspicion that like with schools where we can produce great resources that support the curriculum we could also have success at producing resources that support courses and allow content to be used and repurposed by lecturers etc for teaching.  And perhaps we don’t have to produce these resources - just supply the content (images and documentation) for others to produce tailored resources of this kind. I wonder why museums seem to do so little work working in partnership with Universities. Are they both reluctant partners?

We were lucky to receive JISC funding for our project with the support of the University of Birmingham. There is currently another round of JISC digi funding open - the lead partner in the application has to be a University but partners can include museums and galleries. Unfortunately the deadline for the proposal is 22nd July 08, but I’d encourage organisations to apply as it has been a positive experience for us - at least so far!

JISC Funding call

Pre-Raphaelite Resource Audience Research

It is always a bit dangerous to think you know what people want, so with a £167,000 digitisation project on our hands we thought that we had better do some audience research to make sure we got it right. This is Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource project that is funded by JISC and due to be completed by Feb 09.  The audience is the academic community - students, lecturers, picture librarians, etc.

We wanted to know what online resources this audience currently uses, and what they would like to see in our resource. Did they want to add things to it? Comments? Resources? Tagging? For the most part the answer was - no! They thought that if they or anyone could add stuff to it how could it possibly be a scholarly resource? And that is just what they wanted - something trustworthy, reliable and authorative. Someone yesterday described this as boring, but I don’t see why every website has to be all singing and all dancing, it depends what it is for and who is going to use it.

There was an interesting comment from one post-graduate  student that:

If it’s meant for the general public it’s probably not academic enough for us.

I laughed at the fact that Wikipedia was considered evil. Apparently students shouldn’t use it (lecturers hate it) and if they did use it they would never quote it as a source. That’s our challenge - to create something so reliable and trustworthy that they wouldn’t be embarrassed to say that they read it on our site.

Everyone seems to have a Facebook account these days but the students wanted a separation from their work and leisure, not a website that mimics or links up with social networking sites. Blogging and wikis are generally seem as being for geeks, and hardly anyone had heard of RSS. I think the problem with knowing lots of techie people is that you start to think that the whole world knows about this stuff and has embraced it.

 It was a bit of a jolt to find that people 20 years or more younger than me didn’t know about these things or didn’t want to use them. It has made me think that instead of rushing into creating websites with user generated content/blogs/wikis we really need to do research to see if this is what people want. Yesterday I was at a London Hub Museums event about online audiences and that also showed that people had very little interest in user generated content. It was suggested that this might be because people didn’t really know what it meant - or maybe that’s not what they want from a museum site?

I am not anti-user generated content, I think it is great for some projects, especially if you’re actually working with communities rather than relying on unknown people online to invest their time in adding content. All I am saying is - lets not rush in spending lots of money to try to create these sort of projects unless we’re really sure that it is what people want! 

To questionnaire or not to questionnaire….

Questionnaires are common place in research and evaluation as a cheap, quick and straight forward method of gathering data. Whilst they can be a highly effective way of finding things out, should we be striving to use alternative methods for evaluating our products and services? I attended a really interesting Sharing Benefits course yesterday on research and evaluation for children and family audiences. Angus McCabe from the University of Birmingham gave some useful ideas on using the arts as a way of consulting with children and families, in a move away from traditional research and evaluation techniques. For example getting a group to make a heraldic banner to show visually what is liked (or disliked!) about a product or service, then using the art work as a basis for  discussion.

Let me know what you think!

A spring in your step

The museum was positively heaving today.  Hopefully it’s not just the beautiful, spring-like weather that has brought out the crowds, but also the wonderfully fun activities that have been organised to keep kids busy over half-term.  This week, I need to remember to allow for another 10 minutes on my lunch break - 3 minutes zig-zagging my way through crowds from the staff entrance to the lift, 5 minutes spent going up to the 3rd floor then stopping at every floor on the way down to collect and deposit visitors, and 2 minutes squeezing past a phalanx of prams jostling for space in the lift lobby.  Phew, take a deep breath.  Must remember to take the stairs next time! 

January (is it still only…..?)

2nd Jan -  back to work - visit cardiac unit with chest pains same day- turns out to be strained muscles from too much excercise (no-not lifting  heavy glass to mouth!). 4th - roof tile blows off resulting in nice little artistic crack in conservatory roof. 7th - finish returning wrong sized Christmas pressies, all items in January sales at 50/70% off, don’t have receipts so have to accept straight exchanges. 11th - fairly uneventful week at work except for threats of violence  by  supplier because of unpaid invoices.

14th - nice rail trip to Bristol. Train manager issues paddles and life jackets due to a little bit of rain round Gloucester way. 16th- cat gets sick. Very nice vet says I can pay by instalments. 21st - weekend wasn’t bad, man flu’ seems to be easing off. Just a week to payday - Happy New Year! 

Museums? Exciting?

We recently had an enormous surge of interest in a recent acquisition by our museum: a 116 year old orange in a lunch tin. It belonged to a local miner who was injured in a coal mine explosion in 1891 and later died. His family kept the fruit as a memento, and it is now blackened, dried and shrivelled.

This human interest story touched something in people: on Monday 29th October, it was published in a City Council magazine, then picked up by the local BBC radio station. BBC Online in Birmingham phoned up and put the story on its website at 10.50am, and from there it became huge. The story was on the BBC website news front page by midday, and was already the 5th most popular and 5th most e-mailed story in the world on that site.

By mid-afternoon, and again in the late evening, as people in Asia and Australia became aware, it became the most read and most e-mailed story in the world in the BBC. The story was picked up by lots of websites and news programmes in many countries, and by Friday 2nd November, the item on the BBC site had had 2 million hits.

It’s great that there should be so much interest in this story, but it raises many questions. What impact, if any, has it had on the museum’s website? How many people will become regular visitors to the museum’s website for other news or information? Can we predict which stories will cause a lot of interest? How should we prepare for, and retain, large numbers of new visitors?

This whole episode made me think of the recent fortnight of live Autumn Watch programmes on BBC2. Like Spring Watch, it generated huge levels of interest, with people posting questions and sightings on the BBC website, and each evening the presenters responded to a few of that day’s postings.

How could our museum, and indeed any museum, generate such interest? It took huge resources from the BBC to create the programmes, sending many film crews to lots of locations throughout the country, some of them very remote, to film sights that are rarely seen, and then co-ordinate the live and recorded footage into fascinating stories that developed over the fortnight.

Perhaps our natural history section could piggy-back on Autumn Watch somehow. We could set up film cameras somewhere locally, to generate interest in a local story, thought I don’t have the expertise even to suggest possible themes. It probably wouldn’t be as rare or as majestic as golden eagles feeding chicks in the Scottish Highlands, but the footage of urban foxes in night-time Glasgow was just as interesting and more easily achievable.

(We could, I suppose, copy Time Team’s hurried approach to archaeological digs where they impose artificial time constraints and deadlines to build a superficial sense of excitement, but that’s the antithesis of serious research.)

I suppose it all comes down to the basic question: can museums (whether in terms of staff, resources or subject matter) be exciting?

Working with Artists & Galleries Seminar - 6 December 2007

I would like to thank all the participants who attended last week’s seminar, which was a great success.

Brendan Flynn, Curator of Paintings & Sculpture at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery shared his strategies for curating artists to enrich historic collections and generate new audiences in new and innovative ways, Claire Turner, Curator of Interpretation & Education at Ikon Gallery, gave some practical and inspirational tips on how to use contemporary artists to educate audiences and interpret exhibitions and attendees learnt about the artist’s creative process from artist Laura Ellis Bacon, who collaborated with Charnwood Museum to create a new work as part of the Museumaker Project.

Participants left the seminar with a toolkit packed with further case studies from artists, curators and gallery educators and some practical guidelines for commissioning contemporary artists as part of MGM 2008. This toolkit will be available from www.mgm.org.uk very soon and this blog will be updated with further information about the arts programme for MGM 2008.

If you would like to learn more about MGM and how to get involved, please contact Clare Moloney by emailing info@campaignformuseums.org.uk

Working with artists

Are you interested in working with artists, want to develop innovative arts projects or engage with audiences in a fresh and stimulating way?

Museums & Galleries Month and engage are working together in partnership to deliver a series of seminars, the aim of which is to stimulate innovative and exciting new visual arts content in museums and heritage sites across the UK – as part of MGM 2008.  Participants will hear from three keynote speakers, who will provide inspirational case studies on commissioning art in response to museum collections; working with arts and audiences; and making art within a museum or heritage site context.  Participants will leave the seminar equipped with practical knowledge and a how-to guide on programming artists and art events within a variety of contexts.

The first seminar will take place at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery on Thursday 6 December.

For a full programme, visit www.renaissancewestmidlands.org.uk

Social Networking used to capture the Lost Generation

There was interesting story in the Guardian today about how broadcasters such as the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky hope to use the social networking site Bebo to target the so-called “lost TV generation” of 13 to 24 years old who don’t engage with TV in the same way as older people or as their generation did in the past.

Bebo has 40 million users and claims to be the most popular social networking site in the UK. It also has a younger audience than other social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The BBC and others are going to allow Bebo users to collect clips from programmes, have exclusive previews of TV shows and have behind the scene footage. Sounds like all those extras you get on a film DVD that I can never be bothered to watch! I am not totally sure why some teenager who prefers to engage with online games, virtual worlds and social networking is suddenly going to want to collect Eastenders clips, but I am sure the BBC will have done their research!

I do think museums can and should engage with social networking sites – we’ve got content, haven’t we got something that people want?! It would be difficult for many museums to create a presence on any of the social networking sites without breaking local authority web rules and perhaps even risking someone getting the sack. But maybe we just need to think imaginatively about how museums could embed themselves in these sites.

How about:

• Museum created quizzes – compare your score with friends
• Give virtual museum objects to friends – maybe similar to the cartoon style developed by Ria Frate on the Curator Collection game 
• An application that allows you to create an online collection on the home page of your social networking site?

Can anyone suggest anymore ideas? Or do you think that museums have no place on social networking sites?

Read the Guardian article here: Broadcasters woo ‘lost generation’ in deal with social networking site Bebo