Managing Museum ICT

Daniel Pett
Digital Humanities Lead

@dejpett

Some of the material in this is from Dominic

Tweddle, DG Royal Naval Museums.
He cannot be here today.

4 Pillars of Museum ICT

Management & Governance

Audience/ Marketing

Collections management

Product management

Management & Governance

Finance

Audience(s)

Systems

Ledgers
Profit & Loss
Balance sheet
Management accounting

Visitor segmentation
Visiting patterns
Spend patterns
Direct audience research

Governance
Health & Safety
Compliance
Human Resources

Collections Management
Tracking

Research

Images

Title of ownership
Acquisition/disposal data
Movement tracking - display, loan, etc
Condition

Object metadata
Digital display and interpretation
Images, scientific and 3D data
Comparanda/synthesis with external collections

Identification
Condition
Research purposes
Public use
Licensing

How ready is our collections information for

the superhighway? I suspect a lot of it is not
ready for the mud track or even the
occasionally trodden grassy path.
Tim Schadla-Hall
(1996, What are we groping for?, MDAInformation, 2. 4)

Audience/ Marketing
Audience

Demographics
Geographical spread - isochronic travel times
How did they come to interact with you?
Non-visiting audience (overseas, domestic)

Reaction and
conversation

What did they like? Did on this day meet expectations

What did they not like?
Were you value for money?
Create a feedback loop and conversation

Behaviour

What did they do?

Dwell times, visitor patterns
Facility usage (cafe, toilets)
Spending patterns - turn audience into consumer

This area should most definitely be data driven.

Example Museum Products

Kiosks

Touch screens and tables

Edited linear video displays
Information stele

Computer generated

3D site and artefact reconstructions

Animations
Blended environments

Enhanced experience

Virtual Reality
Augmented Reality
Holographic

Hand-held and wearable

Sound wands
Audio and multimedia mediated guides
Bring your own device - mobile phone, Nintendo DS
Fitbits, Apple Watch etc

Grand Challenges for Museum Digital

Mobile

Big Data Analysis

Relevance! Build team capacity

Social Media Wave

Kiosk/ Stele/ In gallery

Computer Generated Reconstruction/ Interactive

Hand held technology

Data driven decisions to make products

Digital Services

Broadcast

Ecommerce

Retail

Remote
information

Mediated
tours

Virtual
access

Tracking
Museum digital product family

Consume on or offsite
HTML
Video

Bring your
own device

Museum
provided
personal
device

Audio/multi-media guide

Podcast
CGI

VR
Visual media

Interactives
Digital cases

Handling

Some Museum brand drivers

Collection Exhibitions Building

ICT - internal and public facing

Staff
Third parties (eg social media)

Press

Build an appropriate team (BM model - simplified)

HoD

Research

Programmes

Rights

Products

Big Data

Broadcast

Editorial

Do not rely on one person to do everything

Keep BUS FACTOR LOW

Not all museums can do everything in the vast

ICT realm. Choose your battles, play to your
strengths and your workforce. Learn from others
and be inspired.
So, the argument Museums should do this is
weak in my opinion.

Cutting edge?
or
Behind the curve?

Museum content areas

1. Brand, identity, vision, people
2. Research output (if produced)
3. Programming, education and activities
4. Collections data (arguably the jewel in the crown.)

Museums are a political tool

What does your poster look like?

Disruptive
technologies
Software, platforms and hardware

Harnessing disruption

Technology chosen should be easy to use and

sustainable
Third party services should be programmatically
easy to integrate within your infrastructure
All services should provide added value to your
organisation
Choose wisely, think about sustainability

Talent availability?
{ You can learn to code }

Examples of moving towards

the OPEN digital museum

http://www.getty.edu/about/opencontent.html

http://openglam.org/2013/02/27/case-study-rijksmuseum-releases-111-000-highquality-images-to-the-public-domain/

Licensing and Open

Versus

Orphan works
Read: http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/reuseof-digitised-content-4-chasing.html

Diverging from traditional models

The Museum as a multiplatform broadcaster?

The challenge is, to what extent do we remain authors, and in what sense
do we become publishers providing a platform for international
conversations. I am certain that in the next 10-15 years, there will be a
limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working
as commissioning editors working on material online
Nicholas Serota

The future has to be, without question, the museum as a publisher and
broadcaster
Neil MacGregor

http://youtu.be/tVhXp9wU5sw

Are they right?

Possibly not yet.

Compare this YouTube

Mugumogu cat in box

Compare with this museum YouTube

Difficult to become
ubiquitous
Here we are folks, the dream we all dream of, boy versus girl
(Bonus points if you know the song this is from)

Multiple broadcast platforms

Celebrity endorsement

Bastille @britishmuseum

http://youtu.be/27DelLooE1o

The cult of celebrity wins

every time on social media

Changing concept of the

Museum

The Public museum

A space for discourse, creativity, experience

The serendipitous
museum
You never know what people might do with your
content when it becomes open.

The Participatory
Museum

Read Nina Simons excellent work:

http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

Withdrawing your content

from your audience(s)

For example, Brooklyn Museum thought platforms were not

working for them, so they withdrew membership.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2014/04/04/social-change/

Ill miss their User Generated Content

poems002 says:
All these images have the WOW factor I visited Egypt a
couple of years ago and it blew me away at the pyramids
to have seen it like this would have been amazing
-PIRATE- says:
im convinced they where built by aliens.

The public can interact with your exhibits and add to your knowledge
as an institution now thats public archaeology.

Licence changes
Can also force withdrawal, for example from Europeana

Has that broken their

digital finger print on the
web?

Strategy
Now all the rage, too many thinkers?
Not enough doers?

Reach

Relationships

Revenue

Expansion of reach
Small scale to massive scale change - but how?

Perhaps by partnership?

Building commercial
revenue
Is that a pipe-dream?
Do people really want your wares, your apps?
Have you asked them?

Social media strategy

Boils down to simple stuff really.
Would your parents be proud of what you write?
Does your output represent your professional
persona and your institution?
Your staff are your biggest asset, use their combined voice
Be appropriate!

Some BM examples of
public facing ICT

Samsung Digital Discovery Centre

British Museum apps

Apps for apps sake?

Digital artefacts?
Abandoned silos?

Games

Collaboration: BBC/BM

Examples of BM/ Google partnership

Indoor mapping and Street View

A few things I built

Or worked on

Visualising collections
Taking data and making it interesting

Mapping coins
http://tracemedia.co.uk/lostchange

Video-conferencing
Taking archaeology and heritage into primary school classrooms
via technology and the expertise of British Museum educators.

Crowd-sourcing
http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org

Co-production of 3D

Crowdsourced 3d - MicroPasts

Potential monetisation of 3D outputs

In house printing

Objects inserted into Virtual Reality

https://vimeo.com/151510535