Just because your museum objects are online doesn’t make them interesting
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"Getting your collection online" is only half (probably less) of the battle. In this slide deck I provide ten "habits" of museums who have got their collections online but then taken it a step further by thinking really hard about audience and engagement in a more strategic way.
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Just because your museum objects are online doesn’t make them interesting
- 1. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 (Or: don’t go thinking you can relax just yet) Just because your objects are online doesn’t make them interesting
- 2. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 I’m Mike Ellis from Thirty8 Digital. We work with museums, galleries and others to help them get the most from the web. We: > train people on how to use things like social media effectively > offer consultancy, particularly around web strategy and content > build beautiful mobile-friendly, editor-friendly, user-friendly websites hello
- 3. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 what I hope you’ll get from this: > ten good habits to get into with your online collections > examples and ideas from other museums > lots of worksheets and stuff to look at later
- 4. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 number of slides > pain 10 bearable
- 5. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 number of slides > pain bearable n childbirth frankly, quite unreasonable 10 Don’t panic: slides will be available shortly at http://slideshare.net/dmje/presentations
- 6. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 habit #1 be less museumy and more audiency
- 7. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Do you know how big / important these segments are to you..? • potential museum visitors • researchers / academics • interested non-museum-visitors / “stumblers”
- 8. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Do you know how big / important these segments are to you..? • potential museum visitors • researchers / academics • interested non-museum-visitors / “stumblers”
- 9. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Researcher Stumbler Visitor
- 10. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Talk to your users… …face to face …on your website …via social media …ask your mum …ask a focus group …just talk to them…
- 11. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 12. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 habit #2 understand the importance of Google
- 13. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Museum object quiz! Which museum website would you go to to find more information about these objects: Q: Stephenson’s Rocket? A: The Science Museum Q: The Raft of the Medusa? A: The Louvre Q: A Pearson “Nife” No.20 A: Durham Mining Museum
- 14. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Museum object quiz! Which museum website would you go to to find more information about these objects: Q: Stephenson’s Rocket? A: Google Q: The Raft of the Medusa? A: Google Q: A Pearson “Nife” No.20 A: Google
- 15. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 “on the web, visibility is authority”
- 16. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 If your objects can’t be found on Google, they are invisible to the world. If your objects are invisible, there is no point in them being online.
- 17. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 your site is here 1. link! (then link again...) 2. use the <title> tag well 3. use words in <h1> tags 4. use the description metatag 5. have “nice” urls 6. make your site easier to navigate 7. use robots.txt and google site maps 8. content, content, content, content….! Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in one slide.. bit.ly/seostarterguide
- 18. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 out.thirty8.co.uk/seo101 moz.com seoptimer.com
- 19. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 social / sociable objects habit #3
- 20. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 “Social objects are the engines of socially networked experiences, the content around which conversation happens.. http://www.participatorymuseum.org/chapter4/ ..one of my most reliable social objects is my dog. When I walk around town with my dog, lots of people talk to me, or, more precisely, talk through the dog to me. The dog allows for transference of attention from person-to-person to person-to-object-to-person”
- 21. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 that looks painful! yeah, glad my boss doesn’t use one on me I have one at home I..oh..
- 22. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Sociable objects online are those that allow users to easily interact with them and with other people.
- 23. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 a sociable object is.. integrated into your main site http://www.nms.ac.uk/explore/collections-stories/world-cultures/ancient-egypt/coffins-and-mummy-masks/
- 24. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 a sociable object is.. one which lets users tell their side of the story
- 25. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 a sociable object has.. a clear call to action • print • download • share • save • see similar • add to lightbox • see wikipedia entry • send to a friend
- 26. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 …and is easy to share or bookmark Ask: 1) do I want to share this, and if not - why not? 2) if I did want to share this, how easy is it to do so?
- 27. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 not just “fire and forget” habit #4
- 28. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 where are you now? where do you want to be? how do you know when you get there? what should you change next time? digital is iterative
- 29. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 • what and who is your online collection for? • what is “success”? • how are you going to get there? • how will you measure it..? • do you have the resources in place to change things?
- 30. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 31. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 The Diplodocus Curve = spend at least as much (maybe more) later on time cash
- 32. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 out.thirty8.co.uk/digitalstrategy
- 33. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 focus on stories habit #5
- 34. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/fr/contributions/3948
- 35. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/
- 36. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 • Stories should be drillable. • Each piece of the story should be enriching, but not vital to the understanding of the story (so that a customer can still have a clear idea of the bigger picture even though he has missed a part of it) • Involve the fans in the creation process. • Build a world in which your story can evolve (such as Coca-Cola's "Happiness Factory") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling
- 37. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
- 38. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 make informed tech choices habit #6
- 39. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Technologies can’t be second- guessed, but don’t be afraid to ask • “Can I get my data in and out again in a useful format?” • “Is my content backed up?” • “What ongoing costs - licensing, hosting, updates - are there?” • “What standards are being applied?” • “What other risks are there?” • “How are these risks being mitigated?”
- 40. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Open isn’t everything, but it is a large part of it • Open data formats - XML, JSON, etc • Open Source • Open and transparent development roadmap • Open relationships with tech partners
- 41. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Set your data free • Culture Grid • Europeana • Wikipedia • Flickr • Tumblr • …develop a simple API…
- 42. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Getting help… • Ask your vendors and anyone else you do work with • Ask your colleagues • Ask the internet • Ask special interest groups like MCG or MCN • Ask me :-)
- 43. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 knowing what users do habit #7
- 44. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 •What do people do with your objects? •Which is the most popular? •Why? •How did they get to them? •Who shared them? Measure everything so you can answer things like this:
- 45. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 “how engaging is the collections area of our site?” “is anyone actually scanning that QR code?” “how much effort should we put in to Twitter?” “is that ticket promotion code working?” “is it worth continuing our newsletter?” “where do people go on our website?”
- 46. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Really, Google Analytics is the only tool you should need. Get your collections management vendor to put it on your site today. google.com/analytics
- 47. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 48. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 out.thirty8.co.uk/ga101
- 49. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 do less, better habit #8
- 50. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 “the web offers you the space to publish everything, and it’s much easier to treat it like a hall closet with infinite stuffing- space than to impose constraints” Erin Kissane, The Elements of Content Strategy
- 51. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 We have 100,000 object records online! I’m not interested. They don’t have images.
- 52. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Number of object records Qualityofrecord x National Museums Users want this Museums (Funders?) want this
- 53. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 54. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 55. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 “It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you” objectstories.org
- 56. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 don’t be afraid of marketing habit #9
- 57. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 58. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 59. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 60. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 be visual, designed, playful habit #10
- 61. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Some old thing Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator Some other old thing Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator More of the same Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator An old thing Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator We have hundreds of these Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator No idea why this is here Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator Hey look, another thing Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator Oh, never mind Not really much reason to look at this, unless you’re a researcher or a curator You searched for: A thing
- 62. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 63. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 64. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015
- 65. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 http://wellcomecollection.org/thecollectors https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection
- 66. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 1. think about (think like) your audience 2. understand a bit about how to work with Google 3. create social and sociable objects 4. iterate, don’t fire and forget 5. focus on object stories 6. make informed, long-term choices about technology 7. know what your users do, and adapt (see #4) 8. do less, better 9. don’t be afraid of marketing 10. be visual, designed, playful That’s it! Recap..
- 67. nice people talking sense about the web | hello@thirty8.co.uk | 0800 808 54 38 | © Thirty8 Digital 2015 Images • Audience: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tattoodjay/4129779298/ • Google Lego: https://www.flickr.com/photos/skrb/5067632676 • Stretching rack: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thukral/650015443 • Fire and forget: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamessteel/515548930 • Music graph: https://www.flickr.com/photos/remiforall/3019989956 Thanks… Any thoughts, questions, etc…? @m1ke_ellis mike@thirty8.co.uk thirty8.co.uk / courses.thirty8.co.uk
Editor's Notes
- Getting your museum collections online is a constant driving force in many museums. It’s actually the thing we get asked to cover the most in our training, which is why we’ll shortly be launching an online course which covers all the steps you need to consider when getting your collection online. Why is it important? because it’s core to your museum mission because objects are the reason for your being, and giving wider access to them makes sense because it’s a requirement for funding or accreditation because the Director said so because everyone else is doing it Today I’m going to look at some “habits” that the more successful museums have taken in getting their collection online and will hopefully give you some thoughts and ideas to take away when considering your own online presence.
- But it’s fine because as the last speaker of the day I can just keep going until I’ve finished :-)
- I’ve worked in and with museum people for 15 years. They - we - are wonderful people. But you’re also museum people, in the way that people who work in retail are retail people, people who work in banks are bankers, and people who work in a lab are lab people. You wouldn’t expect to understand banking phraseology, or retail phraseology. And yet because we’re museum people we think things like “collection”, “artefact”, “curator”, “exhibition” and “accession number” are normal. Unfortunately, this almost always means that we’re often the worst people to decide on how to present things online.
- There are several solutions to this. Firstly, be very clear about who your audience (and potential audience - remember, these can be different) is. It’s likely that if you’re running a “normal” museum website that around about 60-70%, possibly more, of all users are people looking for visitor information - what’s on, where you are, how much it costs and so on. Today I’m not talking about these people - but bear in mind that because of the size of audience chunk they’re an important section.
- This is the audience I’m focusing on today..
- Also bear in mind that your audiences do three things: Firstly, they overlap - for instance a “stumbler” reading about your organisation online with no initial intention to visit in person might decide to come at a later date, or - better - might be inspired by your online presence to come. Secondly, audiences don’t really divide in this nice clean way. Actually their mode of use changes. A Researcher during the day with quite a focused set of tasks might turn into a relaxed browser looking for serendipitous online experiences after work. Thirdly, their devices change too. That Researcher might be using a laptop during the day, a tablet at night and an iPhone when they come and visit.
- This can appear to be horribly complicated. Actually the solution is not to panic, or to use phrases like “lifelong learner” (= “everyone”) but simply to get to know your users. Firstly, buy these books :-) If you have the cash for a proper eye-tracking type focus group, rock on. If you don’t, just get together people who you know are passionate about your organisation. Ask them what they want but more importantly watch them using your site and make notes when they have problems, or find things easy. Recruit these users from wherever you can: social media, newsletters, friends of friends, your mum… Offer them free coffee or tell them they’re going to be part of a group (they’ll like that).
- When the focus switches from museum to user, a wonderful kind of thing can happen, as demonstrated by Walker Art Centre. The change - as demonstrated by these guys - is that your presence becomes about developing a platform for engagement (focused on user) rather than a site (focused on the institution). The Walker Art site is an art lover’s site which just happens to also be the Walker Art Centre site too..
- Yay, an interactive quiz!
- The answer of course is that because you’re subject specialists you knew (probably) at least 2 out of 3 of the answers. But remember - you aren't most people. Most people, and let’s be honest probably you too - go to Google first. This is why something like 60% of your referred website traffic probably comes from Google. Even if you’re going to facebook.com and know the web address, chances are you Google “Facebook” and click on the first result.
- (Quote: Koven J Smith, Kinetic Museums) If you search for something, you are hugely much more likely to click through on the first page of results. In other words: you need to be on the first page of Google for searches for your objects..
- The learning is this: Google is probably the most important tool in your toolbox
- Improving SEO is a huge topic, and one that whole companies base their business around. Lots of it is technical in nature, but a huge part of it is around creating compelling, linked, changing content.
- SEO is also one of the things that museums are mostly terrible at. Unfortunately, the worst offenders in my experience are collections management vendors putting collections information online. If you have one of the “plug and play” systems that are sold by these guys then chances are you’re suffering because of it. My challenge to you is to go away and read up on SEO via the links above and then spend an hour looking at and auditing your collections pages. Once you’ve done that, email you provider and ask them to fix things.
- Nina Simon in her wonderful book The Participatory Museum talks about “social objects” and how these allow for and encourage conversation.
- In your museum for instance you probably have objects that people gather round and conversation starts because of these objects. You can identify these (KnowYourAudience Klaxon!!) by just spending time on gallery and looking out for“hotspots” of activity.
- It’s no different on the web, but I’m using the phrase “sociable” rather than “social”. Sociable objects are those where it is made easy - through technology or content or sharing - to engage in a dialogue.
- In general, Sociable objects have a few traits. Firstly - they’re not “off on their own collections site”, somewhere separate from your main site. They’re integrated into the main content flow - linked to in sidebars, included in stories, part of your newsletter, examined in blog posts.
- Allowing users to engage with the object is the second trait - either through well designed “add your comment” functionality or “tag this” or “we don’t know what this is, what do you think?” approaches. {86% of tags used by curators aren’t the same ones that users tag stuff with (Steve project) - we need the curatorial input of the crowd..}
- The next trait is the idea of having a “call to action” for your object record itself. The idea of a call to action isn’t new in marketing circles, and in fact we use it for all pages of a website when we’re designing them - ask what is it that I want the user to do next? ..and then give them clear, well-labelled navigation to help them do this.
- …and although it’s a call to action as well, it’s worth calling out the shareability - as this is absolutely key to the Sociable Object. There are some easy wins here - share buttons like Share This and ensuring they’re easy to use, trackable via your stats and play nicely with things like mobile browsers - but also some deeper tech. You can for instance specify which image and text is shared on Facebook from a particular page by getting your developer to tweak what are called OpenGraph or OG tags.
- I worked in print once and yes there were moments where we shipped out 20,000 leaflets only to get them back and realise that the logo was upside-down. There’s a reason I moved into the world of the web…
- These are big strategic questions, far too much for us to think about today. But - know what you’re trying to do, who you’re trying to do it for and why. Know what “success” is, measure whether you’re hitting this….
- …and most importantly, know that you absolutely will need resource - time, money, people - after you’ve launched. The takeaway here is to do whatever you can not to blow all your cash in one go. Nag funders, senior manager, your director - whoever you can - for ongoing cash so that you can iterate as you discover more about what works and what doesn’t.
- There are loads of free PDF worksheets here for you to steal, adapt, ignore, share…
- > George Cavan was a sergeant major in the Highland Light Infantry. > While away at training camp the orders came through to dispatch to France. > On 29th March 1918, the train he was on with his troops went through his home station but did not stop there. He threw out onto the station a matchbox containing a note to his family. > Someone picked up the matchbox and delivered it to the family. > George was killed just on 13th April 1918, a few days after arriving in France
- “Dear wife and bairns, Off to France - love to you all, Daddy” The object - the matchbox - takes on a whole meaning once the context is revealed
- This is from the wikipedia page on storytelling, which I think is also interesting.
- Stories have been around since humanity crawled out of the swamp. They’re often formulaic - The Hero’s Journey (from the 1949 seminal book “The Hero with a thousand faces” by Joseph Campbell) for example has a well plotted “archetypal hero” which is found right across the worlds’ mythologies. See Star Wars as a well known example.. The point? These journeys - these stories - are very interesting to us - we want to hear them, compare them with our own lives, share them. They’re intrinsically compelling. Museums are about objects, but what makes objects interesting is more often than not the stories that surround this objects and not the object in and of itself. Tell these stories!
- Guessing what technologies to use and how to use them is a obviously a mugs game. However, there are some more meta questions you should ask in order to avoid getting your organisation into a rut. You are investing hundreds, thousands of person hours into cataloguing your data into a CM system. Think about disaster scenarios - what if company goes bust, gets bought out (cough), doubles their fees, changes their business model…? I’d suggest you go and ask these questions of your collections system or collections system vendor, and plan if things sound dodgy…
- One of the things we say when we first take on a new client at Thirty8 Digital is this: “We really hope you’re going to like us as much in 1, 2 or 5 years’ time, but we want you to be in a position to escape should things change - either with you or with us”. This is why for instance we use the open source tool WordPress - if we were no longer involved with a client website they’d be in a position to take it to another WordPress specialist, rather than being locked in to something proprietary.
- I’m in danger of heading off into geek territory here… In short: if your collections data is in a portable, open format then you stand a much better chance of it being visible, findable, impactful.
- This can all be quite confusing, but there are huge numbers of sources of help out there - among them, these.
- Do you know the answers to these questions? You should. Quite often though, collections management vendors (yeah, I know, I’m being horrible to them today) don’t put proper analytics tools on your collections pages, so you’d be forgiven for not knowing the answers. You should, however, be asking the questions.. :-)
- You have almost definitely heard of Google Analytics before - you should have done. It’s a free system provided by Google for measuring activity on your website. Free is good - even better is the fact that it is now the standard tool for measuring web activity in the museum and cultural heritage sector. ..so you have a pool of expertise and benchmarks to work with
- GA can - and should - also be put in place for measuring activity on your collections pages too. (as per earlier sociable object slides, these pages should be part of your main website..) It gives you unprecedented detail into how people got to your object pages (for instance, did they arrive because you tweeted or sent a newsletter or just via a Google search?) and what they do when they get there.
- Here’s a top-level example - but you can drill into much, much more detail should you need to. It’s worth doing because it will highlight for you which activities you’re doing are having an impact, and which ones aren’t. For the above for example you can see a Facebook post has been instrumental in driving traffic to this particular object.
- Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, and easy to get overwhelmed by it. Here’s a link to a free PDF which introduces it.
- Ah, the internet. It’s the place where you can PUT EVERYTHING, right? Got some old shit you don’t need? Put it on the internet. Actually, no. Complexity is the enemy of usability.
- With objects - you may be deeply impressed that you’ve got a collection of 100,000 things. But it’s highly likely that users want deeper stuff, particularly images.
- Sometimes, the actual act of curation - whittling down 20,000 to 200 (as in the case of Waterloo 200) is not only more satisfying but gives a much better “crafted” feel to a site. Having said that - this isn’t necessarily an either/or - if you can do both then do both! But focusing on the quality rather than quantity is a more user-centred activity.
- A good local example of a small, curated recordset. Tyne and Wear Museums 213 images on Facebook, 260 images on flickr In 6 months: flickr: 247,465 views, 1500 comments, 5000 favourites Facebook : 92,987 views, 405 followers / likes, 712 comments, 1078 monthly active users
- Another one - Object Stories is a fantastic example of a finely curated and small set of objects. It’s a project from Portland Museum which launched in 2011 (?) The nice thing about it is that it has a gallery as well as a web presence. It also intermingles museum objects with personal objects. This makes the museum objects seem less foreign and remote, and more personal
- I think - luckily - that this is less and less of a problem, but I’m still occasionally surprised that some museum people think marketing = selling = EVIL. Marketing is always forgotten about in digital projects, too. It’s part of the long term “fire and forget” thing - you need budget, people, knowledge in order to pimp your stuff. And you need to keep pimping.
- The Science Museum do an amazing job of writing content that is topical and engaging, but also relates what’s going on the in world to stuff in their collections… They pimp - they market the hell out of this stuff.
- Being everywhere is a good thing, but again - it costs lots and lots of money.
- You know it to be true…
- It doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. This just makes anyone with eyes sad. With just a _little_ bit of care - some work on fonts, colours, etc - things can be transformed from painful to pleasing
- Here’s an example (Dallas Museum of Art). Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder - but even so, basic aesthetics are important!
- Simple, playful, fun interfaces and ideas - presenting a random object (W200), writing about how something is being restored on your blog (Powerhouse Museum). Even let out some of the behind-the-scenes-we-dropped-the-priceless-artefact stories too….! Also at top is Magic Tate Ball - an example of serendipitous discovery. Bottom left is CultureCam - you take a picture of a thing and get back matching Europeana search results. It’s experimental but fun..
- Two great examples - at the top is the Wellcome Collection - recently launched, lovely, lovely design - objects as part of the story… …below is Rijksmuseum