Presented to senior EU cultural figures at A Vision for European Cultural Heritage 2025, I presented Museum in a Box as a forward-thinking company trying to succeed in making the best of the current state of digital cultural heritage. (Notes included in this version).
1. “Museum out of the Box“
A Case Study
George Oates, CEO & Founder
Museum in a Box
museuminabox.org @_museuminabox
glo@museuminabox.org @ukglo
Varna, May 2018
Good afternoon. Thank you to Harry for inviting me to speak with you today, and I’m looking forward to participating in the workshop too. Thank you also to the
translators in the room. I’ll try to remember to speak slowly.
2. What’s Museum in a Box?
What’s our business model?
Commissions so far
Challenges being a startup in the
cultural sector
Here’s what I’d like to describe for you in this session. After some discussion, Harry and I thought it might be useful to use Museum in a Box as a case study, to help
think through the themes of this meeting. It’s a real company trying to do things a bit differently, so I’ll be very interested to hear what you all think.
Also, I’ve brought a box with me, so everyone will have a chance to try it out - either today, or tomorrow.
3. What’s
Museum in a Box?
So, to begin… the best way to describe Museum in a Box is to show it, so let me play you a short video to explain the concept:
5. Our core mission:
Increase access to cultural
resources
From the very beginning, its been our mission to help museums, libraries, and archives increase access to their collections. Even though we’re learning we have other
types of customers, this remains our number one goal.
What can we do with all the fantastic work being done to increase our digital cultural heritage?
6. For Museums:
Send your collections
everywhere
There’s certainly a lot to be said for putting digital versions of your collection online. No doubt about that. But, you’ll notice there’s a different verb here: to send. Instead
of just publishing millions of metadata records, we want our partners to carefully choose which of their objects to gather, describe, print, and share. Perhaps it’s a bit
more effort, but, this careful selection makes for great results.
7. For Teachers:
Support kids to build
their cultural capital
As the company has developed over the last two years or so, we’ve met and talked with lots of teachers. There are lots of challenges in a classroom relating to cultural
learning:
- A trip to a museum is too expensive, and not only that, but a museum might simply be too far away to visit, even in another country
- It takes too much time and effort to gather materials for a subject that’s outside of the standard curriculum
- Time on a computer might be difficult, not only for the teachers, but students too, and even if you can do that, it’s hard to find good resources, and the digital
experience can be really bland
The idea of a museum handling collection is not new. Museums have been sending sets of objects to schools nearby for years. But it’s one school, at one time. What if
you could send a handling collection to a hundred schools? All over the world?
8. For Kids:
Let museums from around
the world visit you
I was recently in Washington DC delivering a box to one of the poorest schools in the area. I loved hearing the librarian tell the kids “Where are we going to travel today?”
when she opened up the box with the class.
It’s not enough anymore to expect people to cross your threshold. Why not bring the museum to them?
15. London Metropolitan Archives,
Abira Hussein
1 box
Several workshops
1 collection, undescribed
Healing Through Archives initiative
“using technology to work with community groups around themes of migration, memory and identity”
Then, without any descriptions, she took the set of images and objects into a workshop with older Somali women in London, and asked for their input…
play audio
26. Creative ecosystem
Smithsonian Folkways Audio Archive
2 researchers
2 writers
3 actors
1 recording studio
1 printing house
Free sound archive
There were lots of other people involved to create the Smithsonian collections…
43. What does that start to look like when there are thousands of boxes all over the place?
How does that change the meaning of access and impact? What does a visit mean?
44. CHOOSE OBJECTS
“Make Your Own”
CREATE CONTENT
MAKE THE TECH
Now I’d like to introduce the second type of the product: Make Your Own Museum in a Box.
Thanks to our commission work, we’ve developed a relatively stable process which each collection and box needs to be made. It’s these three components, and we’ve
heard loud and clear from teachers that they love the idea of having kids develop their own collections, and even maybe make the boxes too. It’s potentially a real cross-
curricular learning tool, that taps into a bunch of the skills mentioned in the various reading materials for this meeting. Curiosity, critical thinking, collaboration, and even
performance.
When you…
Choose Objects - curation, research, digitisation, 3D printing
Create Content - writing and communication, audio production, information/media literacy, subject area knowledge
Make the Tech - maker skills, fabrication, coding, interaction design
45. In this case, we sell the components, not the collections…
46. We’re natural collectors
CHOOSE OBJECTS
- use the frame of “museum” to encourage gathering, cataloguing, describing, presenting
- “Museum of My Backyard” or “Museum of my Grandma”
-
49. - here’s a diagram of the componentry inside the box
- the tech is not the complex bit, and we’ve also deliberately chosen off-the-shelf stuff as well as Raspberry Pi as our “brain” because we want it to be easy to
reproduce… for kids to make their own.
50. Maker
But we’re also curious about a longer term dynamic that might be possible…
52. Maker
Museum
Library
Archive
+ LIFE
Collection
Maker
Make Your Own
Collection
Makers can make a collection about whatever they want. They may draw on “official” resources, or not.
I like imagining Lizzie, who is really into lizards, and wants to make her own collection about them. She may draw from a natural history museum, or, she might just use
her own set of objects or photographs she creates herself.
55. local performance
MakerMaker
I think there’s also a point to be made here about “performance” being a great way to develop cultural capital, and 21st century skills. For Lizzie to show her collection to
her classmates or friends or family means that she has to do a lots of work to make it presentable. Does it make sense? Is the information interesting?
60. Museum
Library
Archive
????
Maker
- How does this change the relationship with cultural organisations?
- What’s the opportunity here?
- What’s the philosophical relationship?
- How does this kind of content development and questioning affect an institution?
- Can an institution hold a dialog like this?
- How might that improve the situation?