Digital technology in museums

Digital technology in museums

prehistory1950-1984

Audioguides - 1950sBusiness systems (accounting, payroll, etc) - 1950sHVAC systems - 1960sContent management systems - late 1960s (MCN - 1967)IT/IS departments - 1970sApple II/VisiCalc - 1977IBM PC - 1981Apple Macintosh - 1984______________________

Antiquity1984-2000

Computers driving exhibits, rather than computers as exhibits - 1980sPOS systems - 1980sFirst museum websites - mid 1990s

Computers driving exhibits, rather than computers as exhibits - 1980sPOS systems

Present day2000-

Modern museum computer infrastructureRepositories:Collections Management Systems (CMS)Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS)Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMS)

Collections Management Systemssystem for housing and serving information pertaining to:objects (in the case of physical objects), or the objects themselves (in the case of born-digital objects). Not to be confused with the Content Management Systems, also called CMSs, like WordPress, Drupal, etc..

The most obvious source of truth is a system for housing and serving information pertaining to the stuff the museum houses and cares for (in the case of physical objects), or the objects themselves (in the case of born-digital objects). The systems that exist and are made to handle physical museum collections are called Collections Management Systems, or CMSs and are not to be confused with the Content Management Systems, also called CMSs, that quietly rule the Web behind the scenes, assembling and publishing information like this blog, which runs on the WordPress content management system.

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Digital Asset Management Systems

System designed to house and store assets usually heavily optimized towards serving visual assets - video and images - and encoding and optimizing those assets for various output methods and platforms.

Traditionally, image-related digital assets relating to collections were handled inside whatever CMS a museum used. Want an image of an object? Tell Registration or Collections the accession number, and receive an image in return. So far, so good. But being tied to a CMS has real limitations, since a CMS is built to track collections objects. Where do you put a picture of a whole gallery? A group portrait of staff? An exterior shot of the building? A video that accompanied an exhibition that might not reference a single object in the show? The universe of digital information that museums are creating is getting larger and larger every year, and now might even include digital assets generated by visitors to the museum, like bookmarks to content theyve selected using their Pen at the Cooper Hewitt, or the biometric data theyve compiled on themselves at the Museum of Science, Bostons Hall of Human Life. Most modern enterprises that dont collect objects, but do all the other things museums do; create stuff like stories and images and moving images, tend to rely on a Digital Asset Management system, or DAMS . These system are usually heavily optimized towards serving visual assets - video and images - and encoding and optimizing those assets for various output methods and platforms.

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Customer Relationship Management Systems

System designed to store information about people and their relationship to the organization.Often specific to Membership and Development depts, beginning to be more broadly used

Museums traditionally have lagged far, far behind the rest of the world when it comes to trying to understand the people who visit the museum and what they do. As Max Anderson said at MCN 2014, Texas ranchers know more about their cattles daily habits than most museums know about their visitors actions in the museum. Aside from the gross numbers of people who come in the door, the amount of information the vast majority of museums collect on the people we serve is pretty thin. If they charge based on age categories then they can look at children, adults, and senior citizens. They might also collect post codes, so they have a rough geographic map of where visitors are coming from, and it usually ends there. For museums that sell memberships, theres another level of information thats collected, but its usually demographic, and it doesnt help unpack what they do while theyre using the museum.

To further raise hackles, Ill also make a Disney comparison that is unflattering to museums. Being Disney-like is almost always a pejorative term in museums, but Disney spends a lot more effort on visitor experience than any museum on the planet, and is able to do things most frontline museum staff can only dream of, like load balance crowds on the fly based on current line lengths, and examine in great detail visitor satisfaction based on their customer journey from before they enter the park till after they get home. Whatever your feelings about the core Disney experience, their knowledge of audience is lights years beyond ours.

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Two examples of integrated museum digital experiences

Cleveland museum of art: gallery one

Cleveland Gallery OnePhotos?VideoReview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWJqd6lyJ-E

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Cooper hewitt national design museum

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Cooper hewitts stack

Cooper-HewittFull stack blog postPen is not the point, the databases are the point$$ Doesnt equal innovationMoral of the story is Dont make a consumer electronic product. Seb going to China to factory story.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLXLtQxGsP8

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https://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2014/the-api-at-the-center-of-the-museum/

Day two

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Digital strategy development

MIT Sloan School/deloitte reportDigital strategy drives digital maturity. The power of a digital transformation strategy lies in its scope and objectives.Maturing digital organizations build skills to realize the strategy. Employees want to work for digital leaders. Taking risks becomes a cultural norm. The digital agenda is led from the top.

McKinsey Digital Labs reportThe stages of digital transformationSince digital touches so many parts of an organization, any large digital program requires unprecedented coordination of people, processes, and technologies.

simplifyCompanies need to create a single source of truth for all software: one repository for storing, versioning, and tracking all source code. The mainline version of code can then be accessed quickly and reliably.

Simplify(Museum version)I dont think there can be a single source of truth for museums. There can be a very small number (2-3) of repositories that are the foundation of all our systems.

scaleLong and expensive task to scale up IT systems that have a mix of modern and legacy technologies. Focusing on the highest-value automation opportunities is most productive.

Scale(MUSEUM VERSION)Museums rarely have the ability to automate the way government and for-profit sectors do.Focusing on the highest-value automation opportunities therefore becomes even more important.What is the highest-value?

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sustainAll-hands-on-deck approach is rarely sustainable. Pursuit of continuous delivery needs to be easy for staffers to follow and ingrained in the culture to maintain its value.

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Sustain(museum version)The theatre vs garden analogy.Should digital projects ever be done? Or are they tended?

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Ways to approach strategic planning

Understanding the larger contextNMC Horizon Report 2016

Key Trends Accelerating Technology Adoption in Museums

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Key TrendsLong-Term Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in museums for five or more years> Cross-Institution Collaboration > New Roles for Museum Professionals

Key TrendsMid-Term Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in museums for three to five years> Data Analytics for Museum Operations > Personalization

Key TrendsShort-Term Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in museums for the next one to two years> Mobile Content and Delivery > Participatory Experiences

Significant Challenges Impeding Technology Adoption in Museums

Significant ChallengesSolvable Challenges: Those that we understand and know how to solve> Developing Effective Digital Strategies > Improving Digital Literacy of Museum Professionals

Significant ChallengesDifficult Challenges: Those that we understand but for which solutions are elusive> Improving Accessibility for Disabled Populations > Measuring the Impact of New Technologies

Significant ChallengesWicked Challenges: Those that are complex to even define, much less address> Managing Knowledge Obsolescence > Privacy Concerns

Important Developments in Technology for Museum Education &Interpretation

Important DevelopmentsTime-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less> Digital Humanities Technologies > Makerspaces

Important DevelopmentsTime-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years> Location Intelligence > Virtual Reality

Important DevelopmentsTime-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years> Information Visualization > Networked Objects

Some useful Dialectics

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Transformation vs. changeDoing things differently involves a high degree of discomfort, which is why most of us prefer not to.Marcia Tucker, the New Museum

Transformation vs. changeIn my experience, change and transformation strategies are very different beasts. Change is often treated like a discrete, time-bounded process; one that is begun, carried out, and completed at the end. This mindset posits change as something to be gotten through, like a river to be crossed. On the far shore lies the Promised Land and all we have to do is build a bridge to get there. The traditional model of change management assumes a static endpoint one can visualize. And on the far shore were still recognizably us, with most of our 20th and 19th century traditions intact. Thats not what Im after.

A truly transformational digital strategy recognizes that there is no far shore. The goal is not to transplant the existing organization in a new context, rather it aims to create a continuously evolving, learning institution that trains its people and transforms its processes to make use of (not uncritically adopt) digital technologies in every aspect of our work. The journey is that of finding all the designable surfaces in the organization, and thoughtfully building on them to meet the needs of the people. Successful digital transformation will allow us to go wherever we need to go, regardless of the weather. Like any disruption, it will be uncomfortable. Marcia Tucker, the New Museums founding director said, Doing things differently involves a high degree of discomfort, which is why most of us prefer not to. Achieving transformation will be hard, but I would argue that the alternative will be worse.

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Design vs. traditionThe opposite of design is tradition.Johanna Koljonen, Alibis for Interaction

One of the greatest challenges of working in an institution of any longevity is the burden of tradition, the things we do because Thats how we do things here. The unspoken, informal, learned ways of doing our work make real transformation a daunting task. But we have tools to help. I recently heard the experience designer Johanna Koljonen say, The opposite of design is tradition and I think theres great truth in that. For our needs, though, Id turn it around and say, The opposite of tradition is design because design is the tool that is going to allow us to replace traditions with processes up to the needs of the era.

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Literacy vs. fluencyDigital literacy ..is essential to improving technical infrastructure and workflows. Digital literacy needs to be achieved across the board, especially in the context of museum leadership.The New Media ConsortiumHorizon Report: 2016 Museum Edition

Literacy vs. fluencyOne challenge that I often hear executives mention is the mismatch between their current staff and their digital ambitions. Itll cost too much to hire a shedload of programmers! they say, and thats usually the end of that. Implicit in that statement is the mindset that digital is a domain that needs to be understood at least as well as any curatorial domain if anything is to be done. Since museums derive their authority from the expertise of their staff, it follows that without that same level of digital expertise, theyre helpless.

Its also wrong and ignores most of the history of technology. When I was a child, typing was a specialized skill restricted to typists. They went to school to learn how to do it well and very quickly. Big organizations had whole offices full of these specialists. Sending out a letter was next to impossible without them. Now, everybody type their own damned letters (or emails) and the typist has gone the way of the lamplighter. The postdigital workplace doesnt require a staff brimming with programmers. It requires a staff with enough confidence and training to use the tools designed for them.

The other mantra I often hear executives talk about is needing to wait until more digital natives enter the workforce, and a new generation of leaders arise. I have little patience with this kind of kicking the can down the road. Digital maturity is not a generational issue; its a cultural one. Designing a culture where continuous staff development is part of the landscape is the only way to escape the dilemma of having staff who dont know how to use the latest tools. Todays 25-year-olds will be just as ill-equipped to deal with the technologies developed five years hence unless we design a culture that bakes in staff development as something we all do, all the time, as a regular part of being alive in an age of digital abudance. The New Media Consortiums Horizon Report: 2016 Museum Edition suggests that this kind of literacy, not fluency, ..is essential to improving technical infrastructure and workflows. Digital literacy needs to be achieved across the board, especially in the context of museum leadership.

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Culture vs values

Values have a tendency to be bullshit.Jan Gunnarson

Culture vs. valuesBuilding that culture require more than a good mission, vision, or values statement. Too often, the values tend to be pleasant sounding bullshit. Many museums have great-sounding visions and missions, but workplace cultures that do little to deliver those values and mostly maintain the traditional way of being a museum. Having values like digital transformation arent enough, figuring out how we concretely act on those values, is the challenging part. Jan Gunnarson says, Culture is the manifestation of values and its everywhere; in our org charts, our meetings, our repositories, our labels.

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Building blocks of strategies

Theres a leaderTheres no one right answer for who that person is or where in the organization they are.

Crafting and leading a successful digital transformation will require a C-level leader to champion digital efforts. Whatever that persons title (CDO, CIO, CXO, etc), their mandate and resources will need to be sufficient to ensure their ability to get the job done.

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Theres a strong foundationEstablish a baseline, (eg. a SWOT analysis, or similar survey of existing structure)

Lay a strong foundationAs part of the initial scoping of our current situation, it makes sense to hire a consultant to conduct a detailed SWOT analysis, ask the important questions, and get honest answers. This can be done in-house, of course, but at this early stage, I recommend bringing in an experienced consultant who can place the museums particular challenges in the best-informed, broadest context possible.

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Learn from others successGreat artists steal. So do museums.

Learn from others successNot being early adopters has it drawbacks, but it also affords museums the opportunity to survey the field and learn from other museums that have already embarked on digital transformation processes. Some, like the Tate, Cooper Hewitt, and Carnegie Museum of Art, have been actively sharing their thinking online for years, giving you a rich body of information to use as you chart your own course. Additionally, I recommend that all senior leaders engage in similar surveying of their professional networks.

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Build shared vision among senior leadersCoalition building is essentialSuccessful strategists manage up, down, and across

As a museum-wide effort, requiring unprecedented cooperation and collaboration between departments, building understanding and support at the executive level will be essential as you begin to work out how staff in different departments will work together to realize the vision. I recommend you hold a strategy and leadership retreat with senior staff to build a shared vision for the project and assess where your museum is now, where you would like to be in the next 3-5 years, and how you will get from here to there.

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Assemble the right teamStrategic planning is a team sport. You need input and support from across the museum.

Assemble the right teamThe kind of institution-wide transformation Im proposing will be difficult, if not impossible to achieve without the active support of wide cross-section of the staff being actively involved in shaping and implementing the process. I propose you establish a Digital Task Force who would be charged with spearheading your effort. The bulk of their work would consist of smaller teams focusing on different aspects of digital transformation. Those teams would include:55

Example strategies:Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA

Example strategies:Fords Theatre Society