Rhiannon Looseley's blog

Twelve things I took away from the Culture24 Let's Get Real conference

2011-10-14T15:12:00.000+01:00

On 21 September I attended Culture24's Let's Get Real conference in Bristol. This is quite a long time ago now and I should have blogged about it before but maybe the time lapse can help me be a bit more succinct about what I took away rather than providing a blow-by-blow account of the day.

Here are 10 things I took away from the conference:

Tom Uglow, Creative Lead in the Google Creative lab did a really inspiring keynote. Without consulting my notes, the thing that's stuck in my head is his very gratifying and inspiring suggestion that the people in the room that day would be the pioneers of taking museums forward into the future.
There's so much more that you can do with Google Analytics than most of us are probably currently doing - I knew this before, but wanted to be told what these things were - and to a large extent the conference didn't disappoint! Examples that have stuck in my mind include: using segments to look at where your audience is coming from geographically and filtering out visits from within your own organisation.
In the 'failing forward' section, Matthew Cock from the British Museum did a very quick but useful talk about how they'd refreshed their website and the tools he used to make the process easier e.g. having evidence-based discussions with stakeholders using heat maps and Analytics data often taking the sting out of certain decisions. James Morley from Kew also talked about some of the stuff they did on a similar project including optimising their 404 page with a set of quicklinks for likely content the user was looking for and a sponsorship banner.
There's going to be a second round of the Action Research Project led by Culture24 that this conference came out of. Information will be made available on this soon. The first round sounds like it was a very useful experience for all involved and you can read about what it found out and how people found the project in the very interesting report.
The report has also produced a couple of toolkits which I've looked at since I've returned to work and found very useful. One is a Google Analytics healthchecklist, another to do with measuring social media impact and another to do with comparing social media tools.
The action research report also questions that long-held belief that the web helps museums reach new audiences as Hitwise data suggests that the audiences using are website are very similar to those visiting our sites.
I talked to Danny and Martha from the Wellcome Trust about their very cool game High Tea which accompanied the High Society exhibition last year. I played the game when I got back - it's VERY cool, but I also read the really very interesting report about the game. Key thing that stuck with me here - how they targetted the gaming community with great success.
Jane Finnis (and I think others) talked about not having a digital strategy, but having a digital strand of an overarching strategy.
The action research report shows that search engines and mobile visits are the fastest growing segments, and found no real evidence that social media drives traffic to sites.
Someone highlighted some interesting research by Jim Richardson at MuseumNext about how people use museums on Facebook and Twitter.
Couple of useful tools: XSort for analysing card sorting (although seems to be only for Mac?) and Reinvigorate for heat map tracking.
Bristol is actually a rather nice place - who knew?

What is online learning in museums?

2011-10-14T12:58:00.000+01:00

I've been reflecting quite a lot recently on what online learning means in a museum context.

Is it just for schools?

Or just for schools and children outside schools?

Or for schools, children and adults taking part in a formal course?

Or is it for everyone?

What constitutes learning in an online context?

Is it learning that takes place when you're looking at something online?

Or is it the delivery online of tools that help you learn on- and offline?

And where do you see responsibility for online learning as sitting within a museum?

I obviously have views of my own on all these things, and I may blog about them at some point, but I'm interested to hear what other people think and what museum online learning is seen as being.

Please leave your comments here if you have a view on this! I'd be really interested to hear people's thoughts. And please feel free to raise further questions too if you have any!

Thanks all!

What can museums learn from universities about online learning?

2011-07-21T10:33:00.000+01:00

Last night I went to a seminar at the University of Westminster. The seminar was public but part of the Johns Hopkins University museum studies summer school. The students are part of an online museum studies course similar to the one I did at Leicester except the distance learning element is conducted online rather than through big blue folders of paper!

Phyllis Hecht the course director talked about how the course works and most particularly about how they have built a community online through social media, and through the various softwares they use as part of the course.

The course is mostly asychronous, but they do also have live webinars that are also recorded to listen to later. They have chat rooms and an online museum cafe where students can chat about anything they want, course related or not. I can really see the value of building this community online and really investing time and effort into it and making it a required and encouraged part of the learning experience. Distance learning can be such an isolating experience and there's a risk that you miss out on so much of the serendipitous stuff that you get from bumping into someone on a university campus or bouncing ideas off each other in seminars.

It made me think about whether museums should be running online courses in the same way (some already are of course) and whether or not it would be just as important to build that community. I imagine museum online courses would be much much shorter which is a key difference and probably would make the vast amounts of work that goes in to Phyllis's online community untenable and perhaps to an extent less necessary. I also thought that it would be very hard for a museum to resource the amount of interaction Phyllis described. Nevertheless, I do think that if museums did go down the road (or continue down it) of offering short online courses in the same way as some run short courses for adults onsite, it would be important that the course tutor invested some time in building some kind of community online in order to facilitate the learning experience by providing some of the social interaction that you would get in an onsite course.

The main problems that Phyllis encounters are to do with the technology failing and I think that would be a key thing for museums to consider carefully before embarking on running an online course.

Rebecca Sinker, Curator: Digital Learning at Tate also then talked about her role and some of the questions it raises. I found this fascinating because she raised so many questions that I've battled with myself and also some new ones that I hadn't thought of. I think it's clear that museums and galleries still have some way to go before they/we completely work out what online learning really means and what its implications are.

The conversations that then ensued from the floor were also fascinating. It was so great to be part of a group of intellectual and articulate people all theorising and raising interesting discussions about what I do on a daily basis. It's so easy to get lost in the day-to-day and so important to go to these kinds of discussions once in a while to remind yourself of the issues and remember why we work in this wonderful, interesting sector that's so full of great objects and promotes so many discussions all the time about the best ways to share them.

New museum online learning content strategy - your thoughts please

2011-07-20T22:54:00.001+01:00

Update 25 July - I should just add a bit of a disclaimer/explanation here:
1. This thinking isn't related to the work I do in my paid work, more just me rolling ideas around in my head about museum online learning generally
2. This isn't particularly the start of a strategy document, more just some ideas about a modus operandi/working principles (maybe strategy with a small 's'?) for museum online learning.

Original post:
I was part of the workshop to critically evaluate the National Musuems Online Learning Project webquests yesterday and as ever, when I step away from my desk, the curtain opened in my brain and I was able to think more broadly then I ever can normally about my job and how I go about it.

Some thoughts developed which I want to expand upon about what a museum online learning strategy should be about and this germ of an idea is brewing in my head that I'd like to hear people's thoughts and comments on. It's very much a germ of an idea at the moment and I'm sure it has lots of disadvantages so I'd really appreciate your feedback.

What would you think of a museum online learning strategy that set out the following:

1. Online learning resources for schools and colleges that sit on the Museum's website should be in the following forms:

A) A bank of object images with contextual information about them that teachers/tutors/students can download and use for educational use

B) A set of short introductions to the topics that the museum is an authority on

C) A set of short films with schools/colleges as the target audience where a curator talks about particular objects and what you can learn from them

D) A set of relatively light-touch/low-tech pre-visit (and possibly post-visit) resources that support the school/college sessions run by the Museum. These might be in PPT or SMART notebook or something and would simply serve to introduce key concepts and objects that relate to the session.
In other words the stuff on a museum websites is relatively unprescriptive and is about opening up our 'stuff' and making it available to educators to do what they want with it.

2) All material where the primary aim is to provide a learning experience online that is independent to a face-to-face museum session (and I think this particularly applies to informal learning material online, and to more prescriptive and structured formal learning which does a lot of the teaching for the teacher) e.g. an online game, or an interactive story should do the following :

A) If it is for schools/colleges, pick on particular topic or area of a topic and create a resource to support that area of the curriculum

B) Be developed in partnership with other organisations who have authority on that subject

C) Be developed in partnership with commercial and other big organisations who are already providing this kind of content or where the target audience are already spending time. The idea would be for an equal partnership where funds and resources were put in from both parties

D) Emphasis is put on the findability of the resource from the start

E) Significant budget/resources are set aside for marketing the resource

F) Potentially sit on an independent URL or a place where the target audience are already spending time rather than on the museum's website (Update: 25 July - this is an addition that I meant to put in and realised I'd omitted)

These ideas are based on the following assumptions/observations/thoughts:

There's no point in museums trying to compete for people's attention and leisure time with online activities which are much better funded than museums are ever likely to be.
People will only come to museum websites either if they know that there is material there or if they find it by accident in Google.
We have limited resources both in terms of budget and staff time and it's vital that we channel our energies wisely.

Please please feel free to use the comments to let me know what you think. I'd really value some discussion on this and so I hope it gets people thinking and chatting. Over to you!

MCG Spring Meeting 2011: 'Go Collaborate', Brighton, 17 June 2011

2011-06-27T17:10:00.001+01:00

I wanted to write up a few points from Friday's MCG Spring meeting while they're still fresh in my head. Just to start with a few caveats - my notes vary in quality throughout the day, I'm not recording everything that went on here, and any of the opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer or the MCG or anyone else present unless stated.

Jane Finnis, Director of Culture24, opened the day after a welcome from Ross Parry, Chair of the MCG, with an explanation of the theme of the day. Jane wanted the day to bridge relationships between sectors that aren’t working together as yet. She explained that the people in the room represented a group of people who ought to be working together and that the ‘space’ that we work in is in some ways full of opportunity and great and exciting but sometimes quite a difficult space. Its also a space that is changing with the move of the responsibilities of the MLA to the Arts Council.

The day was to start with Andrew Nairne, Executive Director of the Arts Council talking about this transition and how museums, libraries and archives can fit into the Arts Council’s world. The rest of the morning would then be spent thinking about what collaboration means and giving examples of it. In the afternoon, Jane explained, representatives of four commercial organisations would talk about why they want to work with the museums sector. Jane senses some trepidation in our sector about working with the commercial sector. She attributes this to a discomfort with their driving force being about making money, which does not sit comfortably with us who work in the not-for-profit sector. The pressures of the funding cuts mean that we are going to have to generate our own income and there is a need to reflect on what we don’t have the expertise to deliver but that the commercial sector might have. These four representatives were here to show us that they are not just about making money and to explain what drives them to work with our sector.

Andrew Nairne opened by telling us that the functions of the MLA would be transferring to the Arts Council on 1 October this year. Reassuringly, he explained that they are currently in close collaboration with the current MLA staff in order to try and work out the implications of this changeover. Andrew explained that a lot of discussion at present was centring on how to integrate the work of museums and libraries (I was interested that archives were scarcely mentioned but I assume they were inferred) [update 28 Jun 11: I have been reliably informed that archives will not fall under the ACE banner. MLA's responsibilities for archives will apparently go to The National Archives.] into the strategic aims of the Arts Council established three years ago in their publication 'Achieving Great Art for Everyone'. I have yet to read this and made a mental note to do so. A companion volume to this will be published online in the autumn that will explain how our sector will fit in with all these goals so that's another 'must-read' on the list.

Andrew then announced a new funding stream run together with NESTA and the AHRC that asks arts and cultural organisations to work with those with digital expertise :

'to help them understand the potential offered by new technologies and together develop innovative project proposals for submission to this new research fund, which is for projects that will harness digital technologies to connect with wider audiences and explore new ways of working.'

I found the press release about the funding on the ACE website if people are interested in finding out more.

I got the impression that the key thing was that they were willing to fund experimentation which is important if we want to continue to innovate and not always possible when budgets are limited so I imagine this will be welcomed in the sector.

I'm going to skip over Honor Harger's talk about some of the cool collaborative projects that Lighthouse (our venue for the day) have been working on (not because they weren't interesting - they were - one really cool-sounding one got artists and scientists to work together on a project where the public were also allowed to drop in and join in - it involved infected textiles, and fruit flies and smelly things... looks like you can find out more about it here: http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/whatson/laboratorylifeopenlab.htm) but because I haven't got space for everything here and there's lots I still want to talk about!

After Honor’s talk there was a group discussion lead by Ross Parry with Andrew and Honor. My notes are long here but I’m not sure I’ve totally digested them yet so I don’t think I’ll write coherently about them here. A couple of questions did stick out though. Ross asked Oliver Vicars-Harris in the audience what makes collaboration succeed and he said ‘mutual respect – respecting differences, different skills and different relationships.’ Honor agreed that it’s about compromise and noted that collaboration is seldom easy and that one of the hardest things is what you have to give up which can often be your whole way of working. Re-reading my notes about this sheds an interesting light, I think, on some of the discussions in the afternoon (more on this later).

I was also interested to hear Jon Pratty’s account of a presentation he’d heard recently by Matthew Cock from the British Museum and someone from the BBC who were talking very openly and honestly about their collaboration on the A History of the World project recently. Both recognised that they had perhaps underestimated what would be involved but Jon found it particularly interesting that they had clearly reached a place in their collaboration where they were able to talk openly and honestly. I think the talk that Jon was referring to was one where Matthew Cock presented with Andrew Caspari from the BBC at the Open Cultures conference last week. If anyone knows of a transcript or anyone who's blogged further about it, please let me know, I'd be interested to read it. [update 28 Jun 11: Thanks to Mia for pointing out this blog about this session: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2011/06/open-culture-2011-a-history-of-the-world/].

Mia Ridge also noted at this point that the research information network is releasing a report quite soon about some of the barriers to collaboroation, some of which is based on work with museums. Ross Parry added that a lot of the work of the Knowledge Exchange programme is useful here too.

Again - I'm going to skip Kevin Bacon's interesting talk about image sales in Brighton Museums (sorry Kevin!) and the visit to Brighton Museum at lunchtime because of lack of space and time.

I want to move on to the discussions that happened in the afternoon which raised lots of things to think about and rather a lot of discussion. We had four presentations from commercial companies talking about why they wanted to work with the cultural sector. As mentioned above, the purpose here was to encourage us as a museum sector to consider collaborating more with commercial companies to work towards a common goal and to see them less as entities that are just about making money, and more as people with similar goals to us that can help us fulfil our aims. After the four presentations, an open discussion began to prompt reasonably impassioned exchanges of views which I will attempt to represent some of below.

The overall message that I took away from all these discussions is that while the museum sector does potentially need to do some readjusting in its perceptions and practices with regards to the commercial sector, there is also scope for the commercial sector to take some time to learn about our idiosyncracies, practices, passions and motivations/restrictions as well if we are to work together in harmony in the future.

This first struck me during Chris Thorpe's presentation about Artfinder and other projects that he has worked on. He explained the approach they take and raised some interesting points about user-centred design and remembering that users may not always find the things that we do interesting. He explained the importance of considering time and space, the fact that users are often looking to apps as a distraction (e.g. on the train), size, context and finishability (i.e. users like to be able to complete something and get a sense of achievement reasonably quickly).

As I listened and typed up what I was hearing, my impression was that everything that was being discussed was about art. Looking back this was perhaps inevitable given that Chris worked on Artfinder but I began to think 'but what about other museum objects?' I tentatively tweeted 'Museums aren't just about art though...' and was cheered to find a number of people retweeting my point and seeming to agree. I wonder now whether this was a slightly unfair criticism but at the time, if the object of the presentation was to show that our goals were shared by the commercial sector, I remained unconvinced since the collections I work with and my background is much more history-based. It felt like there was an assumption that understanding/being passionate about art meant understanding museums. It was the first flag that maybe there were misconceptions about our sector.

The second presentation was by Andy Budd from Clearleft. Andy pointed out that small companies like his who employ 14 people are not solely about making money and ensuring 'a retirement fund'. They don't see the museum sector as 'a market segment' but like solving problems and their ultimate goal is to add value to the world and make the world a better place. I could see that Andy was genuine about this. He did say as well however that as we fear profiteering, so the commercial sector fear cost-cutting and 'design by committee' and that if they ask for more money, it's not because they're money-grabbing but because more money means more of their time and better and smarter solutions.

At this point I was feeling pretty sympathetic to Andy's points but it raised another flag in my mind - here were we, a room full of museum professionals worrying about funding cuts, squeezed budgets and possible redundancies being told that sometimes we need to spend not less, but more money to get creative outcomes.

Furthermore, I'm a little sensitive when people jump to criticise what might appear to be 'design by committee'. While design of every single detail by a committee of non-design experts is obviously to be avoided because it slow things down, sometimes what might appear to be 'design by committee' may be what I perceive to be taking advantage of the many different skills in our sector. On the learning projects I work on, those that have input from documentation experts, curators and learning staff are the richest. Couple this with the inevitable need for management sign off and that makes a lot of 'cooks' but, managed properly, that doesn't mean that they necessarily 'spoil the broth'.

Further presentations from Sky Arts and Google were also very interesting but I want to focus on the group discussion that continued later.

As I say, at this point my notes become sketchy at best but the bits and pieces that I have remind me of some of the comments that added to my growing sense that perhaps the bridge between the commercial and the museum sector goes both ways and efforts to cross it need to be equal. These include:

'Having a certain budget creates constraints. There is an urgency to get stuff done to move on to the next project...'

‘A lot of what the cultural sector is doing is marketing. Sometimes people don’t want what you’re selling.’

There was lots of discussion about museum procurement policies and practices. It seemed clear that certain practices are incredibly frustrating for designers and probably do mean that certain companies choose not to work with our sector. There was a feeling in the audience, however, that we as a sector know that our processes are flawed and have tried to change it, but are in many cases powerless to do so. I picked up a few bits and pieces of useful advice which I will definitely remember - for example, why not have a 'thinking day' at the start of a project where you pay people from several companies for their time to come and discuss ideas. This will allow you to get to know them and then you can choose one or two to take forward discussions with and go through the more formal tendering requirements then. Rather worryingly there was also a perception from someone that there wasn't much creativity in the museum sector.

From the audience, it felt a little bit in the end like we were being lectured at/got at for things that may well need changing but that are outside of our control. I also found myself wondering what exactly we all meant by 'collaboration'. The BBC/British Museum History of the World project as obviously a collaboration, but discussions on Friday seemed to descend into describing scenarios where museums commission commercial companies to build things, which we are already doing, albeit with room for improvement potentially. These scenarios seemed to me to do little to help the financial constraints we find ourselves faced with. Collaboration to me implies more of an equal footing, and potentially a way in which we can work differently to have we have in the past to continue to reap benefits with smaller budgets. If this is to happen, it seems to me that the mutual respect and willingness to change working practices that were highlighted by Oliver Vicars-Harris and Honor Harger earlier in the day are crucial, but my feeling from Friday is that this is not just about the museum sector being willing to change.

I'm presenting on a panel of heritage/cultural sector content commissioners at the Children's Media Conference (CMC) in a couple of weeks. Friday was a great chance for us to hear from the commercial sector about how they work and how they would like to work with us. It struck me over the weekend that, along similar lines, the CMC may well be my/our chance, although it won't be the same people there, to respond by talking a little about how we work and why.

I hope that in my ten minutes I might be able to represent what seemed on Friday to be perceived as a rather clunky and frustrating sector in a better light. We've got breathtaking collections for starters, we've got some incredibly knowledgeable people who make the stories of those objects come alive, we've got learning experts who know our audiences and are skilled and practiced at interpreting our collections in a way that fascinates and engages people and actively improves their lives. Yes we can sometimes seem idiosyncratic and slow, and sometimes lots of people will have input into a project, but I love those idiosyncracies, and I love that I work in a sector where it's still ok to have them. We are unlikely to ever have much money in the foreseeable future, but I hope that the commercial sector can see us as creative, intelligent people who have some amazing and unique stories to tell. We've got things we need to learn and we're doing our best, perhaps take some time to get to know our working practices, and then maybe we can all work together towards the greater good!

Incidentally, I've promised that I will be the person on our panel of four who will put in a word for smaller museums as well and try and represent the sector as a whole. If you have anything that you particularly feel is important to tell companies about the way we work, or if you want me to feed back on anything after the conference, please let me know.

I hope those that were at the conference think this is an accurate portrayal of what happened. If not, please feel free to use the comments to add to it/change it. For those of you that weren't there - I hope this is useful. Please remember that it is only the way I remember it, based on somewhat haphazard notes!

Quick plug as well for a Culture24 conference in September called 'Let's get real' about how to evaluate online success.

Changing platforms: creating effective digital content

2011-03-15T14:46:00.000Z

As I've just mentioned in my previous blog where I've pasted my handout, I spoke this morning at the Museums Association conference called Changing platforms: creating effective digital content.

I think that choosing the right people to work on your project and carrying out effective and thorough planning together at the start of your project are key elements of creating effective digital content. I was talking, therefore, about the key people to think about including in your project, and the things that you and they need to consider when initiating an online learning project.

I could only stay for the morning unfortunately as I have things I need to get on with in work but there were a couple of things that I took away from this morning which I thought were worth mentioning here.

Vicki Porter from the Welcome Trust was chairing the event and I found her opening address really interesting. It raised lots of points about how technology in museums has changed over the last 15-20 years.
One of the points that I wanted to raise myself this morning that needs to be considered at the start of an online learning project is 'why are we as an organisation providing this resource?' It sounds like an obvious question but it prompted some really interesting discussions in a project I was working on recently about what we could bring to this kind of resource as a unique selling point. Vicki pointed out in her opening talk this morning that the web has really changed museum's outlooks because it's made them be, rather than a single authoritative voice, part of a multiplicity of voices describing and writing about historical events in the public domain. This has made it imperative for museums to think carefully about our 'brand'/our identity and what we can provide that is unique.

Dave Patten from the Science Museum later alluded to a possible future model for museums where we move away from the big museum website and towards a model where museum content is distributed on lots of different websites. This made me think back to the lecture I gave at Westminster University last week and the discussions we had about Wikipedia as a competitor to museum websites. As I mentioned then, I think the the British Museum/Wikipedia project is really fascinating and potentially part of this new model that Dave describes.

The other thing that I wanted to mention from this morning came from Kevin Sumption at the National Maritime Museum who mentioned in his talk that the Mass Observation Archive are effectively crowd sourcing material for their archive. I used some stuff from the Mass Observation Archive for my History MA dissertation on the French soldiers evacuated alongside the British from Dunkirk in 1940 (published in shortened form in History Today) but I had no idea they were still gathering information today. For anyone who doesn't know, the website says that Mass Observation...

'specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex and is housed in the Library in Special Collections.'

Sadly they're currently only recruiting men from regions other than the south east which is a shame as I'd love to contribute!

So this morning was yet another example of why I enjoy taking a little bit of time out of every day work (even just a morning) to hear other people talk about their work and remind myself why I chose to work in such a fascinating sector - thanks everyone!

Handout for Creating Digital Content event

2011-03-15T14:11:00.000Z

This morning I spoke at the Museums Association event Changing platforms: creating effective digital content (more later). Here is the information from the handout that I intended to be in the delegates' packs.

Things to decide about the resource

What are you producing?
Who is the resource for?
What will it do for them?
How and where will they use it?
If applicable, what areas of the curriculum/programme of study etc does it relate to?
What area of the organisation’s work does it relate to? E.g. is there a taught session that it links to? Or a gallery on the same subject?
Why should (or should) your organisation be creating these specific resources?
Have any other organisations created similar resources for the same audience?
What benefits will come from the project?
Will there be any dis-benefits or negative effects of the project?
What are the outcomes against which you will evaluate?
What limitations are there to what you can achieve?
How will the project maintain momentum once it’s over - sustainability
Will the project require the use of images from the Museum’s collection? If so, which ones, what restrictions on use are there?

Practical things about how the project will work

What role is each individual on the team going to play?
What needs to happen in the project and what are realistic timescales for these activities?
How are you going to sign things off?
Who needs to be kept informed?
What risks are there to the project?
What different ways of approaching the project are there?
How will you evaluate?
What will need to be covered in each meeting agenda
Will there be any training needed?
How will you communicate?
When will we meet?
What do all of the people in the working group want out of it

Museums and the web lecture at Westminster University

2011-03-09T15:25:00.000Z

I gave my first ever university lecture this morning at the University of Westminster. The students are BA History students and are studying a module on London and its Museums. My former colleague Helen Glew asked me to come to talk to them about Museums and the web.

I was delighted to be asked to do this by Helen as although I'm happy in some ways that my time on my two MAs is over, I miss the world of academia. I took some time when I first came back from the Christmas holidays to think about what I was going to talk about today and realised how much I missed the opportunity to do this kind of rigorous thinking about the sector that I work in and the more intellectual issues that surround it.

I started this morning's lecture with three questions that were up on the board for the students to think about when they came in. These were:

Why should museums be on the web?
Should museum websites be online museums?
Should museums be authoritative or participatory online?

I wanted to get the students thinking and discussing these issues for themselves before I stood and talked at them about what I think.

I wasn't sure what to expect but the discussions that came out of these questions were great and a lot of the points that I wanted to talk about were raised.

Inevitably people's first thoughts about why museums should be on the web centred around the fact that we expect to be able to find out about everything on the web now and it would be frustrating to not be able to find out visitor information etc online prior to a museum visit. When I probed a bit further about whether museum websites were simply about visitor information, somebody brought up the issue of online collections database as useful for finding out more about objects on display prior to a museum visit. The discussion of this question focussed mostly around information to support a visit.

One interesting point that came out here was from a student who talked about a particular exhibition that she'd visited where the exhibits were not arranged in a way that engaged her in the physical exhibition, but were more systematically arranged online which appealed to her. I thought this made a good point about meaning making and learning styles that we use as one of our justifications for using technology in Learning at the Museum of London i.e. that it caters for lots of different learning styles and perhaps enables people to organise things and information in a way that makes a meaning personal to them.

I then turned to the idea of museums on social media. The first comment was that one person found it slightly irritating when, as he perceived it, museums 'tried to be hip' by being on social media. The discussion then continued and people pointed out that social media was a good way of reaching audiences in spaces where they were already spending time rather than expecting them to come to museum websites and we had a good discussion about social media as a way of engaging as well as just as a broadcast mechanism.

One student also pointed out how effective she found Facebook advertising, particularly if it picked up on her geographical location, she found that more effective than museums necessarily having pages on Facebook.

Moving on to the second question about online museums immediately prompted some quite definite opinions that so much about a museum visit was to do with the physical building and that this could not be replicated online. It was also acknowledged, however, that online museums could be a real boon for people who could not physically access a museum building for whatever reason, and also that it's a good way of providing more information than is possible on an exhibition/caption panel.

The third question about participation/authority was a hard one if you were new to the topic and it didn't get as much response but we generally agreed that a halfway point between the two would be preferable!

Once we'd started off proceedings with this discussion I talked for the rest of the lecture about other questions that I felt that these questions raised and looked at websites and projects that I felt were relevant to them.

We compared different types of museum websites with Hackney as an example of a museum website within a local council website, Wandsworth as a local authority website with its own URL but still essentially an online brochure, and Tate, at the other end of the scale. I pointed them in the direction of the 2004 Jemima Rellie article about Tate's online strategy which put Tate Online as a brand on an equal footing with the other physical Tate sites in terms of providing a museum experience.

In the 'online museums' discussion I talked about museum websites as a way of enhancing a physical visit but also gave some examples of times when an online experience could be differently and arguably 'better' than a physical one. The first example came from my own work digitising the R M Phillips collection at The British Postal Museum & Archive. Digitising this rare and important philatelic collection and scanning the images high res and 150% made it possible for a global audience to access a collection which had previously only been available to view under one-to-one supervision, but we also made it possible to zoom in on the images and see the philatelic material in arguably greater detail than you can in person. I also talked about some of the 3d objects that we've had made at the Museum of London, some of which you can see in our SEN resources.

In the authority/participation discussion, I talked about my experiences of the BPMA Wiki (I won't link to it because I believe it won't be there for much longer now) where in some cases our audiences were quite uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their knowledge on the BPMA's website because BPMA was seen as an authoritative organisation that users wanted to provide 'the truth' and they were concerned that their information may be inaccurate.

On the flipside, I also then talked about Flickr Commons and the tremendous response to the Library of Congress images when they were first uploaded a few years back.

I touched on the British Museum/Wikipedia project which I think is absolutely fascinating and I talked a little bit about the Digital Learning Network Think Drink that I attended a few months back where we discussed the perceived differences in looking at sensitive material online and in person.

I finished by talking a little about my job and my background and how it's lead me here. It was nice to see at least one person who's considering a museum job in the group. I hope I encouraged and inspired others to join our profession even at this challenging time!

Big thanks to Helen Glew for inviting me to lecture today. I really enjoyed the experience and I hope the students did too!

The Titanic Artefacts exhibition

2011-01-14T13:34:00.000Z

Last night my fiancé and I visited the Titanic Artefacts Exhibition at the O2 Bubble. I really enjoyed the exhibition although I did find it slightly gimmicky. The object captions are a little inconsistent presumably because the exhibition creators know more about some objects than others. Some captions are directly linked to the exhibition and to the Titanic and explain where they were found, who they belonged to, what they can tell us about the Titanic etc, which was fascinating. Where they presumably know less about the object, however, the exhibition creators have just tried to give a bit of historical information about the object which felt a bit disjointed and irrelevant. One example is a series of bank notes where the interpretation explained a bit about the history of bank notes. What I really wanted to know was where on the ship the bank notes were found, whether there's any idea who they belonged to. If this kind of information isn't available then they could at least maybe have talked about what currencies were accepted on the Titanic (presumably dollars and pounds at least but there were passengers of many different nationalities, so did they accept other currencies?) so that it was still related to the story.

The exhibition was also not terribly engaging for younger audiences. There was little to do or touch, and the interpretation was quite wordy.

The exhibition covers an interesting range of topics relating to the Titanic, including the class system (first, second and third class), the way the ship was built, a little about the engine rooms, an account of what happened when the Titanic hit the iceberg, and a good deal about the people on board, both survivors and people who died. At the entrance you are given a ticket with the name of a person on board and at the end, a list of survivors and people who died is laid out by class. This is perhaps a little tokenistic as a way of making the visitor feel involved but the way that the names were displayed was nevertheless quite poignant. The lists were divided up into the three classes of passenger, and then divided into people who died and people who survived with numbers for each list in brackets. It was immediately evident from this that third class passengers and the crew fared much much worse than the first and second class passengers. By far the worst hit group in terms of deaths was the crew (I think it was over 700 who died) which says a lot about their dedication to their work.

We went at 7pm in the evening which is perhaps a bit of a strange time, but we were very struck as well by how quiet the exhibition was. This was quite nice for us as we could enjoy it undisturbed and at our leisure, but I wonder how popular the exhibition is proving.

What I found most interesting, however, despite all my apparently quite negative feedback so far, is that I really really enjoyed the whole exhibition and I want to explain why I think this was.

When the Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet Titanic film came out in 1998 I suspect that few people saw it as an important learning resource about the 1912 disaster. I, however, was an impressionable young 16-year-old on a date with my first boyfriend when I first saw it, and I'm not ashamed to say that I loved it. I was, and remain to an extent, a sucker for romances and I was completely drawn in by the schmaltzy and no doubt factually inaccurate blockbuster. A side result was that after watching the film, I developed an enduring interest in the Titanic which I had not had before because the engaging storyline had made it real for me and helped me relate to it.

Walking around the exhibition last night, I found two things really striking. One, I found myself fully engaged and interested in an otherwise not terribly engaging exhibition in a way that I seldom am. For a museum professional, I have a surprisingly low museum-overload threshold - maybe it feels too much like a bus man's holiday!. The 'wow factor' of seeing real objects, which I've become a bit immune to of late, maybe because I take it for granted because of my job, returned full force last night. I felt really excited to be looking at objects that had actually been on the Titanic and which had stayed under the sea for over 70 years but were still in some cases in perfect condition. Second - I found that a lot of the factual information, the names of the key passengers, the reasons why the Titanic sank when it was thought to be virtually unsinkable were all very familiar to me, entirely because of the film.

This got me thinking whether there was something that I could learn from this about engaging audiences. I imagine that many purists will be scoffing and appalled that I am waxing lyrical about a factually inaccurate Hollywood blockbuster from the late 1990s. I know also that I was not necessarily your average teenager, and that not everyone would have been engaged by or enjoyed the film. I believe, however, that the film ignited an interest in a historical event that still persists, and that I learnt a lot from watching and rewatching it. I'd be interested to hear whether any museums have successfully explored creating historical fiction/feature films that engage visitors with a topic/event prior to their visit in order to bring it alive. I think it could be a really interesting idea!

Interviewing a museum/archive director

2010-09-16T12:19:00.000+01:00

Last Tuesday I took an afternoon out of work and went back to my old work: The British Postal Museum & Archive. I had an appointment with Director Adrian Steel to further some aspects of my AMA.

I wanted to talk to Adrian because, in his role as director, and in his previous senior management roles, I know that he has a lot of experience and is very skilled in various areas of work that I'm interested in. As I've blogged about previously, I'm always looking to continue to improve my project management skills. In addition to this, however, I'm also aware that there are many areas of the work of senior managers which I could do with gaining a better understanding of at this point of my career if I want to continue to move up. These include areas like people management and strategic development. Adrian seemed like the ideal person to talk to about his role, and what skills he thinks he requires, and what he thinks are the best ways to go about it.

Adrian and I had a long, detailed and productive chat which helped put a lot of things into perspective in a way that sometimes only talking to someone objective can do. I thought I'd share some of the key advice that I took away with me:

Always have a mentor in another organisation, even if you are at a senior level. Talking to someone objective with experience of your situation can put a different perspective on things and help you clarify your own thoughts on something you're working on.
You have a responsibility not only to yourself, but to your organisation to keep yourself sane. Do this by ensuring that you do some things that you enjoy doing - both at work and in your life outside work. This will help you to continue to work effectively.
Regularly agree priorities with your boss - be it weekly or monthly. You can't possibly do everything all of the time, and as long as you and your boss have acknowledged this, then you can prioritise sensibly and do your job well whilst still keeping a balance and hopefully mostly going home on time.
There are two aspects which are equally important to a planning process, be it for a project, or for a broader strategic plan. One is the more practical ABC approach of considering where you are now, where you want to be, and how to get there. The second (which is an extension of the first) is to think creatively about this endpoint and draw pictures and diagrams about what it will look like that will help you to get a clearer understanding of your own priorities for this endpoint.
There are several strategies to ensuring that you have buy-in to your project and that everyone involved in it is clear about, and has the same understanding and priorities as you as project manager do about it:

Ensure senior management buy-in, as senior as you think you need to go. Understand what senior management think the organisation wants and needs from a project/area of work before taking it any further because this will cascade through the organisation if what you are doing is on senior management's radar and is going the way they think is important.
I've talked already in previous posts about getting buy-in from members of your project team by getting them to help you make all of the important decisions from the start. An alternative to this, either with a team or with senior managers, is to 'build a straw man' of how you think the endpoint should look or how you think something should happen and ask them to either knock it down or accept it.
Ensure that you have a good understanding of the people working with you on a project, how they work, and how they perceive you, and work with it. Different people will respond differently to different information and instructions and, as project manager, it's your job to understand how they will react and act accordingly.

6. Before asking someone to perform a task, ensure that you have a good understanding of that task, what is involved and how long it will take, and be able to show them your workings. If the task is one that you have no previous experience of doing, then observe it being done, or do it yourself, and time it rather than guessing how long it should take. It means that what you are asking for is realistic but also demonstrates that you have an understanding of the process.

7. Always treat staff time as an asset. If you were given £40,000 per year to spend, you would spend it wisely and carefully. An individual on a salary of £30,000 may well cost the organisation in the region of £40,000 per year and their time should therefore be valued accordingly.

Putting project management theory into practice

2010-08-23T09:14:00.001+01:00

I've been a bit quiet on the blog front recently but behind the scenes I've been beavering away at activities that'll all go towards my AMA.

I'm working on a major project at work where I'm applying as much 'best practice' for project management as I can whilst also working it into my own and the organisation's working patterns. This is key because if it doesn't fit in with these it can appear false and overly bureaucratic.

Since I've learned a lot from watching and talking to others I thought it was worth sharing my own practical experience of applying project management theory and best practice and what I think has worked best so far.

1. It's definitely worth spending the time planning at the beginning even if it feels laborious at the time.

Even a few months in to a project I'm already feeling the benefits of having established a project plan in the earlier stages of the project. I opted for one coverall document that outlined everything about the project - who the audience is, what the aims and objectives are, both for the project and for the resources that the project will create, why we're creating them, where they will sit on the website, how we'll publicise them, what they'll look like, who will write them, who will check them etc, how we'll have them proof read etc etc. Getting all of this worked out at the start when I'm concentrating on it as a whole project rather than later down the line when I'm already embroiled in one aspect has already saved me time.

I'm now at the stage of writing guidelines and briefs for content creation and I'm finding it quick and useful that I can just copy and paste large chunks of text about why we're doing the project and the aims and objectives straight from the earlier document safe in the knowledge that the rest of the team have read and approved them.

2. Setting up a working group and establishing roles and responsibilities early is worthwhile

I made the decision on this project to set up a working team that represented viewpoints of people across the organisation. I have curators, documentation people and a learning representative for each of our target audiences. I discuss each of the major decisions for the project with the working group. This has lead to some great conceptual discussions about why we're doing things we are which is not only useful, it's actually very interesting and enjoyable.

Agreeing roles and responsibilities with each individual in the group and taking the time to make sure you and they understand them in the same way will also avoid disputes and misunderstandings further down the line.

3. Plan evaluation and sign off early

The only major planning I've written up outside the major plan document discussed above is to write an evaluation plan and an approvals diagram.

Taking the time to plan all the stages that I want to go through to test that these resources achieve their objectives and are approved by the right people helped me to plan the timetable to accommodate them all.

Establishing them at the start and getting approval for these plans can also avoid disputes further down the line when there is less time to make major decisions.

The key message therefore is that it's well worth taking the time at the start to plan for everything. A big reason for this is that it forces you to give time and head space to the bigger picture before you get bogged down in the minutiae of actually doing the project at which point it can be harder to think clearly about that bigger picture.

I hope readers find this rings true and find it useful as I have found hearing other people's experiences useful. If you have your own tips and experiences please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Quick summary of an MW2002 paper: How do you like to learn?

2010-07-12T22:09:00.000+01:00

I just read an interesting paper that was referenced in some research by my former colleague Mariruth Leftwich. I would recommend reading it if you're interested in Museum online learning. It's a little out of date now but I think it still has some interesting findings. The article is by David T. Schaller, Steven Allison-Bunnell, Minda Borun and Margaret B. Chambers and was presented at the Museums and the Web conference in 2002. You can read the full article here: How do you like to learn? Comparing User Preferences And Visit Length Of Educational Web Sites (and I recommend that you do!)

This is just a quick summary of some points that I found particularly useful from it.

They use a typology from Gammon (Ben Gammon, 2001 - Assessing learning in museum environments: A practical guide for museum evaluators. Unpublished Science Museum (London) report) to identify five types which museums should choose from when thinking about what kind of educational experience they want their users to have: cognitive, affective, social, developing skills and personal.
Their research was based on six activity types - creative play, guided tour, interactive reference, puzzle/interactive mystery, role-playing story, simulation
They found that adults preferred interactive reference and simulation and children preferred creative play and role-playing
They found that boys preferred creative play and girls role-playing story and puzzle/mystery
They concluded that: 'Adults prefer the information-based activities of Interactive Reference and Simulation, whereas children, not surprisingly, are more inclined to prefer the exploratory experiences of Role-playing and Story and Creative Play. The adult sites yield more straight-forward cognitive information while the sites preferred by children have strong affective components and allow more personal choice and interaction, but can lead to "dead ends" or less utilitarian solutions. Apparently, adults bring an intrinsic motivation to the learning experience... Children on the other hand, need to be motivated. They respond positively to the opportunity for interaction and choice within a goal-based environment that offers them an extrinsic purpose.'
They unpick this idea of a goal-based environment, quoting Roger Schank (1992) and explain that the goals are not things like high scores or prizes but things that 'stem from the activity itself - solve a crime, reach a destination, create an original artwork.' Using an example of stuff that I've worked on myself, the Create a costume game for 3-5 year olds that we produced last year uses this kind of goal (dragging shapes onto a costume and then colouring it in based on items from the Museum of London's collections). The authors here point out that puzzle/mystery and role-playing story lend themselves particularly well to this kind of idea of a goal.
They explain that 'Young or novice learners who are unfamiliar with a particular learning domain need such guidance and structure to attract and hold their attention'. They also point out, however, that 'Within the structure and guidance provided by [goal-based scenarios], young learners prefer some degree of freedom.
They round up their paper with a list of things that developers of educational web activities should consider:

i. the fact that children like to have goals whereas adults prefer reference sites
ii. the need to choose a pedagogical approach i.e. which kind of activity they're going to produce
iii. the expertise of the audience in the subject in hand - they conclude that 'Expert learners with existing interest in the domain are more likely to favor interactive references sites. Novice learners, regardless of age, are more likely to need and prefer a guided experience to introduce them to the subject and motivate them to learn about it.'
iv. the fact that this level of expertise also affects the learning goals of an activity

9. They end with a caveat to their conslusions, saying that just because something holds people's attention doesn't mean that it is achieving its goals but that 'a web activity or any other learning activity must first attract and hold the interest of learners in order to have the opportunity to achieve its learning objectives.'

I hope others find this quick summary as useful as I found the article and are tempted to read it in full. It's certainly useful to me for a project I'm currently working on to be able to quote studies of the different behaviours of adults and children in their online learning and interesting, generally, to slot the projects that I've worked on into the different categories above and assess them from that perspective.

One reason I'm enjoying my AMA

2010-06-27T19:37:00.001+01:00

When I was studying for my MA in history at Reading I took advantage of the university's free Microsoft training courses. This was 2004-5. We had had a computer of some sort at home since about 1987. I had written all my undergraduate work on computer, I had worked for a year in admin in an investment bank in Paris and then in an admin office at the university of Leeds. I was already pretty confident with word, PowerPoint, access and excel. Yes, there were aspects of these Reading courses that were deadly boring - "how to open a new document" etc. They also, however, taught me things I had never known about. I learnt about creating contents pages automatically, and about heading styles and section breaks. I still use all these skills today and often find others are as clueless as I was about them.

The point if my story here is that, even though I had some good grounding and experience, there was still a lot more I could learn.

Today I've just started flicking through the Leicester study series book on e-learning in museums. It was produced in 2006 so is quite out of date now and I've been working in museum web/learning environments pretty much since 2006 so I'm fairly well versed in e-learning now. Nevertheless as I flicked through the first few pages I was reminded of those Reading courses. I'm sure there will be little bits and pieces of stuff in the booklet that I haven't thought of before in the same way that the digital learning network conference last week made me remember things I'd forgotten and hear about projects I didn't know about before.

I don't think any of us should ever feel we know everything about our specialism or be too proud or too busy to attend events that might give us that vital refresher. for me, that's what the AMA is all about and it gives you the framework to identify and find time for those learning needs. Anyone who is thinking of doing it but is unsure whether it's the right thing, please get in touch!

MCG Spring Meeting 2010

2010-06-20T15:46:00.006+01:00

Early (very early) on Thursday morning, I got up and got the 7.03 train from Euston to Birmingham for this year's Museums Computer Group (MCG) Spring Meeting. The theme of the day was 'Programming, Promotion and Policy' and I was looking forward to the interesting range of topics that we had on the programme, particularly hearing from the people behind the immensely successful way in which the story of the Staffordshire Hoard find was announced, and the round-table discussion in the afternoon about what the post-election climate has in store for our sector.

The day didn't disappoint. What I particularly liked, having never attended one of the smaller MCG meeting before, was the atmosphere. Rather than the usual conference atmosphere at the bigger meetings, this was much more informal, chatty, and friendly. I've really enjoyed the two UK Museums on the web conferences that I've attended but this was refreshingly different.

First up after Ross's introduction and a few words about Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) from Jo Smith, was my fellow MCG committee member Linda Spurdle. Linda is the Digital Manager at BMAG and talked about some of the projects that she is working on, particularly the new BMAG galleries - Birmingham: A city in the making - for which stories and images will be gathered from the community using social media. Linda talked enthusiastically of the vibrant and flourishing social media scene in Birmingham which I hadn't heard about before. It was really cheering to hear about a community who are proud of their city and keen to get involved in cultural projects. Linda also talked a little about the Staffordshire Hoard and the amazing scenes of 3-4-hour long queues outside BMAG when it first went on display. 65,000 people visited the Hoard in 19 days and web visit-or figures increased 12-fold. The effect of this amazing find has been felt right across BMAG and it sounds as if staff across the organisation have risen to the occasion to make the most of it, with conservators offering to blog about their work to clean up the treasures and live-question-and-answer sessions happening in the galleries and online. This set the tone for the day for me as the Staffordshire Hoard was a recurring theme throughout the day and what really struck me was the admirable way in which BMAG and all those involved in the project had acted so fast and in such an effective and organised fashion.

Immediately following on from Linda's talk came Tony Adams from Stoke Museums who also have parts of the Staffordshire Hoard on display. Tony was talking about an ambitious project he is working on to create a virtual Staffordshire museum online by pulling together data from all the museums across the region which will in turn also feed into the Culture Grid and Europeana. I have to admit to glazing over slightly once James Grimster, the web developer for the project started talking the techy acronyms of web geekery which I'm afraid still evade my understanding. Nevertheless, I was already hooked on the atmosphere in the room and already feeling that now-familiar buzz that I get once I realise that a conference is giving me ideas and helping me to think properly again (I blogged on the evening of the conference about what I love about conferences and this freeing up of my thought processes is a key aspect). What particularly struck me about Tony's talk was the fact that he described the project as 'writing the rule book' as they go along. This, to me, would feel a little frightening in a world where we're increasingly encouraged to be accountable at all times, but I admired Tony's brave and enthusiastic attitude as he described how exciting he found this.

After these two talks, Ross Parry, chair of the MCG, set the tone for the relaxed nature of the day by taking time out of the programme to encourage some discussion about the talks. He encouraged Jeremy Ottevanger (recently of the Museum of London, now at the Imperial War Museum but also heavily involved in the Europeana project) to describe what was going through his head as he heard James talking through the technical aspects of the Staffordshire museums website and the way that data would be collected. I don't know if Jeremy will blog Thursday's conference but I hope he will as he might be able to give you a better idea of some of the things James covered which I couldn't do any justice to here. Keep an eye on Jeremy's blog over the coming weeks!

After a short break we moved on to the next part of the day: the Staffordshire Hoard and the publicity campaign around it. This session stemmed from an idea by another committee member (and key organiser of the spring meeting) Gemma Sturtridge who was really struck when the story of the breathtaking find broke by the coordinated way in which everyone pulled together so that nothing was leaked in advance and that various aspects of a slick media campaign exploded all at once. As a committee we agreed that hearing about how this had happened would provide valuable lessons to us all. We weren't wrong.

The session started with an interesting talk by Dan Pett of the Portable Antiquities Scheme who is responsible for building the Staffordshire Hoard website (Dan has shared his slides for his talk online already). As an archaeologist by background, Dan was able to give us an insight into how big a story the Portable Antiquities Scheme immediately realised this was. Whereas a usual find is worth around £50-100, this one was valued at about £3,285,000! The impressive thing to note about Dan's work on the website is that he was given 1 week's notice and no budget to build it, and so it cost £0 to make! Using textpattern, Dan built a website which relied heavily on social media. All the images were uploaded to Flickr under a Creative Commons license (so no images were actually hosted on the server making the site faster under the strain of a lot of visitors) which proved popular as it allowed people to make use of them on their own blogs and websites and the site also pulled in people's tweets as the news broke.

Once the news broke the website did come under a certain amount of strain with 2000 connections a second at one point but Dan was able to harness the power of the great network of museum web geeks that we have on Twitter to ask for advice on what to do to manage this. A quarter of a million people visited the site within three days.

Following on from Dan, we heard from Kerri Keiwan of the Art Fund about the tremendous 'Save the Stafforshire Hoard' campaign which raised money to ensure that it was able to stay on display in the region. I'm aware that this post if getting longer and longer so I'm not going to go into detail about every talk here but after Kerri, we heard from Jon Pratty, a man with many hats, but talking here with his journalist hat on who gave some very insightful tips on breaking news stories on a museum website. These included amongst much other valuable advice, discussing what stories you will have coming up 6 months in advance, making sure that you always put a sensible and useful subject when you email a press release to journalists, and making sure you always attach a small, unedited picture to your press release.

During the lunch break we had an interesting tour of the Museums Collections Centre where the meeting was held, getting a behind-the-scenes insight into BMAG's collections which are housed here.

After lunch, Caroline Moore of Renaissance East Midlands talked to us about the project that she and Bryony Robbins are working on at present called Mubu which gathers together a series of learning and community projects across the East Midlands which all have a digital output. Caroline also touched on the project that I've blogged about before called My Life as an Object which used four different social media platforms over four weeks to experiment with engaging audiences with museum collections in different ways. It was a project with Rattle Central and I was delighted that Caroline gave me a copy of the newspaper that was produced to gather together the results of the projects at the end.

We then moved on to the open mic session which I was chairing. This is where we open up the floor to up to speakers to talk about a subject of their choice for 5 minutes, without slides and with only internet access. The call that we had put out had been fairly general but it was great to see that actually the four talks that were eventually presented pulled together some of the themes for the day quite nicely.

Firstly we heard from Laura Whitton from the Collections Trust who talked about the new Culture Grid website which has recently been launched and had already been on everyone's lips earlier in the day. The website basically pulls together data from across the sector and allows cross collections searches - check it out, it's pretty cool!

Next up was Lucinda Donnachie from the National Maritime Museum with a quick five minutes on a project she's working on with www.naval-history.net to improve the data that they have based on an old card catalogue of 20,000 vessels.

Following on from Lucinda, we heard from Rebecca Cadwallader about the fascinating http://www.wevee.co.uk/ which encourages users to 'mashup' film footage from the UK Film Council to make their own creations.

Lastly, Jon Pratty gave an off-the-cuff presentation of a personal project he's working on called Americanium which pulls together RSS feeds from various different cultural sites to make a website which is simple to produce and pulls together a lot of American cultural material in one place - quite a cool idea! This was the first time Jon had talked about this project in the UK so you could say it was a national premier!

We then moved on to the round table discussion of the effect of the events of 6 May 2010 on the digital heritage sector. My notes here become quite sketchy because there was so much to say and many people speaking. I hope I can give a flavour of what was said but I can't promise that there aren't inaccuracies. Here are a few of the main points:

Katie Peckacar, MLA Policy Advisor warned us that we still don't know a lot of what will happen but that it looks like we will be a lot more scrutinised than we were about why projects are important and whether or not they are aligned to our organisational strategies and aims. Partnerships with software developers and academics who have priorities aligned to ours will be important. An example model Katie quoted was the Tank Museum which has given a games company access to their collections in order to create a game which they can then use for free. MLA are also putting together a kind of buddying system to pair up software developers in academia who are interested in solving practical problems with museums and various events and hack days are being organised to further these kinds of working models.

Katie had to leave at that point but it was then the turn of Bridget McKenzie of Flow Associates to put her thoughts across. Bridget wants to push for a more creative cultural strategy - one that's much more about advocating the value of cultural content to the economy and to cultural public life rather than risk a return to silo-ised way of working that might come out focussing in to much on local need and the improving each institution. Bridget spoke of the need for a body to strongly advocate for the value of our content and the potential of the services that that content can make rather than the fun stuff that technology enables you can do for the sake of it.

Jon Pratty pointed out at this point that the digital inclusion agenda and the work that Martha Lane Fox is doing to to regenerate and to empower and to join people up using technology seems to be one of the few growth areas of digital heritage. He suggested that perhaps culturally we should be projecting ourselves over towards that sector. Jon advocated, along similar lines to Katie, ensuring that your organisation has a very joined up and cross-thinking perspective when writing its digital strategy to ensure it is aligned with business plans etc before applying for funding.

These interesting and valuable discussions were rounded up with Ross's summing up of the themes for the day and then some of us moved on to see the Staffordshire Hoard for real at BMAG in Birmingham City Centre. This was a great ending to a really interesting day. I would recommend going to see the Hoard if you haven't already. I know very little about the Anglo-Saxons but the thing that struck me was the detail and the amazing craftsmanship of these sometimes tiny objects that were thought to have been produced around 600AD. We were lucky enough to get a curator's tour which made the whole thing so much more meaningful and really rounded off a great day. Once again, I was struck by how quickly and effectively BMAG must have responded to the news of the find. In a sector that can sometimes feel slow to move, I was really struck by how well they appear to have worked together so that the hoard could be dug up, put on display, funded and publicised so smoothly in such a short time.

I hope that those of you that weren't there on the day have been able to get some sense of what went on and the positive threads of enthusiasm, creativity, inspiration and joined-up thinking that went on. It was a great, informal, friendly day that, as conferences often do, reminded me of my passion for the sector I work in and the work I do. I hope that those of you were there shared my enjoyment of the day and urge you all to keep an eye on the meetings section of the Museums Computer Group website for details of our annual conference which should be held in London in November/December of this year.

Ten things I love about conferences

2010-06-17T22:24:00.002+01:00

I've had a rather conference-ful week this week with the Digital Learning Network 'Creating and Evaluating online learning resources' conference on Tuesday (which I spoke at) and the MCG Spring Meeting in Birmingham today which I helped to organise. Both were excellent in very different ways and I will try and blog about them both separately if I get time.

This post is just a quick one to share with you (and to remind myself once normal life resumes tomorrow) what I feel like when I'm on a happy post-conference high.

So here are the ten things that I like most about attending conferences:

1. (and this is the best one) My brain feels alive once more! I don't have to have been sitting in a conference for long before ideas start to pop into my head and I remember why it is that I love the sector that I work in. I feel excited, interested and stimulated in a way that I hardly ever feel when the pressures of my email and my task list and my desk are in front of me. I leave conferences with new ideas, and renewed enthusiasm for my work. Even my head of department has noticed the good effect they have on me!

2. Meeting new people and catching up with old friends - it's so nice meeting people that you've only ever talked to on Twitter, or, better still, people who you've quoted in essays and read their work extensively, who've taken on a mythical entity in your mind but you've never met them before! It's also really nice to see familiar faces who I don't see very often, and, because of the subject matter in the conferences I attend, it's really great as well to spend a day with people who do similar jobs to me as my role as the only web person within a Learning department means that this doesn't happen so much on a day-to-day basis as my role is quite unique in my department.

3. Hearing what other people are doing - this is so important that it's acknowledged in our departmental objectives for e-learning because when you work with new technologies, it's vitally important to keep pace with what's happening and with what others are doing.

4. It reminds you of things you already know - nothing at the Digital Learning event earlier this week was particularly new to me now that I've been in a role where I create and evaluate online learning resources on a daily basis, but it was just nice to hear people affirm and reiterate the points that you already knew. It serves either to confirm that you're doing ok, or just as a reminder not to get complacent.

5. Train journeys - sounds weird, and at 5am this morning when I had to wake up in order to get the 7.03 train from Euston to Birmingham I perhaps loved this a little less, but I still think it's worth mentioning. If conferences are outside London, I really enjoy the chance to work on my netbook on the train and do some work-related thinking. It's not often that you get this kind of uninterrupted time at your desk, and it's great for thinking things through and planning for things.

6. Twitter - as I've mentioned before, it was the MW2009 conference in Indianapolis that converted me to Twitter and I've been a bit of an addict ever since. We sadly didn't manage to get wifi for the MCG meeting today and I found myself really missing watching what other people were saying about the talks. On the other hand, it was quite nice just to focus on taking notes for once!

7. Other people's enthusiasm, commitment and ability - I find meeting other people who work in my sector very inspiring. I'm particularly in awe of the people at the conferences I go to who have the ability to tweet, take notes, think and participate all at once (some people even respond to emails and get on with other work while they're there as well - you know who you are!). I think it's an enviable skill that I haven't quite yet mastered. Aside from that, it just really does me good to hear people talking about the work that we do in such enthusiastic and passionate terms. Once again, it reminds me why I want to work in this sector.

8. Visiting new museums etc - as part of today's conference we got to see the amazing Staffordshire Hoard at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - I'll blog about this separately. Also as part of conferences I've attended I've got to see the Theatre and Performance galleries at the V&A and the medieval galleries there, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and lots of other cool places that I might not have seen had I not gone to these conferences.,

9. I'm struggling a little bit now but I'm determined to get to 10 - ummm....biscuits! There were great biscuits at today's conference. I ate too many of them but I'm still grateful that they were there!

10. Conferneces give me something to blog about - I'm not being entirely flippant here. I like blogging and I wish I could do it more, but every day life doesn't always give me as many opportunities as I'd like, or as much stimulation. So the tenth thing that I love about conferences is that they remind me that I have a blog and that I ought to use it!

I hope everyone else enjoyed the two conferences that I've been part of this week anyway. Tell me what you liked most in the comments!

I'm going to bed now - it's a long long time since 5am this morning!

Leicester Study Series: Project management module

2010-04-06T12:37:00.003+01:00

This morning on the tube I finished reading through the booklet for the Leicester Study Series for professional development on project management so I thought I'd do a quick review. I should note that I haven't read the accompanying book yet, just the booklet.

Just a quick note first on what the Leicester Study Series - it's a series of modules put together by the department of Museum Studies at Leicester University to help people develop their skills in various areas of museum work. There are also modules on e-Learning (which I'll be hopefully going through soon as well) , evaluating learning, social inclusion and oral history. This module cost £57 including postage and packing.

The first good thing about the pack is it's size. For £57 you get a book on project management which I'm still working my way through, and an A5 spiralbound booklet. The booklet is just the right size for reading on the tube which is the only time I really have to do these things so that was ideal.

I thought that the price was a little steep for what you get. The book is only worth £11 ish and so the rest of the money goes towards the booklet. I appreciate that a lot of work went into it but I was a little disappointed by what I got for that price.

Another slight criticism is that the information in the booklet now feels a little dated (it was published in 2006). The case studies are at least 5-6 years old now and, since one featured my work place it was very obvious to me as a reader that the projects were now long past as all the individuals mentioned are in very different roles now. In addition, a section on promotion mentions only 'Putting up-to-date information about the project on the museum's website' and makes no mention of social media, highlighting for me the outdated nature of the module. I think the whole thing would benefit from a quick refresh.

I felt as well that the booklet focused a lot on grant-funded projects and the kinds of reporting that are needed for these. Evidently this is probably very useful for a lot of people, but since at present a lot of my projects are not grant funded, I personally found that focus slightly distracting.

I also thought, coming from a learning perspective, that there could have been more focus on Inspiring Learning for All, or at the very least, on establishing the learning outcomes for your project from the start, which makes evaluation, which the module covers in detail at the end, easier.

Aside from this I did get something out of the module. I would say it would be particularly useful for people in small museum with no experience of project management (the aims and objectives do state that it is aimed at 'people working in small to medium-sized museums'). For me, someone who is spending quite a lot of time at the moment researching best practice in project management, it served as a good reminder but didn't really teach me anything new.

I would say if you've just taken on a new role and are unfamiliar with one of the topics that the study series covers, and have a spare £60-odd to hand, then it is probably worth investing in one of these modules. They're probably quite a good idea as well for those of us following a CPD programme, simply because you can send off to Leicester for a certificate to prove that you've completed the module and a couple of short activities, thus giving you proof of your CPD activity.

Decode at the V&A

2010-04-02T20:53:00.004+01:00

We finally got to make the most of some complimentary tickets to go to the Decode exhibition at the V&A today and I really enjoyed it. For those of you that aren't familiar with it, the website explains that the exhibition:

'showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.' (go to the website if you need more info)

I was a little bit baffled by the first bits. I'm a bit clueless about art - just because I've never really learnt how best to approach it and what to do when I'm looking at it, and digital art was no different. Plus there was a really narrow corridor at the start which was full of people, it being Good Friday and therefore a bank holiday, and it was hard to get close to any of the exhibits, and when you did, it felt like you were blocking other people's views.

When the corridor widened out though, the exhibits got more interesting. The first one that really caught my eye was the Social Collider exhibit which is part of the Network section. I don't really get how it worked but this basically makes a visual representation based on data from Twitter about whatever you type in to the keyboard at the start. I typed in my Twitter ID and saw a visualisation of all my own tweets and, from what I can make out, tweets by people I have tweeted with, and tweets between people I follow. Without really understanding it I still just thought it was really cool!

All the other exhibits that really caught my attention though were in the Interactivity section which is unsurprising really because they engaged me by getting me to do things and being actively involved in the experience. Particularly cool were:

Dandelion - where you used a hairdryer with an infrared signal in it to blow the seeds of a virtual dandelion on the screen in front of you
Video grid - a 'blockbuster' type screen of lot of videos where you could touch one of the videos and replace it with a little film of yourself doing whatever you wanted in front of the camera for a couple of seconds which was then repeated over and over again until someone replaced your video. It made a wall of continuously moving images of people doing funny things, or just simple things - a woman picking up her child, a couple kissing, people dancing, spinning round on the spot, doing funny walks etc. It would be interesting to do a study of which types of videos stayed up their longest. The only thing was that, for the more timid amongst us, having loads of people around you made you a bit reticent to record yourself - I rather regret now that we didn't do it now!
Body Paint - you could stand in front of a screen and basically your body movements were reflected in great colourful splashes of paint on a digital canvas in front of you

Overall I thought it was a really great way to showcase a different side of technology to the boring, techy stereotype and to make it into something fun and interactive for everyone to enjoy and be part of.

Hurry up if you haven't been yet - it closes on 11 April!

Interviewing an experienced project manager

2010-04-01T19:33:00.002+01:00

This afternoon, as part of my AMA, I interviewed one of my colleagues, Isabel Benavides about her experiences of project management. Isabel is the project officer in our department and has also project managed a variety of different projects, large and small, in the past.

Talking to Isabel proved really useful as she talked about what had worked well in projects she has managed in the past and gave me examples of how she uses the tools that I’ve learnt about and am starting to use more and more in my own work. As so many people say, a lot of project management is common sense, but sometimes it’s just useful to take the time out of your everyday life to sit down and think ‘common sensically’ about it. Hearing her describe how she deals with situations that I’m familiar with also gave me the confidence to try and use some of her strategies myself.

The success of one of Isabel’s previous projects was partly due, she believes, to having set up a steering group and a working group at the start and having clearly defined the roles of each person with a job description at the start. The steering group was particularly useful at the start of the project when setting out the strategic vision of the project. She recommends keeping the steering group fairly small and making sure that key people who have a strategic stake in the project are involved. For a smaller project a steering group is probably not necessary, but a working group set up from the start of the project who are very hands-on, problem solving and carrying out the project can still be very useful.

Other factors that made this project successful in Isabel’s view were the freedom and space that she was given to work with the blank canvas at the start of the project, recruiting a good team, having good electronic and filing systems and good training and development.

I asked Isabel whether she deals differently with smaller projects than she would with bigger ones. This was partly because I sometimes feel that using all the tools and mechanism that I was taught to use in project management training feels like overkill on a small project, but, on projects where I have not used them, I’ve inevitably regretted it towards the end. I was cheered to hear that Isabel thinks that these tools are always useful in all projects, but it was interesting to hear the way she phrases her communications with project team members in such a way that it doesn’t need to feel overly formal and contrived. She also feels that even if people respond skeptically at first to tools that may be unfamiliar, an efficient and well-run project will always win them over in the end.

One example that stuck in my mind was establishing the communications plan. I have written communications plans for myself in the past but never found a way of circulating them to a project team without it feeling overly bureaucratic and heavy. But as Isabel explained, this need not be a case of circulating numerous Word document attachments, but simply making sure that all the partners know who is involved in the project, what their involvement is, and how, whether and when to contact each other. So this could be an email dialogue between the project manager here and the project manager at a partner organisation saying:

‘These are the people working on this project full time, their email addresses are… We will also be working with an external consultant called X, the museum project manager will liaise directly with this person and feed back to the project team.’

Isabel had a useful tip for preparing for meetings which was to mentally consider all the worst case scenarios beforehand and all the things that people might take issue with and to think about how to deal with them.

Two more essential tips from Isabel which are, again, common sense, but in reality probably don’t come to mind as easily as they should:

If you feel frustrated by a project, take a step away from your desk, get a coffee, go for a walk or whatever before responding to whatever has frustrated you
Slow down to speed up – projects will always get done faster in the end if you take the time at the beginning to plan for them

I’ve come away brimming with ideas for how to improve my existing methods. I think I’ve already made some big improvements to my project management in the last few years and I already use a lot of the strategies that people suggest, but with some little tweaks based on Isabel's advice I think I could really continue to improve them.

Things I will try and do from now on:

Establish a working group at the very start of a project
Get the working group involved in all of the decisions establishing the aims, objectives and outcomes of the project, thus ensuring that everyone is on board from the start.
Establish timescales at the start together with the team and then set them in stone and have the confidence to stick to them. This way I’ll hopefully decrease the likelihood of things not being delivered on time, but also hopefully reduce the risk of people coming back with changes after a sign off phase has passed.
Extend the usual planning I do before meetings to consider all the worst case scenarios and all the things that people might respond to my points and how I will deal with them

Digital Learning Network

2010-03-10T12:22:00.005Z

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while but keep forgetting, but now that I'm on a roll with blogging I thought I'd get round to it - have you heard about the changes to what used to be the e-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives?

Well, the e-Learning Group has now changed its identity and become The Digital Learning Network (DLNet for short). You can read their announcement about the changes, but basically it seems the drive behind it is to continue to provide all the training and events that they used to provide, but to shift the focus back to just providing a network for people to talk about using technology in heritage learning.

I think it's a great idea! When I started my current job I became very aware that I was in quite an unusual role that doesn't exist in a lot of organisations. I was fresh from a year of being the Web Officer at The British Postal Museum & Archive and during that year I'd built up a great network of contacts to do with museums and the web which I'd found really useful.

Suddenly, faced with a job which also used some of the skills I'd previously developed to do with museum learning as well as my web skills and was subtlely different to my previous role, I found I suddenly felt quite isolated again as I felt my way around my new role. I had found my network of contacts and all their blogs etc really invaluable in helping me get a sense of what key issues and debates in the sector were and I really missed this in my new role.

Anyway, a few months into my job, I met with Wendy Earle at the BFI and discovered that her role is, in many ways similar to mine. It was great talking to her about my job and the challenges and opportunities it provided and we both agreed that we needed more opportunties to network in this way. We petitioned Martin Bazley, the chair of the e-Learning Group, to help us in this endeavour and he organised what is now considered to have been the first London ThinkDrink (a key aspect of this new DLNet - basically digital learning people, meeting in an informal setting - a pub in this case - to chat about their work). I discovered other people in similar roles to me and it was great to talk through ideas with them.

A few months after that, at Museums and the Web 2009, I met the lovely Claire Ross, then an e-Learning Project Manager at Geevor Tin Mine Museum in Cornwall and we discovered that we had loads in common - both of us had come to e-Learning through a non-technical route and were both finding our way and trying to establish ourselves in a museum/web world which often feels a bit daunting for us non-geeks/semi-geeks.

Claire is now on the committee of the Digital Learning Network (I nominated her so I'm quite proud!) and is one of the driving forces behind these current changes which they hope will help people like us find and meet up with others to share experiences and ideas with other people working in digital learning. Incidentally, Claire has also blogged about these recent changes.

If any of this rings true to you, if you work in a museum, library or archive in e-Learning/digital learning, I urge you to do one or all of the following:

sign up to the Digital Learning Network's website, look to see if a network group has been set up for your area, and if not, set one up!
Attend a ThinkDrink in your area, or organise one if one isn't already happening - it's a great way to meet people
Follow @DLNet on Twitter
Sign up to the email list which will now be using DLNET@JISCMAIL.AC.UK instead of the old e-Learning Group address. You can do this at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=DLNET.

One last thing to point out - I've put loads of references to DLNet in my AMA plan. A big part of the AMA is about networking and building a network of contacts. You're also supposed to demonstrate what you've learnt in a number of ways including sometimes giving presentations/papers etc. I plan to discuss things with members of the London Network group at ThinkDrinks and in blog posts either here or on the DLNet site. If you're doing an AMA and have any aspect of digital learning in your job role then please consider using the Digital Learning Network to help you!

AMA support group meeting - Project management

2010-03-08T13:26:00.005Z

Starting as I mean to go on, this is a very quick post (because I'm running out of lunch break) on an AMA support group meeting that I attended last week which fits in rather well with my plan because it was about project management.

We had a lovely tour of the new Medieval galleries at the V&A to start us off which was great - definitely need to go back and look at that. Then we moved to one of the learning rooms and had some great talks from project managers from the Natural History Museum and the V&A. I've had project management training in the past which I found really useful, but what I want to concentrate on in my AMA is practical application of those skills in the real world. The theory is great, but in my experience so far, it's sometimes hard to relate it to what you're actually doing when you're pushed for time.

Wanda Sheridan did a great talk about her work on the After Darwin: Contemporary Expression exhibition at the Natural History Museum. One of her points confirmed what I was already beginning to realise: that, despite it sometimes feeling like a superfluous waste of time, it's really important to establish the business case for a project and define its scope at the start, and make sure that everyone is on board. Sometimes this feels overly bureaucratic but I've certainly regretted not doing it in the past.

She also stressed the importance of sitting down with each person on the project team face-to-face to make sure that they understand their role on the team and what they need to do by what point. I find this difficult, partly because I'm someone who likes communicating by email, and email is so much faster than face-to-face to each individual, but also because for the kinds of projects that I manage (i.e. not large scale exhibitions, but small-ish projects to develop e-learning resources, it feels like overkill) it feels overly formal. I asked a question at the end of Wanda's session about how she manages to get people to stick to the timescales that she's established etc, and she stressed again the importance of this face-to-face initial meeting in doing this. So it's something I'm going to have to try. It certainly sounds promising.

She also emphasised the importance of not dismissing a project as soon as it's completed but making sure that it's fully evaluated. This is a trap I could very easily fall into. Especially at times of the year like this when I'm finishing a number of projects before the end of the financial year and it would be so easy to just breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the month and forget the projects forever. Wanda also evaluates not only the final product but the project is evaluated internally as well. This is something I'd like to do more of because it'll help me improve my project management skills if I can get people's feed back on how I have managed a project (although I might have to toughen up to criticism a little!)

She suggested a useful tool for this post-project evaluation: Red, Amber and Green - Red - for what should we stop doing in future projects, Amber for 'what do we need to consider continuing or perhaps stopping?' and Green for 'what did we do well that should be imparted to others?'

She identified things to be aware of in a project:

Scope creep - make sure you stick to the objectives you originally defined
Lack of role definition for team members - clearly define who does what at the start
Dependency on one person
Unclear objectives
Incomplete plan

Wanda's talk was followed by Anna DeJean from the V&A who came in towards the end of the development of the Renaissance and Medieval galleries - sounds like she really had her work cut out but I admired the way she sounds like she stayed so positive!

Anna emphasised a lot of the points that Wanda had mentioned but some of the key messages she talked about were:

Don't underestimate logistics
Make sure you have clear communications channels
Be prepared to escalate issues
Carry a mobile phone charger!
Trust your team
Have a contingency plan

Lastly, we had a talk from Ella Ravilious, Curator of Documentation & Digistisation in the Word and Image department of the V&A. This was a really interesting insight into a completely different kind of project - the digitisation of prints and drawings - which has no defined endpoint and is managed in many ways very differently from those described above.

We ended the day with a tour around the V&A's Theatre and Performance galleries which I DEFINITELY want to go back and take a better look around on my own, along with the Flower Fairies exhibition.

Overall it was a really interesting day despite the fact that I wasn't feeling very well, and as ever it was brilliant to do something different for the afternoon, chat to other AMA-ers, and just open up my head to new ideas for a bit. Many thanks to Carmen and Kristian who coordinate the London AMA support group for organising it!

My AMA begins

2010-03-08T12:58:00.005Z

Right, I've just sent off my AMA CPD plan so, providing it gets accepted, today is the official start date of me being able to log activity towards my AMA. This will therefore, hopefully, give me stuff to blog about again after a rather long silence.

For those of you that don't know, the AMA (Associateship of the Museums Association) is a continuing professional development programme run by the Museums Association. It basically encourages you to look at what areas you work in now that you want to improve on and where you want to go in the future and then guides you through how to get there and improve your skills. It's basically what you should be doing anyway to improve your career but within an organised framework that employers recognise and that hopefully gives you the structure to keep it going when time is tight (that's the theory anyway!)

I have aims to use my current role to improve on my skills in the following areas:

project management
people management
evaluation
web accessibility and standards
e-Learning theory and practice
strategic development

In terms of future aspirations, I want to keep my options open. I'm still in my late 20s and I'm in a job that's quite specific and that doesn't exist in a lot of museums. I feel like I don't want to shut any doors, so I want to try and keep my finger in as many other 'museum pies' as possible as well as e-Learning. A lot of the skills in my role are quite transferable so that's good, but I also want to work on my subject knowledge and keep my hand in with writing and research and exhibitions. Lastly, I want to finish my AMA with a better idea of what jobs are out there and what skills I need to work on to move up to them.

Throughout my AMA I'll be reading books, attending courses, interviewing people in more senior roles and I have to keep a log of it all. I'm hoping to use my blog to do that so if you're interested in Museums, in e-Learning, and in project and people management, then please add me to your RSS feeds and help me through!

Engaging Users: Users Engaging

2009-05-26T13:40:00.006+01:00

Decided it is high time (a week later) that I blog last week's E-Learning Group Engaging Users: Users Engaging event. Claire Ross from Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall has already written her post on the day so I'll try not to duplicate that but instead just talk about the points that particularly interested me.

The first thing that struck me about the day was the different audience and atmosphere to MW2009 (the last conference I attended). It would seem that broadly speaking 'Learning' people attend e-Learning events and 'geeks' (they call themselves that, I'm not insulting them!) attend MW2009-type conferences but there's not a lot of crossover. I think this in itself is a shame. People like me, and Claire, fall somewhere between these two camps. We're not quite technical enough to be geeks (we can't code for example) but our job is heavily reliant on our understanding new technologies as well as understanding learning issues. It seems that roles like these are still relatively rare and this may be why there is little crossover at present between the two kinds of events but I still think it's a shame and that both could be improved by having perspectives from the other side. This could perhaps turn into another post about the role of the e-Learning Officer and that's perhaps for another time so I'll move on...

As I often find happens with these events, it's not so much that I'm learning new things (although I am) but listening to talks and presentations makes me look at things from new perspectives, make connections I haven't made before and from there get some new ideas.

Frankie Roberto's 'keynote' was a good example of this. Frankie didn't really tell me anything new about how to engage users, but he made me think 'oh yeah, that's a good idea,that's a good way of looking at things' etc.

Frankie's already blogged about his three ideas for museums that he talked about last Tuesday. What got me thinking more was his 8 design principles. Claire's already listed them so I'll just highlight the bits I particularly got out of them:

1. Take note of existing design patterns - just as in real life we have come to accept that certain things mean certain things (a green light means go, a red light means stop), the internet is now at a stage where we're used to certain patterns and it's important to follow those existing patterns if you want to engage users e.g. people are now used to engaging in a number of set ways e.g. entering competitions, commenting, sharing memories etc and it's worth bearing these patterns in mind when you're designing a way of engaging users yourself

2. NABC - ok so Frankie did teach me one thing, I'd not heard of this before - NABC stands for Needs, Approach, Benefits, Competition. It's a way of anchoring a new project to make sure that it serves its users need. i.e. identify what user need it solves, think about how you're going to do it, think about how it would benefit the user and look at what competition there is - who else is also doing it and how they're doing it. It's certainly a model I'll try and use for new ideas in the future.

3. Design for either quality of users or quantity of users. Don't try for both, at least not at first. You either want a small audience really engaging with what you're doing, engaging regularly and putting in a lot of time and effort, or you want lots of people engaging but possibly don't need them to engage particularly deeply. Quality engagement might include something like a wiki or a blog, but quantity might be inviting comments on Flickr for example.

4. As a linguistics graduate, Frankie puts a lot of store in 'key verbs' and as a linguist myself I think he's got a point - he pointed out how really big successful social websites have picked a key verb that identifies what they want people to do on their site - on Facebook it's 'Share', on Flickr it's 'Upload' and these feature all over the sites. It's important to find a key verb that defines the one thing you want people to be doing on your engaging site

5. I really liked Frankie's point about visual affordance - what something is telling you to do with it. It's a design term used in the design of everyday things e.g. doors - if you see a panel at hand height, you know to push, or a handle, you know to pull (mostly!) and it's the same on the social web. Frankie pointed out that buttons (as opposed to links) have come to represent a commitment to something. You fill in a form and then by pushing the button you feel like you're committing yourself a little by signing up to something.

The next speaker was Guy Grannum of the National Archives who was talking about Your Archives - the National Archives wiki launched not long before the BPMA Wiki which I worked on and spoke about recently. It was interesting to hear about another wiki similar to the one I'd worked on, especially in the context of being on the Wiki panel at MW2009 and so having heard about lots of other heritage wikis recently too. I was interested that, rather like the BPMA Wiki, Your Archives doesn't just have one way that users can engage with it - they can, for instance, transcribe documents, or add to the catalogue (or do a whole load of things which are explained in more detail on their What can I contribute? section. If you can judge a wiki's success at all then you could say that Your Archives has been fairly successful, it's got 7,300 articles and has had 167,000 edits and yet, unlike the Science Museum Object Wiki or Placeography Wiki (both discussed at MW2009) it doesn't just have one single call to action.

Moving quickly onwards, I was interested to hear about Caboodle, an upcoming (and soon to be launched) Culture24 Project. Anra Kennedy and Mark Slawinski only had about 5 minutes to outline what Caboodle will do so it was hard to get a real picture, but in a nutshell it sounds like it will give children aged 8-13 the chance to create their own online collections of objects from museums and from their own uploads and will hopefully have the end result of getting more children into museums with their families. It will be useful for schools but is largely intended to be extra curricular and Culture24 also hope that museums will launch Caboodle Clubs to engage children in person as well as online. It's certainly something I'd like to keep an eye on to see how it goes and whether it could be useful for my work.

Ruth Levis then talked about Creative Spaces which I had largely heard about at MW2009 through the efforts of Carolyn Royston, Steve Gardam and others. It was still interesting to hear another person's perspective on it though. Regardless of what you think of Creative Spaces and the National Museums Online Learning Project in general, when you hear the people who worked on it talking about the project, it's abundantly clear that they should be applauded for all their hard work in what was undoubtedly a very complicated project.

The final talk of the day was from Jack Latimer and was about Community Sites, and particularly the My Brighton and Hove site. Around for about 9 years now, it should give hope to anyone who is skeptical about the power of community and the ability of web 2.0 to harness the power of the many and create something more than the few could manage etc etc. This whole project cost £2000 and the website is full of really lovely stuff and is completely maintained by the community. A Brighton resident at the conference also added a nice anecdote - that her local butcher and the community in general actively promote the site and they all clearly feel that it belongs to them and they are justifiably proud!

Lastly, Frankie also used the day to promote another project that he's working on that I've been involved with. Frankie has teamed up with a friend of his - Big Chief I Spy - to revivify the old I Spy books for children in a new way using the power of the social web. Big Chief I Spy has sent old I Spy books to loads of different people and is encouraging them to use Twitter and Flickr and the I Spy Blog to come together and share the fruit of their spying. I've got I Spy London from sometime in the 90s and although I haven't been doing as much spying as I ought to have done recently, it's been a great experience. It's so easy to take London for granted and just walk to work every day with my head down, thinking about what you need to do that day, but I Spy really makes you take a look at the great city around you (or whatever it is you're spying). It's a great formula that museums could use as well to help people engage with galleries more, rather than just wandering around them aimlessly. You can find out more about our I Spy Tribe on Flickr , on the blog: http://www.ispytribe.com or on Twitter by following @bigchiefispy.

On the whole I enjoyed the Engaging Users Day because it made me look at things differently, I met a few new interesting people, heard about a few project I didn't know much about, and came away with some new ideas. All-in-all, just what you want from a conference like that.

MW2009 #2 - one week on

2009-04-27T10:41:00.002+01:00

Finally returned back to the UK a week after MW2009 after a holiday with my partner in Washington DC and then Boston which was lovely.

Before returning to work tomorrow, I wanted to take the time to write a second post about what I got out of MW2009 now that I've had time to read the proceedings and generally reflect on everything. It follows on from my previous post: Thoughts, ideas and plans from MW2009.

1. Think it's interesting to reflect on individual threads and themes that I saw in the conference as well as the 'intended' themes laid out in the proceedings. For me the key themes were:

A series of different perspectives and tips on project managing web projects: re-designs, e-Learning projects, games etc
The power of reaching existing web (or other similar) communities through museum web activity.

2. This reaching existing communities theme was evident particularly in the papers on the WolfQuest game (which reached out to an existing gaming community rather than the traditional museum audience) and on the Alternate Reality Game by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (which tapped into an existing community of 'hardcore gamers').

A more unexpected (but really nice one) came across from one of our wiki panel - the Quilt Index Wiki experienced difficulties, as others also did, with the community they wanted to reach lacking confidence with the technology, but where they had the advantage was that the quilting community are already familiar with the notion of collaboratively building something and that helped.

I suppose in a way this is also one of the powerful opportunities that the mini workshop on iTunes U demonstrated - getting Museum content out to an existing community looking for learning material on iTunes.

3. Lots of people have been reflecting on the explosion of Twitter activity at MW2009. I signed up to Twitter during and as a direct result of the conference. I think for me it allowed me to have a voice and to join in a conversation that can too often seem like a closed shop where the same names come up over and over again (rather as @clairey_ross and @miaridge were discussing about the UK Museums Computer Group listserv on Twitter last night).

I don't pretend that I had anything massively inspired to say either on Twitter, anymore than I do on the MCG list, but participating, and having people start to know me through that, gives me a confidence to feel that I can be part of those conversations. It sort of makes everything feel more democratic and inclusive.

4. Quick list of the sessions I got the most out of (in no particular order) and that I'd recommend reading the papers of (where there are papers) it you couldn't attend:

Again, a bit stream of consciousness but I wanted to record everything while I was still buzzing from the enthusiasm and new ideas.

Overall I got loads out of the conference not just because of the sessions that I went to but also because of the people I met, the conversations I had, the new networks we started to build and overall the time it gave me to take a step back from work and think about the bigger picture.

Thoughts, ideas and plans from MW2009

2009-04-17T15:06:00.003+01:00

Just a quick post this time to sum up some of the things I've got out of MW2009 so far. They're a bit stream of consciousness but I wanted to record them whilst I'm still buzzing from the conference inspiration!

1. Interested to hear yesterday about a lady from the US (I'm sorry that I can't remember her name or her institution but it was to do with Egyptology) who uses Twitter in an interesting way to keep school children engaged. I've been wracking my brains since I started my e-Learning role to think of ways that social media can really work in a learning context (rather than a more general, promotional capacity for the museum in general). This organisation have a number of mummies that children discover when they visit the museum. When they leave, each child can adopt a mummy and that mummy has a Twitter feed. The mummies then keep the children in touch with what's going on in the museum that might interest them, in the hope that they come back with their families and teach them what they learnt in their school session.

2. Started a blog post already on 'tips for project managing e-Learning resources'. Hoping that if this sparks some discussion, I could maybe at some point set up a wiki which other e-learning museum people could contribute to so that we can build a really good centralised resource to help each other out with projects like this. All suggestions welcome!

3. Was interesting to hear about the American perspective on evaluation and how it differs from Inspiring Learning for All in the UK. I definitely want to think quite carefully about how I can apply some of the suggestions they made to future projects I'll be working on.

4. Really great to meet Sharna Jackson of Tate Kids yesterday and to hear about how she set up Tate Kids. I hope to be able to talk to Sharna again when I'm back in London as it would be great to pick her brains further about her experiences setting up this great resource.

5. Fascinating to hear about the different wiki projects in the session which I spoke in yesterday. It demonstrated really clearly one of the key points of my dissertation i.e. that it takes a lot of time and effort to foster these museum wiki communities but it was really cheering to see that paying off in some of the other wikis which have been around a bit longer than the BPMA Wiki and have been doing some really amazing stuff. You can read the other papers here: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/sessions/index.html (Go to Wikis and the expanded museum community bit)

6. As I said in my previous post, it's just been really great to meet like-minded people and just take the time out of normal daily working life to think about what we do, why we do it, how we could do it better etc. It's really lovely to feel like a part of my brain that often gets stifled has a chance to breath!

Top tips for museums creating e-Learning resources

2009-04-16T22:03:00.004+01:00

This post is inspired by the workshop I attended at MW2009 by Carolyn Royston and Steve Gardam.

I love conferences for the way that they allow you to take time out of work and just open up your brain to ideas. It only takes a few minutes into a good conference session before my brain suddenly wakes from the deep slumber that is often induced from busy days responding to the ever-growing task list and starts to fizz with new ideas, thoughts and connections that aren't usually there.

It struck me that it would be good to start a blog post on things to remember or tips for creating e-Learning resources based on my own recent experiences and also on what Carolyn and Steve had to say on Wednesday. I'm hoping that if this works it can become a growing and evolving post and a conversation between others who may have other experiences and tips to add to it. It's far from being an exhaustive list and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who would like to add things to it or change bits. Who knows, maybe we could draw on my wiki experience (see my MW2009 paper on wikis with Frankie Roberto) and turn it into a wiki some day (let me know if you think that would be a good idea).

1. Test, test and test again

This is actually also partly influenced by the second MW2009 workshop I attended on evaluation.

At the start of any new e-Learning project, however small, there should be some form of user testing and evaluation. This could be as simple as running your ideas past the target audience, be it teachers, children of a certain age group or whatever. It will allow you to get an idea before you start spending any time or money about whether your idea will work. It might give you really important pointers about how you should go about your project, or suggest things that you didn't think of putting into the brief.

There should also be formative testing whilst the project is happening. It might be tempting to wait until you have some kind of usable version of the resource already built before testing it, but it's probably also worth paper prototyping (i.e. sketching out what your site will look like and testing the navigation and how pages link together on paper or with simple wireframes) much earlier than this. This is backed up by what Steve and Carolyn did, by the evaluation workshop and also by a conversation I had with a developer I was working with recently.

If there are important functionality issues that come out of testing, it's best to spot them early on and iron them out before complicated code gets written that will take time to correct at later stage. This kind of testing needn't try too hard to get a representative sample of the target audience testing it. As Kate and Jes pointed out yesterday, if you get a handful of people who don't have a clue what you're trying to achieve with your resource then that's enough to tell you that you need to make changes!

You should also evaluate your project at the end as well, even if, by that stage, you're just glad it's over. If there's scope to still change things then remedial evaluation can work but even if it's just to learn some lessons for the next similar project you do, or to share your findings with others so that they can learn from it too it is a valuable exercise.

2. Think carefully at the outset about who you need to involve in the project and what each of their roles will be

In the National Museums Online Learning Project this was particularly important because they were working across 9 big national museums with different structures, different skills, different amounts of experience etc. Carolyn used Basecamp to communicate with everyone involved in the project and it sounds like this worked really well.

From personal experience as well I would say that it's particularly important to remember that you will need considerable curatorial input into any e-Learning project. In the early stages of a project, it can be easy to concentrate on the people who will be directly managing the project. Even if the content is to be created by educators, and the technical side built by technical people, it is the curators who need to approve every aspect of factual content and the historical accuracy of any illustration etc in the resource. Getting a curator involved in the early stages of a project and making sure that project timing is planned around curatorial workloads as well as those of the departments directly creating the resource could save a lot of time further down the line. In addition, curators may be able to suggest items in the collection or subjects that an educator might not have thought of. The same is also true for other departments in the organisation. Consider for instance whether you will need to use images, and if so, what the copyright implications are and who you need to talk to in advance of the project starting about this.

Also from experience I would recommend establishing roles and levels of authority to sign things off at this early stage of a project and make sure everyone is aware of it and agrees with it. This way, if difficulties arise later on then it will be easier to resolve them. I would also advocate having a fairly formalised sign-off process which establishes an order for people to sign things off (and involves an actual signature on paper) to ensure that those with ultimate sign-off see any iterations last so that they can also approve/challenge everyone else's comments and changes.

3. Plan your resource

Steve and Carolyn stressed the importance of establishing their aims and deliverables at the start of the project. This is particularly important in a multi-partner project like theirs because it's imperative that everyone is 'singing from the same song sheet' from the start and knows what the project is trying to achieve.

I was initially quite sceptical when I was first introduced to Inspiring Learning for All but the thing I find the Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) particularly useful for is forcing you to anchor your project in what you want people to take away from it at the end. From a quick glance it also looks like the new Inspiring Learning website is a lot easier to use than the old one and it's much easier to find the GLOs quickly.

Steve and Carolyn suggested some key questions to ask yourself/things to remember at this planning stage:

1. be really specific about your target audience.

2. Are you genuinely meeting an audience need?

3. What do you want to achieve with this resource?

4. How is the project funded and when does that funding end (and how will the project be maintained once the funding is no longer available)?

5. Who is writing the content?

6. How will you produce content appropriate for your audience?

7. How will you make sure that your content maximises the potential of the web?

8. How will you transform raw content into an online resource?

9. How will you manage your quality control?

10. Do the people have the right skills to handle the content?

I'm going to leave this post there at the moment. As I say, it's far from being an exhaustive list. I'm hoping that it's just a start and can be something that can be built on and can continue to grow. Please feel free to comment with suggestions and I'll try and update the post as and when I think someone has added a good idea.

Museums and Wikis at MW2009

2008-12-29T11:14:00.003Z

As Frankie Roberto has already blogged, I'm really pleased that he and I have been accepted to co-author a paper for April 2009's Museums and the Web Conference in Indianapolis!

The full programme is now available for the conference. We'll be speaking as part of a session on Thursday 16 April called 'Wikis and the Expanded Museum Community'. Our abstract is available online already and we'll be writing the paper over the next month or so and this will be available in advance of the conference online.

Also speaking in the session will be Tracey Baker, Joe Hoover and Rose Sherman from the USA, and Justine Richardson, Canada, Marsha MacDowell, Dean Rehberger, Amanda Sikarskie and Mary Worrall, USA. I'm particularly interested in the first paper by Tracey et al. as I mentioned their MN150 Wiki in my dissertation.

The conference looks really good. I've already signed up to attend the following pre-conference workshops:

Developing effective e-Learning resources: a practical guide - interesting on two counts for me - partly because I'm now working specifically on e-Learning rather than just web generally, but also because Steve Gardam, one of the speakers, is my former colleague, initiator of the BPMA Wiki which has been so important to me recently, and also a good friend.
Evaluation Methods: A Practicum - I'm hoping this will be useful just generally for help with evaluating the projects I'm now working on at the Museum of London

I'd have liked to attend Martin Bazley and my colleague Mariruth Leftwich's paper, Pedagogy and Design: Understanding Teacher Use of Online Museum Resources but unfortunately they're speaking at the same time as us so I'll have to content myself with reading their paper online!

I'll definitely try and catch Using Online Maps for User-Generated Content in Museums as it'll be interesting to hear about other project similar to the Museum of London's Postcodes project which I now montior. The session called Young Audiences and Creators also looks very relevant. It includes two papers:

At the Museum of London, we have a whole range of online resources and games for children of all ages and it will be useful to hear Tate's perspective on the 6 to 12 age group. I'd also like to look into using podcasts more as well.

It's certainly going to be a great experience - to speak at such a well-known and well-thought-of conference, to meet a lot of names that I've read about and also a chance to hear others talk about subjects directly related to my current role. I look forward to meeting anyone else who's going in April!

MA result!
As a p.s. I thought people may also be interestd to hear that I passed my MA with merit in the end, with 66% for my dissertation. I was a little disappointed with my dissertation mark as I had been hoping for a distinction, but I'm mostly just very relieved that it's over now. Many thanks to everyone for their support during 6 fairly gruelling months!

Some endings and some beginnings

2008-09-20T23:24:00.002+01:00

I haven't blogged for a good long time now because things have been extremely hectic for the last few months.

Those of you who have been following the course of my dissertation on this blog may be interested to know that I submitted the dissertation at the start of September. After months of hard work it was a huge relief to post it off. I'm now concentrating on not re-reading the bound copy that arrived in the post recently for fear of finding typos!

Even without my dissertation, I've contrived to continue to feel extremely busy recently. Part of the reason for this is that I am (on Monday) leaving the BPMA. A few weeks before my dissertation was due to be completed, a job came up that I couldn't possibly justify not applying for. The job was E-Learning Officer (Web) at the Museum of London. The job description seemed too good to be true. The person spec described a person with experience in all the things I have worked on in the last year: web strategy, user testing and user consultation, liaising with external contractors etc. The aspects that I hadn't covered as Web Officer at the BPMA I had relevant experience of from my time as Access Officer when I created educational resources as well as working on web stuff. I put together my application and, on 8 August I was interviewed. I had no idea what to expect but a couple of days later I was offered the job and start on 29 September.

I will be sorry to leave the BPMA after three good years building up invaluable experience and working on some great projects with some really dedicated and enthusiastic people. One of the projects that I will be most sorry not to see to completion is the Last Post: Remembering the First World War exhibition. I have worked on the text writing and preparation for this exhibition, together with BPMA Curator, Chris Taft and look forward to seeing the final product at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms from 6 November 2008. It's a fascinating exploration of the vital role and contribution that the Post Office made to the First World War. It outlines aspects of the organisation's involvement in the war effort which one might never consider when thinking about the history of the Great War in general.

I'm excited now by the new challenges that the Museum of London will present. As a much larger, and better known museum, I imagine many aspects of working there may well be different to the BPMA. I'm particularly looking forward to changing my focus back slightly more towards learning. Whilst I've really enjoyed developing an interest in all things to do with0 museum websites in general over the last year, my original reason for working in museums was always to promote an alternative perspective to learning. Many of my relatives are involved in education in one form or another, and whilst I always knew I didn't want to be a classroom teacher myself, I have always been surrounded by people with a strong passion for the importance of learning.

I hope you enjoyed reading my blog about my dissertation. I'll be sure to post about my results when they finally come out (could be up to six months apparently). I intend, now, to make my blog a bit more general, commenting on articles and lectures/talks/training sessions that I attend as part of my new role. I might also occasionally comment on other stuff unrelated to my job, I haven't decided yet! I hope that you will continue to read the posts which I hope to write a bit more frequently now. Thank you to those of you have commented on my blog so far, I hope you and others will continue to do into the future.

Authority

2008-06-19T18:06:00.002+01:00

I haven't blogged for quite a while now about my dissertation because I've been writing up the boring chapters - lit review, background etc - yawn! - and they weren't much fun.

This week though, my experiences at both the NaMu and the UK Museums on the Web Conferences have got my brain juices flowing a bit more and last night, in my little student hall of residence room (quite a change from the luxury of the Belmont Hotel during NaMu), I got to thinking a bit about my data analysis chapter which I started writing at the start of June.

I was writing my section on the quality of the contributions that we have received on the BPMA Wiki and got to discussing why it is that we have had lots of page views on the philatelic glossary, but very few edits. Those people that have edited have also tended to add terms and definitions rather than correcting or improving existing entries.

I came up with a number of reasons why this might be. The first is that the philatelic community thinks that the glossary doesn't need improving. I don't agree with this assumption but it's possible that that's what they think. The second thought was that maybe the lack of transparency on our wiki as to what others had already added meant people did not have the confidence to contribute themselves.

One reason, however, piqued my interest and I began to explore it further but I'm still not too sure about it. This was prompted by all the discussions about authority and trust at NaMu. People trust museums. They go to them to find out 'the truth'. Could it be that an organisation like BPMA, presenting an extensive philatelic glossary, and then asking people to help to improve it goes against people's understanding and perception of what museums are trying to do? Does the presentation of the glossary within the framework of the BPMA website mean that people are unable to see the wood for the trees, i.e. can't see how to improve it?

Perhaps Wikipedia, with its widespread audience, and its transparency about what other people have added, works because people feel that they are equal to the others that have already contributed. They feel able to express their own knowledge and contradict others because they feel on a level with them.

Is it anathema to suggest to an audience that a museum, after all, the source of 'the truth', should ask for help in creating something like a philatelic glossary? This opens up into the broader question of whether a wiki, by definition about democracy and equality of contributions, can ever achieve widespread contributions if it's 'lead' by an authoritative organisation.

This would appear to be disproved by the Science Museum Object Wiki which has had numerous contributions correcting and adding information about each of the objects. Is it possible, however, that the minimal Science Museum branding, the fact that this wiki is a separate site and the fact that the Science Museum haven't needed to actively promote it because people have found it through Google all contribute to the user not really realising that it is in a wiki run by the Science Museum? Or is it simply that the objects in the Science Museum Wiki are more everyday than philatelic terms and therefore attract an audience that feels more confident to make edits?

What do people think? Interested to hear other people's comments!

2008-05-13T10:04:00.003+01:00

After my somewhat angst-ridden post last week about research questions, I've agreed with my tutor that my proposed 'big question' is ok: 'Can Wikis work for museums: the practical and conceptual challenges of wiki technology for the BPMA'. He says that it's important, however, that I 'unpack' this question a little. I guess basically this means thinking what other questions are inherent in this big question, so here goes:

What are the challenges?
Can the challenges be overcome (and how)
How are the challenges that have been identified by others relevant in a museum context?
What type of Wiki pages/topics particularly appeal to a museum audience?
How much work in involved in museums using Wikis?
How do you go about getting people to use a Wiki?
Is there an inherent contradiction if an organisation tries to lead on a Wiki when Wikis should fundamentally be egalitarian and democratic?
What does 'can wikis work?' actually mean - I guess basically can they achieve the goals they set out to, can they attract new audiences, can they enhance the BPMA website. I guess this will mean that my background section will need to look more carefully at what the wiki set out to do. (Steve - I know most of this but it reminds me that I must really get round to asking you questions about it a bit more formally!)

This gives me more of a focus I think and it makes sense in my head (finally) so hopefully now I can carry on as I was with writing the first few sections!

Refining research question(s)

2008-05-08T20:48:00.004+01:00

I sent a progress report to my tutor a couple of weeks ago and at the weekend I got his response back. It was generally really positive which was encouraging - he was impressed by my bibliography and thought that I was asking pertinent questions etc. He raised an interesting point on research questions though because he felt that my report didn't quite make it clear what my research question was.

I had been intending to steer clear of starting out to answer the question 'Should museums use Wikis?' Rather I didn't want this to be the focus of my argument. I have noted in my introduction that, although the topic might end up helping people make that decision for themselves. As I have mentioned before, the BPMA Wiki was not my idea and by being in a position to run with an idea without being too precious about whether or not it works puts me in an ideal position to write quite a balanced dissertation.

Instead I have been roughly working to the idea of writing about the practical and conceptual challenges for museums using wikis. In writing this I was lead to look again at the original title Ross suggested, and realised that it was 'Can wikis really work for museums? The practical and conceptual challenges of Wiki technology for the BPMA' - or something like that anyway, I've changed a couple of words. This leads me to re-consider the section that I've put in the introduction about not being steered by a should we/shouldn't we approach.

I think I perhaps need to have a think about what questions I've really been asking myself in my preparation. So here goes:

What are the challenges?
How can they be overcome?
How are the challenges that have been identified by others relevant in a museum context?
What type of Wiki pages/topics particularly appeal to a museum audience?
How much work in involved in museums using Wikis?
How do you go about getting people to use a Wiki?
Is there an inherent contradiction if an organisation tries to lead on a Wiki when Wikis should fundamentally be egalitarian and democratic?
How do audiences behave on a Wiki?

I think maybe my tutor is right that 'Should museums use Wikis', or, for the sake of argument, 'Can wikis really work for museums?' is quite a broad topic. He made some suggestions of other questions:

do the risks/challenges to museums using wikis outweigh the opportunities?
can a wiki demonstrably contribute to the achievement of a museum's goals/objectives/mission?

I don't think my data really lends itself to the second one, I've really been working around what the challenges are and how to overcome them. Plus I think Ross originally steered me away from a topic like this when I originally suggested something to do with whether or not a Wiki could stand in the sted of a physical museum site. He said that there was a real lack in the field of a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of museums and wikis. Reading back on my first post about my conversation with Ross, I noted that I wrote: 'He suggested that I treat it as a story of how the BPMA have got to the position we are currently at with the Wiki and the issues that have arisen.'

I'm aware that my mind tends to gradually identify patterns and arguments once I start writing but it occurred to me that it might be valuable to try and work out what I'd be arguing with the current direction I've been heading in. I guess you could summarise the kind of themes that are coming out of my work and my data at the moment as:

Wikis involve a lot of hard work from the moderator
It's often quite difficult to get people to start contributing
Some topics work better than others in getting people to contribute
It's very important to consider the target audience and then push it to them (many of our newsletter readers, for instance, don't have a computer so too much newsletter coverage is probably pointless!)

If I need a more refined question, there is of course still the possibility that I outlined in another previous post of looking only at one challenge - namely how to get users to contribute to a Wiki. But the disadvantages that I raised at that point probably still stand - we haven't got a huge number of contributions yet to build a case on.

I feel like my brain is like pea soup at the moment and I have to really dredge out any thoughts. I guess I kind of set out to just sort of do an exposé/case study of the BPMA Wiki but I do think maybe I need a more specific question to answer. I feel a bit anxious now that I might have been trying to address too broad a topic but I can't really think how to refine it for the moment... Watch this space, hopefully I'll get inspiration soon!

Wikis for the museum community as a whole

2008-04-25T21:01:00.002+01:00

Just a quick post tonight on Wikis that are meant to be used by the museum community as a whole.

Museums Wiki

Started by Jonathan Bowen, the Museums Wiki homepage states that 'It is intended for museum personnel to participate in populating this wiki with museum-related material, typically in a form that is more detailed than suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.'

The Wiki lists as its most visited content:

Chicago Postcard Museum - a very short page about the museum
MN150 Wiki - again, a really short page about this example of a museum Wiki
Stanley Kubrick Archive- short page about the archive
Museum Documentation and Wikipedia.de - this article is a little longer and talks about the importance of the museum sector engaging with Wikipedia
Web 2.0 an Museen, Bibliotheken und Archiven- an article in German about a conference paper to do with blogging, tagging and podcasting in museums, libraries and archives
Markham Museum- a really substantial entry on Markham Museum
Museum studies - a so far empty page on Museum studies as a discipline

The Editor's pick includes an aritcle on Open Context which appears to have attracted a large number of edits.

The Wiki has 117 articles in total at present. I turned to Jonathan's paper at MW2007 called 'A Museums Wiki' to try and find out a bit more. Here I learnt a little bit more about the thinking behind the Museums Wiki: 'The main criterion for acceptability applicable on this wiki is that the material is museum-related. Of course the site is still an open wiki like Wikipedia, so no one person has overall control of the material. Any entry could be updated by others. Thus it is mainly useful where collaboration is being actively encouraged (e.g., by on-line museum visitors).'

It's interesting that the page with the most revisions, the main page, has still only had 69 revisions. I'm starting to get a picture of a Wiki that is probably a good idea, but that doesn't seem to be getting a huge amount of uptake. It seems like there are a lot of pages about museums, or about museum websites, or aspects thereof, about conference papers, and about key museum issues like education and accessibility. I don't get the feeling, and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that many museums have used it to engage their public. It seems to be more of a tool for museum professionals, by museum professionals.

Museum Virtual Worlds
This is a similar idea in that it claims (on its About page) to be 'a place for sharing information and resources for museum and other educational web developers about online virtual worlds.' i.e. it's a place for museum professionals to communicate with each other.

At this point, maybe because it's late on a Friday night, I got confused. In his MW 2008 paper, Jonathan described this wiki as:

'The Museum Virtual Worlds Wiki (http://apps.exploratorium.edu/worlds/wiki/) has been established as an on-line resource by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, USA. It is designed to be a virtual space for sharing among museum and other educational Web developers information and resources about on-line virtual worlds. The resource is powered by the Wikka wiki engine. It is necessary to register with the site in order to edit pages. This is a specialist professional wiki, not designed for members of the general public.'

However, when I go to the link now, it appears to redirect you straight to http://museumvirtualworlds.org/. I wonder if they've taken the Wiki down or something. I@ll have to keep an eye out to see whether it's just a temporary thing or if they've got rid of it completely.

"Collections" Wikis

2008-04-23T20:55:00.005+01:00

I'm starting to feel a bit demotivated this week so I'm trying to keep myself interested by varying the tasks I'm doing. I think one problem is that I've read a good deal of the interesting stuff now, and I'm starting to have to plug the gaps in my reading with the dull stuff - it's not very stimulating!

Instead of reading or writing tonight, I'm going to look at some other museum wikis to prepare for my section that surveys how the museum, or rather heritage, sector is using wikis.

I won't really be focussing on the technical aspects (i.e. what wiki organisations have chosen to build their wiki in etc), others have covered that and I can't claim to be an expert. I'm more interested in what topics people are choosing to create wikis about, and who and how people are contributing. Content rather than technicalities basically.

Tonight I'll consider a couple of what I'll call 'Collecions Wikis' - i.e. Wikis which use objects or documents in their collections as a starting point for Wiki content. To start close to home, let's look first at the Science Museum Object Wiki. Frankie Roberto has blogged about this new project recently.

The Object Wiki was launched in March 2008.On its main page it introduces itself as follows: 'The website contains information about objects held in the museum's collections, selected from the Dan Dare exhibition. The website is a 'wiki', which means that anyone - including you - can contribute by adding information or your memories of the objects.' It currently contains 105 objects. At present, and correct me if I'm wrong, it appears that only Frankie and one of the Science Museum curators has changed any content. I don't think the Wiki has been officially launched yet though so this possibly explains why. The Science Museum's collections are arguably broader than the BPMA's and so might attract the attention of a wider audience. In addition, a massive museum like this one obviously has a large audience that cannot really be compared to the BPMA's, particularly with our lack of physical exhibition space at present. You could argue, however, that our specialist and easier-to-define audience may be easier to attract. Given that these wikis were launched roughly around the same time but are, in many ways, very different, it will be interesting to see how each progresses.

I notice that the object wiki doesn't have talk pages linked to each article, although it does have user talk pages. Our Wiki has neither, but as I have probably already mentioned, studies of Wikipedia view these as central to the building of a regularly editing community. I am currently trying to get around this by creating a google group to try and get to know who is editing the Wiki and interact with them. It's in its early stages at the moment but I've had a few members join this week after I mentioned it in a press release about the philatelic glossary.

The Nationals Archives 'Your Archives'
A similar 'Collections Wiki' was launched in 2007 by The National Archives in Kew. Again, it's homepage says 'The National Archives' online community of records users. These pages are for you to contribute your knowledge of archival sources held by The National Archives and by other archives throughout the UK.' Your Archives requires its users to register before they can contribute. Once registered, users can perform a variety of tasks outlined in the help section called: What can I contribute? You could describe the purpose of this wiki as basically catalogue enhancement. Users can provide transcripts of documents, expand on a catlalogue entry, or help others with research guidance. This is something I had considered using our wiki for in the future i.e getting users to write their own guidance on how to use our Search Room, or about our Museum Store. It would act almost like the alternative prospectuses that universities ask students to write.

As it's a bit more established than the Science Museum one, it's easier to see what kind of activity is going on. It's interesting to see that Guy Grannum (TNA staff member)'s talk page has got some questions on it so people are obviously using the talk pages to interact. The recent changes page shows some interesting activity with Guy Grannum blocking a certain Molly8888 who had added the content: '(deleted "Molly8888": content was: 'molly rocks shes sexy hot my msn is ...' A lot of the activity is by TNA staff Guy Grannum and Simon Dixon but other users are obviously creating content as well. The recent changes page also suggests that users don't just edit one page at a time, but add content to several pages. The 'Featured articles' section on the homepage is useful because it takes you to pages of particular interest - pages that have obviously worked. It is interesting that there are only 4 at present. If we assume that these are the pages that TNA sees as being parituclarly successful then we can assume that a particularly successful function of YourArchives has been people providing transcripts or summaries of the information within particular documents. I hadn't particularly considered doing this, but it could be quite a good idea. We're often being asked if we can provide more of our collections online, this could be a way of doing so.

That's it for tonight, I think this is a useful process so I'll perhaps explore some other museum wikis tomorrow.

Public sector Wikis

2008-04-21T19:48:00.002+01:00

This page is a bit easier to write than Private sector wikis because I've already found a fair bit of stuff on the subject.

There were a few articles a while back that hailed the rise of wiki technology in the public sector.

I've already talked about Wiki or won't he? but I don't think I cited many of the examples he/she(?) mentions:

DoWire's E-Democracy Best Practices Wiki - describes itself as 'A collaborative drafting environment' . Guy says of it: 'a primary source for important developments concerning the convergence of democracy and the Internet around the world'
Bristol wireless - Guy says 'is a co-operative set up to develop a free-to-access broadband intranet using radio to communities around Birstol, UK, that find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.'
Flu Wiki - 'a national online resource created to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic.' (Guy)

Then of course there's the famous, or rather infamous DEFRA Wiki which everyone uses as an example of why you should have some protection from SPAM. (Surely a caveat to this should be 'if you're a massive government department with a lot of people that don't like you!'? Or maybe I'm being naive) The DEFRA Wiki was brought down within a day because of the SPAM and malicious editing that it suffered. It is now available 'for reference purposes - but further editing is not encouraged'.

Another article, Public sector catches wikimania, mentions the e-innovations wiki. It takes only a few seconds to realise that this site is overrun with Viagra SPAM! It was supposed to be 'a "tester"... it may soon be modified and retargeted. The aim was to involve senior staff leading local e-government innovations, but only 20 out of some 200 invited to participate have done so.'

So that's a quick survey of public sector wikis. I'm sure more will appear as I read more.

Private sector Wikis

2008-04-21T19:44:00.001+01:00

Certified Twiki claims to be able to 'optimize your business', so I explored their site a little to see who was using it and how. They have some useful quotes from clients which do nicely for my purposes of brief summaries of how some big companies are using Wikis. Here are some examples:

Nokia: 'At Nokia we are always looking for new and improved ways of communicating. In use since 2002, TWiki has developed inside Nokia into a valuable tool for team collaboration, sharing of ideas and promoting innovation.' Harri Lakkala, Social Software Expert at Nokia

Motorola: 'There are many people at Motorola actively using TWiki for ISO 9000 compliancy, reporting, project management and other applications.' Kenneth Lavrsen, Engineering Manager, Motorola

Yahoo: 'We use TWiki internally to manage documentation and project planning for our products. Our development team includes hundreds of people in various locations all over the world, so web collaboration is VERY important to us. TWiki has changed the way we run meetings, plan releases, document our product and generally communicate with each other. We're great fans of your work!' Eric Baldeschwieler, Director of Software Development, Yahoo!

These are prime examples of the use of private wikis within an organisation, used to boost productivity and collaboration.

In August 2005, Ezra Goodnoe reported in his article 'How To Use Wikis For Business' in Information Week that ' Although wikis have been around for a decade, they're just starting to take off in business'. He later asks the question that I hoped he would ask: 'what companies are actually using wikis?'. He answers himself with the following paragraph:

'Nokia has been using Socialtext wiki software for a year and a half to facilitate information exchange within its Insight & Foresight group. Yahoo uses Twiki software to help its development team overcome the problems associated with working from a variety of separate locations. Michelin China also uses Twiki as a knowledge management tool. Jean-Noel Simonnet, from the company's IT department, writes, "Our purpose was to share ALL the information, procedures, setup documents, so that we were less dependent on a particular staff member knowledge, so that nobody in the team has any document left in a personal directory."'

Twiki also has a success stories page which looks in a bit more detail at what some of its clients are using Wiki for. I really don't think I can justify going into the topic too deeply because of my word count, so I won't bother to explore them at the moment, at least I've noted the link.

Wikis outside the heritage sector

2008-04-21T18:52:00.004+01:00

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently because I took some time to start writing a very rough first draft of the first few sections of my dissertation. I wanted to see where the gaps in my reading appeared once I started to write. Sure enough they appeared quickly.

One particular gap that I noticed appeared when I tried to write a brief survey of how wikis were being used outside the heritage sector. This section needn't be long so I'm going to spend this evening researching this a bit, and logging my findings here, then I can just write the entry up more formally.

So, I need to explore the following:

Private sector wikis
Public sector wikis
Wikis in education
Wikis in libraries
Wikis for the general public

I've linked to the ones that I've managed to research tonight but now I've got bored of this kind of necessary gap filling so I'm going to go back to something more interesting and will no doubt do the other bits at a later date.

Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly on web 2.0 at last year's MW conference

2008-04-09T22:28:00.005+01:00

This is one of those inspiring articles which makes you nod your head vigorously as you read through. It confirmed a lot of the thoughts that were starting to form in my head on a number of topics and covered a great deal on many of the topics that I want to discuss in my dissertation.

The paper was presented at the Museums and the Web Conference 2007 by Brian Kelly and Mike Ellis and was called 'Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers'.

Authority
They talk a little about the challenges to do with authority that museums, and other organisations face when considering web 2.0. As web 2.0 puts users, rather than the organisation as the central focus, 'Organisational structures, departmental ways of naming things, the perceived 'value' of our assets, in fact, what the organisation has to say about itself - all are being challenged'. They point out that these are particularly difficult for museums to deal with since they are often 'historically highly respected or [have] a long-standing way of doing things.'

I think that's a good point that museums, perhaps more than other institutions, might be prone to be 'set in their ways' at times, simply by their very nature. I think perhaps BPMA's relative youth might explain why we are quite lucky in not having to overcome too many of these attitudinal barriers.

Reasons
Although I am going to be careful in my dissertation not to get distracted by discussion on whether or not museums should use Wikis (this isn't the point of the exercise), I think Ellis and Kelly make a good point when they say 'The risk is that we do these things just because we can, or because everyone else is doing them, or even more dangerously, because it attracts funding.' They do make the point, later on that 'It is not always true to say that IT innovation should be deployed in response to clearly articulated user requirements. The take-up of the Web in the early to mid 1990s was identified due to the potential which organisations identified once they had seen the Web and identified its potential to support current business requirements and also to provide new services which hadn't been considered previously.'

They also put across a strong case for web 2.0 in museums: 'Museums must continue to pioneer on the Web. We have extraordinary content: niche, long tail content aswell as high-profile 'exhibition friendly' content...The opportunities we have as a sector for touching real people with what we do are immense. To do this we need to find technologies which bridge the gap between 'us' and 'them'.

Barriers
They succintly summarise some of the barriers that might stop museums from wanting to embrace web 2.0 and note that 'cultural and political barriers are often the most challenging to respond to'. Education and marketing teams have difficulties with the idea ofUGC 'from both a brand and a 'trusted organisation' perspective.' 'Curatorial staff have additional, deep seated concerns about authority once user content is brought into the mix.'

Legal issues
On the legal side - 'Data protection, privacy, liability and accessibility issues, uncertainties regarding the lack of any formal contractual agreements - are often fears which surround Web 2.0. This may also give rise to concerns regarding the sustainability of such services, and disaster recovery strategies which may be needed if an external provider of a service becomes bankrupt or changes the terms and conditions governing use of the service to the detriment of the user orgnisation.'

They point out, however, that the potential for abuse isn't always as great as you might first assume: 'User Generated Content is usually not the scary "all we'll end up doing is editing endless obscene comments 24/7" beast that it first appears.' They also point out how useful the community can become in stopping abuse: 'asking end-users themselves to moderate content have also been employed successfully on many sites.' This made me realise that we can probably make more of this to our users and point out to them that it's alright, certainly at first, if all they do is help us to moderate it and to correct typos. This is particularly true in the light of my post a few days ago about contributors to Wikipedia usually starting small. One issue I came across when trying to do this today, however, is that I don't want to admit to our users that we fear that our Wiki might be overrun with abuse, to an extent that we cannot cope with it on our own. Of course I should give them some credit as they have probably already guessed that it's a risk, but should I really be admitting that we think we might need help dealing with it? I guess it's all about how you word it.

Data capture
They even talk about data capture (this article just got better and better as I read through!). A good point for my methodology section: 'Not only are there ill-defined ways of measuring success, technically, but also agreed standardds are often non-existent.'

Hype
I was interested in what the article said about the Gartner hype curve which I'd not heard of before. It'll be interesting to see how much the BPMA Wiki follows its pattern in its own modest way (although obviously at present 'hype' might be a bit of a strong term!). According to their analysis of the curve the following can be observed:

'Early adopters are little or no challenge. These are the people who are technically savvy; those who 'get it'...'
After the early adopters, comes a chasm
Then the graph increases rapidly to a 'peak of inflated expectations' - 'Here, media hype has expanded and extended the original reach of the technology to realms often way beyond those which are actually possible.'
'Shortly afterwards the technology begins an inevitable descent into the trough of despair'
It all ends happily on the curve though which proceeds away at a gradual incline towards that hallowed position: 'Service Plateau'!

In the conclusion, they point out that 'It is only by working with these technologies 'in the wild' that we begin to understand exactly what the benefits and risks of these approaches are.'

Overall, in one article, I managed to find some excellent quotes on many of the topics I'll be covering - bingo!

BPMA Wiki to be mentioned at MW2008

2008-04-09T21:32:00.003+01:00

I'm really pleased that Jonathan Bowen has agreed to mention the BPMA Wiki in his mini-workshop on Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums at the Museums and the Web Conference in Montreal this week.

I noticed that Jonathan had asked if he could mention the new Science Museum Object Wiki in the workshop on one of the pages on his Museums Wiki. Someone had very kindly linked to the BPMA Wiki in their online communities section (I'm not sure how they found out about it) and I had been trying to contact Jonathan already by email, but to no avail.

Anyway, the BPMA Wiki now has an entry on the Museums Wiki which will help Jonathan talk about it on Friday. I look forward to hearing how it goes.

Theories of participation in Wikis

2008-04-07T20:12:00.004+01:00

I read two articles last week which put forward some useful theories about what makes people contribute to Wikipedia. They were grounded in theories of participation which were also quite interesting.

The first article is Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia by Bryant, Forte and Bruckman. It cites the theoretical description by Lave and Wenger called 'Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP).

Bryant et al. say: 'According to LPP, newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in peripheral yet productive tasks that contribute to the overall goal of the community.' In Wikipedia this means people tend to start off making really small edits, correcting typos etc.

Wenger identified three characteristics of communities of practice which Bryant et al. feel are present in Wikipedians: 'community members are mutually engaged, they actively negotiate the nature of the encyclopedia-building enterprise, and they have collected a repertoire of shared, negotiable resources including the Wikipedia software and content itself.'

LPP also suggests that 'If newcomers can directly observe the practices of experts, they understand the broader context into which their own efforts fit.'

As Wikipedians grow in confidence and experience, their participation also grows. Bryant et al.'s findings demonstrate that 'For ... "Wikipedians"[i.e. the confident, experienced users], the Wikipedia as a whole becomes more important than any single article or set of articles....their motivation seems to become rooted in a concern for the quality of the Wikipedia itself....Many Wikipedians perceive their work as contributing to a greater good, offering knowledge to the world at large. When asked why they contribute to the Wikipedia, many Wikipedians recognized the project's overarching goals, the appeal of community, and perceived contributions to society.'

'Wikipedians described feelings of personal responsibility for the quality of their contributions to the site and its contents.'

The second article is by Schroer & Hertel and is called 'Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-based Encyclopedia: Wikipedians, and Why They Do It'. They cite Klandermans' model (1997, 2003) on social movements: 'ACcording to this model, the motivation to participate in a social movement depends on subjective expectancy and importance of several motives, which can be categorized into three classes, as well as identification processes: Elements of the first class, social motives, refer to expected reaction of relevant others, such as friends, family, or colleagues'.

THey also note that 'interest and "having fun" during an activity are important elements of intrinsic motivation.'

Another interesting bit:
'Volunteers are generally more satisfied if their engagement meets important needs (Clary et al., 1998; Houlse, Sagarin & Kaplan, 2005)'

Some of the motives cited by the people they interviewed for contributing:

'I like working with text'
'I enjoy writing'
'power to share knowledge'
'cover topics that are omitted in other encyclopedias'
'create a heritage for our children'
'timeless project to collect knowledge'
'compensation for unrealized career aspirations'

This is only a brief overview of these articles but I think it's useful to make a note of them because it might give me a better idea of what to play on when trying to get people onto the BPMA Wiki.

I think the lessons to learn from them are the importance of community, the feeling of personal pride in what they have created, the desire to share knowledge and the fact that people are likely to start off small and gradually do bigger edits as they gain confidence.

Data capture

2008-04-04T09:41:00.002+01:00

According to the schedule that the department set us, this month should be spent capturing data. We were supposed to spend the first month reading, this month capturing data, the next two months analysing the data and the last two months writing. I think in practice it might not work out quite like that. A lot of my data will collect itself once I've set up the mechanisms, and I think I can probably analyse it as I go along. I'm going to carry on reading for now, and collect data over the next three months as I think it'll give a better sample. The Wiki's just getting started and to collect data just over this month would not get very good results.

I've chosen four pages on the BPMA Wiki to track the progress of. I wanted four fairly different types of page, that could be advertised in different ways and which would provide a different experience for the user. I wanted pages that would attract different types of user as well.

The pages I am using are as follows:

Philatelic glossary - this is the 'factual' page. I think it's the one that will most likely draw on the lessons I've learnt from reading about Wikipedia's success. It lends itself to the collaborative improvement of a piece of writing. It is for a specialist audience, that we know exists. It is also an opportunity to launch a piece of text that is already written (albeit in need of improvement) and therefore provides less of a daunting task for new users than a completely blank canvas.
Wartime letters - I wanted a page that could be used by non-specialist audiences. This page links to our Last Post exhibition, about the Post Office and the First World War, which will begin its two year tour of various museums around the country at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in November 2008. The exhibition, like the education packs that preceded it, touches on the enormous importance of the Post Office in maintaining communication between the troops and their loved ones. I wanted to use this to draw on people's stories, both reminiscences about past conflicts, and contemporary experiences of the importance of the post in a wartime context. I hope that we will be able to market this page to a wider audience, including reminiscence groups, veterans' associations, and the wider public.
Working for the Post Office - this is a page that I had already set up and which has had some success, so far mainly through contacts that I have asked favours from. Again, it will attract contributions from a more specific audience than wartime letters but nevertheless has potential because there are a surprising number of people who have worked for the postal service at one point or another. I may choose not to push this page as widely as the others as I want to demonstrate the need to really push pages if they are going to work.
Mount Pleasant Sports and Social clubs - this will attract contributions from a very specific group - namely workers in Mount Pleasant sorting office. I wanted to have one topic where I could test out how well it worked if I got a group of people together in a room and helped them make Wiki contributions. This topic is ideal because it shouldn't lend itself to too much negativity about Royal Mail as an employer (something the BPMA cannot be seen to endorse) but will allow one of our key target audiences, Royal Mail staff, to contribute. Royal Mail run Work-Time Listening and Learning sessions and have computer suites available for these purposes and so they should hopefully provide a good opportunity for a captive audience with access to computers and a certain amount of knowledge. It will hopefully also be a good opportunity for collaboration.

I have set up a spreadsheet to capture various bits of data about these pages. In terms of quantitative data I will look at the number of page views each page gets over three months. I will also log how many edits each page receives, and distinguish between edits that I am making and ones made by others. This will help demonstrate how one of the practical challenges of Wikis for museums is the amount of staff time needed to get a Wiki off the ground. I am aware that this number of edits is not a particularly reliable statistic. I am counting the number of edits by the number of emails I get saying that changes have been made to a page. I personally am quite cautious about clicking the save button and therefore I might appear to be making more edits than others doing the same amount of work on a page as me. I can't see any way round this, however, so I'll just have to account for it in the discussion of the results.

I'm also keeping track of how many hours I spend working on the Wiki, again as a measure of the staff time involved in projects like this.

In terms of qualitative data, the "/diff" pages will be useful in that they show what edits people are making. I will be able to assess whether people are changing other people's text, or simply contributing their own, how much text they're contributing, what they're contributing etc etc. I will also be able to use these to demonstrate issues like the potential for abuse, how much administrators should moderate content etc. I'm also keeping a note of all the ways in which I publicise each page. Comparing these to the quantitative figures will help to measure both which topics work best, and which methods of marketing Wikis work best.

Lastly, I hope to talk to a few sector peers who are doing similar work about the kinds of challenges that they are facing so that I can compare them with the ones that I am facing. This is particularly important because the BPMA is, in many ways, quite an unusual organisation. If Frankie Roberto doesn't mind, he may well be my first port of call since he is in charge of the new Science Museum Object Wiki.

I'd welcome any comments on this methodology. My background is in History and so my previous dissertation research hasn't really involved the same kind of data capture (although there are similarities). The above is a rough draft, I expect my methodology will get refined over the next few months, but at least it's a start!

The mammoth power of Wikipedia

2008-04-03T09:59:00.003+01:00

I've just had my first awe-inspiring encounter with Wikipedia this morning. I had read elsewhere that you had to be really careful when linking to your own Wiki from Wikipedia because they will clamp down on anything trying to promote things, or trying to compete with Wikipedia etc. I wasn't trying to be difficult, I just found that there was no philatelic glossary on Wikipedia, although there was a category called philatelic terms, and I thought I would experiment with linking from some of the philatelic terms pages to our new philatelic glossary on the BPMA Wiki. Sadly, within 15 minutes I'd say, I got a very polite message from a Wikipedian informing me that my link that I had added on a particular page didn't comply with their linking policy and therefore he had removed that link. Within seconds all the other links I'd just posted had been removed too.

It's a shame. I really wasn't trying to compete with them. I just wanted to harness some of the willingness of that massive community, particularly the ones who might have philatelic knowledge, and use it for our little Wiki. The notion that I might be trying to compete with them is completely ludicrous as we never could! Anyway, duly chastened, I will have to find another way to promote the Philatelic Glossary!

Useful tips for new Wikis

2008-03-21T10:03:00.006Z

I've read some really useful tips this morning on a forum recommended in a comment on one of my posts made by my colleague Sian yesterday. The forum's called Will Wikis Work? It's intended for users of Wikia Wikis but it still applies to others as well. So a big thank you to Sian for pointing me in that direction.

To summarise some of the points I found particularly useful:
1. 'The three factors that determine contributors to a Wiki project are Confidence, Interest and Awareness'. It's common sense really but they point out that confident users are those who are willing and able to contribute to a Wiki. In Wikipedia, which is so broad in scope, all of these confident users are likely to have some subject of interest that they can contribute to. In smaller, subject specialist Wikis like ours, however, the likelihood of finding people who are both confident, but also interested (or knowledgeable) in our subject is harder. Add to this the fact that many people who fall into these two categories may not yet know about our Wiki, and you start to understand the full scale of the work that we need to do to get people on there. As I say, it's not rocket science, but I thought the way that they explained and argued it was very clear and accessible.
2. They point out that the key to increasing the number of people who are interested, but also confident, is to train them. I've been thinking that I need to write a kind of user guide but this has confirmed me in that decision. They recommend 'a really easy user friendly introduction to Wiki editing.'
3. In terms of marketing, they recommend first marketing to those who are both interested and confident. Once the critical number of contributors is reached, you can then move on to really pushing the Wiki to people who are just interested but not yet confident.
4. I liked their equation to work out the likely number of contributors:

No. of interested x aware proportion x confident and passionate proportion = Potential contributors

The confident and passionate proportion can be assumed to be about 1% based on Wikipedia and other web 2.0 communities.

The number of people interested in postal history/philately is surprisingly large, but at the moment the number of them who are aware of our Wiki is very small. So that's where the work lies!

5. Again, it's common sense really, but they stress the importance of not trying to compete with Wikipedia, simply because it's pointless. They're always going to be bigger! To avoid this competition you can allow people to go into more depth and detail than a Wikipedia entry, which is encyclopedic, can allow. People don't need to have a neutral point of view. And people can contribute their own experience on a subject.

They then move on to how to attract contributions.
Useful tips here include:
1. 'you must identify places where the sort of people your project wishes to attract are common and talk about it there'...'you should consider the audience and the sort of visitors you want to encourage when composing it.'
2. Good tips on how to make people feel comfortable, welcome and motivated: stress that the wiki 'is a common effort', 'be welcoming to visitors and encourage them', 'keep posting regular updates describing the general progress and specific advancements', 'try contracting people that might be interested in contributing to your wiki in ,.... forums, blog, other websites'. I'm going to have a trawl in a minute to see if there are any postal history type blogs out there! There's certainly some interested groups on Flickr. They also advocate 'emphasising community involvement'
3. They suggest that personal invitations are much better than a general email/advert - so that's encouraging - I've been doing that a bit this week, hopefully it will pay off!
4. They preach caution when trying to promote your Wiki on Wikipedia or any Wikimedia projects as the administrators will quickly clamp down.

There's some interesting stuff on building trust with your community in the 'Building a community' section. We don't have 'talk' pages on the BPMA Wiki but I might set up a mailing list and start trying to chat to people by email. It won't necessarily build a community that are talking to each other but at least they'll be talking to me.

There's a slightly gloomy, but probably quite realistic stuff about the length of time it will take to build a community who actively contribute in the Improving your Wikia bit:

They warn that you may need to spend 'three, four or more months adding content all by yourself'. That you (I/BPMA) will have to create 'at least 95% if not 98% of all content.' and that 'That requires about 1-2 years of 1-2 hours of daily work.' 'Do not kid yourself. Only a dozen people will actively contribute to the wiki in the beginnings.' - so, anyone else want to do the rest of my work for the next two years? I've got to spend at least 2 hours everyday creating Wiki content! :-)

Theory, Motivation, and Truth

2008-03-20T22:44:00.005Z

I haven't read anything particularly ground breaking this week, I've mostly just been familiarising myself with what's out there, which has been a useful process. A few things have caught my eye however:

It occurred to me the other day that I ought to be including a little in my literature review about the theory that underlies Wikis. I found one example of such theory, which I have to admit went a bit over my head, in Rafaeli, Hayat and Ariel who talked about Nonaka & Takeuchi's (1995) work on the 'thoery of organizational knowledge creation': 'The process of knowledge creation, according to this theory, involves social interaction and the transition between tacit and explicit knowledge. This theory proposes four modes of knowledge conversion: Socialization individuals share tacit knowledge through joint activities. Externatlization individuals link tacit knowledge to explict knowledge. Combination individuals combine different explicit ideas into more complex sets of explicit knowledge. Internalization individuals extract knowledge from newly created tacti and explicit knowledge.' What? I think I'll figure it out later. It's nearly11.00pm and therefore far too late for that kind of thing! There was also quite a nice reference in Ben Macintyre's 'How wiki-wiki can get sticky' to 'the Enlightenment ideal of the collective pursuit of truth' - which is probably an avenue worth looking into a little from a theoretical perspective.

On motivation, I was interested in Rafaeli, Hayat and Ariel's findings on what motivates Wikipedians to keep 'Wikipedia-ing'(!): 'The data...reveals that the strongest Wikipedians motivators are Cognitive ("Learning new things" and "Intellectual challenge") Affective ("Pleasure") and Integrative ("Sharing my knowledge") and "Contributing to other people")' These findings will be useful when considering how to motivate people to contribute to the BPMA Wiki. It's encouraging to know that there is such a vast community out there who are willing to share their knowledge for no real return. It renews your faith in humanity to know that not everyone is simply out to get whatever they can for themselves. Let's just hope that some of the spirit rests alongside an interest in the history of the post in some individuals!

The feeling of being part of a community was also found to be a strong motivator of Wikipedians. The key issue of course is how to create that community in the first place.

On truth, I also like Ben Macintyre's comment: 'Wikipedia has the same relationship with an encyclopaedia that yesterday's news reporting has with tomorrow's history book. Wikipedia is a first draft. It is not truth.'

Authority again

2008-03-20T22:03:00.003Z

I wanted to make a note to myself about Beler, Borda, Bowen and Filippini-Fanton's comment that 'museums should not just be seen as custodians of knowledge, but part of a wider exchange.' My first reaction, following on from my comments last week about negative perceptions of resistance to the freedom provided by Wikis, was to view this as a criticism of museums as authorities on certain subjects. Admittedly, the word 'just' shows that they're not saying that museums should not be the custodians of knowledge, only that should not exclusively be this. Which I think I agree with. I think I'm just still not wholly won over by the current trend for 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down' information and the power of the crowd. I think that's probably why I quite like the Mitchell and Webb quote that a few people are quoting:

"Are you personally affected by this issue? Then email us. Or if you're not affected by this issue, can you imagine what it would be like if you were? Or if you are affected by it, but don't want to talk about it, can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it? Why not email us? You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed, ad hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk, clicking on 'what I reckon' and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head."

As Oliver Burkeman said last year: 'if you heard it and laughed, it's probably because you share some of the ambivalence it exudes towards the idea of a world in which everyone is a creator of content' - so I'm not the only one!

Collaboration

2008-03-20T21:50:00.004Z

There've been a couple of things to do with Wikis as a knowledge base that have made me think quite carefully. For example, in 2005, Rafaeli, Hayat and Ariel wrote that: 'Wikis should be most effective in gratifying users' "Knowledge Needs" for ad-hoc problems with decentralized knowledge sources.' As I touched on last week I had previously been focussing perhaps too much on the BPMA Wiki as simply a space for users to create content, without considering the collaborative benefits. It strikes me that for Wikis to be used to their full potential, they should be used more for the accumulation of, for want of a better word, 'facts'. Some of the posts that I have been encouraging are more about feelings and experiences of working for the Post Office. Others that I had considered a more about commenting on a particular issue or question. These are valid forms of user-generated content, and for that reason, I don't think there's any harm in using the Wiki as a forum for them. They do not, however, lend themselves to collaboration. The post about my grandfather's time working for the Post Office for instance, realistically will only solicit, at the most, collaboration from my immediate family who still remember the stories he used to tell us. It's currently pretty unlikely that one of his former wor colleagues might find it, but if they did, they might also be able to add to some of my Grandmother's anecdotes about the practical jokes he played on his colleagues. But that is all. There is little scope for collaboration.

But then I took a look around at some of the genealogical Wikis out there. They don't seem to necessarily mind if each page is only contributed to by one person - they simply encourage their users to create a page for each member of their family that they are researching. In the end, if successful, this could create a set of pages on a wide range of people from the past. In theory, if the group gets wide enough, then people might be able to start finding someone that they too are researching, and then they would be able to collaborate.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to promote the creation of content that won't promote collaboration, but I think maybe I need to think more carefully about how to make sure that there is an element of collaboration possible. Otherwise why would people keep returning to the site. And how would a community develop?

Musings, methodology and planning

2008-03-20T20:49:00.004Z

I spent Tuesday evening thinking about exactly what approach I wanted to take and reading the research handbook for tips on Masters research.

Research question
I've pretty much decided to more or less go for the question that Ross Parry suggested although I think I might omit the 'technical' bit. Not being a "techie", and because the work to create the BPMA Wiki was done by our web hosts, I'm don't think I could usefully contribute anything to this topic.

The title is therefore likely to be something like: 'Can Wikis really work for museums? The practical and conceptual challenges of Wiki technology for the BPMA'.

I toyed with idea of just look at one particular challenge - the key one that I'm facing at the moment with our Wiki - how to get people on there. I still haven't completely ruled it out as I think it would be a really good way of combining exactly what I'm working on at work with my MA. Plus I think there's quite a lot to say. The problem, I think, will be in collecting data. Contributions to the BPMA are still relatively infrequent. At the moment quite a few are prompted by me nagging people I know (for instance, the excellent post by my 89-year-old Grandmother about my Grandfather's experiences working for the Post Office! ) This would make it hard to get enough data together to create a representative sample.

Sub-questions
With the research question above, I can consider a number of the key issues that the BPMA is currently facing or has faced at the start of our Wiki project:

How to tackle legal issues like liability and the potential for abuse
How do you get people to start using the Wiki - how do you market it? What ideas work best in prompting people to create content, what motivates people to contribute?
The practical considerations - monitoring it, correcting errors, how much should you correct
The more conceptual ideas - issues to do with trust (how much do we trust our users to write 'The Truth'?)

Data capture
I started having a think about the best ways to collect data. I think choosing 2-3 of the 'seeds' that I've come up with to prompt people to contribute, and just watching how they evolve over the next couple of months would make good case studies. I could use the '/diff' pages to log the kind of additions that people are making and look at issues to do with whether they're just adding content, or are actually altering what other people have put. It will be interesting to see how much the 1% rule comes into play.

As well as case studies I can use our stats package to analyse some quantative data i.e. which Wiki pages are most looked at, and of these, how many are editing content, rather than just viewing it.

For the more practical challenges, I think I may need to consult other museum professionals working on Wikis. Any volunteers or suggestions? I guess it would be a case of either meeting up with them in person and conducting an interview (probably only feasible if they're in London) or else filling in a questionnaire by email.

BPMA documents and my own experience will also form a large part of the data here.

A skeleton plan
I've started to think as well about a skeleton structure for my dissertation:

Introduction

What are Wikis?
About the BPMA Wiki
How are Wikis being used, both generally, and specifically by museums and the heritage sector
What challenges will the dissertation consider in particular
Why is this subject important?
Methodology of the dissertation

2. Literature review

What are other people saying about Museums using Wikis and the challenges that they face
What are other people writing outside the sector about the issues I will be discussing?
What kind of wider work is out there about Wikis
Where does my work fit in to all of this?

3. Finding - presentation of findings from data capture

4. Discussion - discussion of findings

5. Conclusion

Anxieties
I had a brief period of worry that what I'm writing about isn't hugely new. Jonathan Bowen will discuss some of the specific challenges for museums using Wikis in his Museums and the Web Conference workshop this year. Other work has been done on case studies looking at how people behaved on two different Wikis used in a University context. People have looked at what motivates Wikipedians to contribute. So far, however, I haven't found an in-depth case study that looks at a museum's experience of using a Wiki. Also, it appears that at least some of the Museum Wikis that already exist are being used for internal purposes and not in the same way that we are using a Wiki. I hope that this will make my subject interesting and 'original' enough!

Three Wikis issues - potential for abuse, cooperation and authority

2008-03-13T22:20:00.000Z

I wanted to make a couple of notes and comments about four points that I've come across in my reading today.

An article by John Sutherland in the Education Guardian on 7 Feb 2007 called Something wiki this way comes makes a point which I'm starting to see recurring across various articles about web 2.0 and Wikis. It's to do with authority and the perceived threats that Wikis pose to it.

Sutherland writes:

'The Middlebury ban [on students citing Wikipedia in their academic work] provoked a predictable culture clash: on the one side the whiskery 'old' authoritarian, wielding the censor's scissors [my emphasis], and on the other, the cyber-libertarians. Think Catholic Church, think Galileo, think Index Librorum Prohibitorum.'

I'm interested in this depiction of resistance to the freedom of Wikis in such a negative, old-fashioned light. I think the dangers to authority posed by web 2.0 shouldn't be underestimated, and resistance to them shouldn't be viewed in this mocking, almost dismissive way. That's not to say that I don't think Wikis and Web 2.0 aren't great, but I also think there is a place for museums remaining the 'authority' in certain circumstances.

The other three comments regard, again, Jonathan Bowen's paper for his Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums workshop that he will give at this years Museums and the Web Conference in April.

1. I was interested in the historical overview he gave to cooperation through Wikis: 'Human beings have collaborated throughout their development from the earliest times. Without cooperation, the human race would never have survived; with cooperation, it has thrived. People are well adapted to mutual support through intelligent behaviour when need, but are less well suited to a lone existence.'

I believe this historical perspective to the opportunities that web 2.0 provides were discussed at the Museums Association conference in 2007. As Jane Finnis's blog post on the discussion says: 'UGC is not new, well its not new in the offline world. But it is new in the online worlds and is a very different kettle of fish.'

I'm interested in exploring the fact that web 2.0 and Wikis are just an extension of what museums have always done, and therefore shouldn't be viewed as radical, terrifying and threatening.

2. I was also interested in what Bowen had to say about the potential for abuse on Wikis: 'There is a risk of misuse of a wiki if it is made generally writable. This certainly does happen, but is not as large a problem as might be first envisaged. It is so easy to vandalize a wiki that there is not much incentive to do this in terms of demonstrating expertise.'

3. Was also mildly alarmed by, but also wanted to make a note of, Bowen's comment that: 'While there are many success stories with the use of wikis, it is just as likely, if not more probable, for a wiki to be unsuccessful.' Let's hope the BPMA Wiki doesn't fall into that trap!

Other Museum Wikis

2008-03-13T22:04:00.000Z

At present I just want this to be a place where I can list all the other Museum Wikis, or Wikis related to museums that I come across. If you come across others, please let me know about them in the comments below.

These are the ones listed in Jonathan Bowen's paper for his Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums workshop that he will give at this years Museums and the Web Conference in April:

The general museums Wiki: http://museums.wikia.com
The Museum Virtual World Wiki: http://apps.exploratorium.edu/worlds/wiki
The Newark Museum Wiki: http://www.newarkmuseumpr.org/mwiki/
The Brooklyn Museum's The Dinner Party Wiki: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/about_wiki.php
The Amersham Museum Wiki: http://amershammuseum.pbwiki.com
The MN150 Wiki: http://discovery.mnhs.org/MN150
The Thomas Jefferson Wiki: http://wiki.monticello.org
Placeography: http://placeography.org

During my 'data capture' month, I hope to be able to explore these a bit, see how they tackle some of the issues that the BPMA Wiki is facing etc.

Ideas for getting people to use the BPMA Wiki

2008-03-13T21:27:00.001Z

I want to start a page which I can gradually add to, and which others can make suggestions on, about ideas for increasing the amount of content on the BPMA Wiki. All suggestions are welcome.

Many of these ideas were prompted by an article I read called Wikis in Education: Is Public Better? by Sarah Guth. It made me look at the way I've been approaching trying to get content onto the BPMA Wiki from a different perspective. So far I think I've been concentrating on the principal of user-generated content and so have been offering opportunities for individual users to share their knowledge. This is still valid I think, but it is also worth exploiting the potential for collaboration that Wikis can provide. I want to explore the possibilities of co-authoring of pages.

The article also made me think that we need to offer opportunities that help people learn and improve themselves, as well as helping us out by posting on our Wiki! I had hoped that the opportunity to show off your own knowledge might be adequate but I wonder now whether this isn't enough. How can we offer opportunities that will leave people feeling enriched by their BPMA Wiki experience?

Here are some of the ideas I'm currently thinking about, some of them need some shaping and honing!

Someone, either a BPMA staff member, or a contact we have, writes a factual piece related to a postal topic. We then actively approach a particular group of people that we know to have knowledge on this subject, and encourage them to work together to improve the piece. We could even make sure there were a few intentional errors, either spelling/grammar or factual errors that needed correcting that might help them gain confidence.
I've been toying for a while with ideas involving getting a group of people into a room with a load of computers and helping them to write Wikis pages on the spot. This would hopefully spark the impetus needed to get some content on there in an environment where we were on hand to help and advise if the task seemed daunting.
Following on from the idea of having a captive group of people contributing to the Wiki, we could perhaps start the session with three groups and give each group a topic to write about. We could then rotate the groups so that the other two groups could edit what a first group had written. The result would be three jointly authored Wiki pages which would then be available for others to add to.
I'm wondering whether there is potential to work with other postal or communication museums and archives to co-author a number of pieces using the Wiki first as a collaborative tool between 'museum/archive authorities' but also leaving the pages open for other to add to/edit.
We could offer a service to budding stamp collectors who could upload images of stamps they wanted to know more about and ask questions about them which others could answer. This may at first mean a certain amount of BPMA staff/volunteer time, but we may be able to enlist the help of other philatelic organisations that we are in contact with to help us. This could link in with one of the aims of our London 2010: Festival of stamps initiative - to revivify interest in the hobby of stamp collecting. We could market it through philatelic societies around the country and maybe also through the Stamps in Schools initiative that BPMA sponsor.
Either BPMA or someone at the event could write an account of a BPMA event, and then flyer everyone who attends the event asking them to add to/edit what has been written. This would involve choosing the event quite carefully to make sure it was something worth writing about.
I have thought about offering prizes of some kind for the best entry in a group of entries produced by a project. The difficulty with that, unless it is people we can actually watch creating the pages, is that, without a login, we won't be able to prove which person has created what page.
I'm also pondering the possibilities of trying to build a community of remote Wiki users initially through our E-Newsletter facility. I could then perhaps create a mailing list simply for interested wiki users and contact them whenever new material that I thought might interest them was added to the Wiki, reminding them that they could contribute.
Royal Mail employees at Mount Pleasant sorting office in London (where the BPMA is based) could potentially provide a wealth of information about what it is like to work for the postal service. The computer suites available in the Mount, and the Work Time Learning sessions that all members of staff attend could also provide a good opportunity to test out some of the above ideas for using a captive group of people to spark some Wiki content.

I don't think there's any way that I'm going to be able to try all, or even many of these ideas during the time of my dissertation. Hopefully I'll be able to manage a couple though.

Any thought/suggestions/comments would be gratefully received!

Marieke Guy's 'Wiki or Won't He?' article

2008-03-12T04:34:00.000Z

Guy's, 'Wiki or Won't He? A Tale of Public Sector Wikis' responds to Steven Andrew Mathieson's Guardian unlimited article from February2006 on public sector wikis. Guy's article will be particularly useful for literature review because it shows that the technical aspects of setting up a wiki have been adequately covered, certainly more adequately than I could cover them.

It also makes some interesting points on what Guy feels is stopping a widespread use of Wiki technology in the public sector.

Among the barriers that Guy identifies is the potential reluctance that some organisations may feel when faced with the freedom that Wikis provide. This may have implications for authority, opinion and accountability and liability.

Guy also discusses the practical issue of the time taken to moderate content. I think this is a very real consideration. As the Web Officer, I get notified by email as soon as anyone makes a change to a BPMA Wiki page. I can immediately use a "/diff page" to see what it is they have added, and if necessary, I can revert the change. So far this has proved quite manageable but it may prove more difficult to manage if/when more people start to contribute to the Wiki.

Guy, like others that I've already read, cites the famous John Seigenthaler's entry on Wikipedia which, for a while in 2005, falsely linked Seigenthaler to the Kennedy assassination, as an example of the potential for abuse of Wikis.

Getting people to use a Wiki
Like Tonkin, Guy discussed the 'biggest barrier of all' - 'getting people to use a wiki'. He explains 'We are so used to the idea of Web sites as entities that are controlled by their creators that challenging this control is unnatural.

I was particularly interested in his application of the 1% rule which suggests that 'For every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it ... and the other 89 will just view it.'

Guy also includes some useful discussions of how others are using Wikis, including in learning and in libraries which may well be applicable and interesting for my project.

Tonkin's 'Making the Case for a Wiki'

2008-03-11T20:14:00.000Z

One of the first pieces that I have read for my dissertation is: Tonkin's 'Making the Case for a Wiki'.

The section I found most interesting was that titled 'Issues in Deployment'. Of particular interest:

'Even in the event of a wiki being made available, there is no guarantee that the opportunity will be seen as useful.' Tonkin feels that the difficulties include 'communication difficulties, lack of common ground, status issues in human relationships.'

Interestingly she links the likelihood of posting on a wiki to both gender and aggression: 'it is justifiable to theorise that wiki use -- and indeed motivation to contribute -- is likely to vary by gender, status and relationship to the apparent community.' and 'one might imagine that correcting a wiki page is an act that comes easier to certain individuals than to others, and one in which aggression plays a significant role.'

My first gut reaction was that it seemed unlikely that this link to gender be true. In my experience men might be slightly more likely to spend time on the internet, and therefore might be more likely to come across a Wiki. I don't think they would necessarily, however, be more likely to contribute than women. I'm also slightly uncomfortable with the word 'aggression'. I think those that contribute to a Wiki are likely to be confident, forthright and perhaps opinionated, but not necessarily aggressive. It will be interested to watch the contributions to the BPMA Wiki for signs of aggressive behaviour! I'd also be interested to hear others' thoughts on Tonkin's comments.

Tonkin also stresses the immense importance of getting to know your audience - 'if you cannot imagine your target group conversing comfortably together under normal circumstances, the chances are fairly slim that they will imagine they can either ... much less online.'

I think under certain circumstances BPMA audiences would be quite capable of conversing on various subjects. The challenge for us is more likely to be, I think, encouraging our core audience, many of whom are over 60, to embrace this new technology.

Ross Parry's recommendation to proceed

2008-03-05T19:56:00.000Z

My dissertation pack arrived today, complete with instructions and guidelines on writing my dissertation, and, most importantly, a detailed response to my proposal by Ross Parry. This concluded, crucially, with the very welcome sentence 'I recommend the applicant and this project for Masters research' - phew!

Ross described my proposed subject as 'a timely and potentially important piece of reserach into how museums might use wikis'. He noted that 'there is potential for genuine innovation within this project' - which was very encouraging!

He feels that my decision to focus on Wikis as a specific aspect of Web 2.0, and The British Postal Museum & Archive's (BPMA)'s Wiki specially as a good one as it limits the topic and stops it from becoming unmanageable.

Ross suggests that during my preliminary reading around the subject, I should seek to refine my research questions into one single, challenging question. As an example, (but not suggesting I should necessarily use this one) he puts forward 'Can Wikis really work for museums? The practical, technical and conceptual challenges of Web 2.0 technology for the BPMA'.

In addition he advised me to 'marshal more systematically [the] key ideas and themes.' e.g. the practical, conceptual and technical themes in the example title.

As recommended reading, Ross has suggested the online proceedings of the 'Museums and the Web' conferences, especially those of the last few years.

In terms of data gathering, Ross thinks that I need to get a clear idea pretty quickly of what I'm trying to achieve with the project as this will affect whether or not, and how much I need to gather user evaluation data etc.

Luckily Ross didn't foresee there being any ethical risks to my project (which is why I got my proposal back earlier than some people I think). He in facts suggests that I could even consider looking into the ethics of wikis (specifically user-generated content).

So there we are, permission to start on the project that will no doubt dominate much of my waking (and perhaps some of my sleeping) life for the next six months. I'm taking a week off from my MA this week. I'm still recovering from the final essay and I need some time to clean my flat, do some washing, and turn my head around! I expect I might do the odd bit of reading here and there but mostly I'm having a rest.

I'm actually quite excited about starting this project though. Unlike the prescribed essays all the way through the MA, it's a subject that I've been able to choose myself, and can shape into whatever I want to make it. It's a topic I'm becoming increasingly interested in and I feel quite fired by it. Whether or not I still feel like that by the end of August will be another question - if you're interested in finding out then keep reading! :-)

Next week I'll start doing some reading. I hope to comment on and summarise it as I go along on here.

Starting my dissertation on Museum Wikis

2008-02-27T20:48:00.000Z

I have submitted a dissertation proposal for the final stage of my MA in Museum Studies by Distance Learning. It's going to be broadly about museum wikis. For those of you that don't know, a Wiki is defined on Sandy Berger's Techionary as 'From a Hawaiian word that means "quick", a wiki is a website that can be edited quickly by Web visitors'. At The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) where I work, we've just launched a new Wiki which I am in charge of. This puts me in quite a strong position to talk about the practical issues that face museums wanting to use Wiki technology.

I had discussed this with my personal tutor and as a result submitted a proposal based around comparing a Museum Wiki experience with a real-world museum experience, and discussing issues about authority etc. I had identified certain key research questions:

Is interactivity and web 2.0 technology the future for the process of meaning-making and storytelling in museums?
Can wiki technology help audiences learn and engage with a museum and its website by getting them actively involved in creating content?
In a broader context, how does interactivity in museums benefit visitors?
How are wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies changing the face of modern museums?
Does interactivity have implications for the ‘authoritative’ nature of the museum?
Is this wider cultural context of audience participation really what audiences want?

These were quite general questions and had strayed slightly from my original conception of a dissertation basically about the BPMA Wiki.

An encouraging conversation with Ross Parry on the phone last week in fact confirmed that I could do just that. It was great to discuss some ideas with Ross and hear his enthusiasm about our Wiki and my dissertation proposal.

He suggested that I treat it as a story of how the BPMA have got to the position we are currently at with the Wiki and the issues that have arisen. He suggestedI start by taking stock of web 2.0 in general and the stage it is at. I could then write about 2,000 words specifically about Wikis generally both inside and outside the museum and heritage sector. Following on from this, he thought I could talk about the constraints and pressures that face museums wanting to work with Wikis and how Wikis work with museological ambition. This might encompass issues like authority, content and digital assets.

The next chapter could then say 'ok, if a museum wanted to build one of these Wikis, how would they do so? Why might they do so? What rules would they need to apply? What precedents are there. This would bring in the practical examples of the BPMA Wiki and the issues that we have tackled and are tackling.

I'm waiting now for Ross's official write up on my proposal and now I'm itching to get started. I've just got to finish my final essay this weekend and then I can really get my teeth into it. I'm starting to build up a bookmark list of all the articles out there that I want to read - there are so many of them! I'm also starting to keep an eye on key blogs that seem to regularly comment on Museums and the Web, particularly Web 2.0 and Wikis.

The ones I am currently looking at are:

Frankie Roberto's blog
Open Objects
Foe Romeo

and a few others. I'd be interested to know of any others I should be keeping an eye on.

The next stage will be receiving Ross's comments and official sanction to begin my research. I'm on tenterhooks now until that arrives! Watch this space!