In a gathering that could ostensibly have been about how technology and social media have changed the landscape of museum practice, I was so thrilled to find that almost all of our discussion focused on how museums and libraries can make significant and lasting changes in our local communities. Working in a museum, I’ve taken that as my context, but many of these issues have important corollaries in libraries as well.

Perhaps the most useful change in my own thinking is an understanding that the era of participatory culture is not a new thing, but rather – enhanced by recent trends in technology – one that has its roots in the very reasons why museums exist in the first place.  While technology, social media, and mobile adoption influence the ways that we engage museum audiences and the expectations they bring into the museum, an attitude that invites participation has the potential to transform individual and community experiences that enhance the public value of the work we do.

Why is your community better off because it has a museum?

I’m challenged by the courage and convictions of colleagues I met in Salzburg, who take a commitment to their local community very seriously. Whether helping neighbors recover from devastating storms in the Philippines, reaching out to the homeless and poor communities in Sao Paulo, or bringing libraries to rural Kenya on the backs of camels, I found myself inspired to think about how a museum in Indianapolis can learn from such tangible demonstrations of public value.

In his book “Making Museums Matter,” Stephen Weil talked about a mandate for museums to demonstrate real value within our communities:

“Why is your community better off because it has a museum? [The answer] must necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence.”

The Occupy Museums protests demonstrate a growing frustration with the way museums see their role in today's society

This topic surfaced repeatedly during the conversations about participatory culture in Salzburg. The consensus among the group coalesced in an assertion that museums have an inherent mission to deliver public value driven by a universal right to cultural access.

It is clear to me that although museums have long enjoyed a privileged place in the public’s confidence, societal and economic changes, as well as the public’s expectation of museums, have significantly augmented the landscape of public value.  New questions about what constitutes public value and who sees the benefits of that value need to be considered seriously by those museums that want to see real impact from their effort. Lest we think that the value of museums is secure, the nascent ”occupy museums” movement reminds us that a growing frustration exists with the way museums think about their role in society.

The real test for public value is not what the museum says it is, but rather the value attributed to us by our communities and stakeholders. Simply declaring that the museum is valuable isn’t a substitute for actually demonstrating that value on a consistent basis.

At the heart of the issue is the museum community’s willingness to take a harsh look in the mirror and ask hard questions about whether or not we actually do a good job of bringing value to our constituents. In my opinion, a more wholehearted embrace of participatory culture may be the tonic we need to really delve into the ways that museums can change their current practice.  To realize the benefits of participatory culture will require an openness to welcome new opinions about the museum.

Serhan Ada, from Istanbul Bilgi University had a wonderful way of framing the difference. He notes that, “Participation occurs when someone welcomed as a guest feels as though they have become a host.” Are visitors to your museum truly guests in this sense? Perhaps the benefits of participatory culture are most easily witnessed with such a shared sense of ownership.

Access is about more than just digitization

When museums talk about access, we typically mean one of two kinds of accessibility: 1) The digital availability of collection objects with correct metadata and quality digital imaging, and 2) a set of provisions to accessing collections for those with physical or cognitive disabilities. Throughout the conversation in Salzburg, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that my own ideas about access are too small.

As we developed the concept more completely, it was clear to me that a truly accessible museum will provide appropriate and comprehensive support to the physical, intellectual, and attitudinal facets of a museum visit that allows guests to engage most successfully. Of these facets, the attitudinal changes in museums seem to be the most challenging. As we discussed in the previous blog posts, are museums really ready to embrace and value the inclusion of all audiences?

In Brazil, Gabriela Aidar works with the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo in the museum’s department of social inclusion. Rather than focusing only on those audiences the museum is already successful at reaching, Gabriela decided to pursue so-called “non-audiences” who are typically marginalized by museums and therefore miss out on the rich cultural offerings contained there. During her presentation in Salzburg, Gabriela highlighted a number of quotes that really piqued my thinking. First, from Annamari Laaksonen of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies:

“Participation in cultural activities, together with access to them, forms the backbone of human rights pertaining to culture. Access is a precondition for participation and participation is indispensable to ensure the exercising of human rights.”
Laaksonen, Annamari, Revista Observatório Itaú Cultural, n.11 (jan./apr.2011). São Paulo, SP: Itaú Cultural, 2011, pg. 50.

“… any organization that is not working to break down barriers to access is actively maintaining them. Neutrality is not possible.”(p. 34)

“If social inclusion means anything, it means actively seeking out and removing barriers, of acknowledging that people who have been left out for generations need additional support in a whole variety of ways to enable them to exercise their rights to participate in many of the facilities that the better off and better educated take for granted.”(p. 37)
O’Neill, Mark, “The good enough visitor”. In: Sandell, Richard (ed.) Museums, society, inequality. London & New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 37.

These points have really challenged my own thinking about how museums seek and pursue our local audiences. I think it’s true that there are whole segments of individuals that don’t feel the same right to access the museum as those of us among the “better off and better educated.” There’s frequent coverage in the press about the consequences of a widening “technology gap,” but is there also a corresponding “culture gap” that carries many of the same consequences? Much of the beauty and power of museums lies in their ability to level the playing fields of society and to offer a place for discourse and exchange with diverse audiences. Sadly, much of this potential beauty is latent and waiting to be activated by museums with a vision to change the status quo.

The changing role of Authority

All this talk about participatory culture eventually ends up begging an important question about how the changes we are witnessing will eventually impact the role and authority of museums. The care and creation of knowledge has always been an important part of the mission of museums, and continues to be so.  However, with today’s ubiquitous access to information that is afforded by the web, museums are keenly aware that we are not the only producers of content related to our own collections, and many times not even the best source of content. Perhaps this has always been true, but technical advances are only highlighting a reality that has long been hidden.  In any case, museums are struggling to understand their relationship to an ecosystem of information that sometimes defies categorization and authority.

While discrete sources of information seem to be ever expanding, it’s reasonable to assert that unique and high-quality sources are becoming relatively more scarce. In an information landscape that privileges the popular over the credible, low-circulation-high-quality results can be easily lost.  Couple this idea with what’s been written about the state of digital media literacy and critical thinking skills among the general public and you quickly see the problem.  While it’s never been easier to discover a diverse variety of information about virtually any topic, discriminating quality between those sources is becoming more and more difficult.

This is – in my opinion – is where content specialists in museums can play an important part. Reference librarians are specifically trained in how to support researchers and scholars who dig through a litany of resources to find the information they need.  These skills transfer directly into a similar role for information-seeking on the internet.  The principles and practice remain the same, even though some of the tools may be different.  Museums would be well served to include their library staff as consultants to efforts of web design and information delivery both online and in the galleries, as they are perhaps better equipped than most staff to make sense of such a diversity of source material.

Secondly, as the true content experts in the museum, curators have an incredibly significant role to play in connecting both scholars and the general audience with the important concepts, facts, and narratives that drive the mission of the museum. With their knowledge of primary sources and their expertise with the museum’s collection, curators can be an incredible facilitator for the audience, especially when well supported by an enthusiastic staff of educators.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem terribly different than the standard operating procedure for museums. The difference, however, lies in an attitudinal shift among museum staff concerning an approach to authority as it relates to participatory culture. An authoritarian approach requires the museum to assert its authority by definition and then leaves us scratching our heads when the crowd of followers starts to thin. Conversely, an authoritative approach demonstrates the expertise of the museum’s staff in a participatory context that recognizes the museum’s role in facilitating access to cultural objects and information. The difference between authoritarian and authoritative is subtle, but crucial. In the latter case, authority is ascribed to the museum by the audience, and not the other way around. You may notice that this is similar to the earlier assertions about public value. In both cases, the audience is the central determiner of value, but the museum is responsible for building an appreciation for cultural access and preservation.

 Final thoughts

The shifts in our culture that result from a technology and information surge are pervasive and persistent. A rise in participatory expectations among communities around the world offers a variety of opportunities and challenges for museums to deal with. I’m hopeful that the conversations spurred by the Salzburg Global Seminar and the online conversations concerning these issues will prove as challenging for you as they have for me. Museums and libraries are home to the best stories the world has to offer, how we determine to manage, share, and cultivate those stories will determine the relevance and value we bring to the public in years to come.

The view from our meeting room. An amazing setting to think about the future of libraries and museums.

Having completed the first full day of the Salzburg Global Seminar – discussing the role of museums and libraries in an era of participatory culture – I’m now fully convinced about why such gatherings are so important to the future relevance and impact of our libraries and museums.  Comprising individuals from 24 countries and a variety of professional backgrounds, the group has spent its first days considering the evolving impact that participatory culture is having on our practice, and at times returning to the very first principles of what it means to be a library or museum.

For those of you who are interested in the excellent and continuing discussion happening in Salzburg, you should go to check out the excellent work by Michael Stephens on his blog “Tame the Web”. Michael has some great coverage of the proceedings and brings a valuable perspective from libraries to the conversation.

For my part, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight three questions that, as a museum professional,  stood out to me as being important for us to fully flesh out as we consider what museums might become in the next decade.

1. How can museums aid in addressing the socio-economic consequences of a widening technology gap?

A number of participants spoke eloquently about the social and economic consequences that impact marginalized communities who lack the same easy-access to technology that many of us take for granted.  This lack of access means a lack of opportunity to engage with the cultural evolutions of content produced online and critical dialogs taking place on blogs, twitter and cultural websites. The prevalence of information access is contributing to a changing set of skills and digital media literacy that cannot be replaced by other means.  The ability to sift, process, remix, and reformulate thoughts and critical argument is – quite specifically – a new form of literacy that will increasingly determine the opportunities and inclusion afforded to the privileged.

This fact has been well documented in the literature, and for those of you eager to learn more, I would recommend reading Henry Jenkins’ work – particularly his white-paper on “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” (PDF).

New to me, was the realization that addressing the technology gap only delays the problem until the next disruptive technology arrives.  While we don’t yet know what that technology is, it’s a safe bet that the privileged among us will have access to it before many in our local communities do.

Since museums, and art museums in particular, posses such rich collections of artifacts, media, and artistic communication, are there ways that we can use those assets to address the underlying issues of media literacy? This opportunity further reinforces the value of museums’ existing efforts to build critical thinking skills into a wide range of programming efforts. Addressing the root skills at the heart of digital media literacy can work alongside efforts to provide comprehensive digital access to begin to positively impact and bridge that gap.

2. Do museums really want to take participatory culture seriously?

After thinking about and discussing the topic for quite some time now, it’s clear to me that the opportunities afforded to us by the changing expectations of participatory culture are resulting in a series of choices that museums will need to make regarding whether or not we will embrace participatory culture as an integral part of our museums.

To be intellectually genuine, it seems that there is scarcely any middle ground.  Either the museum will determine that there is inherent value to the opinions, expertise, and efforts of their invested communities or it will not. For museums that choose to embrace a conversational engagement with their audiences about the nature, origins, and personal interpretations of their collections, what remains to be seen is how the evolution of the authoritative voice of museum experts resolves its place in the discussion.

I, for one, believe that it’s entirely consistent to wholeheartedly pursue the creation of scholarly knowledge about our collections, and at the same time welcome the diversity of interpretation brought to the museum by the general public. As a number of the contributors to part I of this article pointed out though, truly owning up to this decision will have far reaching consequences for the sustainability of these efforts in the long term.  I’m not sure that most museums really recognize how profoundly this might impact their daily operations. Time will tell.

3. Is it possible for art museums to catalyze community conversation and action to addresses issues that matter to our local and global communities?

Lastly, I’m intrigued by the possibility that art museums can begin to leverage their deep collections and the changes in participatory media to promote meaningful conversations with communities about how to deal with a variety of social challenges.

The polarizing effects of politics have destroyed any opportunity for genuine civic discourse, and the educational system is so over burdened with curricular metrics that there is a dearth of opportunity for reasonable and well considered citizens to discuss the important issues of our time with empathy and respect. Artists have certainly been a bellwether for social discourse throughout our past. Is it possible that museums might emerge as a useful venue for this kind of discussion, and at the same time reinforce the relevance of the art in our collections to the daily lives of our constituents?

This is an area that I plan on reading and studying more about myself when I return to Indianapolis. In particular, I’ll be picking up Lois Silverman’s book entitled “The Social Work of Museums”. I’m certain that I could learn a lot from many of you as well, and look forward to thinking together about whether this is a valuable role for museums to play.

With the hustle and bustle of life and meetings swirling around us all, it’s a rare occasion that we get to step outside of that pace and reflect on “big issues.” Contemplating an approach for the challenges that face museums given the changes in popular culture can make the difference between an organization that significantly impacts its community for good, and those that simply succeed at keeping the doors open.  Given the economic challenges many museums are encountering, keeping the doors open is – in and of itself – a challenge.  I’m a firm believer that times of challenge can be the best possible times to seize the opportunities at hand and make big changes.

I’m grateful for an opportunity to join a small group of museum and library experts in Salzburg next week for a meeting at the Salzburg Global Seminar entitled, “Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.”  I’ve agreed to participate and blog about my experiences from my perspective as a museum executive and a technologist.  I thought that in the spirit of “participatory culture,” I could ask a number of my friends and colleagues their opinions about the biggest challenges facing museums and libraries today.  I’ll bring those ideas and insights to Salzburg with me and represent those thoughts in the discussions there.  Please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter (#museumchallenges) or post your thoughts in the comments here.

The responses I’ve received via email and twitter have been pretty amazing! Several of my colleagues pointed out that museums are still adjusting to a perceived shift in our relationships with visitors.  Museums want to engage visitors and provide a variety of deep experiences, but don’t quite know how to sustain those efforts over a long period of time.

Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology from the Brooklyn Museum of Art asks the critical questions about how museums can build consistency in their efforts of engagement.

“How do we create engaging experiences consistently, so that visitors feel participation is part of the overall culture of the institution?  I’ve seen a lot of one-offs, where there’s a burst of activity around one single project, but the challenge is creating a consistency so that valued participation is always part of the museum experience.  In addition, these projects too often just exist online and not within the walls of the institution when people visit. The challenge is creating an overall experience that works both online and off and one that consistently allows visitors to participate in meaningful ways.”

Rich Cherry, Director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, points out that this goal of engagement and interaction with visitors both online and in the gallery carries with it some different expectations from public audiences and funding agencies that make planning for sustainability more difficult on the museum.

“Museums are in a difficult transition phase because of changing media consumption.  While young audiences are consuming social media and online content, older audiences are making that transition more slowly.   Unlike past shifts in media, this one is more interactive and limits the ability to simply re-purpose content.  This creates unique staffing and budgetary issues that are compounded by the recent economic downturn.  Funders are pushing museums to engage these new audience behaviors while not recognizing that a significant audience does not use these new methods and [museums] must support a dual track for some time to come.”

Nina Simon, Executive Director of the Museum of Art and History Santa Cruz, makes the point in her book about The Participatory Museum that,

“Participatory projects are like gardens; they require continual tending and cultivation. They may not demand as much capital spending and pre-launch planning as traditional museum projects, but they require ongoing management once they are open to participants. This means shifting a larger percentage of project budgets towards operation, maintenance, and facilitation staff.”

In addition to this fact, when I asked Nina what she saw as the challenges for museums seeking to embrace a participatory culture, she raised an important issue about museums’ strategy for funding these initiatives. Nina asks, “How do [museums] use participatory techniques to support more diverse and equitable use of our resources (as opposed to providing more for the people we already serve well)?”

It was a happy coincidence that Nina also covered a similar topic on her Museum 2.0 blog recently (What are the Most Important Problems in Our Field?, October 3, 2011).  I highly recommend reading through many of the excellent comments in response to that article for more great insight on the topic.

Ed Rodley, from the Museum of Science in Boston echoed some similar thoughts in questioning whether museums have really come to grips with the profound changes that we have all experienced in the rise of digital culture and the ubiquitous access to information afforded by the web.

“The digital challenge is that we are still conflicted about how to be citizens of a global information network. When all digital content has the capacity to reach people all over the planet, why are we still building websites based on the 1995 paradigm of “make a virtual simulacrum of the building”? The sway museums could have in this ecosystem is vast, given the breadth and depth of content we sit on.
…
Digital is ceasing to be a separate thing, and is becoming (if it hasn’t already become) part of the information ecosystem that our visitors use daily. [Museum] practice certainly doesn’t reflect this yet. How can we re-imagine ourselves in such a way that museums not just recognize, but embrace the online and the digital in ways that remain true to our core competencies as repositories for authentic experiences with culture?”

I was curious about what the potential overlap between these issues might be for libraries and museums.  In many ways it seems that some of the challenges addressed here are similar for both kinds of institutions and others are more unique.  I asked Martin Kalfatovic, Associate Director for the Digital Services Division of the Smithsonian Libraries for questions he would like to ask at the forum.  Martin asks,

“How can libraries, museums, and archives more effectively collaborate to cross-pollinate their collections? (i.e. a museum object with the associated printed text and archival materials that led to its collection). Can participatory culture (crowdsourcing) be used to help make links or show relationships that are not otherwise possible?

He raises an interesting issue about potential areas of collaboration that exist between these organizations that are as yet, unexploited.  These institutions have recognized relatively recently that many of the challenges faced by one kind of organization are faced in some way by all the others.  Collectively these “memory institutions” face questions about the changing role of authority, scholarship, and access in an age that offers vast amounts of information at the click of a button.  As Martin points out,

“How does the role of the museum library, particularly in the area of reference, change when museums begin to bring in crowdsourced content? Can the library play a knowledge management role for this content and perform the same information curation that is done with traditional print and archival sources?”

Rodley also touches on the new challenges of being source of authority in our current culture.

“Participatory culture doesn’t do away with the need for authority, but it will privilege a different kind of authority, a more transparent, more engaged one.  I believe people still want a trusted voice they can listen to, particularly in the digital realm.

… [Museums] must be less like the Great Oz, hiding behind our artifice and erudition. That doesn’t mean that we abandon our position, but it means we have make being questioned, being challenged, being called out, even being heckled part of what it means to be a museum. To be an authority in the current century will require a level of engagement that we can scarcely imagine.”

The pervasive nature of the web and information changes the game for museums and libraries. What is the relevance of an object in our collection, or a book in the stacks, if the information about that artifact can be accessed from the phone in my pocket?  This is not a trumped up argument about whether or not people will come to museums if we put great images of our collection online, but a more substantial concern about the pipeline of knowledge management that defines the collections we care about.

Kalfatovic continues,

As increasing amounts of library content becomes information online, where will the museum of artifacts and the museum of books as artifacts merge/overlap?”

It seems that the very nature of the artifact, or the object that is collected is changing.  What will this mean for museums and libraries who – in addition to creating new knowledge – are dedicated to preserving artifacts of history and culture?  Cherry points out an interesting conundrum,

“The changes we are witnessing in technology and culture are the ways cultural institutions work together. One seemingly benign artifact of this current age is going to cause enormous headaches in the years to come: email.  30 years ago when a museum director, or curator worked with an artist/collector/dealer/estate on an exhibition; that correspondence was captured on paper and was likely to be physically archived.  Today that correspondence is taking place in email and is unlikely to be archived effectively, if at all. The amount of information that is lost in that process is terrible for future researchers.  Museums and libraries need to research this problem on two fronts:  1) finding cheap effective ways for museums to create long term archives of electronic messages and 2) developing software capable of mining these messages to collate information about significant events in an organizations historical record.”

A litany of challenges to be sure! Ultimately, there seemed to be consensus among everyone I talked to that the place in our culture reserved for museums and libraries is changing to be one that is more integrated and important to the lives of the communities we live in.

Rodley,

“Making museums places that you go to in order to be an active citizen is something I’d love to see more museums attempt. That means making space available, making time available, and making our ears available to hear what matters to our constituents. Rephrased as a question, I’d say ‘How can we re-shape our buildings, staffs, and offerings in ways that support our local communities, not as temples where visitors come to consume culture, but more like agoras – meeting-places where our visitors can come to exchange ideas and culture?’”

For many of you that work in the field of museums, libraries, and archives, I’m sure that much of what I’m saying is repeating a familiar refrain.  I’m very impressed by the level of conversation that I encounter from my peers when we talk about these topics.  With very few exceptions, most of my colleagues understand that museums and libraries face a relevance issue to demonstrate the continued and enduring value of what we do in the face of changing cultural norms and expectations. The inherent value of museum and library collections is not a sure thing.  As Nina points out, it’s a garden that we tend through lots of hard work towards a set of common goals.

The key question then, is whether or not we are ready to do that hard work of authentic engagement? Or, are we instead seeking the ‘quick-hit’ payoffs to be gleaned from the current crop of cultural fads? Nancy Proctor is Head of Mobile Strategy and Initiatives for the Smithsonian Institution and puts the question in context:

“The move towards a more participatory culture in museums has been underway for a couple of decades now, and seems finally to be impacting daily practice among museum professionals on a wide scale. However even as we achieve greater openness, transparency, and collaboration among museums and “the people formerly known as the audience,” I am increasingly wondering if we are truly changing the fundamental structure of museums within society, or simply putting new faces into power in the old system? It won’t take us far if, to use a simplistic shorthand of stereotypes, “old guard” academics, curators, directors and other power-holders in the existing hegemony are simply swapped out for perhaps younger, more social media-savvy, museum “rock stars.” This may offer a temporary “revolution,” but is not a truly sustainable radical museum practice and will last only until the next group of upstarts overturns the establishment in their own turn. Modernism and capitalism of course depend on this kind of illusion of “progress” through revolution, because each depends on a constant supply of fresh “innovation” to fuel the markets. But I think we need to be very suspicious of the fetishization of the new in this period where there is a constant stream of shiny new toys to dazzle us with the promise of starting over in a Brave New World. Let’s make sure we don’t deceive ourselves, like Columbus discovering America, but rather undertake the much harder, less sexy, but ultimately more sustainable task of radically restructuring our museums and practices even as we work within those very institutions.”

Thanks to all my friends and colleagues for chiming in on the topic!  I’m very much looking forward to continuing the conversation with you all in the comments, on Twitter (#museumchallenges), and in Salzburg next week. Stay tuned for new posts and insights as the conversation progresses!

Since the meeting, we’ve been collecting thoughts and integrating the suggestions of the group into the formalized language description of TourML.  In preparation for the next Museum Mobile Summit on Wed Oct 26 in Austin, TX, we’ve updated and reworked the TourML specification to address the results of the first meeting.

I’ll say that TourML is feeling much more complete and much more like the real-deal.  As always, we’d love a lot of comment and input from the community, and would love to hear about ways you would like to use mobile tours in your museum.  We’re already seeing a number of museums building and creating mobile tours using the early version of TourML and the vendor community has been very supportive of the effort as well.

For those technical and metadata experts in the crowd,  you can download a new version of the TourML XMLSchema or browse it from the source repository for the TAP project you can also check-out a sample instance of some valid XML for a tour.  In the rest of this blog post, I’ll detail the changes that have been made to the standard, and will enumerate the reasons for those changes and some questions that still remain for discussion at the next summit.

Stops and Assets:

Perhaps the biggest change in the spec as a result of the initial meeting is the addition of Assets along with Stops as the basic elements that hold content in TourML.  Originally, Stops of different types each held links to their own media assets.  An AudioStop contained a link to an audio file, and so on.  By separating Stops and Assets we achieve a number of important features in the spec that we weren’t able to before.

Each Stop may contain links to multiple Assets which may be of mixed type.  This lets us create new types of Stops that potentially mix different kinds of media together. (i.e. a slideshow with an audio narrative running)  Also, assets for a stop may be defined that relate primarily to the design and user experience of the tour and not just the content of that tour.  For example, header images, icons, backgrounds and sound effects can all be defined as Assets and attached to a particular stop.  In order to tell the difference between how each of these assets should be used, we’ve also added some additional attributes to those Assets that describe their use on the stop.  In addition we’ve added the ability to indicate that an asset should be automatically played when a stop is initiated (“autoplay”).  This would be a great way to start an audio file playing as soon as the visitor reaches the stop.  This removes the need for the old GOTO feature of the initial TourML specification, and is a much stronger way of moving forward.

No More StopGroups:

In the original spec, StopGroups were used as containers for stops and were the way we conceived of linking those stops together for the navigation of a tour.  It was pretty clear in the initial Museum Mobile Summit that this concept was confusing to many.  What we came up with instead, is the concept of a StopReference.  Similar to AssetReferences (described above), a Stop may define a number of StopReferences, or pointers to other stops that a user should be able to use for navigation from that Stop.  This allows the tour author to create a narrative path of stops through the tour, and to offer choices to the visitor about what they might want to do next.  Like the AssetReference, StopReferences have some hints included with them as well.  Using the “navhints” attribute on a StopReference allows the author to designate particular stops as the “first”, “last”, “next” and “previous” stops for navigation.  Therefore, if the tour author wanted a “book-like” experience on a tour where each “page” in the book is a Stop… they could use the navhints attribute of a StopReference to indicate what the next and previous pages are.

There is still some thinking to be done regarding the implementation of the “autoplay” and “navhints” attributes.  It would be great to get some feedback from the community on those ideas and what kinds of values we might want to include with those attributes.

Multi-lingual

An obvious area of interest in the first Mobile Summit was the ability to create multi-lingual tours without needing to completely segment and copy the tour for each different language.  To address this we’ve added a number of language specific elements to Assets and Stops which allow the author to create one or more versions of the content in a stop but using different languages.  We think this is a pretty clean and easily understood way of including multi-lingual content in your next mobile tour.  Take a look through the spec and let us know if we’ve missed any elements that should support multiple languages!

Object Collections

One thing that the original TourML specification never addressed was the ability to include links to objet collections in a tour.  I know this is an application that many people in the community are using right now, and it needs to be supported well in any successful specification.

After asking around a bit and doing some research on my own, it seems the that LIDO specification offers a pretty good solution for describing many different kinds of object collections.  Rather than invent something new ourselves that wouldn’t be nearly as good, or have nearly the amount of thought as LIDO, we think it would be a good idea to reference that specification in TourML, and use it as the default object specification for museum tours.

This is a point that we’ll really want to talk over at the next Mobile Summit, and I hope some folks who are interested in object description (and maybe LIDO) will join us and help us to integrate it correctly.

Rights

As we all know too well, securing the appropriate rights and permissions for media we use in the tours can be a bit of a process.  To make sure that none of that information gets lost, we’ve added some elements to the TourML specification that seek to describe rights information and how it is represented in the tour.  We’ve even added the ability to assign a watermark to different assets on the tour.  Like many new things in the spec, AssetRights can be defined once and reused across many different assets in the tour.

Positions

As more and more of us create tours which rely on the location of users to correctly experience the content, it’s becoming more and more critical to correctly indicate the place of a stop during the tour.  We’ve added a Position element to the spec which exists on every Stop.  This position element can be used to record the x, y, and z position of the stop which can then, in turn, be rendered to a map or some other user interface for the visitor.  So whether you want to locate the new gallery on the third floor of the museum, or the latitude and longitude of where that artifact came from, you can now encode that information in TourML.  We’re also experimenting with the GML specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium to see if that will provide a nice way to tie museum experiences into other location based experiences.

Next Steps

While we’ve taken some great strides towards a more usable specification, we’ve still got a long way to go.  We really need the input of museums and vendors who will look at the descriptions and let us know where it works and where it doesn’t for their particular application.  Again, we’re shooting for a very practical 80% rule at this point in the game (see the previous blog posting), and also to be flexible enough to make TourML work for describing your next tour. Want to help?  Here are some things you can do to help move the process along!

1. Read The Spec: It would be great to get a lot of eyes on this version of the specification as it incorporates a lot of the input from the first meeting.  For those that are not as comfortable looking at XML, we will soon update the text description of all the Elements and Fields on the Museum Mobile Wiki
2. Attend the Meeting: While it might not be possible for everyone who’s interested to attend the next meeting, we really hope that lots of you will join us.  The meeting is FREE and takes place during the pre-conference workshops at the MCN Conference in Austin.  Thanks to the Museum Computer Network Board and Program Committee for agreeing to host this meeting for us!
3. Give us Your Two Cents: Don’t be shy!  Speak up and ask your questions, give us your suggestions about how we can improve what we’re doing.  We completely re-wrote our first version based on the input for those who attended the London meeting.  If we need to, we’ll do it again, and again until we get it right.  We need input from museums, software vendors, academics and enthusiasts to attempt to synthesize something that represents the majority of what we need.  We’ll do our best to smooth out the wrinkles and we promise not to bite!
4. Give us Your Examples: I know that many of you (vendors in particular) have your own XMLSchemas that you’re already using to build your tours with.  We’d really like to see examples of those and how they’re constructed.  This might be a shortcut to figuring out hard problems, finding consistency, and ensuring that the features you need make it into the final spec.  Please post any sample files or schemas to the Museum Mobile Wiki, or mail them to me directly and I’ll put them up for you.

Thanks, and see you in Austin!  -Rob

As we roll out a new security program, we say goodbye to 33 full-time and 23 part-time security officers whose positions have been eliminated. These individuals served with diligence and care, and they helped to keep our visitors and our artwork safe for years, and in some cases decades. Unfortunately, we were unable to meet the objectives of enhancing security at 100 Acres; responding to potentially serious incidents that arise on the IMA campus, and reducing the cost of the security program with the previous staffing model.

What is the new program?

The new model enables protection of visitors and artwork through its three distinct job functions: campus police officers; communications and monitoring specialists; and visitor assistants.

1. A key component of the program is the campus police force made up of 14 officers. The officers, who are reserve officers of area police forces, are employees of the IMA, and they provide patrols of the campus as well as security to the museum. Their patrol cars and uniforms identify them as police officers, and their presence also will serve to deter crime. Should an incident that requires a police response occur at the IMA, we no longer need to call the police and wait for them to respond. Our campus police officers are able to take police reports and follow other police protocols.
2. The communications and monitoring function uses an elaborate electronic surveillance system to monitor museum galleries and outdoor areas.
3. The visitor assistants are trained ambassadors of the museum experience; they are posted throughout museum galleries and the rest of the campus. The visitor assistant staff, which is composed of students from a federally funded work study program at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), will provide enhanced customer service as they will be available to answer questions or assist visitors throughout the IMA’s 152 acres.

We also have added two Emergency Medical Technicians who are able to respond to medical needs that arise in 100 Acres or elsewhere on the campus.

Why did we implement a new security program?

1. This summer we opened 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The park has been filled with visitors since opening day, and it requires an ongoing security presence.
2. The IMA has a reputation for being a safe place. Regrettably, we’d seen some incidents that could threaten that reputation.  We’ve had numerous car break-ins, and we had been unable to curb that problem, despite increased security patrols.
3. The security department makes up a large percentage of the IMA’s payroll, and in an effort to budget efficiently and effectively, we had to substantially reduce the cost of our security personnel budget.

This new model for the IMA’s security department was envisioned by Nick Cameron, the IMA’s Chief Operating Officer and was thoroughly vetted by IMA staff and public safety and security professionals. For several weeks, Martin Whitfield, the IMA’s Director of Security, has worked with a team to staff the new positions, and to ensure that all team members are properly trained.

As times have changed and our museum and its campus have grown, so too must our security measures.  This new program is necessary in order to better protect the 152 acre campus.  Implementing the new program was a process not undertaken lightly. We are sincerely grateful for the years of service that our security officers dedicated to the IMA, and we are providing outplacement services and other benefits to them.

Planning the Future of Museum Mobile Experiences @ Tate

Many of you may know that the IMA has been really active in building mobile content for our main website, our special exhibitions, and 100 Acres.  One of the things I love about working at the IMA is that we always try to give a little love back to our museum buddies when we undertake new projects.  That’s why we’ve made all the software for these mobile experiences available for free to anyone who’d like to play around with them.

While I’m happy that many museums can pick these tools up and use them for their own content, it won’t be the right solution for everyone.  In fact, it only solves just part of the problem.

One of the things we talked a lot about this year at the conference was the need for a common standard for the mobile tours that so many museums are creating.  The danger with such a quickly changing technical playing field is that the choices we make today will certainly be different this time next year.  We risk losing the investment in content we are making today if we don’t anticipate and plan for the changes that we know are coming.

That’s why a group of us (museums, vendors, and other experts) met together after the conference was over to begin to plan and document a potential standard for the mobile content we’re creating.  We had some great conversation and have a good start on some common language that will be really useful as we move forward together.

To keep the fire burning a bit and to hopefully engage all of you – dear reader – in some useful conversation, I’ve put together what I think are:

5 Ingredients Required for a Successful Mobile Standard

1. Simplicity – Let’s face it, there are a lot of standards proposed in the world that are rarely used to solve real problems.  I’m a firm believer in fact that a standard is only “standard” in as much as people use it.  Keeping it simple is important to ensure that the standard can be easily understood in one sitting, can be easily implemented by museums and vendors, and can easily integrate with museums’ existing tools.
2. 80% Rule – Not that we’re underachievers, but shooting for a comprehensive standard is the quickest way to ensure failure.  With technology changing so quickly, seeking to cover only 80% of the most common types of content and tours might allow us to actually finish and put this standard to use (see rule #1)
3. Extensibility – If we are not going to shoot for 100% coverage in our standard, then it will be important that users have some easy way to add their own “secret sauce” to the mix without breaking the rules.  All the successful standards efforts I know of include some way to grow and adapt to changes. Think about the ways we’ve seen the HTML and CSS standards grow and change over time. As we get smarter and smarter about the ways we want to create mobile content, we’ll certainly need to adapt our initial version of a standard to be smarter too.
4. Smart People – Speaking of smart… team work and contributions from  really smart people will certainly be the make-or-break ingredient that determines whether we can succeed in creating this standard.  Would you please consider being involved with us? Don’t feel that you have to be a standards expert in order to contribute something valuable to the mix.  In fact, very few of us are standards experts, and we could really use your best ideas to make this thing work!  I’ll share some specific ways you can help at the end of this article.
5. Determination – Success in this area will require some real commitment on the part of museums and vendors to make it all work.  The standard will require some early adopters to take the plunge and use this standard in practice to sort out all the kinks.  The IMA is willing to do this, and I hope that a lot of you will be too. It may take us a little while to see the fruits of our labor, but it would seem silly to keep investing the amount of money and effort we are already pouring in without at least giving it our best attempt.

How can you get involved?

If you’re interested in learning more, you can track our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki here: http://wiki.museummobile.info/standards.  You can also read the notes from our first meeting in London.  We’ll be updating and refining those notes as we go, so stay tuned for more information.  Please add comments or thoughts to those pages with any questions or ideas you might have.  You can also track the current version of the TourML XML Standard here: http://wiki.museummobile.info/museums-to-go/products-services/tourml.  Those schema documents will be changing soon to reflect the initial conversations from the London meeting.

Most of All

Come to the next edition of the Museum Mobile Summit to be held on October 27, 2010 in Austin, TX.  This meeting is free and we hope you will attend.  Please let me know if you plan to be there so we can have enough chairs!  The US version of this meeting will continue where the UK summit left off and will align nicely with the MCN Annual Conference that week as well!

Thanks! -Rob

The graph below shows that most people are really intrigued by the possibilities of accessing mobile content from their own devices, follow by slightly fewer respondents who felt like they’d prefer to rent a device that was guaranteed to work.  If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that we most recently released a tour for the 100 Acres park that anyone with a internet-capable smartphone can experience. (visit http://www.imamuseum.org/ on your mobile phone and look for 100 Acres)  Internally at the IMA we’re still looking for that “right” balance between devices that we maintain and a user’s own device.  We’d be interested in your feedback in the comments if you have a good thought or opinion.

In trying to fish about for the kinds of content most people were itching to get their hands on, I used the results to come up with a ranking of the types of content that people responded to the most.  I simply added the percentages of “Yeah, definately” and “Can’t get enough” together for a total positive response.  Removing museum staff responses from the mix yielded the same rank ordering. The rankings came out as follows.  I  think I’m most surprised by how poorly Games rated in this ranking, and had expected it to do much better.

1. Hear from Artists (90%)
2. Behind the Scenes (83%)
3. Hear from Experts (54%)
4. High-Res Images (51%)
5. Ways to Express Opinion (44%)
6. Things to Take Away (41%)
7. Games (27%)

Responses were pretty evenly split on which kinds of tours we should create next with preferences expressed for tours of the permanent collection and the gardens and grounds.  Again, the rankings did not change when museum staff were removed from the responses.

This statistic is pretty hilarious to me.  Apparently, museum tours are informative, but boring!  Funny enough, it seems like museum professionals are the most critical of their own tours.  The non-museum respondents had better overall opinions of museum tours than that of the museum staff.  Seems like maybe we’re being a bit too hard on ourselves as museum staff and should focus on delivering a flexible experience with deep content as described above.

Responses from those who DO work in museums

Responses from those who DO NOT work in museums

For completeness, here are the remaining two questions regarding a little bit about the survey respondents. Overall not a huge dataset, but I think a really meaningful representative set for this museum anyways!

Have it Your Way!

Well, our intrepid team of media and software guru’s are busy preparing to launch our first outdoor mobile content tour to highlight the opening of 100 Acres this weekend.  Folks are a little bit frazzled and wishing for the sunshine, but I think we’re all universally excited about the incredible stories there are to tell in the park.

While we’ve ironed out our initial set of tour content for 100 Acres, we could use your help in planning the next great escapades we undertake for mobile content.  So, in the great tradition of McDonalds… if you could “Have it Your Way”, what should our next mobile tour look like?

If you’ll answer a few of these questions, I promise to come back next week and share with the class all we’ve learned from your responses!  We’ll take the best ideas from this survey and see if we can wrap them into our next mobile tour!

Thank You! -Rob

We’ve promised this for a while, and today I’m pleased to announce that we have released ALL of the materials and source code we’ve used to make TAP as open-source, and freely available to the museum community.  I think it’s clear to many of us that mobile content and interpretation is an incredible opportunity for cultural organizations and the role we play in engaging and educating audiences about our collections and programming. Our hope is that the contribution of TAP might spur collaboration and contribution from other museums to further develop a tool – owned by the community – that can power and deliver those mobile experiences to the public.

I think it’s important for us to explain some of the foundational ideas behind TAP, and why museums might choose this direction over so many of the other options.  In that light here are:

5 reasons why TAP should be your museum’s next mobile platform

1. First-Class Content Management
2. Open-Source, community owned, freely available
3. Open Standards (TourML)
4. Multi-Platform
5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

1. First-Class Content Management

The task of creating mobile tours for museums is an art form in and of itself.  I’m not sure that we’ve  nailed it yet, and we’re certainly still learning a whole lot from our peers about what works and what doesn’t when engaging audiences on a mobile device.  One thing I know for certain is that creating these experiences is a lot of work, and the results are pieces of content that we would be well advised to preserve and reuse over a long period of time.  Along those lines, it is incredibly important that we treat the mobile content we create as a first-class citizen with respect to the other content our museums care for.  If we take this content seriously, we will necessarily store and manage it professionally and for the long term.  A proper content management system is critical in this effort.

The Homepage of the TAP CMS Showing Two Different Tours

TAP is based on an open-source content management system called Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) that the IMA (and many other museums) have used successfully over the years to drive all sorts of online experiences.  This means that any museum adopting TAP as their mobile platform will immediately benefit from the depth of experience in the Drupal community and from the possibilities for expandability and enhancement that come from an active open-source platform.

Because creating the tour content can be time consuming, we need to be sure that the tools we give content authors are as easy to use as possible.  TAP features a very simple user interface, and takes all of the guess-work out of creating a tour that is properly formatted for the web.

TAP's User Interface for Adding Tour Stops

For those of you who have authored these tours in other platforms, there is nothing worse than pushing content to your device platform only to realize that you missed some small little detail or that tour stops were mis-labeled, mis-linked or otherwise incorrect.  TAP’s CMS offers the ability to preview and view media and connections between tour-stops so that authors can be sure all the content is correct prior to publishing to a device.

TAP's Stop Preview Pop-Up for Video

2. Open-Source, Community Owned, Freely Available

If you’ve been paying attention to the mobile tour space over the past few years, you’ll already know that we are seeing an incredible growth in the number of options available to museums who want to create mobile tour content.  Many of these systems offer very nice interfaces for authors to create engaging content and offer very attractive pricing options and incentives for museums who want to publish tours on those platforms.

I can’t help but think we’ve seen this movie before…

In the past 5-10 years many museums adopted proprietary CMS tools to drive their websites too with varying levels of success.  To me, many of the available options for mobile tours today seem very similar to the kinds of options museums pursued to get collections and content on the web to begin with.

At the end of the day, I think we’ve seen now that only a few of those proprietary solutions have been successful over the long term.  Museums bear a responsibility for the preservation of collections and content as our primary and core business service to the public.  Certainly this is possible within a proprietary context, but I would argue that open-source platforms and solutions put museums in the driver’s seat with regard to their own success and content preservation issues.

We are releasing TAP so that others can take advantage of the work we’ve done in this area, and can extend and enhance it to meet their needs as well.  I think we’re all still learning all the features we want and need as a part of a mobile solution.  Our requirements will continue to evolve over the next several years as mobile computing cements itself into our audience’s expectations.  I’m hoping that those who use TAP will also contribute their changes back so that we can build a suite of tools and help each other succeed in this area.

Google Code Project Hosting for TAP

Source code and documentation for TAP can be downloaded from a Google Code Project (http://code.google.com/p/tap-tours).  Instructions for installing the CMS and configuring the iPod Client can be found there as well.  There’s also an email list that we will monitor to answer questions about using the tool.  While we’ve made the process of authoring tours very simple at this point, it will still take someone familiar with web and mobile development some time to correctly setup and configure the CMS and particularly the Apple Development environment.  We’re happy to help with this as we can and continue to document the process.

3. Open Standards (TourML)

As we think about ways that mobile tours are different than web pages, and more so, how we might encode these tours in a way that’s portable and future proof…  We eventually end up needing some standard description of a Tour, its content and its structure.

We’ve floated a proposed meta-data standard for mobile tours called TourML (pronounced Turmoil)  and have published this for comment on the Museum Mobile Wiki.  We’ve successfully used TourML on a few production tours now, and have shown how it can be used to drive many types of tours.  We’re certainly not saying that TourML is perfect, and would really love to receive input from the community on ways that it could be improved, but it serves as a useful (and functional) straw-man as we try to settle on a good standard.

4. Multi-Platform

5. Intuitive and Tested Mobile Client

In addition to the back-end CMS and authoring infrastructure, we are also releasing an iPod-Touch application client that we’ve used at the IMA for public tours.  The keypad based tour is not the only type of tour museums will want to offer based on the TAP platform, but offers a multipurpose and easy-to-use interface that is a great starting point.

We’re working on several different kinds of clients for future versions of TAP including web-based and outdoor versions of TAP tours.

The future of TAP

For our part, we’re working on a new set of tools for an outdoor tour for our 100 Acres Art and Nature Park which will include an HTML5 web client that visitors will use on their own devices.  We’re also going to add some support for GPS and mapping features so that visitors can locate themselves on trails throughout the park.  As a teaser, here are some mockups of our ideas so far.

One great pleasure of working in a creative environment like an art museum is that on occasion, we actually get to create things that are unique, tangible, and if we’ve done our job… useful.

Matt Gipson - Web Designer Extraordinaire

It’s one of the reasons I love to cook.  The process of pulling together all the right ingredients and a little skill to create a delightful experience that can be shared with others seems so personal, meaningful, visceral.  In short, very different from most of what keeps me busy on most days. So, it was a great honor to have the chance over the last six months to work together with so many talented staff from around the museum in creating and reformulating a new website for the IMA.

Over the last several years, the IMA has invested a lot of energy and resource in understanding and making use of the web in ways that help the museum meet its goals and carry out its mission.  Along the way, we’ve learned a lot.  We are constantly learning from our audience and visitors – watching the way they interact with content, reading comments, and listening to feedback.  We’ve learned immensely through our relationships and collaborations with other museums about what has worked and not in the past and about new thoughts, strategies and approaches we might try.  If I’m honest, we’ve definitely learned the most from our failures.  Hopefully, we’ve disguised most of them cleverly, but come join us for a beer in the cafe and we’ll share a bunch of the “less-than-superstar” moments.

In talking about how we might launch this new site we’ve been working so hard on, it only seemed right to give the first sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes privileges to our online followers.  So, like any great dish, this one’s hot off the grill and just for you!

One of the first things you’ll notice about the new website is that we’ve gone with a completely different design-feel from our earlier site.  Part of this is inspired by a new brand for the IMA which you’ll notice featured prominently across the site.  We wanted to shoot for a design that is clean and well structured, but still very visual and full of color.  You’ll notice that we stuck to a consistent grid layout on the site which lets us be pretty modular in the way we mix and match content.

As you dig deeper into the site, you’ll see that we kept the visual stimulus going, using a mix of video, photography and some interactive elements to capture attention and provide an engaging experience.  On most pages, you’ll notice a sidebar called “More Like This”.  This sidebar features content relations from across the web that relate to the to the current page content.  These relations are a mix of automated suggestions as well as hand-picked content that relates to the page you’re looking at.

One of the issues we wanted to address with this redesign was to make it easier for online visitors to find content on the site. One primary focus of this work was the simplification of the menu navigation.  The IMA is an organization with an amazing breadth of programming and collections, so it was a challenge to streamline the navigation of the site and make it easier to find information. You’ll notice a single layer of top-level menus that expand when you roll over them. These menus are the same across every page of the website and provide a consistent anchor for visitors to turn to as they navigate around the site.  Since many of our visitors enter the site from search engines, a significant number of them might not ever reach the front page of the site. You’ll see that we expanded a few of the menus to include additional information and tools.  These Mega-Menus provide an easy way for visitors across the site to access tools for searching the collection, getting directions to the museums or linking to featured pages of content.

One of the core areas of the site that has undergone a complete transformation is the underlying search engine technology.  This is one of those features that can’t be explained in a glossy image or paragraph of techno-jargon.  You really have to experience it to understand its power.  One of the easiest ways to play around with the search engine is with the Live search feature in the upper right-hand corner of the site.  You’ll notice that as you start typing, the Live Search automatically provides a number of suggestions for you that might match your query.  You’ll notice that these are broken out by type (Artwork, Exhibition, Artist) and provide thumbnail images when appropriate.  What you may not notice at first is that in addition, this search can also access videos on ArtBabble, posts on our Blog, even images from Flickr.  Every time you press a key, we’re searching over 60,000 pages of content to return the best answers to you.

Another area of the new website that benefits from the work we’ve done on the search engine is the Collection Search Page.  We wanted to provide an experience that would let someone who has a specific search in mind, find what they want quickly… but also an interface that could support an enjoyable browsing experience that is both visual and simple.  As you roll over the thumbnail images on the page you’ll notice that we add more information about the work you’re hovering on and show the full thumbnail of the work.  From this roll-over you can easily tell whether the work is on view today, access a magnified image and link to a page with the full information about the work.

You’ll notice that when you type in a search, the left-hand menu expands to allow you to filter your results by creator and also by descriptive tags added by other users.  Doing so provides a really powerful way to combine the information from our collection databases with the way these works are experienced and understood by visitors.

If you click on the “More+” button on the collection search toolbar, you’ll unroll some additional tools which let you restrict your search by department, materials, object type and a few sliders which let you set a date range you’re interested in.

In my experience, one of the most frustrating things about museum websites is that they frequently have really terrible calendars!  Our own website was a prime example of that phenomenon.  I must admit, it just wasn’t very good.  In our defense (and the defense of all the museum webmasters screaming into their laptops), the problem is that museums have crazy calendars.  The problem is just pretty darn hard.  Some events repeat, some don’t.  Some events (like exhibitions) last for months, others last only one hour.  Events like classes meet many times over the course of a few weeks.  Our desire, is that all of these events be accessible on one nice neat little page of boxes…  aint gonna happen.

We’ve decided to take a little bit different approach for our calendar this time around.  Instead of a traditional list, or box-based calendar, we’re opting for more of a timeline.  In our design process, we found that timelines supported the kind of variation in events that we see in our museum much better than any of the more traditional options.  In one eyeful of timeline, we can show you an entire month’s worth of events at the museum.  Pairing the somewhat novel timeline interface with a traditional date picker on the left will be a nice fall back for those who prefer a more traditional interface, and provides a nice way to index directly to dates you’re interested in.  The scrollable action of the timeline will let users browse to find out more about the pattern of offerings here at the IMA.    A clickable legend in the right sidebar, lets visitors filter events down to see only the ones they’re interested in.  Every event is available at your fingertips and it’s easy to see what exhibitions will be on while you’re here.

One of the things I think we’re all aware of is how much the mobile web is changing the way we seek and access information.  As we’ve watched our web statistics, we’ve seen a steadily increasing number of users coming to our website from mobile platforms.  We can only anticipate that this trend will continue.  As such, we wanted to be sure to offer a specialized experience for mobile users which still let’s them bail-out easily to our full website.  The new website features a specialized mobile page with information you might want to check while you’re on the go… hours, directions, showtimes etc…  If you’re looking for the main site, just click the button on the bottom of the page.  You can always toggle back to the mobile site by using the call out from the IMA homepage (note: this mobile page icon only appears in mobile browsers)

In addition to the calendar, the other area that was not very good on our old site was the way we handled ticket sales and memberships online.  Not that there was anything insecure or hacky about the software, just that it was darn hard to use.  We’ve done an extensive amount of work since that time to replace those systems with a new one that we’ve integrated in-house and customized to make this process as easy and painless as possible.  Why should it be hard?

Finally, one of the new areas of the site that I’m most excited about is called “Interact”.  Maybe this is preaching to the choir since you ARE reading this on the IMA’s Blog… but we’ve been doing some really amazing stuff around the web in the last few years.  We’ve been sorting out the kinds of content and social media tools that give audiences an inside scoop on a pretty amazing institution.  We’ve also been learning a TON from YOU.  I think all of us here get totally jazzed when we see a really insightful comment on the Blog or when someone tells us a really cool story about experiences they’ve had at the museum.  You also take us to task occasionally which is good for us, and helps us grow and get better!

The problem is that most of that content was really buried on our previous sight, and unless you knew where to look, you probably missed it.  The Interact section is a much stronger attempt at providing a home where many of these efforts can live.  Interact will be an easy place for you to find links to our social media efforts, comments you’ve left for us on twitter, on the site, or tags you’ve added to describe your favorite works of art.

Stay tuned to Interact for some pretty fun ideas we have about how to continue to give you all more and better sneak peeks and insider info on what’s next at the IMA.

One of the things that we’ve been dying to put together for a while is called TagTours.  This new area of content on the site gives you a novel way to bring together works from across the collection that might not otherwise be thought of as connected.  Need a way to impress a date?  Like Sports? Animals?  These tours provide a unique way to experience the IMA’s collections online.

Enough of the chatter, let’s get on to the good stuff… but first a word from our sponsors. Click through and watch this video to get the super secret and ever-so-clever username and password to access our new site

Click through to watch this video and get access to the new site

Over the next few weeks staff from the IMA’s webteam will go into a bit more depth on each of these features to explain a little bit more about how they work and why they do what they do.  As always, the IMA is committed to continuing to help other museums develop better tools and techniques for succeeding online.  We’ll be examining which of these features might be released as open-source tools that can be picked up and used by any museum that needs them.

Thanks for sticking with this rather lengthy article.  As always, please leave comments / questions / suggestions for us in the comments.  As I mentioned above, we learn a ton from you and your input and would so much appreciate your thoughts!  -Rob