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

If you’re just joining us, you can find links to the previous articles here (tag: transparency)

To leave you with a bit more to chew on before we head off, this last article provides some suggestions for how to implement your organization’s own dashboard.  Feel free to add your own suggestions / questions to the comment stream after the jump!

7 Guidelines for Implementing Dashboards

For museums that would like to take the plunge into revealing and tracking their performance metrics online, the software used in the creation of the IMA’s Dashboard tool has been made freely available to the community under an open source license. (http://code.google.com/p/museum-dashboard/) Regardless of the tools used to embrace practices of Transparency, the following are some pragmatic suggestions to consider during your planning processes.

1. Choose a Few Key Metrics

Identify tangible and measurable statistics which can serve as leading or trailing indicators of your institutions success at meeting its mission. Many elements in mission statements are intangible and difficult to measure.  Identifying a few metrics which can serve as key indicators of success to mission is of critical importance. (See Maxwell L. Anderson’s “Metrics of Success in Art Museums” for a discussion on this topic)

2. Identify and Share Areas for Improvement

Museums should include statistics to describe areas in which they would like to improve.  Being open about areas in which we are not excelling creates opportunities for discussion with our constituents and an extrinsic motivation for staff members trying to excel in these areas.  Also, it’s only possible to demonstrate progress if we first share our deficiencies.

3. Simplify the Presentation

Resist the temptation to squeeze all of your information onto one screen.  Executive dashboards often suffer from information overload. Dense displays of data can take time and significant effort to decode and understand even for the most invested museum employee.  If we hope to engage the less invested and ever-so driven-to-distraction web visitor with statistics about our museum, we must start with the assumption that this information will be experienced in a glance.  Our hope is to capture that attention in the moment and offer deeper and more meaningful content easily upon further investigation.

4. Involve Staff

As discussed previously, one of the primary benefits of publishing an organization’s performance in a dashboard is the impact doing so can have on internal communications with the museum’s own staff members.  The active involvement of staff from a variety of departments is critical to disseminating an understanding of mission-driven performance metrics and serves to infuse the organization with a culture of honesty, openness, and a desire and expectation of perpetual and incremental improvement.

5. Explain Your Reasoning

Describe to your audience why you think each particular statistic is worth measuring.  Transparency tools, such as dashboards, offer exciting opportunities to share and describe the ways your institution is attempting to achieve its mission.  Museums should use these opportunities to explain why the data looks the way it does.  Are you succeeding, facing challenges, radically improved in this area recently?  The deeper content behind each statistic gives your institution the chance to engage with interested constituents.

6. Describe the Way You Measure

We all know that it’s easy to deceive an audience with statistics; to make the numbers say whatever we want them to.  Be explicit in describing the ways you derived the information you are sharing.  If you make any assumptions, be sure to indicate them.  If you based your information on another source, be sure to reference it accurately. Information without this description is unverifiable and subject to manipulation.  This documentation will also serve institutions well during occasions of staff turn-over, preserving a continuity of reporting and responsibility.

7. Participate in the Creation of Open Standards

An extremely valuable result of many institutions adopting similar strategies for sharing performance metrics online would be the ability to benchmark and compare statistics across institutions.  Current resources for museum comparative statistics are inconsistent, poorly specified and opaque in their measurement specifics making them generally useless for cross-institutional benchmarking.  The community needs a more sophisticated way of thinking about common comparisons which might be made between institutions and how those measurements might be achieved and normalized to facilitate a better common-ground of understanding.  The impact on the efficient and professional management of museums would be profound.

* * * * *

It is undeniable that museums have witnessed their role in the world change due to the dramatic increase of information and access resulting from the influence of the internet on contemporary culture.  This change has provided museums previously unimaginable opportunities for reaching audiences who are quite literally “a world away”.  However, it is important to realize that we now live our lives in the open much more than we ever have in the past.  Concepts of privacy and previously accepted social norms are changing as well. We can see and experience that this is true personally, but museums have been slow to embrace this fact.  The adoption of open and transparent attitudes toward information sharing allows museums to take an information-savvy and culturally relevant approach to engage audiences regarding why museums are important to our communities, and to share the unique challenges faced by mission-driven organizations in today’s marketplace.  Institutions which can embrace these trends will realize significant tangible and strategic benefits.

Two things in particular which set our Dashboard effort apart from other business intelligence or executive dashboard tools are the way we engage our staff in the process, and the extended integration we’ve done with core museum systems.

In the past several weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the theory and the underpinning logic of why any museum would consider moving forward with a strategy like this.  If you’re just joining the discussion you can find the previous articles here:

1. Walking The Talk
2. Reasons for Transparency
3. Impact on Institutional Culture

This week we’ll take a detailed look at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art implemented these ideas in the IMA Dashboard.  We’ll examine how we structured the experience, what our goals were and what some of the results and unintended consequences turned out to be.

We’ve had some really great questions and points raised in the comment sections of the previous articles, and I’d really like to hear questions / thoughts from the peanut gallery as it were.  Don’t be shy!  I’ll do my best to respond to every thoughtful comment in turn.

Transparency in Practice: IMA’s Online Dashboard

As discussed in previous posts, one of the most important aspects for museums wishing to take steps to be more transparent about their successes and failures is a decision about the best way to share this information.  There are many ways museums might accomplish this. Ideally an organization’s information should be freely available to all interested parties with a very low barrier to access. Many museums have adopted the practice of making their annual reports and even tax returns available online for public access. It would be difficult to make the argument that these mechanisms provide “easy access” to this information since these documents are often lengthy, technical, and difficult to interpret.  The investment required by a member of the public must be high enough to overcome these barriers in order to develop an understanding of the museum’s performance.  While well intended, this method of presentation obfuscates the information which, if shared in a simpler more user-friendly model, might otherwise lead to valuable interactions and discussions with media, donors and the general public.

In the summer of 2007, the Indianapolis Museum of Art began to take steps to capitalize on an institution-wide effort and commitment to organizational Transparency. A team of web developers and graphics designers led by the Chief Information Officer set out to design a presentation of information and statistics about the museum which would enable an at-a-glance interaction as well support of deep-diving investigations into specific topics of interest. The team desired a system which was easy to digest and easy to navigate, and could support the wide array of information important to the mission of a diverse institution.  The project took inspiration from contemporary web design and interaction trends to create a site which would feel fresh, fun and visually engaging.  Feeling that many corporate dashboards were both intimidating and hard to understand, the team strove for a simplicity of presentation that could hook interested visitors into a deeper investigation and tracking of the museum’s performance over time. Finally, the institution needed an easy to use tool which could be integrated into the pre-existing workflows and job demands of many of the different staff around the museum.  The result was a tool called the IMA Dashboard, which was launched by the museum in September, 2007 and later released as open-source software for the benefit of the larger museum community.  Many museums and institutions have downloaded this software and expressed an interest in using it to fuel similar endeavors within their own organizations.

Figure 1 - The IMA Dashboard

The selection of an initial set of statistics for the Dashboard was undertaken by the senior management team of the museum and focused on metrics which had direct impact and bearing on the mission of the museum.  Nine statistics were selected initially covering areas such as, the acquisition of art, educational tours, membership, financial performance, horticultural activities (the IMA is an accredited horticultural institution), and attendance.  Statistics are arranged by topic or by department and visitors are invited to explore related bits of information.

The automated reporting of statistics to the Dashboard was a topic of much discussion early in the development of this tool.  At first glance, the technical slickness and wizardry of an automatically updated dashboard seems to hold much promise.  In reality, several factors existed that complicated this fact and have led the IMA to a slightly different approach.  Remember first, that a key desire of pursuing a policy of institutional Transparency is not only to share that information with our external constituents, but with our internal constituencies as well.  The automation of statistics is convenient in that it saves effort and attention on the part of the museum staff, but can frequently and easily result in neglect.  This result can be attributed more to human nature than to any lack of effort.  Parents of young children can attest that we are conditioned at an early age to tune out automated processes, or expected interruptions.  This is, in fact, the opposite of what we want to encourage in our staff.  Since these are “mission critical” statistics, we want staff members to attend to and understand them each and every month.  If a small amount of data entry causes staff members to pause and internalize this data at the same time that it is deriving a benefit for the public, so much the better.  Secondly, computers are notoriously bad at predicting exceptions to the rule.  Take attendance counting for example.  Institutions can make rules about the hours the museum is open, and about when they expect certain numbers of staff to report, but museum staff cannot tell the computer how to anticipate a weather related closing, or a special event on a day the museum is normally closed.  These cases all require human intervention.  Likewise, there are many types of statistics which are important to the operation of the museum, for which no automated system currently exists.  The IMA tracks the number of hours conservators spend treating works of art in our collection.  We think it is important, that despite all their other responsibilities, conservators should continue to treat the works in our collection regularly.  While many different types of time-tracking software exist, our conservators already have a system of tracking this information that works well for them.  So instead of spending time and money purchasing, integrating and training staff so that we can automate this system, we simply ask them to cut and paste their hours into a web form once a month.

The involvement of museum staff in the selection, authoring, and maintenance of these statistics is a fundamental priority for the Dashboard tool.  As discussed earlier, utilizing members of the staff in the collection, reporting, and monitoring of key statistics is an important way to engage them with how and why certain numbers are the way they are and how the museum might improve its performance over time. Staff members from various departments were invited to submit statistics which they felt would be important to track.  The web team worked with these staff members to author, refine, and create the statistics they suggested.  Each statistic is assigned to the museum staff member most directly responsible for monitoring that information.  Ideally, updating the Dashboard will coincide with existing workflows and reporting tasks that staff members are already performing. The frequency at which each statistic is updated varies depending on how quickly that information changes, from five minute updates for automated attendance counting to twice annually for horticultural plantings on the museum’s campus.  Email reminders are sent to the assigned staff members and updates consist of a simple cut-and-paste operation taking less than one minute and very little technical knowledge. As of this writing, the IMA Dashboard maintains statistics in 6 different topic areas across 13 departments.  42 statistics are current tracked and maintained by 31 staff members. These statistics have been maintained by the staff usefully for over two years as of this writing.

Several of the statistics recorded become quite interesting and even compelling examples of improvements and challenges encountered by our museum during the past year. For example, the museum has a commitment to reducing our energy consumption.  As a result, we track the total kilowatt-hours per month we consume as stated on our gas and electric utility bills. (See Figure 2) We have been relatively successful in this endeavor and have in fact reduced our energy consumption year-over-year in 30 of the last 34 months.  In February 2009, we used 22% less energy as compared to just one year earlier, while in September 2009 we used just 2% less energy than September of 2008.

Figure 2 – The tracking of energy consumption on the IMA Dashboard

Not all statistics are so rosy however.  Financial statistics show that, as a result of the economic downturn, the value of our endowment holdings decreased by almost $100M in a six-month period between September 2008 and April 2009.  Statistics show a 46% shortfall in contributed income compared to the budgeted projections in December 2008, and an adjustment of those revenue estimates in the following month. Early in 2009 the museum went through a strategic restructuring of staff positions resulting in the elimination of several part-time and full-time staff positions – a fact which is reflected clearly on the Dashboard update of our Employee Count and distribution on March 10, 2009. While these statistics are not among the shining examples of museum performance, we are thankful for them. They have given us a chance to engage with donors, board members, funding agencies, and our local city government about the reality of the challenges the museum is facing and our plans for addressing them.  The way these “bad” statistics would be received weighed heavily on the minds of the senior management team as we discussed this series of tough decisions. The ability of the Dashboard to serve as a positive seed for discussion is explained by Anderson, “The point of the Dashboard is both to crow when we see positive trends, of course, but also to show where we have room to improve, either through our actions or as a result of the generosity and support of others.“

Overall, the Dashboard has been received very positively by the IMA staff and senior management in particular.

“The dashboard has been a persuasive tool to use with the news media. Certain journalists who we work with on a regular basis know to check the dashboard for facts and figures, though they’ll still often verify the information with our public relations staff. I believe that the transparency that the dashboard allows permits us to have additional credibility with members of the media. They know that we’re not hiding information from them.”

-Katie Zarich, Director of Public Affairs, IMA

“In my opinion, the IMA’s dashboard has served as a visible reminder of our accountability to our supporters and the communities that we serve.  It is remarkable to me that it is not the data that has gotten the most attention, but the mere act of posting the information for public view.  By openly sharing the information, it has helped to build a sense of trust with our constituencies.  Mechanically speaking, the Dashboard is so user friendly that it enables those who own the data to update it using minimal time and effort.  In order to be a sustainable tool, I think it is important to have this ability to disperse responsibility for its maintenance and to minimize the additional time burden on staff to keep it current.  The one thing I don’t think we have quite figured out is how to incorporate the Dashboard as an information source or motivational tool for staff.  It is a challenge to balance what is interesting and useful to outside users with the needs and interests from an internal management perspective.”

Anne Munsch – Chief Finance Officer, IMA

More recently, the Dashboard has been used to illustrate museum visitor demographics accomplished through the collection of zip codes from visitors to the museum’s campus. This admissions data is then correlated to demographic data about race, age, income and educational attainment in the museum’s local community.  The information is presented in a simple map interface which allows the public to explore these demographics at their leisure. (See Figure 3)  Attendance tracking software utilizes heat-sensitive cameras to detect and automatically count the visitors to the museum.  This data is automatically integrated with the Dashboard tool and drives graphs and charts allowing year-to-year comparisons and attendance projections. (See Figure 4)

Figure 3 – A demographic comparison of museum admissions by zip code

Figure 4 – A comparative graph of month to month museum attendance

Next week we’ll conclude this series of posts with a set of suggestions for museums to use when staging their own efforts online with transparency.  I’d love to hear about ways in which these articles are being discussed in your museums or particular struggles or flaws in these arguments. -Rob

Community – the culture of this gathering – is where the real diffusion and impact occur.  Although the speakers and panelists were great and a good trigger for conversation, the value really took hold in the hallways over coffee or in some of Portland’s great pubs over a beer.

In thinking about this next post on transparency, it struck me that the same is true about our own museums as well.  The culture of our institution – the hallway and cafe conversations that happen between colleagues – is where much of the success and innovation will come from.

At the MCN conference we heard some great conversations about strategy and innovation.  But I think all would realize, the harder part of strategy is finding a way for it to take hold and become REAL.

As a final salvo offering reasons why your museum should adopt open and transparent practices around institutional performance, let’s talk a bit more about the impact this choice can have on the culture of your museum.

If you’re just joining the conversation, here are links to parts 1 and 2 of this series. (Part 1 – Walking the Talk) (Part 2 – Reasons for Transparency)  Please join the conversation in the comments and tell us what you think! A little virtual water cooler would help us all.

Reasons For Transparency: Impact on Institutional Culture

“The organizations that will be truly successful in this environment are those that have integrated Transparency as part of their organizational culture and not just their communications strategy. To the extent that the two are inter-related, the communications strategist has a substantial role to play here.”

-Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

The infusion of an attitude of Transparency and an institutional understanding of strategy will allow our museums to continue to mature steadily and continuously over time, but these goals require a cultural shift for our staff. One organization which understands the impact of Transparency and the role of company culture is the internet shoe company, Zappos (recently acquired by Amazon). As illustrated by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh,

“It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter.

The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.

The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touch-point that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.”

-Tony Hsieh, “Your Culture is Your Brand”, Zappos CEO Blog, January 3, 2009

Hsieh makes an important point that museums should observe as well. In order to remain culturally relevant, museums must address this inevitable and global cultural shift towards ubiquitous information and user experience or risk being sidelined both online as well as in our communities.

Putting Transparency into practice in an institution has a number of consequences which can offer significant benefits to museums. The act of publishing information for public scrutiny always elevates the attention that is given to that effort.  Whereas staff members may have been apt to forget about tracking performance in a key area, a commitment to publish that information pushes professional staff members to pay more attention regarding how that information will be perceived outside the walls of the museum.  Ideally these are features museums want and need to be tracking anyway, but the reality is that when no one is looking, it’s easy to pay less attention. Transparency then, is an effective mechanism for generating this external motivation which can result in measurable improvements for the museum.

When these key metrics are tracked, organizations will be able to easily identify and develop trends and forecasts for these mission critical pieces of information. Since institutions are committed to a timely publishing of this information they will also benefit from more timely and accurate disclosure of problem areas not only to the public but also to internal constituencies. Indicators of success and poor performance can help management teams identify areas which need more attention or resources without simply sweeping the problem under the carpet.  Measuring which areas are succeeding can help museums better optimize how much effort is required to continue performing well in that area.  Perhaps staff can spend half as much time or money and achieve the same results?  Mission-critical information such as this is a crucial underpinning that will allow management teams to execute good decision-making based on fact and not opinion.  These steps can facilitate not only cost savings, but time savings over the long term as well.

Next week, we’ll begin to look more practically at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art put some of these theories into practice and what kind of impact / experience we’ve seen since doing so.  Again, I’ve really enjoyed some of the comments offered to these posts… but understand that there are several shy ones among you!  Don’t Fear!  Pipe up with your thoughts… I’ve generally found our little blog community to be very open to opinions of all different stripes!  -Rob

Saying that transparency is a “good idea” is not enough to address concerns that many museums have about sharing  information in this way.  Today, we’ll spend some more time examining a few reasons why museum administrators should seriously consider an open approach to transparency as a strategic choice in running the museum.

Again, please chime in with thoughts / questions / analogies / etc…  Your thoughts really add to and enrich the conversation.  Do you think this would work in your museum?  What would be the biggest concerns that would arise?

Reasons for Transparency: The Internet Will Out You

Since a common counter argument to efforts for Transparency is the impact of information sharing on the museum’s brand and reputation, it is useful to explore this in the context of today’s realities. Seen initially in the rise of the blogosphere and more recently in the emergence of micro-blogging and real-time search, the pace of information creation and the ease of access to this information has changed the ways in which a museum’s brand and reputation are perceived in the media and online. The advent of the real-time web means that the invested public frequently has as much input into a museum’s online reputation as media professionals do.  An increasingly information-savvy audience is becoming more and more sophisticated in their ability to decipher fact versus spin as they surf this info-sphere. Author Clive Thompson highlights the impact of these facts on Transparency in his article for WIRED Magazine,

“But here’s the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation.”  - Clive Thompson, “The See-Through CEO”, WIRED Magazine – Issue 15.04, March, 2007.

This reality is not restricted only to government and for-profit corporations to deal with, but in fact, has already reached deeply into the way that museums and non-profit institutions operate in modern culture. “There is no outside world anymore, just a world–one that is blogged, Facebooked, Twittered, and utterly porous. The extent to which we can control our image is directly proportionate to our honesty about ups and downs in a context that we can to some degree define” points out Maxwell Anderson, The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

A common reaction and perhaps our gut response is to see Transparency as just another public relations tool which can be employed to enhance an institution’s brand and reputation in the public’s eye.  While efforts in Transparency can have a positive impact on a museum’s reputation, that’s not the point says Anderson, “To view a dashboard primarily as a PR tool is to miss entirely the point of Transparency, which is to influence contemporary organizations to act with greater responsibility.“ Likewise, author Thompson points out that, “Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it – or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.”

Reasons for Transparency: Impact on Mission and Performance

“I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that, at a time when new media technologies are changing the rules of journalism, companies are placing a new emphasis on Transparency. Access to, and distribution of, information is being rapidly democratized and smart companies know to get out ahead of this trend. However, as with many corporate buzzwords (e.g., “quality” and “innovation”), the concept is suffering from inflation as too many companies claim “Transparency” as part of their identity without really walking the talk.” -Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

It is a natural tendency to promote what is good about our institutions and hide what is not. As professionals, we’ve been conditioned over many years to treat the internet as just another communications medium, but in fact it’s not.  What does it take for a museum to begin the adoption of transparent methods and attitudes without falling into thinking of Transparency as just another PR tool, and what are the advantages of this strategy that might compel institutions to make the leap?

Museums are mission-driven organizations. For a museum, success cannot be measured in financial terms alone.  Sometimes – in service to our mission – museums make decisions which would play very poorly on Wall Street. However, these very decisions are those that set us apart most clearly from the for-profit world and offer us a chance to communicate with our constituents about our mission and about the unique and important place museums hold in our communities.

It is safe to say that museums spend large amounts of time and money every year on strategic planning – and for good reason.  A healthy and vibrant strategic plan is an invaluable tool to use in divining which activities we should pursue and which we should not.  The choices we make about which activities to forgo often say more about our strategic purpose than those we choose to pursue.  A common thread among many museums seems to be an addiction to an over-abundant array of worthwhile programs and activities. Solid strategic planning helps us focus activities on those which will achieve a measurable impact for the mission of the institution and result in long-term progress towards those stated goals.

Museums face difficult challenges when trying to measure whether or not they are being successful.  Success cannot be measured solely by the size of their endowments, attendance figures, or recent coverage in the press. Unlike their for-profit counterparts – where profit/loss statements can ultimately separate the winners and losers – a museum’s success has much more to do with achieving its mission and its degree of impact within the community.  Defining what success looks like and the establishment of benchmarks for comparison is absolutely vital to achieving a continuous improvement to goals and success over the long term. In his 2004 paper entitled “Metrics of Success in Art Museums”, Maxwell Anderson points out that “The root of the problem is that there is no longer an agreed-upon method of measuring achievement” and proposes several sets of measurements by which museums might gauge their success over time. Of course, the task of defining and agreeing on common metrics to be used across institutions seems to be a daunting task, however Anderson highlights the fact that, “While many challenges beset art museum leaders today, finding a way to measure performance is accordingly among the field’s most urgent.” and, “Without generally accepted metrics, arts organizations will have more and more trouble making a case for themselves.”

Choosing such a set of primary metrics for your institution can help to clarify and codify the relationship between your organization’s mission and its strategic plan.  These conversations are perhaps the most important discussions that could possibly be had among senior management executives and board members. As Andrew Taylor points out in his blog the Artful Manager,

“Of course, such systems [dashboards] raise a rather vexing challenge: what, exactly, are the few key indicators you would need to watch to monitor your success? It’s this question that actually proves to be more effective than the dashboard tool itself. To know what you should monitor, you need to know what you’re trying to do, and you also have to define what success looks like (more people? happier people? more art? better reviews? prolific artists?).” - Andrew Taylor, “Keeping an Eye on Dashboards”, The Artful Manager Blog, October 20.

It is important to note that this is a point at which the notion of Transparency and Metrics of Success in your museum are very closely related.  Anderson’s paper makes a convincing argument regarding the measurement of those efforts which are the most important to meeting our mission objectives.  Furthermore an establishment of appropriate metrics and benchmarks can have tangible benefits for museum operation.  Author Jason Saul illustrates this point in his book on benchmarking for non-profits,

“Thus, benchmarking has many direct and indirect benefits: increasing the impact of mission-related activities, raising internal standards, improving performance, attracting more funding, uncovering (and fixing) hidden weaknesses, and overall, improving the public face of the organization.” – Jason Saul, Benchmarking for nonprofits: how to measure, manage, and improve performance (Fieldstone Alliance, 2004) pg 12.

If these benchmarks or metrics are indeed the key drivers of our success, is it not also the case that these are the same facts and figures we should be making available to our constituents? By so doing, we begin to build an ongoing trust based on measurable fact and open a door to rational and informed conversations about why continued support of our museum is so vital.

Unfortunately, choosing the statistics and deciding to share them is not enough. Our museums are composed of an amalgam of individuals from many different social, educational, and professional backgrounds. Many of whom are extremely intelligent and passionate about their service to our institutions. Their daily choices, attitudes and activities are required to actually put these strategies and metrics into action and achieve the institution’s mission.  We cannot succeed in achieving our mission without the buy-in and understanding of these key staff members.

I had originally authored this as a paper to be published in print form, but I think it will actually work better in a blog format like this one.  I’ve really appreciated the feedback and input readers have contributed to my last few posts, and would love your thoughts on this text as well.

Perhaps the most prevalent concern shared by peers about adopting similar approaches to transparency is a latent fear of the unknown, or a feeling that sharing the gritty details with the public will be too overwhelming and therefore misconstrued.  I’m happy to say that the wheels haven’t fallen off the IMA’s apple cart yet, hopefully this series will illuminate some of the benefits we’ve seen from taking these steps.

Walking the Talk – Part 1

The concept of Transparency has received significant attention in the media and online recently.  This attention comes at a time when public doubt in corporations, government and corporate executives is at an all-time high. High profile failures of some of the nation’s largest and most trusted institutions have shaken our assumptions about what had always seemed to be untouchable industries. Museums have always jealously guarded their trusted place in the public’s perception, but is there a risk that this trust will someday be lost?  As caretakers of this trust, what is the best way to foster open communication about the challenges and opportunities that face us as we try to achieve the mission of our museums?  As comprehensive and easy access to operational information becomes the norm, how can museums embrace this as an opportunity and confront internal fears about sharing their performance metrics with the public?

A Working Definition of Transparency

To begin, we must first come to a common understanding about Transparency. Institutional Transparency is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define precisely.  Principally, Transparency can be defined as the open sharing of information regarding a museum’s operations and performance.  But questions soon arise regarding what to share, when to share, and how to share it. These issues are much more significant for museums to consider when crafting an organizational stance about Transparency.

Museums and museum staff members are always striving for the best. We craft strategies that seek to make our program offerings vital and engaging to our community.  We seek to build our collections by acquiring important works of art.  We take extensive measures to protect and preserve the works in our care. We attempt to run more and more efficient operations by carefully crafting our budgets while, at the same time, seeking to increase our earned and contributed income so that we can continue to be effective in fulfilling our mission. If we’re honest, we would all agree that we succeed in some of these areas and fail in others.  We are not afraid to admit among ourselves that we are not yet the perfect museum which we strive to be, yet we seldom talk about these challenges to our constituents and donors.  We share a common fear that exposing these negative facts about our museums will result in condemnation from the press, a loss of respect in the community, and perhaps most significantly financial loss from decreasing membership or donor revenue.  As a result, our staff works hard to control the flow of information and shield the museum from negative consequences, crafting careful rationalizations which attempt to address and make up for our short comings.

Transparency in our institutions has a goal of counteracting these tendencies | realities with a type of radical authenticity.  Our culture values authenticity and looks for it in our public officials and the institutions we trust. For a museum, authenticity means sharing both the good and the bad in addition to the reasons, circumstances, context and challenges that face us everyday. Transparency then, is the ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence our museum possesses at the time.

This notion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of our public relations and marketing departments who for years have sought to protect us from negative public sentiment and donor frustration. Some express concern that too much Transparency would be a bad thing.  Like any tool or technique, too much of a good thing can indeed be harmful.  When considering issues of Transparency we must do so thoughtfully and carefully, with a goal of maintaining an institutional integrity which is beyond reproach and at the same time, maintain a commitment to an open and authentic relationship with our constituents.

Several common challenges will help illustrate these issues. Museums must consider carefully, for example, their stance on sharing the purchase price of works of art in their collections.  Does doing so, enhance or harm the public’s understanding and relationship with these works of art?  Will sharing this information allow the museum to evaluate or improve its performance in some areas?  What impact, if any, would this action have upon the broader practice of art collecting? At the IMA, we have chosen NOT to share the purchase price or valuation of accessioned works of art in our collection. In addition, we have chosen that we WILL share the valuation of works slated for deaccessioning as well as the prices realized from their sale at auction and then listing the ways these proceeds are used towards the acquisition of new art for the collection.

Deaccessioned Artworks from the IMA's Website

Museums often depend on catering and space rental revenues to contribute to their operating budgets. To make a blanket statement saying that we will always share comprehensive financial information for all of our departments would mean that we would reveal financial information which would damage our competitive advantage against other catering and rental operations. Obviously, doing so is not in the best interests of the institution.

Rather than attempting to determine which information is eligible to be shared, perhaps the best approach is to instead discuss which sorts of information should not be shared. This would certainly cover sharing information which would break laws, breach contracts, violate trust or compromise privacy. Each of these situations would constitute a loss of integrity on the part of the museum.  This leaves a vast set of information that does not violate these caveats resulting in a freedom to share many different facets of museum operations.

Is it possible for a museum to share too much information? Do we risk placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on the sharing of information without a clear understanding of the expectations of our audience? Blogger Jeff Brooks examines this in his posting about the IMA’s Dashboard.

“It would be easy to say it’s too much, that it’s too arcane, too detailed, too boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person’s boring factoid is another’s hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it’s not likely. And their openness defuses these things — much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they’re sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?” - Jeff Brooks, “Museum opens the books to anyone who cares”, Donor Power Blog, December 3, 2007,

Looking at the question from a different perspective raises an interesting rule of thumb. If an investment of staff time and effort will be made measuring certain statistics, then museums should choose to measure those things which will offer insight to change or improve our future performance, and shy away from those measurements that will not impact staff actions no matter what the results.  Perhaps this seems too obvious at first glance, but the careful selection of statistics that matter is part and parcel to operating as a transparent institution.  Creating a needle in the haystack model of information sharing does not result in better information for the public, or museum staff for that matter.

In the coming weeks we’ll continue to look at a variety of issues at play when seeking to implement transparency in practice at your museum.  Next week we’ll focus on the underlying reasons why transparency is a good idea, and one that all museums should seek to adopt.

Again, we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to these ideas.  The IMA has a few years of experience in this area, but we still find that we’re learning more and more each day.  I’m sure if you focus hard enough, you’ll find some discrepancies or deficiencies in our efforts… in fact, we hope you do!  At least then we’ll know about them and can take steps to fix them!  Thanks in advance!  -Rob

So, at conferences and parties, I invariably end up on a soapbox talking about how museums need to build tools to give away to each other. I’ve done this more times than I’d care to admit. (I know, not the best way to spice up the party!) Chris Mackie from the Mellon Foundation gives this spiel better than almost anyone I know. Maybe Chris or others will chime in and help me refine my list.

I decided to take a crack at it myself – and to work it into 100 words or less.

OK, so I cheated by only doing this in outline form, but if you care to read the explanation behind the spiel click through for more.

So, next time your stuck in an elevator with your museum’s director and want to convince him/her about why your museum should use open-source software – whip this little baby out of your pocket-protector, and try not to get fired!   -Rob

Museum Software: The Case for Shared Tools

The Situation

1. Museum software problems are hard
2. Museums have small amounts of money for technology
3. Being a good client is challenging
4. Most museums do things their own way

The Opportunity

1. Museums don’t compete with peers like businesses do
2. Museums have long traditions of collaboration
3. Museums endorse the wisdom of common standards

The Solution

1. We find better solutions when we collaborate
2. Shared tools let us take the same road to different destinations
3. Vendors need our help to build better tools
4. Museums should act sooner not later in adopting open standards

The following is a brief statement which attempts to articulate both the frustration and opportunity which exists within the museum community regarding the current state of tools available to help us make a difference in the world. Many museums seek to make an impact in ways that often have little to do with technology, yet we are witnessing how quickly culture is being shaped and influenced by the web.  The fact that museums are increasingly dependant on technology to achieve the impact they desire is unavoidable.  The poor quality and availability of tools to support museum professionals in this effort should make us feel uncomfortable

The Situation

Museum software problems are hard

Many people assume that software for museums is simple and straightforward.  But given more thought, they soon discover that the tools that museums need reflect a complex set of workflows and information that needs to be managed.  Couple these requirements with preservation issues and an institutional mission which mandates public access and you have a recipe for a class of software problems which rivals many enterprise business systems.

Museums have not historically been early adopters of new technology, but that fact is changing as the use and integration of social media tools becomes an area in which museums would like to make advances.  It should not surprise us then, when we struggle to find tools that fit our needs.  Some of the tools we use have been built from the ground up to support our particular industry, but many of these have been poorly supported and updated since their creation.  Certainly the museum community has benefited from the quality work of a few notable software vendors; however the resources of these companies are necessarily limited due to the small size of this particular vertical market.  Others tools we use, were initially designed for different industries altogether and museums have customized and put them to use in new and sometimes unanticipated ways.  In both cases, software quality and ease-of-use leave a lot to be desired. Museums should not just accept that this is the case.

Museums have small amounts of money for technology

If you survey museums across the country, you will notice that they come in all shapes and sizes.  Some have annual budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and others have almost no budget at all.  In most cases, it is fair to say that technology spending typically accounts for a small percentage of the overall budget.

That doesn’t mean that museums don’t spend money on software, just that the typical investment made by museums during a given year is small compared to many other industries. From the perspective of a commercial software vendor, this makes museums a relatively small and specialized vertical market.

Being a good client is challenging

Vendors do not bear all the blame for the bad experiences many of us have had with software projects.  Museums share a good portion of that problem as well. One aspect that has been so refreshing about working in this community is being surrounded by experts from a thousand different subjects.  As brilliant as they are, it’s fair to say that museum experts are not often technology experts.  Most museums do not have software professionals on staff to help them to create or managing technical projects successfully.  Even those with years of technical experience find it challenging to effectively communicate all of the specific requirements needed by a software vendor to successfully pull off “the next big thing”.  Consequently, museums are often not very good at being clients.  We have a hard time expressing exactly what we need and we don’t share a common vocabulary with the creative professionals actually producing the software we pay for.

Most museums do things their own way

Because the work of running a museum from day to day is a complex task, museums tend to fall into patterns and ways of working which often pre-date the tenure of many current staff members.  We love our idiosyncrasies and often seek to adapt our software tools to our working methods and not the other way around.

This predilection for customized tools has an impact on our technology projects too.  Integration costs are the bane of any museum software project.  In addition to the price paid for the purchase of a particular piece of software, museums frequently pay additional costs to customize these tools for their working environment.  These integration costs can easily approach 25-30% of the total project cost.  Integration software has a very low degree of reusability and makes version upgrades and support troubleshooting much more difficult.

Is it possible that museums could find efficiencies in operations and at the same time reduce software costs if we could standardize our workflow requirements?

The Opportunity

Museums don’t compete with peers like businesses do

In business, a competitive advantage over your rivals is often the difference between success and failure, between paying your staff and laying them off.  The same is not true of the museum industry. Significant revenue streams for most museums bear no direct relationship to any perceived competitive advantages that may exist over peer institutions.  In fact, it could be argued that donations, grants, memberships and even attendance may be bolstered by effective and strategic collaborations not competition. Leisure tourists are just as likely to visit a museum in New York as they are to visit the museum in L.A on their next trip west.  Lovers of art, music, history, etc… are arguably more likely to visit whatever museum is close by than to hold any particular affinity for one museum brand over another.

This is a very different situation from that of the small or medium sized business. The argument extends to software tools as well.  Why wouldn’t museums seek to share resources, tools and requirements in a way that provides the most “bang for the buck” for the entire community?

Museums have long traditions of collaboration

Museums have a leg-up on collaboration given the long standing networks of institutional relationships that have developed as a result of shared exhibitions, loans and other collaborative projects.  In many professional disciplines within museums, there are vibrant communities of experts who share information and practice with each other on a regular basis.  The same is true in the museum technology community.  We have well established conferences and professional venues where we share information and case studies about technology projects.  We see many similar efforts in museum technology, but only a few good examples where several institutions actually choose work together using the same tools and practice.  What is the cause of this?  Could this be due to a lack of standardized practice?  Or is there still a perceived competition between museums to see who is best?

Museums endorse the wisdom of common standards

The ground work for shared tools and standardized working methods has already been started by our collections professionals.  Museums generally see the wisdom and long-term benefit of standardizing data description and cataloging practice.  The museum technology field should leverage those prior efforts, by taking advantage of existing standards as a medium of exchange between museum software products, and by creating new standards which can represent those common workflows and operational needs that we all share.

The Solution

We find better solutions when we collaborate

Museums do not have the time, financial resources, or technical experience to “go it alone” and hope to achieve quality software tools that are easy to use and maintain.  Given the lack of competitive necessity described above, collaboration between peers seems to be an obvious way forward. Collaborative platforms and shared tools leverage the experiences and talents of each museum and result in a vigorous and robust supply of expertise and resource from which the best results can be drawn.

Open-source technology projects owned by a community of invested stakeholders, offer one particularly fertile ground for this type of cross-institution collaboration to take hold.  The absence of licensing fees and the ultimate flexibility for integration and enhancement mean that a museum’s dollars of investment can more directly impact feature enhancements and underlying requirements.

In a strict financial sense, shared tools are a better investment than proprietary solutions.  Instead of spending $50,000 every time we want to deploy a new enterprise platform in the museum, why not leverage someone else’s investment and use our money to enhance the tool for both of us?  This strategic shift, taken to its logical conclusion, would have a correspondingly significant impact on the smaller institutions in our field.  Suddenly a small museum with no budget for technology has equal access to tools with hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment and the combined planning the forethought of the best minds in the business. This is the strategy advocated by grant funded projects for many years, buy why should museums shy away from doing this with our own money too? The closed nature of proprietary software from museum vendors will never match the dollar for dollar value of investment in a successful and well supported open-source tool.

Shared tools let us take the same road to different destinations

The key to shared tools and platforms is the recognition of the inherent and historic individuality present in museums as discussed above. Open source software and open access to tools enable museums to benefit from each other’s investments while supporting their more individual needs themselves with a smaller investment required to do so.

Vendors need our help to build better tools

Museum professionals need to become more active and invested in helping to shift the economy of museum software away from customization and support driven business models and towards models which result in enhanced feature sets, better user interface design, adherence to emerging data standards, and open access to API’s which help museums to integrate these software products in more meaningful ways.

Museums should face the facts that the software vendors in our community have an incredibly hard job to do in building quality software. At the same time, they are responsible for sustaining a viable business and a happy place to work for their own employee communities.  Unlike museums, the only way to ensure long-term viability of a museum software vendor is to maintain and enhance a competitive advantage over other vendors in the field.

Why is it then that so many of the tools in our field are based on 10 year old software platforms and antiquated software design practices?  Many seem to have been poorly cobbled together from a set of disparate requirements over the course of many years.  Could it be that many of the “modules” that we see in these tools are actually vestiges of integration requirements initiated and paid for by the needs of a single museum with the money to make it happen?  Integration software projects and maintenance contracts are the core business models for many of the vendors on our field, but are a primary distraction to the continued development and enhancement of a high-quality and well designed core product.

Museums should act sooner not later in adopting open standards

It’s time for museums to act on our words and start actually implementing tools which use and depend on open standards for data interchange and integration as well as the core business functions of the museum.  Several notable and well documented standards are available and ready to be used.  Surely many will point to isolated examples in which this is already happening, but more often than not, museums lack suitable tools to implement these standards.  It’s time that museums put our collective foot down and began working to incrementally make adoption of these standards a reality. The benefits of open standards will never be realized if museums don’t begin using them in daily practice.

What most disturbs me about Nina’s argument is the clear lack of background work she put into crafting what amounts to a pretty scathing opinion of the IMA.  It seems from Nina’s comments that she is basing her views on a single visit to our galleries during a conference reception. I have no way of knowing how many of those 3 hours Nina spent in our exhibitions and galleries, but it seems that she didn’t bother to ask any staff members of the IMA about efforts we might be making to engage our visitors on-site and around the city.  Aside from a brief two minute encounter in the conference hall after her comments, Nina failed to probe in any depth about what (if any) strategy their might be behind our efforts on-site.

Experience and Engagement

In case you haven’t noticed, Art Museums are frequently considered to be the “stuffier”, less “engaging” older brothers to our sibling science, technology, and “experience” museums.  Nina draws at least some of her professional experience from this field, so perhaps we should cut her a little slack for missing a crucial challenge faced by art museums.

Here's one kiosk I'd love to see in our Museum

Many experiences in art museums can tend to be more subjective… more personal… deeply moving but indeed sometimes less factual than in other types of museums.  This isn’t denying that an understanding of the underlying contexts and histories of these works is important.  Just that this knowledge is a means to an end. Facilitating and encouraging these types of experiences is a primary challenge in creating engaging experiences inside art museums.  Balancing engaging exhibits with a gallery aesthetic which still supports and encourages individual interpretation is not an easy problem to solve.

Perhaps the lack of 10 year old kiosks and flashy interpretive signage makes it appear that we are not attempting to engage our audiences?

There still remains an outstanding debate in my mind regarding whether or not even well designed “experiences” in art museums offer an appreciably better connection to works of art than more unobtrusive offerings of information which allow audiences to pick-and-choose their own experiences with works of art.  Apart from leading audiences by a nose-ring through what they should think/experience there must be a place for a clean, open and personal interpretation of our collections.  These are questions we’re wrestling with here at the IMA as I’m sure many of you are in your own institutions.  Why rush to an answer before we’ve studied our own audiences and local needs?

Missing the Mark

Maybe Nina missed the chance to talk to Tiffany Leason – who was also at the conference reception – about the Viewing Project .  A three year grant funded initiative, the Viewing Project is designed to experiment with ways of engaging visitors with works from the IMA’s permanent collection.  In addition, this project seeks to measure and evaluate this visitor engagement in ways that can lead to concrete answers about these issues.  Rather than guessing haphazardly about what kinds of exhibits might make a difference, we’re attempting to really study our particular circumstance and unique audience here in Indianapolis.

The Viewing Project in-gallery interface

I would have loved to point Nina towards some of our New Media team (most of whom are named Daniel) who could share about some pretty innovative ways we are engaging audiences in ways that allow them to self select their participation.

One of the Dans could have shared about project we did in association with an Egyptian Art exhibit which made use of Flickr both in the galleries and on the streets of Indy.  The project, called “Your Afterlife”, asked scads of people from around the museum and city about what they would take with them into the happily-ever-after which resulted in some really funny, interesting, and touching results.

What would you take with you into the Afterlife?

Or Dan might have shared some of the work we did creating visualizations from CAT scan data of one of the mummies in the show. Visitors could take a peak under the wraps both in the galleries near the display or online at home.

Meet Demetrious the Mummy

Yet another Dan might have talk to Nina about “Project IMA” a project we hosted featuring 16 local designers, which engaged the designers and the community in fashion designs presented in conjunction with an exhibition called “Breaking The Mode”.  The project culminated in a runway show inside the museum and some awesome video which is still really popular on ArtBabble.

Our last Dan may have taken Nina over to the Davis LAB where for over three years now we’ve been experimenting with bringing our online-efforts into the galleries for guests to experience and engage with.  Sponsored by several donors who really care about how technology can be used to enhance the museum experience, the Davis LAB has hosted a wide array of experiences.  In 2006, I built a multi-user physical interface for visitors to explore the IMA’s collection using camera tracking and advanced computer graphics algorithms.  This experience ran in the space for over two years and we tracked hundreds of thousands of users using  the interface to explore art from our collection.

ETX - Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface

The LAB has also hosted virtual reality displays, a variety of interactive kiosks, a recreation of ancient Rome which allowed users to navigate through a unique system of interlinked panoramas in addition to many other efforts.  All of these experiences are always available to visitors in the museum and online and are designed to leverage their experiences here at the IMA.

Explore Virtual Rome through Linked Panoramas

Now the Davis LAB plays host to ArtBabble and encourages connections with the IMA’s blogs and online communities.  We find that users engage with the content in new and different ways in the galleries and that we receive a large number of comments from physical visitors from within the space.  Mind you, we are encouraging this online/onsite engagement while preserving – for the moment – an open, clean interpretive experience in many of the galleries.

Visitor Experiences in the Davis LAB

I do think that mobile content deployments offer some intriguing options for user experiences in our galleries.  These platforms can preserve an aesthetic which supports personal connection, while offering unobtrusive ways for visitors to explore deeper connections to works of art on their own devices and at their own pace.  As such, we’ve started work on a new software system for mobile tours which can connect to our back-end content management practices and drive experiences on multiple content platforms including kiosks, phones, and web-browsers.

The project is called TAP and you can expect to see it “in the wild” sometime this fall in connection with our Sacred Spain exhibition.  Beyond serving just ourselves in this endeavor, we’ve been working with a collaboration of like-minded folks on some possible meta-data standards for mobile tours and platform architectures that can work for lots of different museums.  An early version of this spec (TourML – pronounced turmoil) can be seen in action in the Dallas Museum of Art’s new mobile tour.  You can read more about our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki,  follow the effort on twitter (#mtogo) or watch this space for more info.

Innovation

It’s worth taking a bit of time to talk about how innovation happens within museums.  This is a question I get asked a lot these days and, as such, I’ve thought a good bit about it.  I think it’s fair to say that we all seek after innovation in what we do.  At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at.  Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.  I can honestly say that during the last three years, the IMA has truly been the most innovative organization I’ve ever been a part of.  (This includes several major research universities, and the supercomputing center that invented the first web browser.)  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about innovation, it’s that it never occurs in a vacuum.  Certainly Max Anderson’s strong leadership and risk-tolerant style play a significant role here, and I’d like to think that our web team has had some pretty interesting ideas over the years.  The truth, however, is that the innovation others have identified in the IMA’s technology and online efforts is only a leading indicator of true institutional innovation and change happening just under the surface.

Those of you working in larger organizations know how difficult it is to push forward initiatives without comprehensive and wide ranging support from your colleagues.  Likewise, almost everything you see online has its roots in the support, efforts and beliefs of dozens of professionals from every department around the IMA.  Who is it, do you think, that populates the Dashboard with statistics?  Who’s responsible for the underpinnings of deaccessioning on the web?  Who is it that co-creates, consults, connects and supports the videos on ArtBabble?  Many of these folks have worked in art museums for decades and have devoted significant portions of their careers to advancing the arts in a non-profit setting.  To have their support and collaboration has truly been one of the great honors of coming to the IMA.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the first-fruits of innovation can most easily be seen online.  Bricks, mortar and people’s opinions take significantly longer to change than our websites do.  We plan our exhibitions years into the future. Planning for a building expansion can approach the decade mark. Even our educational programs are planned at least a year out.

There are very few efforts in museums which move at the pace and timescale of the internet and social media. But like the buds on a tree, the innovation you see online is propped up by an ecosystem of support throughout the IMA which allows it to succeed at all.  I wish each of you could take the time to understand the institutional change we have been experiencing here at the IMA.  As it stands however, the most evident and easily accessible proof of this transformation is visible online.  Over the coming years, I’m extremely confident that this change will pay ongoing dividends for our visitors.

In Conclusion

Finally, I don’t mean to be overly harsh with Nina.  She is a brilliant professional who brings a lot of value to our profession in her writing and contributions to the field.  I do take exception, in this case, to a poorly informed series of articles.

Nina says on her blog that, “I believe that every museum can grow its audience as long as it is willing to grow with that audience by taking risks, trying new things, and communicating openly.”  In my opinion, I think that the IMA has been an example of these very things over the past few years and has contributed significantly to the community of museums.  I’m not asking for any special treatment or exemption from criticism.  On the contrary, what I’d like most is the chance for a little conversation on the topic.  So… if something we’re doing strikes you wrong or seems out of place…  all you’ve got to do is ask a few questions.  You can find me most easily here on the blog, or on twitter (@rjstein)

Thanks,

Rob

You can find a lot more graphs from the survey results in the rest of this post, but I thought it would be interested to just pull out a few interesting stats for you up front.

Stats Quick-Hit:

• 480 People took the survey between 12/22/2009 and 2/9/2009 (our web traffic during that time included 113,000 unique visitors and 450,000 pages served)
• Almost 90% of people who took the survey were satisfied or very satisfied with their experience on imamuseum.org
• The average visitor is Female (67%) and between 25-34 year old.
• More than 55% of website visitors use Facebook! Guess keeping the IMA’s facebook page flush with content is a good idea!
• Sadly 51% of survey-takers Never Comment on Blogs (c’mon… poke us a little, we don’t bite!)
• Survey-takers were overwhelmingly Caucasian. Our real attendance through the doors of the museum is different than this, so it seems like we need to do a better job of reaching some different audiences.

We’ll be contacting the lucky winner of the iPod touch this week and sending out the love to them!  Thanks to everyone for helping us with the survey!  We’ll be back in touch as we put together a new set of user personas to use for some upcoming web work.

In the mean time, enjoy sifting through our data for us.  If you see anything interesting here, be sure to be one of those 49% who do comment on blogs, and Let Us Know!  We’re happy to answer any questions you ask!

YOU our IMA Blog Readers!
(Click here to help us by taking a short survey)

We did a similar survey about 1 year ago and are really interested to see how our audience and our performance has changed since that time. Our gut feeling is that these have changed some, but surveys like this will really help us know for sure.

I thought I’d ante up two items to sweeten the deal a little bit to entice you to help us out. From the graphic above you see that one of these is a drawing for an iPod touch give away to one lucky survey taker. The other is that I’ll promise to write up the results of the survey and present them here for others to pick and poke at.

On the web team, we hope to use these survey results in the creation of User Personasto reflect the current state of our online audience. Personas like these are an element of User Centered Design(UCD) and can really help us conceptualize features and workflows for the web. While we don’t actually adhere to all the tenets of UCD, this is one feature that has been helpful in the past.

We originally partnered with a local marketing and communications firm, Williams Randall, in the creation of User Personas for the re-launch of imamuseum.org in September 2007. Through a pretty detailed set of user research, they helped us develop 4 primary personas which we’ve come back to from time to time.

We gave them each fictional names and roles, which really helped us to think about them as people:

• Kate – a young, single, social, art enthusiast
• Andrew – a high school art teacher
• Claire – a parent of young children
• Annette – a current member of the IMA

In my opinion, we’re far from perfect when it comes to meeting all the needs of even these four imaginary people, but our hope is that by having actual targets in front of us that really matter we might end up focussing on features and content that makes a different.

So, will you help us get to know you better? We’d really like to better understand who you are and how you use our site. Maybe next year’s personas will be a Tim, or Jill who we havn’t met yet!