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

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.

Ever wondered how web designers make those little icons up in the address bar? Can’t figure out how to make a glossy button, complete with faded out reflective web 2.0 goodness? Or how about how to create those little badges and buttons you see gracing the sidebars and footers of your favorite blogs? I’m here to help.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to own an $3,000 software package and a bleeding-edge beefed up computer. In fact you can pass as a pro without even opening up Photoshop… for, dare I say, free! Thanks to the advancement of web technology and all of the love being spread by the web design community, you should have no problem convincing your friends you’ve spent back-breaking hours creating a pixel-perfect masterpiece.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 great online tools to help you become a web design (insert musical genre of choice here) star.

favicon.ico Generator
This tool is great for creating favicons. You have the option of importing an image to trace over with a very intuitive user interface making this task a snap. Favicon.cc even gives you the ability to create an animated icon! What more do you need? I’ll answer that, nothing.

Button Maker
This Button Maker by Adam Kalsey is the perfect tool for creating your own zany badge & button images. Choose your own custom messages, colors, and crispy pixel perfect positioning options.

Websnapshot 1.0
This is an Adobe Air application, which means you have to download and install it, but it’s free. This tool takes snapshots of any given website and creates 3 different sizes on your command. Perfect for bloggers and web content publishers.

Photoshop Express
Did you know Photoshop has an online web application that let’s you “Upload, tweak, rotate, edit, share and store your photos” for free? I’ve used this in a pinch a few times, and it’s very handy. There are a few filters as you see in the thumbnail.

Silk Icons
This set from famfamfam.com has over 700 icons you can use for any purpose, and make any changes you like. We use these on our in-house project management system, Athena. This is the most expansive free icon set I’ve seen.

stock.xchng
I can’t stress enough how great this site is. Users get hundreds of thousands of high quality, hand picked stock photos and graphics – all free! It’s also a great way for you to share your own self-produced stock art as a way to give back to this wonderful community.

Squidfingers’ Patterns
The web design community truly is a sharing bunch these days. Squidfingers has been sharing these beautiful pixel patterns for years, before it was trendy to be so giving. If your looking for web page background ideas, don’t sleep on this site.

Web Developer Firefox Extension
This tool comes in pretty handy if you dabble in html and/or CSS at all. It gives you easy access to actions such as: validating html and css, displaying image information, clearing your browser cache, viewing outlined css page elements, and much, much more.

ColorZilla Firefox Extension
This tool is perfect for grabbing a color for inspiration in your own designs. With two clicks you’re armed with the HSB, RGB, and Hex values for any given color on a webpage.

MeasureIt Firefox Extension
All too often we need to know the dimensions of areas on a web page. This is the rich man’s version of “print-screen, fire up Photoshop, paste, selection marquee”. If you understood that last sentence, congratulations, you are just as geeky as me.

I hope you find these gems as useful as I have. Feel free to share your favorite tools I left out in the comments!

Student using Global Origins

If you find yourself wandering through the Asian Art Galleries here at the IMA, take a quiet moment to follow the sounds of the Qin music. You will be led to a giant LCD display with a touch panel overlay and a hair dryer-esque sound dome above your head. Global Origins represents one of the first applications developed in-house by the IMA and marks a pivotal point in how the museum approaches technology.

I’ll step back a moment now and introduce myself. My name is Charlie Moad and I am an Applications Developer (a.k.a software developer) here at the museum. Now before you conjure up thoughts of suspenders and lisps, let me assure you I am quite the contrary. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons and I was only addicted to World of Warcraft for 6 months! I started at the museum 2 years ago and we have since hired another software developer and a graphics designer. Together we form what we call, the Applications Team. Traditionally museums outsource their technology which can be very expensive and time consuming. Each project requires bringing a new consultant up to speed on the basic operations of the institution. We allow the museum to retain knowledge and be more flexible when approaching technology.

Now back to Global Origins (GO). GO is an add-on to the NASA developed 3D world viewer, World Wind. Visitors are presented with a spinning globe and a series of stamps with works of art on them. Touching a stamp spins and zooms the globe to the respective origin and provides more information on the work and the culture. The application is meant to provide users with a visual orientation of where some of these works originated.

Global Origins using World Wind by NASA

We have been secretly collecting stats on this application since it was placed in the galleries almost two years ago. I pulled these stats a few days ago and found some impressive numbers. From October, 17^th 2006 to August, 28^th 2008 we have recorded 372,366 individual touches of the display. This averages almost 550 clicks per day with single day totals peaking over 3000. The graphic below represents where on the screen people have been clicking. The “hot spots” are in the expected places with one exception. People have a tendency to touch in the middle of the screen where the red and white target is located once a work is selected. While touching these targets has no effect, it definitely indicates the user wants more information about these geographic locations.

Click Heat overlay of Global Origins

Now let’s take a look at what works of art the users are interested in.  Below is a table which contains the 11 works that appear in GO.  Following that table is a chart containing the number of times a work has been selected by a visitor.  The spread seems fairly even except for two standouts.  It’s somewhat refreshing to see that the bright woodblock print of Mt. Fuji has a slight lead, and I suspect that the shar pei dog came in a strong number two because people like pictures of funny animals.

woman’s ceremonial skirt (33.682)	ritual wine server (guang) (60.43)
vase (maebyeong) (2001.223)	head of Buddha (1994.1)
Buddha of the Future (1995.1)	bull-shaped vessel (75.301)
seated shar pei dog (1999.2)	Fine Wind, Clear Morning (60.12)
storage jar (81.378)	Ichikawa Kakitsu as Ishidome Busuke and Arashi Kichirodku as Sagihira (72.47.271)
vase with dragon and cloud design (60.82)

Number of Views by Work

This post will be followed by similar ones that offer the outsider a peek into the technology operations of the IMA.  There is a common theme that allows us to be productive.  Open source software allows us to create a wide array of applications varying from the in-gallery interactive mentioned above to the blog you are reading right now.