Apologies for the lack of content recently. I’ve been too busy at work. My exhibition finished and was pulled down and then I had to take up another part-time role as the chair of our new web strategy group. In the last few weeks we’ve explained the priority and scope of this new initiative to our Council (or board) and at an all-staff meeting. Since then I’ve been actively involved in setting up an internal forum (we are using Ning) and in training our staff on the use of some common web 2.0 applications.

I think we are blessed with pretty enlightened leadership at the Memorial, because we have embraced the potential of web 2.0 at a reasonably Early stage and we’ve been allowed a pretty free hand to experiment and innovate. Without this, I’m sure an initiative like this is doomed.

So, here is a bit of an outline of the early progress. We have started by getting some volunteers or nominees to join our online forum and set up some basic groups on it for special interests like our historians, education and two projects to progress our presence on Facebook’s ArtShare and the Flickr Commons. The Ning forum or network also has several blog posts running to some pretty inspiring online presentations by people such as Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce.

The idea is to get each of our internal “communities” to bring forward their own suggestions and initiatives, rather than generating them centrally. First, we need our staff to become familiar with what is out there. What we needed to do was gather a small group around a set of terminals and set them up with the relevant accounts.

Firstly, we arranged access to the Firefox browser and Facebook from their work account. Some of the tools we want you to start playing with don’t work very well in IE7.

We started by setting them up with some useful tools in iGoogle. So, they were asked to go Google and register to set up an account. We then asked them to play with their iGoogle page, setting up some useful “widgets” that appear every time you login.

Next was Google Reader (because that is the feed reader I use!). It provides an easy way to automatically subscribe to blogs and other website that are updated regularly, like newspapers. Blogs of interest can be found on Google Blog Search. Most of our staff are already pretty familiar with blogs as we were one of the earlier museum bloggers.

After that we moved to set up a social bookmark account on del.icio.us. We networked the participants with a set of bookmarks that I use and briefly covered how to make the best use of it. I think we can really do some very useful things with del.icio.us to gather together useful and little know areas of our huge website for certain interest groups. (More on this idea in a later post.)

After that we quickly covered SlideShare, a rich source of shared presentations from various sources on virtually all subjects. It is very easy to set up an account, search for and then save your faves.

Finally, we set everyone up with a Facebook account and asked them to add a couple of friends.

The training session took 90 minutes. In our next phase we will tackle more tools like LinkedIN, You Tube and wikis. I think I’ll also add in OpenID because we are setting up so many different accounts.

This is most of the text for my recent “provocative paper” at the 2008 Museums Australia Futures Forum in Canberra. The rest of the text was made up as I talked to the slides I used, so if you wanted to hear them you should have come the the forum. My slides are now up on Slideshare (see the post above).

The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) brings old music to life with their live performances. Sometimes they challenge the audience with new interpretations or even “mash-ups” of old and new music. Museums succeed in giving their own well-interpreted performance when they go beyond just shovelling huge amounts of scanned material on the web. I think it is a bit like the ACO breathing new life into old music.

Parallels (does anyone know a neater way to include a table in Blogger?):

I think there is a further parallel in what the public expects from both orchestras and museums: a professional, engaging and enthusiastic performance. I think the ACO is a better example than a full scale symphony orchestra as it is easier for curators to identify with the artistic leadership given by Richard Tognetti, who usually leads the ACO from his violin, than the more formal orchestra conductor waving a baton from a podium.

Museum curators need to manage and care for the collections resulting from our digitisation programs just as we manage our physical collections and museum curators need to be interpreting our online content by playing “our own instruments”. That interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. I don’t think we can just assume the public will find and use it on our rather static websites. Blogs, Flickr groups, social networks and applications like Art Share on Facebook, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples of the relatively new means curators should be using to draw attention to our digitisation programs and collections. They’re a little like touring exhibitions or broadcast performances, on the internet.

We need to recognise that digitisation of cultural material for preservation is also good for access. Digital assets created and acquired by digitisation initiatives must be managed and preserved. I believe that the provision of free and open access to the digitised collections of public cultural institutions is also an essential part of the process.

Using new online technologies, we can now facilitate the addition of public descriptions to these files. We can even collaborate with the public in the development of online exhibitions. But, I would not go as far as to say that simply allowing our users (or the audience to use the orchestra analogy again) to generate most of the supposed content of our websites is going to please anyone. If we use the new technologies and social networks primarily to allow users to make comments all over our online catalogues then that is the same as the ACO (or any orchestra) inviting those who have paid to attend a concert to get up on stage and have a go themselves. I believe the public want and deserve more from us than just engagement and conversation. We are being paid for our professional skills in museums, libraries and archives and have an obligation to digitise our collections and provide well-interpreted access to them online as well as other rich content for our websites, just as the ACO performs its music on stage.

I am certainly a keen advocate for social networking and going beyond “metadata” and traditional forms of museology, but there is something more fundamental to do before that kind of “window-dressing” becomes the top priority. We still need to be developing and interpreting fundamental digital collection content.

Some of my colleagues attended the first national Summit on Digital Collections in Adelaide in 2006, but despite a draft National Framework being circulated, not much has since changed. So what we have are some words on a page, but no music yet and certainly no instruments to play it with.

What do we need now? I believe we need some kind of national centre of excellence that is capable of encouraging us in the digitisation of cultural materials. But it should also provide research, advice, and facilitate collaboration, cooperation and training. Perhaps it could also coordinate a shared digital repository service (like CAN) for the poorer institutions who cannot afford their own digital storage.

Much of the advice and research is also available online from UK, US and European sites but the situation overseas is vastly different from our own environment and culture. We have different funding models, differing public expectations, different uptake and spread of broadband and mobile coverage and in many cases our national cultural institutions are well ahead of our overseas counterparts. There is nothing in Australia that meets our specific needs or is close enough geographically for us to have shared conferences, seminars and workshops without paying far too much money on overseas travel.

There are many examples of individual Australian digital initiatives that would be the envy of many overseas institutions. A quick list includes the National Library’s Pandora web archive, the Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service, the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy, Picture Australia, and massive digitisation programs from the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia. Currently, something like a large shared digital repository and research service is really only being progressed in the Australian university sector for academic material in projects such as ARROW (led by Monash University) and Demetrius (at ANU). There is nothing like this in the Australian cultural sector.

Maybe we just need to set up an Australian partner centre under one of the international organisations, but we also need some local presence or we will all just keep moving forward in an uncoordinated manner and using vastly different file formats, standards, and even different preservation metadata. Sadly, I think too few institutions are planning for their digital future by setting up trusted digital repositories for their growing collection of digital assets. In the end, if the world decides that the only real digital repository is a certified “Trusted Digital Repository”, that is audited to standards being developed in the US (by OCLC/RLG and NARA) and Germany, will anyone in an Australian cultural institution have had a say in developing that audit checklist? That will make everything more difficult than it needs to be in the future. The “music” might be lost and even if it isn’t, we might not be able to play it.

I did an interview with Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum over the last week. The interview covers our use of blogs at the Australian War Memorial, to share information about our exhibitions and collections. You can read it on his fresh + new(er). He has generously published all of it, so you may need some refreshments to help you get through it all!

Here’s a thing – a draft abstract that was due yesterday. I wonder whether putting it up as a blog post works? Comments are most welcome. (If it doesn’t work, I may end up taking this post down in sheer embarrassment!)

SPERA Conference 2008 Keynote Paper (draft abstract)
Creative use of new and emerging technologies at the Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial is busy preparing itself, both via its website and within the museum itself for the Mobile Generation. Digital content consumed on our website and available on new wireless networks within the museum (coming soon, not there yet!) will increasingly become platform independent and much richer, moving beyond simple text and images to include sound and video files. We are also changing our own approach and attitude to be less institutional or didactic and more engaging and collaborative with our community.

Our role as one of Australia’s oldest national cultural institutions and the experience we have gained in our recent history with new and emerging online technologies is certainly relevant to the education sector, families and the personal development of both teachers and students. Compared to some other institutions, we have a small amount of didactic content specifically related to certain curricula, and have plans to increase this. Generally, our content and information is designed to be accessible to all and we are now making it easier to find, use and re-use, which will also be of benefit to teachers, students and parents. So, it becomes valuable content from the social history, literacy and cultural perspectives and, we may also be seen as a useful model to teachers and students with some imagination and initiative.

I will discuss and demonstrate some of our most recent and somewhat brave initiatives to expose our content and to engage with new and much larger social networks such as blog readers, Flickr, You Tube and Facebook. I will also cover our initiative to migrate our in-house Australian military history encyclopedia’s content to Wikipedia.org, in an attempt to engage with an audience of “produsers”. We believe that many of our younger audience are now more reliant on some or all of these more social platforms and networks for much of their information and knowledge that older generations used to gain from traditional media such as TV, radio, newspapers and printed magazines.

Some of these initiatives may be seen as simple on the surface, but for a large and somewhat conservative national institution with a trusted reputation to protect, they can be seen as risky. Many of our colleagues in like institutions are watching us with some fascination as some have not yet been able to take the same steps. We believe that it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn more about these new “many-to-many” conversations and developing “viral” networks. Our experience has been that we can only learn through involvement, experimentation and innovation. All of that obviously involves some real risk management, as distinct from risk aversion. So far, the returns have been overwhelmingly beneficial and sometimes surprising.

The challenge for us in all of this is to maintain our advantage. We are seen as and need to maintain our position as a trusted provider or credible and authentic, high quality content.

I think this is a pretty decent post from Richard Tognetti the artistic leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It covers the whole arts side of the 20:20 summit.
I guess one aspect not covered is that currently the focus within the arts sector in Oz is still all about the performing arts. Those on the other cultural heritage side (museums, libraries, galleries and archives) are still very much the poor cousins. There are well-funded pockets, but generally we fade into the background, especially when compared to sport!

Wow . . . just wow! Johnny Chung Lee is really clever. He has come up with a complete electronic whiteboard system that you can make yourself really cheaply. You can find the hardware and software instructions, including a very popular YouTube video and the software downloads on his Wii Project page here. You can also view a great demo of his new projects on TEDBlog here. (I tried embedding the video here using the code they give on TEDBlog, but for some reason Blogger didn’t allow the video content to load.)

The only limits to what we might be able to use this for in museums are the bounds of our imagination.

This posts needs to be read in concert with a previous post titled What will people pay for online? Maybe this one should have come first, but I’ve only recently had the chance to see Chris Anderson’s Wired magazine (March 2008) article “Why $0.00 is the future of business”, so here it is now.

It is a really interesting and stimulating article. Read it for yourself as it explains simply many mysteries about “freenomics”. What you get here is my take on that article and my attempt to put it all into a “what might this mean for museums or cultural institutions?” context.

Chris captures the attention of anyone with anything to do with money-making in an online venture with his statement that:

The economies of scale that can be achieved on the web give us the chance to spread the costs of business over increasing audiences, but the emerging business models are more complex than just bigger scale and decreasing prices. He cites three examples of completely free services now provided to users online: unlimited storage (Yahoo Mail); bandwidth (YouTube); and processing power (Google). As he says: “The Web has become the land of the free”. And this has resulted in the spread of two trends that are driving free business models across the web economy:

1. Giving away goods or services to some customers while selling other things to others; and
2. Anything that touches digital networks is affected by falling costs.

So, if we (in cultural institutions) are to look at ways of recovering our costs or making money from e-sales or even measure the value of what we do online, we need to understand those trends and what they mean to us.

Chris also points out the stark difference, from the consumer’s perspective, between the cheap and free economies. He says the psychological gap between a price or market that is free and one that is almost free is why micro payments fail. It is why Google does what Google does for free. Even a small fee charged would fail. As Chris says: “The winners made their stuff free first.”

So how do they make money then? He begins by explaining the traditional “free to air” media model where the media owners are not selling their products to an audience. Instead they are selling their audiences to advertisers. He says that this model has simply been extended on the Web, but advertising isn’t paying for everything and he offers six broad categories for the web’s priceless economy, some of which seem more relevant to cultural institutions than others:

1. FREEMIUM: Stuff like software, services and some content is free to users of the basic version. We already do this with some pretty decent free content on our website. If, however, you need a higher resolution image for publication or some other reason, you need to pay a premium. Or, if you want something digitised for you, you’ll also pay for jumping the queue. But is there a better model or even a different one we could offer for certain services?
2. ADVERTISING: Yahoo, Google and Amazon use advertising big time. Chris says that: “these approaches are based on the principle that free offerings build audiences with distinct interests and expressed needs that advertisers will pay to reach”. The Australian War Memorial now has an advertisement on Facebook! For cultural institutions, however, there is something we probably need to do before we approach potential advertisers for our own sites and that is to build bigger audiences. So again, delivery of popular content that is easily found, searched used and re-used is kinda critical to this, but that’s a whole other ball-game that I won’t get into here and now.
3. CROSS-SUBSIDIES: This relates to the provision of free or cheap products or services that entice you to pay for something else. Maybe those annoying “interest free payments until 2025” advertisements also fall into this category. The money is free (for a while) as long as you buy one of our products. I’m not sure we’ll go there, but perhaps there is something for us to learn from musicians who are providing free online music as simple and cheap publicity for the more lucrative tours they run? Maybe the equivalent for us are free online content such as podcasts, images and even film that relates to our real exhibitions and serves as an enticement to come and see them in the flesh (regardless of whether they are free or paid entry). For many museums the generation of actual visitors is still more important than any form of revenue from the sale of its goods and services. I know, I know, I’ve really twisted Chris’ category this time, but hey, cultural institutions aren’t really competing with Kmart (or Wal-Mart).
4. ZERO MARGINAL COST: I know, scary economic terms, but stay with me. (I think that the main difference between this category and #6 is that this one is more about zero cost to distribute the item.) Chris gives us a great description that the force to make the price zero : “is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM and every other barrier to piracy the [music] labels can think of have failed”. Many creative artists like musicians, visual artists and even short film makers give away their content online for free, sometimes as a way of marketing other things they do, but as Chris points out, many have just accepted that for them their art is not a money-making business. The altruistic provision of free content, (especially when there is no cost of distribution to consider) like the sharing of knowledge, experience and real wisdom, is growing exponentially on the web (IMHO), so perhaps cultural institutions are more part of that side of the web, than a new dot.com push?
5. LABOUR EXCHANGE: This happens when users either improve a service or contribute something to it (like a wiki). Another example that I’ve used recently is Linkedin.com. I set up a quick profile, asked a question about collaborative or forum software to assist in networking for some colleagues of mine and was overwhelmed with answers provided freely by other members from all over the world, within a few hours. Some museums are now playing with user added tags or “folksonomies” that give a new perspective to our online catalogues and descriptions of our collections. I think that is only the tip of the iceberg and much deeper user-collaboration could be facilitated online to generate content. See a previous post here on “produsers“.
6. GIFT ECONOMY: Everything is free: to everyone. Here the web can be used a platform that gives individuals global impact. Altruism comes in again as a motivator, perhaps by becoming more important as a motivating factor and reason in this economy than a price, a cost or a simple monetary value. Maybe for cultural institutions we need to look for better ways of measuring online success than simple commercial revenue targets. It is a bit conceptual, but nonetheless a worthy ideal.

Later on in his article, Chris goes on to suggest that reputation (metric=PageRank) and attention (metric=traffic) are two non-monetary values or “scarcities” that can in turn realise better advertising (as I suggested in point #2 above). Cultural institutions already have an advantage here because we are seen as reliable sources of credible information and content and this is very important in an environment almost overwhelmed by the abundance same. It all gets back to how we best use that advantage and what we want from this new free web. Allowing users to collaborate with us and to generate some of our content will help, but ultimately the audience will also look to us for the qualities we can deliver from our collections such as: uniqueness, rarity, quality, credibility, authenticity and dare I say it, accessibility.

I am reading about a May 2007 interview with David Weinberger’s (author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, May 2007, Times Books) in which he referred to the fundamental change that is taking place (online) as being the “externalisation of meaning”. I read about this on Seb Schmoller’s blog Fortnightly Mailing. When he referred to there being no one right way to order the world, particularly digital stuff, I immediately thought the same thing about our vast digitised collections (both images and documents) that are now online and not always that comprehensively described.

So here is my take on Seb’s summary of David’s talk and what it means in the museum world:

• it is now simpler for people to organise or search digital things (content or collections) as they decide, rather than for them to be classified for them (eg. museum taxonomies which are not always that easy to understand);
• the links between digital things, and the tags (or folksonomies) and other attributes that people give them create a rich layer of meaning that can be drawn upon by others – and they may be better understood by others than the taxonomies we use in museums to describe our digitised stuff;
• the difference between data and meta-data is disappearing (I’ve not thought this one through fully, but will add some more when I do); and
• through Wikipedia and blogs and similar there is an increasingly public negotiation of knowledge, via a conversation, in which experts (curators, historians and the creators of digital collections) are decreasingly the arbiters of authority, solely through the addition of our own context.

So, if what this infers is a step along the path towards facilitating and building a better, open online community that is relevant to museums like the one I work in, perhaps this quote from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (in an interview with David Weinberger) is also something we could well heed:

In the same interview Craig compares the similarity between Craigslist and Wikipedia and again, I think there is relevance for us:

The big similarity is that both sites are built by the people who use them. Both have a culture of trust, and both are part of an historic trend where power is flowing from small groups of powerful people to much larger, but still small, groups of people.

The two go on from there to stress the critical importance and benefits (from unintended consequences) of doing good by paying attention to real customer service, listening to people (those engaged in the conversation) and following through (not just lip service).

The Memorial now has a Facebook page, a YouTube page and a presence on Flickr. And we now have a page on our website with links to them all: find it at http://www.awm.gov.au/aboutus/community.htm In doing this we’ve followed the fantastic example set by Brooklyn Museum and their Community page. We may not be as funky as Brooklyn have managed to be, but we are a war museum and our community will be different from theirs. All of this is an attempt to expose our digital content (or collections) to much larger networks. We are now also looking at the facilitation of tags (or folksonomies) and even deeper descriptions of some of our digitised content by this new community. That will probably have to wait until we’ve implemented our massive new Enterprise Content Management system as it will lay the foundations for many programs including digitisation, web publishing and improved federated search on our site across all collection management systemn and other databases containing digitised documents.

We also continue to use the AWM Blog to draw attention to our collections and the work we do on them as well as to engage the community on topis of particular interest. Some recent examples include posts from conservators, curators and historians on: Aircraft Conservation, our catalogue programs in the Research Centre and also the recent discovery of HMAS Sydney, which has attracted a great deal of interest and many comments from the community.