Research Question Four

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PROCESS: Please enter your responses to the research question in the space below. Research Notes provide guidance on how to approach answering the research questions.

You may list as many items as you wish (and we hope you will!), but please list each item separately -- that is, if you wish to list trend1, trend2, and trend3 as important, please list each item as a separate bullet point (asterisk), as we will be rank ordering these later. Do not list them as a single paragraph, as that will hamper the process.

Please also add your name after each item, as I have done here, so that we can follow up with you if we need additional information or leads to examples. [L. Johnson]

If an item on your list is already listed here, just add your comment to the end of it, with your name.

Research Question Four - Trends

What technology trends do you expect will have a significant impact on the ways in which museums approach their missions during the next five years?

• The rapid development and world-wide implementation of a location-aware infrastructure for knowledge dissemination [David Bearman]

• The emergence of mechanisms for increasingly meaningful group virtual presence [David Bearman]

• User expectations of smart objects and spaces [David Bearman]

David loves the new tech and so do I, but once again I find these timelines wildly optimistic. For instance, we may begin to see the first useful aggregation of location-aware infrastructure by Year 5, but I can't imagine we will see it seamless and worldwide anytime in the next decade. The question of meaningful groups is another challenging one at every level of technology; we may see steady progress over the next five years, but any real adequacy of group support is still a ways off. I'm not sure what David means by smart objects, but if he's talking about anything like augmented reality, that's another item I'd peg for the outer end of this time window.

Much more imminent, I would argue, is the arrival of community source software development as an effective model for the construction of software by and for museums. Projects like OpenCollection point the way to how museums can come together and develop shared technology collaboratively and sustainably, enhancing their autonomy, agility, and sovereignty at the same time as they create new affordances for strategic, mission-critical activities. I'm obviously biased: my organization is a principal funder of these types of initiatives. But they've shown value in every other cultural sector in which Mellon works, and they're showing value already in collections management, so it would be surprising indeed if community source were not at least a somewhat transformative innovation over the next several years.

There's also the issue of open educational resources. The idea of museums as content hubs is very appealing from the traditional perspective, but OER may well reduce or eliminate a museum's ability to monetize the educational and other content it currently publishes, as well as putting pressure on museums to demonetize access to the collection as well. Five years is probably the earliest that these disruptive pressures will become significant, but once they start they'll only grow stronger. One alternative business model would emphasize and monetize the participation of constituents in the construction and sharing of content, but as David and others have noted, that model will be a difficult pill for traditionalists to swallow, and even if it works, its revenues may well not make up for the revenues lost to OER. The trends represented in OER pose very difficult questions for every cultural sector and for both for-profits and not-for-profits, and of all the cultural constituencies in which my program works at present, museums seem to me to be the sector least prepared to tackle those questions effectively, so I'd put OER at or near the top of things to watch. (Christopher J. Mackie)

I hope that others will chime in here, but in the meantime I am putting in a plug for an aggressive pursuit of evolutionary and incremental improvement of our implementation of existing, maturing technologies as being far more significant in the coming five years than any strictly new technologies. I think that museums are still learning to perfect (on a good day) their use of existing technologies, and that in fact our efforts are better focused there than on the continual pursuit of the newest tech. Yes, I love gadgets, and I'm curious about it all, but in terms of the things we've been talking about here, I simply don't see any of these technologies or trends as decisive and transformative, and meanwhile we are still trying to consolidate hard won gains from the last decade. BTW... I AM including handhelds, smartphones, etc. in that domain of maturing tech that can finally be more routinely used within museums, provided we devote adequate time to the creation of strong content, good storytelling, good visuals and truly meaningful video. For many smaller museums, ICAs, and even comparatively tech rich institutions, the lower economic bar for the use of video in-house and on the web, and the lower cost of big flatscreen displays for galleries, lobbies, education and visitor centers, and so on, means that more valuable content can be delivered more often to visitors; if you have staff to do so, you can also migrate it to phones, etc.

Next thing: what do we know about what works best, and for which audiences? A number of museums have been podcasting for a year or two. What have they learned about visitor preferences and use - and not just about numbers downloaded, but about what people think about what they downloaded, about whether they come back for more, pass along recs to friends, etc? (Peter, you could help us assess this trend if you have evaluation stats!) What have we learned recently about website use? Are there any trends there that are surprising and unexpected?

I think that the possibilities of group presence, dialogical things like wikis, blogs, collaborative software, etc., and possibly virtual world discussion groups about RL museum visits and objects might hold some intriguing possibilities, maybe. Regardless, all of that strikes me as instances of learning to use what we've already got, but more effectively.

Finally, for most museums, I doubt the location aware, geotagging idea will ever amount to much, but maybe I just don't understand it yet. (John Weber)

I'm sorry if I'll take us off-topic, but I feel that the question really isn't quite doing the topic justice. I think the main impact on museums use of technology won't come from any new/emergent technology, but rather from public pressure on museums to make use of the network to provide access to their materials in a meaningful way. In many cases, that means: not on the museum website, but in a space where people already are used to interacting with content. In many cases, that means: not in a context where I only can see the materials from one institution, but the materials from many institutions. Any technology which will let us put our content in front of as many people as possible will be a good technology. Museums will spend much of the next 5 years debating fundamental policy questions surrounding openness and copyright, and they'll come to the conclusion that they need to adjust their policies in ways which will actually allow them to take advantage of the network. (Günter Waibel)

• Now that I'm back from MW and can comment on what others have said, I'd like to endorse Christopher Mackie's judgment of implementation time frames and call attention to the question itself which was about trends that would effect "the ways in which museums approach their missions during the next five years". [David Bearman]

I'd like to hope that technology serves mission and not the other way round. I agree with Günter and John. Organizations that are early adopters will be exploring things like geotagging. But, I think that vast majority of museums will be probing and expanding upon the current trends (cell phones, ipods, etc.) The field is likely to continue to gravitate toward new technology that can be adapted to deliver content and provide visitors with means for shaping of experience through their personal tech (innovative software mash-ups are likely to be significant for the next few years.) [Sara DeAngelis]

I'm not sure if there's a good place to put this question/comment, but this discussion seems more wide-ranging than most, so I suppose here will do :-) Is a report that focuses on new technologies qua technologies really a service to the museum community, or will it perhaps do as much harm as good? I'm not sure of my own answer to this question, but here's my thinking. As many others have noted here, museums already have access to a diverse body of effective technologies--most of which are being underused or misused by most museums. In a world where people aren't using what they've already got particularly well, why should we believe that pointing them more quickly and effectively to the Next Big Thing will produce any better outcomes? Would the museum community perhaps be better-served by a report that eschewed attention to the NBTs in favor of sound advice on strategic technology planning and ways to manage organizational relationships around technology to encourage agility, effectiveness, and productivity? I think you could raise the same questions about the Horizon Reports in higher ed, but at least there you have a strong history of strategic tech planning at many institutions, and associations like EDUCAUSE that beat the drum of strategic planning for those willing to hear, so that the Horizon Report becomes a force for good among those prepared to do good with it. Absent those enabling factors (and they appear to be mostly absent in the museum world), will this report just encourage the faddists and dismay those who want (as do our contributors) to help museum leaders evaluate new tech intiatives rationally and in terms of their own, distinctive institutional missions? [Christopher J. Mackie] Editors' note: this conversation continued at some length on the project listserv and is available to Advisory Board members in the Listserv Archive.

Christopher says "OER may well reduce or eliminate a museum's ability to monetize the educational and other content it currently publishes". I must live in a different world I'm afraid. As far as I know there are no museums anywhere that successfully monetize educational content they publish. So what is OER going to change?

I wish I thought the potential of community developed open source software was as great as Christopher imagines too. It would be nice. But I don't see much prospect of it. The examples we have in the museum community to date are trivial - Pachyderm or steve - and Open Collection seems rudderless.

I agree with John and Sara that most actual changes in museum practices in the next five years will come from the implementation of technologies that currently exist, and indeed are widespread in other sectors and well proven in museums, but is that what we mean when we say "how museums approach their missions in the next five years" or do we mean how they think about the shapes their institutions need to take as they move into the future, which was how I read the question (though in retrospect, and on another reading, I can see that the more quotidian reading may be correct and indeed, might be more germane). (David Bearman)

Agreed- it will be about maturity of technology already here. But also as we begin to see the technology as more everyday and apparent (the ball-point pen and the radio are no longer technology) then it is and will be more appropriately about communication trends that will have an impact on the museum's mission. How the museum communicates with its public and does the rest of it's business better (using tech) will remain critical.

I agree that open and community source software movements will have a strong impact in the next 5 years- and not just on the collections level, but on the exhibits and visitor level as well. There have been some recent proposals for open source exhibit kiosk development (still in the proposal stage, but I think it's only time). For a small institution, the ability to design kiosks as easily as one can create a blog will upgrade their whole technology presence on the floor.

I absolutely agree with Gunter's point: Museums will spend much of the next 5 years debating fundamental policy questions surrounding openness and copyright, and they'll come to the conclusion that they need to adjust their policies in ways which will actually allow them to take advantage of the network.

The issue of how museums approach their mission in the next five years is too broad for me here-- the trend towards examining institutional impact and whole institutional planning is interesting but not as relevant within the scope of the report here. It's true that many museums, especially those that aren't the Met, need a whole new business model in order to survive in this marketplace.

I have read and re-read posting on OER on the other questions and can not figure out how this will have any impact on the museum world. As David says, educational publications are a mission-driven money sink for museums. The business model is so different for higher education (and the endowments SO much different) that I can't see the transfer at all.

As for Christopher Mackie's point "will this report just encourage the faddists and dismay those who want (to help museum leaders evaluate new tech intiatives rationally and in terms of their own, distinctive institutional missions?" I think it has a chance of begin taken seriously if the team here is willing to think beyond the art world. NSF has been in the process of completely revamping their evaluation- this could influence the agenda there- and they fund quite a few of the big technology projects that occur in science museums and science centers (not to mention zoos, aquaria, botanical gardens, and others that qualify by AAM's definition of a museum). (Kate Haley Goldman)

To the list I started this discussion with, I'd add the more fundamental trends of miniaturization, embedding, cost reduction, speed improvement, storage growth, consumerization of novel interfaces and devices ... al of which will make it easier for museums to implement new communications technologies and all of which will put greater pressure on them to do so, as the public will expect museums to interact with the means that other institutions and services in their environment do. What will not happen, though some of the commentators on this panel from those sectors think or hope it will, is that museums will not come to resemble universities (adopting education as a primary goal) or libraries (adopting information dissemination as a primary goal) - that would be suicidal for them, and there are few incentives in their world to do so. [David Bearman]

Additional responses to this question were solicited and recorded at a Professional Forum at Museums and the Web 2008. The responses have been posted on a separate page in the wiki.