Research Question Three

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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 challenge1, challenge2, and challenge3 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 Three - Challenges

What do you see as the key challenges related to the adoption of emerging technology in museums during the next five years?

• Fear of surrendering authority to visitors and or non-experts. The perception is that museums hold the public trust as information-providers, and that that trust might be eroded by opening the door to social collaborative participation via various new technologies including tagging, comment networks, open contribution of visitor content. [N. Simon]

• Lack of motivation to innovate. As Eric Siegel, Director of the NY Hall of Science once said, "museums are in the business of survival, not success." As non-profits, we have few incentives to swing for the fences (and face a high potential rate of failure). The question of "why" around emerging technologies is different when market viability is based on a very specific segment of funders. [N. Simon]

• Always, I think, it is maintaining the focus on mission and resisting technologies for their own sake. [David Bearman]

• I'd like to interject a perspective from AAM/Denver re: Nina and David's last comments. Yesterday morning Mike Edson and Nik Honeysett made the point that in order to innovate you have to be able to fail. Shortly afterwards, AAM's new CEO Ford Bell addressed a plenary saying that if there was one word that Museums stood for in America, it was Excellence. They are guarantors of excellence, and their public trust is built, he implied, on this perception.

• But of course--to go back to Mike and Nik's presentation and the Harvard Business Review--the difference between a very good company and a great one is that the great ones are willing to experiment, and acknowledge failures as necessary stages in their organizational learning process. Museums are caught on the horns of this dilemna: they want to personify excellence, in a blameless, unblemished way, and that keeps them protecting their proverbial derriere and looking backwards a lot. But they also want to be innovative and community-focused and all those other progressive ideals. The result is an internal push-pull, approach-avoidance dance with technology, among other things. [Peter Samis]

• I would add to this list (with which I agree) the relative lack of effective collaborative nexi within the museum community vis a vis other not-for-profit cultural communities like higher education, libraries, and the performing arts. Much of what needs to be done over the next several years in the museum space is best done collaboratively; some of it can only be done collaboratively if it is to be sustainable. The lack of existing 'federating' institutions increases the costs of collaboration to institutions and makes such collaborations more ad hoc and therefore more fragile. Institutionalized collaborative nexi also give museums a low-cost pathway to experiment with collaboration in a less-threatening environment: they don't have to jump immediately to collection-sharing or the surrender of sovereignty to non-experts, for example. Effective collaboration in the museum world is going to require would-be collaborators to think hard about how to overcome the lack of these enabling institutions, and to look outside the museum space to other cultural sectors in order to borrow ideas and best-practices from sectors where their presence has made collaboration easier and more robust. (Christopher J. Mackie)

• The big problem (in addition to the above) is institutional myopia. Some of the opportunities that are best aligned with current and future mission AND offer the biggest 'ROI' or payback are those that require significant leaps of faith and *long term thinking*. I'm thinking here particularly of investment in the technologies required for cross-institution searching (faith - that users actually want this, reality - yes they do but they don't want it in the way your organisation thinks they do . . . ). The other big one is geo-tagging (faith - users will have devices and want to encounter the museum world in their world, reality - probably syndication for revenue to cultural tourism services initially). (Seb Chan)

• I agree with most of the above. Many museums have been adopting technology in way that is rather piecemeal perhaps out of fear, focus or funding. (This is particularly true of small and mid-sized underfunded organization who's use of and IT systems on many levels tend to be created in a patchwork style rather than through a long term plan.) In a study done a two years ago by a colleague smaller museums were feeling challenged by technology as advanced as e-mail and word processing. Embracing emergent technology is just too big a leap for some when they're struggling to keep basic resource up and running. I feel I'm see a widening divide within the field. Collaboration can and does sometimes address some of these gaps but can become a challenge to sustain over the long term. I wonder how many museums out there actually have a plan in place for the sustenance and future growth of technology? [Sara DeAngelis]

• The previous entries really hit the marks. Not enough resources, a myopic view of innovation, lack of real urgency and motivation, and poor understanding of the opportunities by leadership. Development does not seem to do a good job of making technology sexy to donors. Christopher's concept of a "federating " institution is very apt, but could be expanded to the idea of leadership in use of technologies with standards. Museums should go beyond the mindset of being vessels that collect and present objects and culture somewhat passively and really take advantage of their inherited badge of expertise and actively educate the public. I think if the goals were changed then the use of technology would follow more organically like it does in the education and business sectors. [H. Goldstein]

• Most museums are still trying to innovate and implement effectively within the framework of the technologies that emerged between 1995 and around 2003 or so, when you could begin to assume that some level of broadband was available at home among your core audiences and members. Yes, we all have websites, and many places have new generation audio tours, and some are experimenting with cell tours, etc., but a lot of that content is tired and in need of refreshing. Just keeping these things going is a challenge for many/most institutions....

More than any thing else, I think that a staggering lack of dedicated resources (staff as well as budgets for them to spend), is the reason we don't see more eager exploratory experimentation with new tech, if not long-term adoption. If resources existed and were not in competition with other institutional efforts and priorities, the other issues, fear, institutional myopia, inertia, would largely melt away. As far as I can see, the bottom line is the bottom line. (John Weber)

• I really agree with Sara and John--and many of the other points raised. Specifically, I'm hearing at AAM words very much like Sara's: "In a study done a two years ago by a colleague smaller museums were feeling challenged by technology as advanced as e-mail and word processing. Embracing emergent technology is just too big a leap for some when they're struggling to keep basic resource up and running." When she adds " I wonder how many museums out there actually have a plan in place for the sustenance and future growth of technology?" I would wager the answer is less than 1%. One way to ascertain this more precisely might be to see how many Chief Technology Officers there are in museums across America. I would wager that in art museums they can be counted on half a hand... One interesting factoid that came up in Ford Bell's address: out of more than 20,000 museums in the US, only 771 are accredited! In this atmosphere, John's comment about the bottom line gains new resonance: with funds so limited, most museums are just trying to keep their core mission-based functions together, and can only dream of technology solutions that universities take fro granted. [Peter Samis]

• Mike Edson cited the Capability-Maturity Model developed at CMU. It states that there is a sequence of stages organizations must go through before they can achieve sustainable technology/software change. Most museums are arguably at the earliest stages, where heroic efforts are needed to achieve any technology change or capacities are "one-deep" (dependent on the presence of certain key persons, without whom the initiative would founder). They don't have the structural capacity or internal expertise to progress beyond that at this point. At the higher levels, processes become more defined, and museums are good at certain long established mission-critical software types--e.g., collections management systems for tracking artworks--but those are not the horizons this report is aiming at! See http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/general/index.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model for more on this. [Peter Samis]

• To the above list, I would add the immense obstacle of copyright and other legal and access controls, which make the implementation of any open-access technology confusing and risky. Museums don't necessarily own the rights to the material they display and use and museum professionals (as well as the public) often lack a clear understanding of the law(s). This is especially a problem in art museums, where so much of the visual material is subject to copyright controls--or, worse, no one understands if it is subject to copyright or not. The technologies of collaboration, open access, social interaction, and shared authorship may all be on the horizon, but they all run directly counter to another horizon of innovation: innovative expansion of copyright, and the exponential growth of the "license culture." When it comes to visual art, the tangle of different national legal regimes can be especially daunting. [Eve Sinaiko]

• An obstacle not specific to museums, but typical of many smaller and medium-size nonprofits in the arts and humanities, is that funding exists for projects, not infrastructure. The independent nonprofit isn't comparable to an institution of higher ed in this respect: the funding models are so different and the tendency is to develop projects based on what funding is available. [Eve Sinaiko]

• …which of course raises questions of sustainability, as funders always want to pay for something new, but never to sustain an initiative already in place. Another reason why we work in "heroic" project cycles rather than rationally engineered building blocks... [Peter Samis]

• Responding to the comments on collaborative workspaces (and other collaboration technologies) in Question One: There's a sort of presumption that collaboration is intended to overcome hierarchies and breakdown entrenched silos, and so forth. But I'm not sure that collaboration or collaborative workspaces have to be in opposition to hierarchies. I want to speak for hierarchies within museums having a positive value--even though that may sustain some of the embedded siloing that can be so frustrating. Curator-driven museums may have a great commitment to mission, just as editor-driven publishing houses are mission-driven. So the technologies that foster collaboration within a museum may need to accommodate hierarchies more than is typical in higher ed., where collaboration is deeply ingrained in the culture. In my experience, no technology is in itself able to overcome the individual passion and drive of the lone scholar, the lone curator. As long as that is perceived to be its purpose, it will be resisted, and museum professionals will take positions that sound perhaps more conservative and Luddite than they really are. [Eve Sinaiko]

• A key obstacle to my mind is that the networked environment we're now in is all about messy dependencies, while the museum is all about clearly circumscribed monolithic authoritativeness. It'll be hard for museums to engage in anything social for fear their reputations will be tainted. It'll be hard for museums to enter into the give-and-take of technological dependencies such as APIs since they'll fear the loss of control. Museums so far have displayed a great tendency to see their own institution at the center of the universe, rather than as a node in a network. (Günter Waibel)

Say amen, somebody! [Peter Samis]

etc... ____

Having waded through the above, I see I should have said that a major obstacle/barrier is the tendency to discuss "museums" as if they were the same sort of relatively homogeneous sector as libraries or archives when in fact the way that art museums, science museums, natural history museums, history museums (to say nothing of acquaria, zoos, botanical gardens, historic houses, archaeological sites) approach their missions is fundamentally different and will necessarily involve different technology solutions. [David Bearman]

The tools are great, but the lack of peer review built into them is an obstacle.

Throughout the responses to the 4 research questions, I see an occasional tendency to ridicule authoritative content, non-collaborative content, and the role of the museum as "gatekeeper" of information, which seems to be resented. I suppose it's built into the culture of this inquiry to be enthusiastic about collaboration, since most of the technologies we're being asked to evaluate exist to foster collaboration and nonspecialist or nonauthoritative sources of content. But the open Internet exists for that, no? I applaud museums for being reluctant to give up their role as authorities... my hope is that these technologies can be fruitfully used to assist authoritative content, as well as offering alternatives to it. I think the implied hostility to authoritative content in some of these comments is itself an obstacle, as it sets up a binary opposition between future-thinking tech-savvy sharers and the (perceived) old-school curatorial voice of authority. No wonder curators feel threatened not only by the bean-counters and monetizers who want museums to behave like businesses, but also the technologists who appear to be devaluing research and substance in favor of undifferentiated openness. Sorry for the philippic, but this division seems to me not only a distraction, but also unnecessarily combative.

What are the ways these technologies can be made available to those "old-school" curators? Something as simple as curators and scholars within the museum ("authorities") being able to use the *model* of social tagging or folksonomy to share information more fluidly, but with structures for identifying information *as* authoritative. Tagging with peer-review. Tagging with means of being identified as trustworthy and vetted. Such structures exist, especially in the sciences, but there's little attention to them in this discussion. The scholars and teachers who are at the heart of any great cultural institution will not buy into these technologies without having some confidence in the content they contain. I suppose the obstacle I'm trying to identify is that of buy-in. [Eve Sinaiko]

What is the motivation for adoption then? Technology per se contains the content we put on in/on it. There are ample means to vet content as Eve points out, the sciences do. An institution's "culture" as shaped by its administration is probably the key determining factor in how motivated it is to innovate technologically. [Sara DeAngelis]

At the moment, the motivation at the administrative or curatorial level seems to be a grudging sense that new technology is upon us and can't be avoided, so we might as well embrace it. Of course there's a generational divide in that attitude. Motivation for adoption may arise from the How Cool Is That factor, from new financial efficiencies, from the disappearance of analogue technologies. Two opposing examples: arts faculty resisted tooth and nail the replacement of analogue slide projectors in the classroom with digital. They would have to replace a lifetime's slide collection; the quality wasn't good enough, etc. (Most realistic problem: schools had not budgeted for throwing out perfectly functional projectors and buying expensive new ones.) The motive was that Kodak announced it wouldn't make the old kind anymore and wouldn't repair them. The switch happened within about a year, and the debate is dead. So that's an external motivator, but a very efficient one.

Conversely, the audioguide has existed now for a couple of decades. Newer, jazzier tools that are essentially upgrades of such equipment are on the horizon. Downloads to iPhones; a MyMuseum or MyExhibition webspace; whatever. I would guess that there's likely to be little real resistance (other than budgetary) to these upgrades, since they are fun and popular. But the audioguide has always been an adjunct to the museum experience, an add-on or substitute for the docent, not a core element. The core element (speaking of art museums here) is a room, a bunch of pictures on walls, and a person walking slowly through that space. That is an experience that began in 40,000 BCE in Lascaux.

In other words, good new technologies find their niche and tend to overcome resistance. The danger--or obstacle--is falling in love with secondary ones that don't really serve core needs but look like a lotta fun. Above all, the delusion that adoption of new technologies will save money is still out there. [Eve Sinaiko]

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.