Research Question Two
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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 widget1, process2, and idea3 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 Two
What technologies that are not on the list developed so far need to be considered in creating a "short list" expressly for museums? These might include technologies that have a solid user base in consumer, entertainment, telecommunications, imaging, or other industries.
NOTE: When answering this question, please also consider the likely timeframe during which the technology will enter mainstream use in museums. You should refer to the three adoption horizons listed in the 2008 Short List and in the Horizon Report -- that is:
- the next 12 months (technologies for which examples are easy to find in current museum practice)
- the next two to three years (technologies that are well established "in the world," but not yet in museums. Answers should be easy to support with actual examples and pointers to things people outside of museums are actually doing.)
- the coming four to five years (technologies that may still be only found in research, demonstration, or experimental contexts, but for which examples and demonstration projects can still be found. Listing the actual companies or organizations working on the items listed here is very important, as we often will follow up with them to learn more as we prepare the report, and museums interested in the practice may want to follow up with them directly.)
1) Next twelve months: Syndicated content distribution and feed redisplay
Museums in the coming year will both publish more through RSS, in social network environments and through video and audio feeds, and do more with content they have aggregated from feeds both by museums and from other sources. The effect will be to make the museum more of a content hub and a greater participant in networked content sharing. [David Bearman]
Microformatted communication (twitter, facebook status, sms text messaging) Step away from institutional voice to another level between museum-visitor-visitor. Giving up the monopoly of the voice. MW forum (Bruce Wyman)
2) 2-3 years out: Geo-Tagging
Museums are going to find that making their collections available to people in the real world, where they are, both gives them a larger audience, contextualizes the objects, invites useful contributed content, and solves many of the political problems created by centuries of taking things from where they were and putting them in museums around the world. It also is one a the few ways to actually, and meaningfully, integrate content from museums, archives, libraries, zoos, botanical gardens and other cultural repositories. [David Bearman]
Multimodal communications-delivery to handhelds, mobile versions of our websites. Mobile changes how people use information. It change what information they want. MW forum (Seb Chan, Bruce Wyman, Nancy Proctor)
3) 4-5 Years out: Last year at ICHIM, I gave a paper with Kati Geber on museum technology futures (see http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/bearman/bearman.html). In one section, it summarized a series of technology trends that are germane in this time frame:
1. Objects (museum artifacts, buildings, public spaces, cell phones, etc.) can be communicating information carriers. This means we can give things knowledge that they can convey to our (physical and remote) visitors and that our visitors carry information they can convey to us.
2. People (visitors, staff, passers-by) will be in communication at all times that they wish with the museum, with each other, and with the objects we imbue with knowledge. This means that we can communicate with people whether they “come” to us or not, and that they in turn can bring to our institutions a “social surround” of their friends and family whom we will not see.
3. Spaces (mountains, street corners, gallery locations) will be aware of who is near them, and even in some cases looking at them, and can convey to those people information from many sources that is germane to that space. This means the collection of the museum can be delivered where it was created or its creator lived, where it was used, or taken or sold or dumped, where it was acquired, collected, exhibited or stored, or anywhere else with which it might be associated and that this information can be provided to people when they are there themselves, and wondering about that place.
4. Memory (ours, the “museum’s”, object’s and space’s, other people’s, that of the “culture”) will be able to recall what we said about things, experiences, events we have encountered. This means that we can enable people to interact with us, objects, places, each other, and to retain the content of their interactions in order to enhance their own return experience or that of others. Memory will be cumulative, collective and cultural.
5. Action will not be restricted to people, or be confined to taking place where they are. We will be able to act at a distance and things (robots, materials, and human devices including buildings) will be able to act on their own. Many objects will be only virtual (acting as software agents), some will be able to change their properties based on programmable materials, and others will have components that receive information and act on it. [David Bearman]
I don't disagree with any of the above except the time-frames. Add a couple of years to each one for how long before they're present in more than a handful of bleeding-edge institutions; add several more years beyond that for adoption by the 20% for Horizon's 'mainstream' criterion; still longer for adoption by the median museum.
- I would add open source software to this list, not because it's a new technology or unknown to museums, but because there's a tremendous amount of misinformation and lack of information out there, particularly among museum leadership. If museums are going to come out of the next five years with a healthy tech infrastructure, their leaders (and not just their tech leaders) will need to get smarter about open source quickly.
- Services oriented architectures need to make their way into museum awareness. Right now, museums are hotbeds of siloed technology, but that will need to change if institutions are going to be agile enough to manage the changing environments in which they attempt to thrive. SOA fosters collaboration--not presently a museum strength but one that needs to be cultivated--and also facilitates institutional agility in a variety of ways, from permitting greater institution-by-institution customization to reducing integration costs to supporting multiple tech-service-delivery models to accommodate various levels of resources and internal tech capacity. It's also a field characterized by a tremendous amount of misinformation and hype; still more challenging, it requires museum leaders to understand their own business processes deeply and fully in order to make effective use of it. The disparate development of those capabilities will play a large role in separating museum winners from also-rans over the next five years.
(Christopher J. Mackie)
I suspect Christopher and I agree about time-frames. I said these were "germane" in this time-frame, but the full report puts adoption of specific technologies that embody some of these evolving characteristics of technologically enabled environments out as far as 8-12 years sometimes. I also agree that open source could have an impact in museums within the 4-5 year timeframe, though I caution that it needs to be better supported for museums to take it on successfully than it has been in the academic community. Finally, I would suggest that XML is actually a sleeper still for museums and has huge potential to impact positively in the next 2-5 years as it will inexorably copme to be more utilized and impact on data interchangability, modeling, and re-use. [David Bearman]
Textual analysis tools for semantic markup - OpenCalais (as at Powerhouse) and the like - are going to be increasingly important for museums to be able to rapidly extract extra value from their datasets without needing to deploy extra staff. The big issue here is whether museums will be able to accept a 'good enough' approach to gain the advantage of semantic markup or will hold back for the utopian 'perfect approach'. (seb chan)
Conservation and restoration use of new technologies like multi-spectral digital capture is probably in the 2-3 year timeframe. Conservation in general is about 2-3 years from utilizing digital capture technology at the same level of museum photo studios. LED lighting, which has safety advantages for object capture, to replace continuous or strobe lighting is also in this 2-3 year timeframe. Technology as service offering is probably 3-5 years off, but seems to be a necessity for small to middle size institutions that do not have the IT resources to take advantage of the technologies represented otherwise. More use of three dimensional representation of collection objects is probably 2-3 years off. I find this frustrating because technologies like QuickTime VR have been around for close to 10 years and museums have made little use of it. [H. Goldstein]
I think the reason for the slow takeup of technologies like Quicktime VR have been because it has been a solution in search of a problem. Whilst the web remains, for musuems, a primarily 2D informational medium (the best advances on online 3D are in a communication and social not information space), almost everyone is more than happy with increasing the volume and detail of 2D images combined with strong textual records. The demand for 3D amongst the consumers of museum information might increase once we can deliver objects to audiences in situ (see David's points) [Seb Chan]
I do think that 360 degree QTVR still images are going to be used more as more museums realize how good the technology can be in the right hands. The work that Columbia U. has done to document architectural sites and the UNESCO World Heritage sites proved this to me, and I'm now planning on implementing regular documentation of our shows in this way. The spatial, experiential dimension that good, full frame (NOT tiny!!) QTVR images adds to the feel of an exhibition is considerable. (John Weber)
I don't work within a museum, so I will respond to this question in more general terms, without guessing about timeline. (I work with professionals in the visual arts in both museums higher ed.) I'm struck by the degree to which museum culture is seen as similar to higher ed culture in the comments to all 4 research questions, and perhaps in the exercise as a whole. E.g., the collaborative nature of academic scholarship is built into things like depts., how grad students are mentored, co-teaching, tenure, sabbaticals and research grants, and committee work. To be sure there is a lot of overlap with museums, but the differences are dramatic--not least of which is the whole concept of "educational mission" having very different targets.
Some of the models set forth in the Horizon Report on Higher Ed are directly mappable to museums, but others are not. The comments tend to pick up on the 12 items in the higher ed short list and find new museum-based iterations for them. I think this mirrors the habit of many arts nonprofits in emulating the university as an ideal model, but only the largest museums can do so successfully, not only because of resources but also because large museums have a greater shared culture with great universities. (For example, the sense that they serve a worldwide constituency more than a local one.)
A key area of difference is the institutional archive, or the collections database. That mass of core content is central to all the activities of a museum, including educational mission. It's not (typically) central to an institution of higher ed, where data and metadata are not centralized, but diffused, where the archive is the library and the "collections database" is the publishing program of the university press. In other words, the museum already has a kind of centralizing structure--or an incentive to centralize--in the CMS, to which any number of other kinds of records may be attached. The university has no such incentive. (Very large museums with catholic collections may share that culture.) So without having any answers, I ask: what are the instruments of collecting practice and the archival management of knowledge, going forward?
My own impression is that even 5 years out, most museums will be happy and successful if they can implement a good CMS and a high-quality mass-digitization project for their current content. [Eve Sinaiko]
Over in Question 3, I noted the hidden reef of intellectual-property law as a challenge to museums seeking to digitize and disseminate content. Both copyright and license/contract law intervene at every level, from file-sharing, to image reproduction and downloads, to repurposing of content within the museum (e.g., for educational projects or tools). So technologies that permit the development of registries for rights information and copyright status will be needed--and soon. Tagging is one piece of that. When an artwork is tagged (as in stevemuseum) it should also be tagged with its metadata (of course) *and* its copyright status. This may involve complex rights searches, links to other registries (such as the US Copyright Office), and the development of standardized international rights-registration metadata protocols. Creative Commons is exploring this need as they develop the "CC Zero" license (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero). As you can see in the CCZero wiki, such a license requires two steps: a) ASSERTION that a work is out of copyright; and b) WAIVER of any rights. If a work is in the public domain, and is asserted to be so, that information should join a registry. In other words, tools like OpenCalais and other devices to assist and improve tagging are helpful, but equally important is a structure for sharing (registering) the rights-status information about an object in ways that are a) authoritative and reliable; and b) easily accessed. [Eve Sinaiko]
Most of what follows immediately was transcribed from a discussion at Museums and the Web 2008 (many Advisory Board members were in attendance, along with other members of the museum community). The discussion transcript, along with other ideas contributed on index cards, has also been posted to a separate page in the wiki.
Geo-aware information-We want it to happen, but the challenge for museums is documenting this information. Need to build in community engagement in order to refine cataloguing. One visitor may know exactly where an object is from, the Museum knows approximately where the object is from. How do we facilitate this dialogue and veryify it. Paolo asked whether we should go it alone on this or whether we need to begin to eliminate the institutional boundaries between information. MW forum (Joel Tan, Seb Chan) Probably 3-5 years.
Great promise in decentralization of museum content. Challenges with trust and authority. Source and Citation? Image source identification? (Scott Geffert) GIS community does a good job of this, with a thorough provenance of informaiton related to a map or data set. Also challenges around interface design to fuse these resources in ways that make sense to the user, and are comfortable to museums. If we don't do it, someone else will, Artcyclopedia example. Museums must decide how we will deal with this. (Willy Lee) MW Forum (Rob Stein)
I hear very healthy laughter that wells up from pure anxiety... Today's museum is a brilliant agorophobic... Outgoing enthusiastic amatuers have cleaned our clocks... in a way that we aren't ready to do because we haven't cleaned up our authorities. MW forum (George Eastman House)
3D data models- University of Calgary. Immersive experience. Experiments with 3D models as educational tool with high school students in Europe. MW Forum.
RFID- Both for collections management and infromation sharing/bookmarking. Exhibit at Science Museum of London running on RFID. Also a project with Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam for delivery of multimedia content. Challenge because the RFID is passive. This may also be a MW Forum
Surface Computing/Tabletop computing/Alternative interfaces MW Forum (Peter Samis)
Augemented reality-getting close in a way that you can't within a showcase. MW Forum (Ben Rubinstein)
Challenge: Privacy concerns around tracking of user behavior. MW Forum.
Ubiquitous computing experience in museum space. Possibly different horizons between art museums and science/history museums. MW Forum (Bruce Wyman)
If Bruce's suggestion above means visitors having a ubiquitous computing experience in museum spaces, I enthusiastically second the notion. I wouldn't have to think about downloading an audio tour podcast ahead of time if I had my iPhone and access to a WiFi network anywhere in a museum building. It seems so elementary and yet art museums in particular haven't embraced the idea of open networks for visitors who are wandering inside the bricks and mortar. (K. Wetterlund)
Natural language processing, data mining. MW Forum.
Mobile phone downloads on your site. MW Forum.
Cloud computing. MW Forum. (Seb Chan)
Storing user experience with cheap harddrives. MW Forum.
Ease of use of all technologies. MW Forum.
Small group interactions. MW Forum.
Recommender systems. MW Forum.
Visitor produced media/Photography. MW Forum.
User modelling methods. MW Forum.
Institutional Impact, how do you reimburse users for developing content. MW Forum.
Legal and copyright issues. MW Forum.
Practical, succint, getting the report to the people that matter. Keep it current. MW forum.
Green technologies. [Sara DeAngelis]
