Beyond the website: the role of the
internet at the Science Museum
Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer,
Science Museum

Beyond the website: the role of the
internet at the Science Museum
(plus bubbles, icebergs, and some
challenges for your museum)
Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer,
Science Museum

Who?
• I’m Mia
• I work for the Science Museum
• Notes will be online at http://openobjects.org.uk/, twitter
@mia_out with comments or questions
• IMHO: museums should be about delight, serendipity
and answers that provoke more questions. Museums
should also be committed to accessibility, transparency,
curation, respecting and enabling expertise. Museum
websites should turn each visitor into a ‘dinner party
bore’ about one topic that inspires them

Bubbles and icebergs
• Your online presence isn’t just about what
happens under your URL
• Your ‘website’ is no longer neatly
contained
• The web has changed our audiences and
changed their expectations about content
and interactivity: mash-up, re-use, re-mix

Who’s already talking to your
audiences?
• Explainers, attendants, front of house
• Educators
• Social media people
Lucky them! They get to hear great stories,
questions, challenges, suggestions, facts.
But do those conversations find their way back into
the organisation or do they stay in a bubble?

2009
Where is your online audience?
“The ten most heavily used web brands
account for 45% of total UK internet time.
Facebook is the most heavily used web brand,
accounting for 13 percent of all UK Internet time
– or one in every eight minutes
Communication and entertainment are central
themes amongst most heavily used web brands”
http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090513_UK.pdf

We’re taking our content to where people
hang out

Beyond your URL
• Social media
– questions for success
• Pushing content out into the world (aka
the acronym bit)
– an experiment with mashups

First questions for digital projects
• What will it do for our audiences?
• How can content be re-used?
• Which existing technologies can we use?
• How can infrastructure and resources be
re-used?
• How can we share our reflections on the
lessons learned?
• What happens afterwards?

Social media
• What kind of interaction is appropriate for
your
– technology
– audiences
– goals?
• What organisational resources need to be
in place to support true engagement?

Example: ObjectWiki
• Strong responses as memories,
reminiscences, ‘living history’ accounts
• Not much editing of ‘curatorial’ information
– the basic facts and figures, interpretative
or subject information
• We’ll take this learning into our next
collections projects

Social media
• How are you asking audiences to participate?
– comment
– conversation
– challenge
– contribute
– create
• Does your organisation really want to open up to
interaction or is it lip service?

Social media
• Is risk ok? How can you alleviate it?
• Can you use social media to improve internal
communications?
• How can you learn from project failures?
• Understand the particular risks in social media and
define your ‘exit strategy’
• Find the unique benefits in social media

The Louvre is an iceberg

The Louvre is an iceberg
(so is your museum)

Show your audiences all the good stuff that happens
behind the scenes
You can only fit so many people on a storeroom tour,
but the web has unlimited capacity
It’s a natural fit for social media
Now is a good time for transparency – turn visitors into
supporters, and supporters into advocates

Dealing with the challenges
• We can’t afford to build interfaces to meet every need
– but we don’t need to if we make it possible for
others to build interfaces with us
• Inspiring examples, real success stories from users,
sharing technical solutions help sector IT evangelisers
• ‘Fail faster, succeed sooner’ – reward intelligent failure

Running with the challenges
• Re-thinking the museum microsite
• Being brave about engagement with the
public
• Making internal data available to the public
and asking them to re-mix it
• Interesting challenges for project design,
management, metrics

The Cosmos & Culture
mashup competition
‘celebrate cutting-edge astronomical
technology alongside stunning objects
from our world-class historical
collections’
http://bit.ly/1ODvVT

Objectives
• Make best use of the limited budget and
staff time to get the highest impact web
presence for Cosmos & Culture
• Take advantage of infrastructure built for
previous projects – demonstrate benefits
internally

Objectives
• Experiment with new ways of making
objects available via the web
• Experiment with new ways of attracting
user-generated content
• Experiment with new forms of audience
participation

Why?
• “The coolest thing to be done with your
data will be thought of by someone else”
– JISC CRIG
• \"The real voyage of discovery consists not
in seeking new landscapes but in having
new eyes\"
– Marcel Proust

What do we have?
• Lots of objects, lots of images
• Lots of metadata about objects
• Also interrelated records on people,
places, dates, historical periods, events,
subjects (topics, themes)
– Who designed, invented, made, used, bought,
owned, donated an object? When and where
was it made, used, found? What’s related?

What is a mashup?
• Combines data from one or more sources or
visualisation tools into a single integrated
interface – takes existing information and shows
it to you in a unique way
• Wikipedia: ‘easy, fast integration, frequently
done by access to open APIs and data sources
to produce results that were not the original goal
of the data owners’
• Mashups are part of the vernacular of the web

Geo-located services

Maps

What is an API?
• A way of accessing data directly
• A ‘set of programming instructions and
standards for accessing a Web-based
software application’, a ‘machine-to-
machine interface’
• An API is a user interface for developers.
Usability is important.

What is an API?
• Easiest way: RESTful.
• Change the URL, the content on the page
changes:
– http://www.planningalerts.com/api.php?call=postcode&
postcode=SW72DD&area_size=l – a large area of
planning applications around the Science Museum
– http://www.planningalerts.com/api.php?call=postcode&
postcode=EC2Y5HN&area_size=s – a small area of
planning applications around the Museum of London

How are mashups made?
• Decide what you’re making
– Maps, timelines, images,
• Decide where your data is coming from
– Our API will provide information about Cosmos and Culture
objects
– Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IBM etc provide APIs and data
visualisation tools
– Other public domain data sources?
• Work out technical issues
– do you have the programming, user experience, design
expertise you need? What framework will you use? Where will
you host it? Do you need to find team mates?
• Start designing, programming, testing

Organisational benefits for the
mashup?
• Possible big impact with small budget
• Ties in with key Cosmos & Culture
messages - astronomy is inspirational,
amateur astronomers can still make
important contributions
• Provide our audiences with new
visualisations and interpretative contexts
for objects
• New insights into our collection

Developer benefits for the mashup?
• Prizes!
• Potentially huge audience
• Learn or consolidate skills
• An interface that gives them information
they want, how they want it
• Not sure you have all the skills? Meet
potential team mates at ‘hack matching’ –
like speed dating for project ideas

Outcomes of the mashup?
• This is the big question!
• We know that it’s possible but we don’t
know if it’ll work in this context
• We think it could provide methods of
exploring collections data that go far
beyond the visitors’ initial query
• We’re not sure how it will work
• But it’ll be fun finding out

Another experiment
• An end to silos - lightweight partnerships with other
museums through information sharing. Small pieces,
loosely joined.
• http://museum-api.pbworks.com/ “is a wiki for sharing,
discussing, arguing (nicely) over and hopefully coming to
some common agreements on APIs and data schemas
for museum collections. It's being led by the Science
Museum, London, but we're interested in working with
other museums in the UK or worldwide. ... this is about
access to and re-use of cultural heritage data”
• Open to contributions, questions, tests – join in!

Innovation bubbles
• Innovation is happening throughout your
organisation
• Do you know where?
• What’s being done to encourage it?

Pop the bubbles
• Address the ‘left hand, right hand’ problem
• Reality check projects, re-discover existing
infrastructure, processes, content
• Involve inter-disciplinary teams from the
start of project planning and design
• Active partners in exhibition and digital
project design means better integration of
gallery and online audience experiences

Hold an internal mashup day
• Pop internal bubbles - invite tech, curatorial,
front of house, learning staff
• Rediscover how smart, passionate and
innovative your staff can be
• Generate new ideas, community
• Informal audit of organisational infrastructure,
processes, content, re-use rights
• Encourage staff to report back to their peers

Too hard?
• Try an unconference (think of it as a
workshop where the participants suggest
topics and lead sessions themselves)
• Or hold informal ‘brown bag’ lunches to
share ideas and solutions – find an empty
meeting room, bring your lunch and ideas

A challenge
Has the web fundamentally
changed your museum?

A challenge
Has the web fundamentally
changed your museum?
Why not?
It’s changed the rest of the world

Thank you for listening
Slide credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17269317@N02/1819837194/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/batigolix/3332091893/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxrosser/2472176282/