Philip Poole of the British Museum spoke fourth at Museum Tech Pecha Kucha Night on 18th June 2009. He shares his personal insights on the Museums and the Web conference which took place in April 2009 in exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
- What i learnt at MW2009 - spread you content, information everywhere - at the moment we are silos of knowledge, where people come for the authoritative source on a subject
- instead we should spread it - But with the advent of the cloud: - social media - facebook - youTube - APIs - There is now the opportunity to spread that knowledge across the cloud and allow you to spread things that you never could - lets break those cages
Sources of authority - we can still be sources of authorioty but be thise sources over mptuiple websites and too different audiances lets look at some examples from mw2009
Videos - video were a big theme at MW2009 - this is something that we would all like to add to our sites - but problems with HOW do we do it - websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Art Babble all provide a platform for us to upload videos and to embed on our own sites
Larger audiences - By utilising these different websites we can engage different and larger audiences. - YouTube has 120 million people use it every day - which museum thinks they can beat that - this is a huge amount of people to look at our content most of which would never come to our website.
9) Build it and they will come However you need the right content for the right people, from the field of dreams they said Build it and they will come. Upload it and they will come??? No, like any content it has to suit the audiance, make the right content and they will come.
Exmaple of different content You tube is short and snappy, the place for quirky content, a 10 minute video on the importantance of persian coins. a 2 minute intruction to the blood rituals of a south americain cultures yes.
What the different sites have
Viral - You also have the possibility of it going viral - Reaching out to audiences you would never expect. - Increasing your exposure to different audiences - There will be a certain demographic to different websites, YouTube audiences compared to iTunes is very different
Itunes Then you have places like iTunes, millions of people downloading yours content to there ipods and you own website viewing it on and listening to it on there way to work. .
- iTunes is a good way to start with podcasting - Move up to iTunes U - brand your pages own pages - You could be featured by Apple on the itunes home page, IWA did and got 10 million downloads,
Statistics - If you are spreading you content, you need to measure and report it. - Statistics from your own site are not good enough - What of your (hopefully) 10 million iTunes downloads - though i could be a bit pessimistic there!.
Who do you report to: - Who are you reporting to - DCMS wants basic statistics on your website - Perhaps they should be persuaded to widen that criteria and include change that, if suddenly it wast hat and others how soon would we all start doing it. (top down approach)
13 APIS - Off videos now and onto APIs - The ability for other people to take your data from your website and do use it on theirs - Very simple example is when you use Google Maps on your website - other simple examples that you may have
Indianapolis Museum of Art - I was talking to someone at the IMA - have URLs that have some pattern which you could use as a simple API - let the public know how their URLs worked - someone started to use it and did a slightly bad job.
15) Work with them - instead of telling them to stop or decide the project was a failure - they worked with him, gave advice and it improve this persons website - now top referrer after Search engines - So no matter how large or small, look at your website now and see how it works, you may have an API hidden already.
16) WIth the BM this is true and out of everything at mW2009, - one things I wish I had time to look at, - all I need to do is explain how some bits of the website are structured and then see what people come up with
17) Other reason for this soft approach, - avoiding the mountain - MW2009 it was in agreement APIs is a good thing - but what about everyone else, - if you show a mountain to climb people will want to avoid it - if we can advertise pseudo APIs now and they are sucessfully - the mountain may start looking like a hill.
18) Digital New Zealand - Love what you can do, - Let people set up their own custom searches - you can save this, - embed it into you own website - share it in a gallery
19) The british museum is all the world for the world. why should the web be any different, what about your institutions? I know what I want mine to be.