How to cope when you open your digital doors
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Museums are striving to share information about their collections online. What impact does this have on their organisations and how can they cope? This presentation is the result of a survey of 16 different online collections where the organisations have chosen to publish the majority of their records online.
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How to cope when you open your digital doors
- 1. Paul Rowe, @armchair_caver CEO, Vernon Systems How to cope when you open your digital doors
- 3. 16 collections 7 art collections, 6 social history collections and 3 natural science collections
- 4. “The presentation of our collection online has had a profound impact on the museum and the way it interacts with its audience.”
- 5. “ballooning number of queries, … surge of people offering us new information”
- 6. “The difficulty in obtaining copyright, quickly and efficiently, to keep up with acquisitions and publishing online”
- 7. Your data will never be perfect
- 8. Increased number of lengthy enquiries
- 9. Harder questions, but deeper engagement
- 10. 50% have had no additional staff since putting the collection online How can you cope?
- 11. “If you don’t know how your stuff is being used, or who is using it, or when it is used, you will remain in a black hole.” George Oates, 12 Mar 2015
- 15. Make the most of your volunteers
- 16. Implement data standards Decide what fields to capture Standardise your terminology Set conventions Set minimum requirements
- 18. Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus
- 19. Standardised terminology can help interlink online records
- 20. Create broad categories to aid the online visitor
- 22. Copyright: low hanging fruit
- 23. Use the least restrictive licence you can
- 24. “started publishing images of New Zealand artworks that are copyright ‘orphans’ ” Use your online collection to help trace copyright owners
- 25. Have a ‘take down’ policy
- 26. Assign roles for social media 75% of respondents had roles to cover this
- 27. Share your records with larger aggregation sites like National Library’s Trove website
- 28. Provide commenting or feedback options This is a great opportunity to find out more about your collection items
- 29. You must assign someone the job of responding to these comments.
- 30. Verify information and incorporate it into your core records if possible
- 31. Natural sciences No change in interest / demand for type specimens
- 32. Natural sciences Minimal increase in workload after putting collection online
- 33. Queensland Museum >700,000 recs on Atlas of Living Australia
- 34. Unanimous overall positive feedback “It has revitalised our small local history Museum and significantly extended our reach.”
- 35. “I have loved the new digitised museum records. To see my Grandad’s gorgeous big ears popping out of a photo online … is truly heart-warming.”
- 36. Paul Rowe Vernon Systems @armchair_caver www.vernonsystems.com Museums Australia conference Sydney, May 2015 Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Kia ora, it’s a pleasure to be visiting from New Zealand for your national conference. I’ll be talking today about putting collections information online and coping with the work that this entails.
- I want to start by thinking about the purpose of museums. I looked at 14 well-crafted museum mission statements to see what were the most common words. Inspire, community, educate and world were all consistently present. Sharing information about your collections is a key way you can help inspire and connect with your community.
- This is talk is the result of a survey of how 16 different online collections have impacted the organisations that share those collections. These were diverse organisations who have chosen to put as much of their collection online as possible.
- A typical survey response was that “The museum has had to reorganise itself to respond actively to the increased demand for information on the collection”. Putting your collection online will have a noticeable impact on your organisation.
- I’ll talk first about the challenges that became apparent from the survey. Half of the organisations said that they now had to spend more time answering queries. While this surge of interest, and often new information, was very encouraging, it can be challenging to cope with this within existing staff constraints.
- Many organisations struggled with working out the copyright status of each of their collection items, particularly pictorial collections where most of the material was still in copyright. This alone was a major part of online collection projects.
- The data is never perfect and putting it online exposes those flaws. However, there is real value in putting the collection online even without images (how else do people know you have the object!). It’s an opportunity to find new information about your collection items and correct mistakes that would not otherwise have been spotted.
- One organisation logged all enquiries requiring more than 15 minutes response work. These enquiries increased from 250 to 400 per year. Many organisations also reported increased demand for loans, reproductions, including more obscure collection items which were being discovered online.
- Strong evidence type of query changes. The simpler questions could often be answered directly from the website, but this in turn led to more difficult questions. However, these questions also led to better connections between the museum and the community interested in its collections. A discussion was now taking place.
- Next I want to talk about how you can cope with these challenges. Some organisations were able to get funding for additional staff on a project basis. This can be a tactic to helping keep on top of the workload. You could apply for project funding based on reaching new audiences or based on metrics for interest in other similar material your have already released online.
- George Oates was one of the team who developed the Flickr online photo website. She recently said “If you don’t know how your stuff is being used, or who is using it, or when it is used, you will remain in a black hole.”
- Measure against desired outcomes. For example, if one desired outcome is to increase the connection with your online visitors then you could measure what proportion of your visitors are returning visitors. Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a wealth of statistics about website usage.
- Keep an independent record of the metrics you’re tracking. Once a month, make a note of the key things you measure. You really need a full year’s worth of statistics to be able to ignore seasonal trends. These metrics can help justify the work you and doing and can demonstrate success with concrete evidence over time.
- Google Analytics can also help you respond to short term events. For example, an item on the website may be popular because of an event in the news and you could choose to write a blog post to make the most of the additional exposure.
- Volunteers can help with the additional workload. Direct contact with people interested in the museum can be extremely rewarding for the volunteers and the volunteers are a huge asset to museums.
- However, before you jump in you should have some basic standards. What pieces of information do you want to capture about your collection? Can you standardise the terms used in the cataloguing? An easily accessible internal standards document, even just a few pages, can greatly improve the quality and consistency of the information you record.
- Have a system for reviewing data entry, both through occasional detailed spot checks and broader reports. E.g. You might periodically search for new records with no title assigned. Don’t just rely on the office cat to check things.
- You may be able to use term lists that have already been developed. The Powerhouse Museum have a object name thesaurus for social history and this is free for download from their website.
- Standardised terms can then help online visitors navigate your website. For example, the object type could be presented as a link so that visitors can easily click to see all of the items of this type in your collection. Improving how you online collection is presented will help visitors answer their own questions.
- Organise your online collection into broad categories to help visitors explore it. This could be low-tech, like this simple page outlining the collections with links going to searches using the cataloguing data available. 20% of respondents were now adding broad, public user oriented, categories into their original catalogue records.
- External standards go into greater detail on how best to catalogue your collection. The Collections Trust website has a whole range of online guides for all museum processes. The Getty has a guide specifically for describing art works.
- Australian Copyright Council provides a guide specifically to help Galleries & Museums understand copyright law. In Australia you cannot publish a photographic reproduction of a work of art if you don’t have copyright clearance. You could however tackle the easier groups first, like art or photographs out of copyright because of when they were made or photographs you have taken of household social history items or natural science specimens.
- Clearly mark the copyright that applies to each record. Use the least restrictive licence you can as this will make the content more useful to those who discover it online.
- Copyright owners often cannot be traced, giving rise to ‘copyright orphans’. Use your online collection to help trace copyright owners. Give visitors a clear way to get in touch about copyright issues.
- Establish guidelines for when there is a copyright dispute. The simplest approach is to take the record off the public website until the copyright issue is resolved. Auckland Art Gallery found that most copyright holders were willing to allow online access via the museum website.
- People will talk about your organisation and your collection. Having permanent pages for each collection item will allow you or others to share this content in many ways, such as on Twitter or Facebook. 75% of respondents had part-time or full-time roles to cover social media and online engagement.
- Reach a bigger audience by sharing your records with other sites. The National Library’s Trove website can periodically copy your records onto their website as another place for them to be discovered.
- Puke Ariki allow the public to add comments to each online collection record and this has unearthed a lot of new information.
- For example, one repeat visitor has added captions identifying who is sitting in a series of school sports team photos. Someone must have the responsibility to respond to these comments, particularly thanking those who provide new information.
- There are definite benefits to publishing the entire collection online, rather than a smaller set of "perfect" records. Even if some information is incorrect, it is beneficial to be corrected by a member of the public as it offers a chance to amend your records.
- Online collections did not increase the demand for information about the natural sciences collections in the survey. This is possibly because significant items, such as type specimens, are separately documented in much greater detail in science journal publications.
- The organisations with natural science collections had not had an increase in work since putting their collections online, possibly because the material had a more specialised audience.
- For specimens, The Atlas of Living Australia does provide a way to share these collections and reach more people, in the same was as Trove does for other collection types.
- Survey participants were unanimously positive about the overall impact of putting the collection online. Comments such as “It's not negotiable for a serious public art museum in my opinion” were typical.
- I want to close with this quote, with is typical of many of the museums that answered the survey. “I have loved the new digitised museum records. To see my Grandad’s gorgeous big ears popping out of a photo online … is truly heart-warming.” You will delight people by putting your content online. Celebrate your successes and keep a note of them. They can help you defend your work and can help you secure funding in the future.