Museum as Platform: Envisioning Visitors as Creators & Contributors
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The session at the American Alliance of Museums in 2009 explored online museum projects that encourage visitors to be creators and contributors in the online museum exhibit. This presentation is about the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's project, click! photography changes everything (www.click.si.edu). Other presenters included: Matthew Fisher, president Night Kitchen Interactive (www.whatscookin.com) Danielle Rice, Executive Director, Delaware Art Museum, Art of Storytelling website (http://www.artofstorytelling.org/) Bill Adair, Director of the Heritage Philadelphia Program for The Pew Charitable Trusts, Rosenbach Museum's 21st Century Abe project (www.21stcenturyabe.org/)
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Museum as Platform: Envisioning Visitors as Creators & Contributors
- 3. Installation View of Smithsonian Photography Hayden Survey Party Picnicking, by William Henry Exhibition Art Section, by Thomas Smillie, SIA Jackson, 1872, Smithsonian Institution Archives Neptune, False-Color Image, National Air and Space Bodianus rufus, Juvenile (Spanish Hogfish) Museum, Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences Belize Larval-Fish Group 2005
- 4. Daguerreotype of Architect's Model of the Smithsonian Institution Castle, Unidentified photographer,1846, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Division of Information Technology and Communications
- 5. goals Host a discussion about photography AND • anthropology • Astrophysics • dating • media • medicine • philosophy • sports, etc. Make it inclusive … cross-disciplinary, many perspectives Relate it to Smithsonian Photo Collections
- 6. challenges Include many voices AND maintain click! ideas click! is more about photo context than content When your audience is everyone, how do you reach them?
- 17. visitor contributed content (6 mos.) Source Submitted Accepted % Accepted : Submitted Pre-Launch: 17 3 17% National Writing Project Launch 17 5 29% CFE: 3 0 0% Inauguration CFE: Women’s 6 1 16% History Month Other * 79 0 0% Total 120 9** 6% *Majority submitted via Flickr ** In 6 month time frame
- 18. stats February 2009 March 2009 Visits: 23,937 Visits: 54,368 Avg. Visit Duration: 0:20:28 Avg. Visit Duration: 0:20:03 Page Views: 63,428 Page Views: 91,925
- 19. are we reaching creators? Forrester's Social Technographics®
- 21. curator’s perspective QUESTION: Have submissions from the general public enhanced/contributed to your curatorial goals for click! I? ANSWER: When they’ve been good, they have…Since we see so many pictures, and spend so much time either looking and not looking at them, it’s a BIG challenge to get people to take a step back and to try and figure out how and why they work… Which is why we’re working so hard to get beyond the “cool picture” discourse. Marvin Heiferman, Curator, click! photography changes everything
- 26. staff effort for public submissions Marketing 14 hrs/week Monitoring 4 hrs/week Curatorial Minimal
- 27. open questions Will thematic calls-for-entry along with targeted marketing get the stories? Are we asking for too much?
- 28. how can we include the rest?
- 29. click.si.edu
Editor's Notes
- No, this is not the crowd-sourced exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum. click! photography changes everything is a program by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and guest curator, Marvin Heiferman. Click! is still in the early phases of including contributions from the public (6 months)
- October 2008, opened contributions to general public, published documentaries about SI photography and how it relates to click! exhibition themes.Seeded visitor contributions with stories from the National Writing Project. Sent invite out to the members of the SPI e-newsletter
- Opened companion site on Flickr to see if we could tap into that audience for submissions.
- We realized that after that initial push, we were going to need a way to keep remind people that we wanted their input.Early 2009, we launched the marketing campaign. Every two months, we pick a new theme for a call-for-entry (Inauguration, Women’s History Month, International Year of Astronomy), reach out to blogs with SMR, traditional press, and send out an e-newsletter to subscribers.
- Also have banners, click! RSS story feed…
- And people can share stories via social networking sites.
- Not much volume overallPartnership with NWP- goodInitial launch – good resultsCFE w/ press – smaller overall, but good returnOther – mostly via flickr, sharing photos is front and center, not storiesCaveat: We’ve only done one thematic call with marketing.
- Starting online marketing, Our web stats doubled from February to March! More people know about it = more potential contributors.
- Going back to the Forrester ‘levels of participation’ chart, we are coming close to reaching the “creator” group when we partner with an educational organization and do the social media releases and outreach. Although, overall numbers aren’t overwhelming.
- We now have 52 stories both from invited guests and the public, 9 from the public
- I posed this question to our curator…
- click! started with an idea around photography and its role in shaping how we understand our culture and ourlives.More and more people have access to digital tool to make, share, and distribute photos easilyWe consume mass amounts of photosIt’s a tool to document our lives, history, events…From Marvin Heiferman, “Our project is about images, but equally important to the project are the ideas that generate images, our uses of them, our responses to them. Interestingly, in an over-the-top visual culture like ours, there’s not a whole lot of dialog around the role photographic images play in culture. “
- We’re also involved in the Smithsonian’s photos on the Flickr Commons site where a lot of ‘typical’ photo dialog happens.
- ‘cool photo’ dialog happens all over and it’s a good thing. We’re in the business to inspire!
- To be fair, it’s not all ‘cool photo’ dialog on the Commons by any means.
- I love the comment inviting us to share this photo with a group called, “Systemic Botany (not for ‘pretty flower images’)
- We need to look into including the critics, collectors, and joiners. INTIMIDATION! We have highly-credentialed people already up on click! and it could be intimidating.
- The Smithsonian’s collections represent this history of photography and documentation… in all different disciplinesSI used it to document expeditions, exhibitions, collections…We currently use it to document fish species and planets.
- Smithsonian has 19 museums, 9 research centersSmithsonian has over13 million images in some seven hundred collections throughout our museums and research centers. The collections are organized by museum and discipline—for instance, the National Museum of Natural History holds natural science images in its collections, the National Air and Space Museum houses images of flight in its archives, and the National Museum of African Art holds photographs of Africa in its collections. The Smithsonian Photography Initiative, located in the Smithsonian Institution main archives, is a pan-SI program dedicated to increasing the public’s access to and understanding of the photography collections from the Smithsonian.
- Get people to think more critically about the photos they consume everyday. We live in a visual culture – Even if people aren’t taking photos, they are looking at them all the time in ads, movies, webs.From Marvin Heiferman, “Because the project is both interdisciplinary and online, we’re able to investigate ideas/issues/questions with a perspective that’s broader than would be possible in more conventional museum presentations about the medium.”
- We want multiple voices, but need to get people to think about things more broadlySmithsonian is for everyone, but this isn’t necessarily an easy idea for people to grasp.
- First phase, we invited contributors (ongoing) who can talk about the role of photos in what they do (different disciplines, inside and outside SI) Seeded site with these contributions (public launch March 2008)Diane Granito, co-founder of Heart Gallery America and adoption outreach specialist p photography used to help kids get adopted
- Also invited curators, researchers, and collections managers throughout the Smithsonian. Jacqueline Sewer at our new Museum of African American History and Culture
- Related each story back to SI’s photos