Marty, P.F. & Jones, K.B. (Eds)
Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums
(New York, Routledge 2007)
Afterword: The Future of Museums in the Information Age
Maxwell L. Anderson, Indianapolis Museum of Art
We are all beholden to technologists for their diligent efforts to improve museums. Notwithstanding extraordinary progress in this field over the course of a very few years, there are two incontrovertible facts about the proliferation of information technology since the 1990s: 1) developing proprietary solutions has been consistently shown to yield short-term pride but long-term problems, and 2) even jointly engineered solutions to any informatics challenge are destined to have a brief shelf life.
A Call to Action
The wealth of information in this book about information must accordingly end with a call to action: how can we cajole busy and techno-skeptical museum leaders into making collaborative investments in informatics? In the preceding pages we find indispensable accounts not only of our collective progress, but also of historical precedents, well-intentioned wrong turns, brilliant innovations swept aside by one-size-fits all commercial solutions, “inside baseball” conversations among specialists, and highly granular remedies for problems in standards and conventions.
Each of these accounts is important, but what this book must do above all is to lead museum professionals to distill its contents into a plan of action that will bridge not only potentially fractious departments, but also bridge museums, regions, nations, NGOs, and professionals the world over. The foibles of past and current technology solutions are of relative significance in this fast-paced world, where change is a constant. Far more important today is helping the non-profit community collectively pursue improved public service by challenging the quarter-to-quarter mentality of the technology sector. Public service begins with the traditional obligations of collecting, preserving, interpreting, and displaying, but through interactivity may now invite shared responsibility in shaping the institution from without.
The alternative to thoughtful engagement by museum leaders is too dismal to contemplate: the loss of copious born-digital information lacking a platform to migrate to, precious resources squandered on short-term or flawed solutions, and lost opportunities to serve digitally sophisticated audiences that may go elsewhere for stimulation.
Museums and Social Computing
For museum leaders open to learning, the accumulated expertise among specialists in information science and museology in this volume is both authoritative and providential. Close reading yields several key insights. Perhaps the most pressing of these is the wholesale change implied by social computing—by the transition from an input-output era to that of a porous and continuous authoring environment, open to anyone regardless of background, education, or location.
For many museum directors, an embrace of tagging could engender the abdication of a leadership role and the possibility that a chorus of amateur enthusiasts might drown out the quiet authority of scholarship. Such fears are misplaced; there will always be a safe harbor for the institutional voice. But it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of potential museum-goers are only that—potential visitors. It is delusional to fear that inviting public commentary and engagement will be disruptive to anything but the fantasy that we are fulfilling our potential. Making the offerings of museums pertinent to as many people as possible is a primary obligation of our field. Within that experience museum leaders will of course provide that which they see fit to provide. But unless a museum’s displays, interpretive insights, amenities, and services are manifestly open to all both onsite and online, the opportunity cost of everyone’s effort will remain needlessly high.
The advent of folksonomy ushers in new ways of connecting our individual experiences through institutions, thereby allowing museums to enter into new relationships with their publics. The interpretive responsibilities of museums are being cast in a new light, one far afield from the millennia-old model of master-pupil. Instead of simply dispensing knowledge, museums will soon be expected to offer a gateway to involvement that begins with scholarly offerings and begins afresh with community editing.
The resource implications of this change are potentially enormous. Today an online visitor already demands the same amount of institutional attention as an onsite visitor, and will probably demand more detailed information than a casual tourist. But the ideal point of departure in putting folksonomy to use demands agreement on how to assess different kinds of involvement and their value.
Calibrating Learning versus Entertainment
Museum administrators today measure institutional success very bluntly, based on bodies crossing their threshold instead of, for example, time spent in front of displays. Since U.S. museums are chartered with tax exemption as educational institutions, not as entertainment centers, the measurement of success should touch first on service to their core mission. Excessive reliance on raw attendance statistics makes no more sense than if universities were to assess their achievement primarily by the number of students enrolled. Such statistics are indicative of the girth of an institution, but offer little in an assessment of its overall performance.
For those enamored of girth for its own sake, the ratio of college applicants to places offered in the next freshman class is a legitimate measurement of a university’s perceived standing among prospective students. Similarly, a museum’s attendance with respect to the attendance at other cultural institutions locally, or with respect to a city’s Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), can be revealing. But a blunt measurement without due consideration of the context in which a museum operates is simplistic, and has led museums to ape commercial indicators. This can have the effect of shortchanging visitors of an abiding educational focus in the choice of exhibitions presented, publications produced, and programs staged.
As a means to help a museum fulfill its mission, technology, too, should be introduced with an educational thrust. While there is debate about how best to evaluate the number and usage patterns of end users, both attendance and end user counts should take advantage of more sophisticated means of measurement. If the average viewing of a museum object lasts only a few seconds, and our goal is to prolong each encounter and its rewards, we should find a way through motion detection to measure the amount of time that people linger in front of displays that are considered particularly deserving. Just as people are curious about which movies prove popular with others, we should be in a position to know which displays end up being the most magnetic and analyze why, with the goal being close looking at other works as well.
Similarly, if the number of end users visiting a museum website is actually secondary to the amount of time that end users delve into rich multimedia assets, then we should devote more energy to the provision and quantification of such experiences than to driving and celebrating traffic for its own sake.
Measuring with insight is all the more necessary since the online museumgoer promises to become more transactional than a traditional visitor. He or she will expect that queries will be answered. If such queries require even rudimentary staff research, he or she will not be patient with a delay or a generic auto-reply. As public institutions, museums will have to develop protocols and mechanisms to cope with increasing expectations on the part of end users worldwide. In the last century we added telephone operators and, briefly, telex operators. The new model of collaborative authoring presages much more change to come in staff engagement with the public.
Paying for Investments in Technology
Much of the adaptation required by technology’s promise will demand new resources. The provision of experience is the primary calling of museums. However we end up agreeing on how to measure engagement most effectively, if millions of potential online visitors are incentivized to take advantage of a museum’s improved online offerings, we will surely be led to question the current cost-benefit assumptions of museums. By way of example, U.S. art museums today have an extremely high ratio of cost per visitor, averaging over $40 a person, calculated by the size of operating budget divided by the number of onsite visitors. If museums chose to think of participation differently, a marginal investment in an online visitor could repay the museum handsomely—not in immediate cash return, but in demonstrating the value of the museum to a greater number of people. This in turn can have the effect of persuading funders—-be they governments, foundations, corporations, or private individuals—to direct support to those museums that reach the most visitors in the most rewarding ways.
We know the following to be true: the promise of top-level funding from without is always greater than the potential for incremental gains from per-visitor earned income. By contrast, today’s economic model is an inefficient and skewed one—as mentioned above, the more people that cross a threshold, the more important a museum is deemed to be. A generation ago, the primary basis for evaluation had to do with the depth of a museum’s collection. Since the 80s museums have increasingly relied on entertainment-focused amenities, such as predictable blockbusters, larger shops and restaurants, and special events, to draw in visitors. But anyone responsible for supporting museums, whether government officials or ticket-buyers, should be asking the following: what are visitors experiencing? How much of their time is devoted to the consideration of objects in the museum’s care? The investment required is in the provision of rich online experiences, from detailed encounters with illustrations of objects or other features of museum collections and offerings, to live chat sessions or webcast events. All of which can be mission-focused and educational, and far less costly than bricks-and-mortar-related expenses.
The myopia of imitating for-profit attractions will lead museums inexorably towards a highly speculative reliance on fickle markets. A far more rewarding approach to serving a mission would make a virtue of the necessity that museums care for collections, by offering in-depth encounters with the core of each museum’s offerings. Part of the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is explained by a public appetite for insight into the mysteries behind creativity, belief systems, and history. If museums can shed their instinct to imitate theme parks and malls, and focus instead on providing privileged access to authentic objects and experiences, the online encounter with museums can be no less rewarding than whatever fare popular culture has to dole out.
Valuing Creative Authenticity over Passive Encounters
Which brings us to another trend for museums in the information age: the incremental growth of media-based experiences is directly proportionate to the incremental rarity of handmade artifacts. Because of their increasing preciousness, it is reasonable to presume growth in the allure of authentic objects as virtual experiences multiply. A young suburban reared on mall culture, videogames, iTunes, and IM has fewer opportunities to encounter authenticity as older generations construe it. Yet while an increasing number of artists, designers, and others are employing digital media and eschewing the traditional market-driven commodification of unique creative acts, there will always be objects that have to be cared for. Thus museums will increasingly find themselves both promoting illustrated or simulated encounters with real things, while caring for the real things themselves. How we make a virtue of this necessity is an interpretive challenge no smaller than the technical challenge of reducing the intrusiveness of hardware. But it will require agility in matching digital museum offerings with new learning habits.
With each half-decade of change in technology, we see young people increasingly reared in electronic cocoons that they are shaping. Their impatience with passive encounters is already transforming entertainment options, as movie theater attendance declines and video games and downloadable films with alternative endings increase. Museums have a plethora of challenges in keeping pace with this new and demanding audience. Ceding authority is never easy, but particularly so in the case of professional fetishists. Our resistance to community editing is natural enough for scholars trained in an academic environment. But opening museum content to contributions from the public will be essential as we seek to be relevant in a world that finds satisfaction in collaborative communication.
As keyboards give way to voice recognition, finite screens will give way to projections on any kind of flat surface, and web pages will give way to more fluid learning environments through lightweight wearable gear including mobile phones. Museums’ battle lines of just a few years ago—around how to write a good label—have swiftly given way to the myriad choices presented by podcasting, blogging, and other subversions of institutional insularity. Our collective embrace of bitstreams created by and with others will be seen by some as threatening the very essence of museum culture. And, indeed, the wholesale abandonment of scholarly authority would spell the end of museums and their substitution by warehouses. But the goal should be to reward the fruits of disciplined research by making these eminently accessible to and annotated by a broad and diverse public.
The way forward will surely not be in the printed exhibition catalogue selling to 5% of audiences, or the website resembling a kinetic brochure, but in live, streaming, downloadable, and open-ended resources. We will have to learn to eschew certain traditional forms of gate-keeping and create new invitations to learn and collaborate in tandem with our audiences. The choice of museum programming itself will be under continuing pressure as resources shrink for the emphatically non-digital world of packing crates, jet fuel, dry wall, and technical expertise associated with museum displays.
How we cope with the fickle tastes of the marketplace will reflect the extent of our reliance on earned income. Those institutions fortunate enough to have sizable endowments can better insulate themselves from the vagaries of presumed public appetite, and can offer up museum experiences that they believe are especially deserving. The alternative is to be increasingly drawn into compromises akin to those in the for-profit world. If museums are to be educational preserves, they need to lead by example, rather than to be reflexively populist. If higher education were to cede decisions about what to teach to a plebiscite of students, the curricula at universities would see much of what is precious about human knowledge vanish under the waves of fashion. And ultimately, this is the preeminent challenge served up by the prevalence of digital media.
Because what may be obvious to a curator is far from obvious to a funder, trustee, government official, or visitor. Since the provision of a personal compass for understanding history, culture, and nature are among our key goals, we will have to establish and collectively advocate new ways of assessing the contributions of museums that imaginatively promote the value of serendipitous encounters. Old models, whether based on the late 19th century vision of museums as beneficent treasure houses ministering to the working class, or the late 20th century vision of museums as shopping malls with galleries attached, can mercifully become obsolete.
A new model, privileging public engagement with accessible scholarly resources, offers a promise of relevance in a world awash with consumer response driving corporate planning. Instead of using technology to make museums more efficient imitators of for-profit attractions, we should devote our energies to making museums more responsive to the perspectives of others, while arguing forcefully for the legitimacy of scholarly innovation. This approach will both underscore museums’ educational benefits and encourage their vitality as a public resource, and can help wean us of a misguided pursuit of ticket sales to the exclusion of mission-focused goals.
Conclusion
A decade ago, in the introduction to The Wired Museum, I imagined a series of imminent changes to the museum landscape, while guardedly noting that “today’s prognostications will fuel tomorrow’s ironic reminiscences.” Along those lines, I then assumed that voice recognition technology would be more universal than it has yet become, along with personally tailored content, three-dimensional imaging, the convergence of the computer and the television, and site licensing as a means of coping with copyright dilemmas. I also supposed that Intranets would allow visitors to “eavesdrop on our activities”—but failed to predict that folksonomy would go so far as to allow them to be unmediated content creators. Mercifully I did promote more open sharing of the mechanics of museum operations, on the assumption that visitors allowed to bear witness to museum activities would be more engaged in the life of museums overall.
Notwithstanding the deliberate pace of technology’s march in some respects, in others we have much promise and many choices ahead. The ‘wireless’ museum is a radical variant of Malraux’s museum without walls. Because the return of art to daily life, in the form of affordable high design, presages our return to a time during which the few will dictate less to the many. Artistic expression is no longer seen as the preserve of an eccentric in a garret, but as the birthright of any boy or girl with authoring software, who can instantly publish the results to a ubiquitous platform. The calibration of achievement in creativity was once made by the French Academy, then by museums, now by the marketplace, and soon enough by the appetites of millions online. While those who toiled in graduate school will bemoan the decline of standards, others with a longer view will have faith that truth and reason will prevail in an unfathomably vast sea of bitstreams.
For museums to become relevant in societies offering instant access to digital equivalents of anything we can create or imagine, a healthy attitude would privilege involvement over silence, questioning over placid acceptance, and a commitment to providing challenging artistic experiences over pandering fare.
I continue to believe, a decade on, that deepened exposure to the latest thinking of experts will inspire people to visit museums and sidle up to original objects. The success of the “CSI” television series is a function of removing the veil from the mechanics of detective work, just as popular hospital dramas offer crash courses in diagnosing and treating ailments. Museums must be no less determined to provide behind-the-scenes access to how we evaluate and foster creativity, history, and science.
Like all of the assumptions we have collectively made about museum informatics since the 1990s, the safest ground in making predictions is there: that greater exposure to daily life in and around museums, such as that provided by this book, can only promote more interest and involvement by those who might be inclined to become regular visitors, both onsite and online.