The Ontario Science Center’s Kevin von Appen talked to me about the Center’s two year old experiment with web video, and its commitment to the YouTube community in particular, when we met at Museums and the Web Conference last spring. Kevin is the Director of Daily Experience Operations at OSC.

Even then he was excited about the big event that’s taking place this Friday, August 8th, at OSC, the 8.8.8. Toronto Meet Up.

RW: How long ago did you start putting videos on the web?

KVA: We started in October 2006 with video experiments on YouTube and other sites. We were watching the emergence of YouTube as a channel for dialogue and communication through the summer of 2006. Smart people were saying this is an area for experimentation. Lots of people didn’t have the skills to shoot and edit video but we did, fortunately. You don’t need to be an expert – you can do in-camera edits. If you have an interesting event, just set up the camera, that’s enough.

RW: Like you did with the astronaut describing how a toilet works in the absence of gravity in space. That was both scientifically accurate and hilarious. It’s been viewed on YouTube over 1,000,000 times!

 

KVA: That’s a good example of what I’m talking about – he was a good storyteller and we just clipped the best two minutes of his presentation. It wasn’t a technological masterpiece, but it was a communications success.

RW: How does the look of these videos affect the impression people have of the Science Center?

KVA: The question of how it makes you look is a big one. For OSC the informal look of the videos works. We’ve talked a lot about what’s the voice of the Science Center. I define it as “a humorous friend who knows just a bit more than you do and is really excited to tell you. Friends tell the truth, they don’t talk down to other friends, they’re respectful; they have a sense of humor.”

RW: Do you mean that sometimes it’s easier for people to hear difficult things if they’re touched with humor?

KVA: You know, when people talk about serious things that are exciting to them, that matter to them, they always find opportunities to crack a joke – out of a sense of joy – it comes out of the love of what they’re doing. They don’t need to be pompous. We’re always looking for that informal voice. On the floor we have human faces – the Hosts – and online videos in social spaces are like that - offering a chance to provide a personal face.

RW: Could you elaborate on this?

KVA: The exchanges VideoChick770 has with other YouTubers are what are meaningful. She captures content in various ways and puts it up there. It covers the interesting people who come to talk, the exhibitions, our demonstrations.

RW: When I perused the videos I came away with the impression that the Ontario Science Center is a place where all kinds of people with all kinds of interests can have a good time.

KVA: For me the exchange is key. These are places for conversation, not for broadcast. That’s why we’re looking forward to the Meet Up. Word spreads through connections VideoChick770 has made. I’m most interested in the conversations, where we, the institution, are listening respectfully - to comments about the videos and in videos that are posted in response to ours. True interactions are driven by visitors on the web and on the floor. We don’t tell people what to think.

RW: How would you characterize these exchanges? What are you looking for in these conversations?

KVA: How would I characterize them? Take the astronaut video. There were well over 1, 000,000 downloads and thousands of responses. If you scroll through them you’ll see lots of stuff  - “lol” messages as if they were instant messages, or bathroom humor but also there are thoughtful pieces of exchange. For example someone wrote in “I didn’t know Canada had a space program.” That opens the door to talk about international space programs besides NASA. But you should look for yourself and make your own judgement.

Theodore Sturgeon, the science fiction writer had his own law: “ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is garbage.”

RW: I know what you mean!

KVA: You can’t control this stuff. We’re watching everything unfold, and we’re as much affected by what happens as we are influencing what happens. For one thing, in the web space to download and watch a video is more of a commitment than clicking on a banner ad.  At a fundamental level, online video is a medium for getting people to engage with science.  Participation, co-creation and dialogue – these are the things we encourage at the Science Center and things can happen using social media regardless of geography. YouTube social media is a natural way to engage visitors in new ways.

RW: Do you see different types of responses at the different video sites?

KVA: That’s a very good question. We have our videos on 19 different places: YouTube, Yahoo, Break.com, spike.tv, blip.tv, etc. Our content is the same on all of them. The responses on break.com are a bit more “frat boy” but the vast majority of our traffic comes from Yahoo and YouTube. Yahoo likes us – they often feature our stuff because its’ slightly quirky, family friendly in a good way, interesting, easily accessible, not intimidating. Also – the provenance of the content is important; they feel safe assuming the content must be solid when they see the OSC logo at the end, meaning it came from a trusted source.

RW: I think the fact that you put the logo at the end is very significant. This way you’re not prejudicing the audience – scaring them away by announcing that they’re about to watch science content. This way they’ve already kind of bought into the content and where it comes from isn’t really important to them.

KVA: With YouTube if you just make the videos and put them up there it’s a little like throwing a cup of water in a river. What makes a difference is dialoguing with other people, supporting them by commenting on their videos, tagging them. VideoChick770 has spent a lot of time interacting with the YouTube community. She’s identified the opinion leaders within the community. How do you get yourself noticed? You have to participate.

We’re genuinely curious about the responses. We’re trying to listen – don’t open the door if there’s nothing on the other side. Commitment to active participation is crucial. That’s why the “persona” of the Museum is so important.

RW: What do you mean by “persona”?

KWA: Organizations right now see the web as the responsibility of web teams, if they have them. You don’t need a web team to build things these days, you just need to tell your story and find the best people to tell it. The new priority setting is to know who/how to tell the story. Some conversations I’ve had with people tell me that this point is not so obvious.

We’re not just a place, we’re a presence. There’s a physical place and a virtual place. There’s what people are saying about us in social media, and what we’re putting out there in social media – these things make us a presence. It’s not about how we get more people to come to the website, it’s more how do we become a presence on the web.

RW: How do you decide which programs or activities will be part of your web presence?

KVA: We see this whole thing as an experiment. In considering what experiments we’ve done we ask:

How does this line up with our mission?

What are we already doing that is like this?

We ask what’s a good fit for us?

Podcasts are a good example. We’ve been answering questions for decades, and podcasts are expanded answers and they allow for a conversation. In the Westin Family Innovation Centre people can create their own stop motion videos on the floor, so its’ a natural expansion to upload them to share. With Facebook, it’s what would make it an opportunity for true community different from our corporate website? We’re still figuring it out.

RW: How to have an impact that is different from but complements the main museum web site.

KVA: It’s also question of resources – what you’re going to do to have impact. We have a pretty small web team so we put our energies into things that support what we’re already doing, or are organic extensions of those things. There are lots of things I’d like to explore – mashups, flickr, I think Brooklyn Museum of Art is an exemplar in this area.

The penny dropped for me when my daughter who was 9 at the time, was asking if she could watch YouTube more than TV. You’re a 9 year old girl interested in funny cats. You can wait nine months for Discovery Channel or you can go on YouTube right away.

There’s a zeitgeist around these activities. It doesn’t take long for interesting videos to zip around and be shared by friends.

RW: You’ve had a few viral videos.

KVA: The majority of our downloads are driven by a few videos that capture interest and go viral. If we do a Hot Spot presentation on a really busy day at OSC there may be 200 people on the floor and some of them are walking in and out of the presentation. When we put a video of that event on our YouTube channel, over time you are exponentially increasing your audience. 200 people may watch on the floor, but 1,000 people will download the video. Is the interaction the same? Of course not, but I would argue that the commitment is greater – as long as the video is brief.

RW: Yes, most of your videos are under 3:00, many are under 2:00… So what’s surprised you the most?

KVA: I’ve been surprised about everything. When we went on all we knew was that it was an interesting medium to explore. We’ve been surprised by how fast things have been picked up, by the quality of comments, by the videos people have made in response – even the parodies, because people have to listen closely to make a good parody.

RW: What’s the idea behind the 888 Toronto Meet Up* that’s happening at OSC on Friday August 8th?

KVA: What I was really interested in as a science museum communicator, was how does this loop back to the experience in the Museum? The idea that you develop relationships with people and invite them to come to the Museum, and they really are coming from all over the world.  People who love videos and science will come together to make videos about science that we would never think of making. That’s where the mission of the organization and the potential of the social web really come together. I’m interested in that.

 

 

RW: So, you’re not worried being able to control for appropriateness, correctness, respect for the subjects?

KVA: You’ve got to be willing to give up control, to embrace the messiness, embrace the crash when it doesn’t work. By and large OSC is committed to these modes of visitor interaction. I feel supported by the organization. The questions that come up are real and should be grappled with, because otherwise vivid imaginations will come up with all sorts of potential horror stories and we won’t even be able to try things out. It’s handy to call things “experiments” because we can see what happens. For the most part our audiences don’t let us down. It doesn’t mean we give up on expertise but it does mean we give up our notion and position of broadcaster at a podium – “here’s my message now listen.”

The Meet up is a way to track transference from web space to physical space.  It will be a very clear response to the question of how do you know this investment of resources will lead to business?

RW: What’s interesting is how the role of the science center in web space differs from its traditional role in physical space, how the role of the science center is changing because of the internet.

KVA: Let’s face it, these days science centers are not about transmitting facts, so what’s our value? Giving people the tools and inspiration to navigate it themselves, and maybe create it. We need to be communicators first – we can’t be all about facts. Facts are cheap but the ability to “cope” – evaluate, have primary experiences – that’s our goal.

* As the OSC website says, “Following the success of YouTube’s 777 meetup (July 7, 2007) in New York City, the Science Centre is hosting the “888torontomeetup,” Canada’s first large-scale YouTube community gathering.” Of course people are invited to bring their cameras, and bite.tv will be televising the proceedings. So far more than 700 YouTubers have rsvp’d!

The event has been organized by Kathy Nicholiachuk , known to YouTubers as videochick770. She is the face of the Center on YouTube, the engine behind the community that has developed on the OSC channel.

At this year’s AAM conference I gave a tutorial on how to produce a video podcast. There were two identical sessions, and at each session, one of the 30 participants won a new FlipCam! This is a great little video camera that fits in the palm of your hand and costs $100.00. You can’t really go wrong.

If you’re interested in a quick and easy way to get started producing your own podcasts, you can download the handout here. Please let me know how it works out. I’d be happy to do a workshop at your museum. If you decide you need something more polished to present on your website or for iTunes U, I can help you produce those too.

On Social Tagging by Native Communities

Tagging can help museums understand how visitors perceive the objects in their collections. While the goal of many tagging projects is to provide better access for the public to online collections, Shelley Mannion, at the University of Lugano, is using it to learn how native communities respond to their own art. Mannion’s findings have implications for how museums can help these communities strengthen their connections to their own culture. She described her research in a lucid presentation, “Seeing Tibetan Art Through Social Tags.”

Working with the open source tagging tool available at http.steve.museum, she asked young Tibetans in Zurich and a control group of Swiss Germans to participate in her research project by tagging six images - five traditional works and one contemporary one. She also interviewed the Tibetans in order to understand how they felt about tagging these works.

What she discovered was that often the young Tibetans didn’t have a lot of knowledge about their own culture, and they felt bad about that, which made them somewhat reluctant to tag the images. Tagging by both the Tibetans and the Swiss Germans showed misunderstandings about the images - what Jennifer Trant calls “teachable moments.” “Tag vocabulary is a window into what people notice. It’s interesting as much for the aggregate, (what many people notice) as for the outlier (what’s noticed by only one).” J.Trant’s blog, March 7, 2008.

Through tagging, visitors “teach” curators what they know about the works, what interests them, what they see and don’t see. Since tagging can expose where the gaps in people’s knowledge are, curators also learn what they need to be “teaching.”

Also, tagging can help to identify individuals in the native community who can translate the concepts of one culture into another. These “translators” can help the museum create materials to support the community’s engagement with objects from their own culture. Mannion’s presentation concludes with some advice to bear in mind when designing tagging systems for communities: Think about what would motivate them to participate, and what type of interface would facilitate their participation - something game-like, perhaps.

Mannion’s research, funded by The Rubin Foundation, is ongoing. The tagging project website Seeing Tibet Through Social Tags is inviting Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in New York to participate in the tagging research project. So, log on and tag. It will make you think.

More About YouTube

Museums are starting their own channels on YouTube in ever greater numbers. At this session presenters from The Exploratorium, San Jose Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, MoMA, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art shared their goals, frustrations and insights about operating a channel on YouTube.

The subjects of the videos on the Exploratorium’s channel expand the definition of “science” to incorporate things you might not normally think of. For example, live web cam videos where you can watch scientists in the Antartic getting suited up to go out to work. It takes a while! Or you can watch visitors to the Museum respond to an invitation to drink water out of a toilet, in Mind, a new exhibition where you get to explore how your own mind works.

They have staff curated playlists on their channel, and are training teen docents to shoot their videos. Nicole Minor, presenting for the Exploratorium, made an important observation based on their experience: building a social network on your channel is a real challenge. Yet building that community around your content is the goal, it’s the reason to be on YouTube - so your museum can reach out to and nurture a new audience who are interested in your content. YouTube offers your museum a different way of presenting itself to people, of enlarging its “persona” on the web, showing a new side of itself. The network grows in response to the effort you make to find interested people and engage them in “conversation,” as The Indianapolis Museum of Art learned.

IMA accidentally found success on YouTube by producing “how to videos” targeted to small but dedicated audiences interested in origami and calligraphy. As Dan Dark said, they had to get over the fact that people were not looking for the IMA brand; they were looking for content that mattered to them. Instructional videos are popular, easy to produce, and easy to promote by linking to subject blogs and participating in subject based community forums. Dan understood that IMA needed to participate as a member of the YouTube community so he looked for similar videos on other channels, used the same tags, and engaged in a dialogue with others interested in these subjects. Their origami videos have been viewed several thousand times.They feature Dr. Robert J. Lang, a physicist and engineer with a passion for origami, who has used this expertise to design the way airbags are folded to deploy immediately when needed, and to enable expandable space telescopes, among other amazing things!

IMA’s videos feature Lang creating origami ducks, swallows and scorpions, but you can begin to see the kind of connections that are possible. IMA has also posted other types of videos of course, and you can watch them all here.

David Hart at MoMA picked up the community theme when describing the situation of MoMA’s channel. It’s very time consuming to moderate comments, at least half of which are spam. Occasionally they see negative comments, but there are some really great ones too. Is it worth all the trouble? How do you evaluate the success of your channel? Is it number of views? Probably not since, as David stated, the farting panda video will definitely get more views than our videos will, even the artist Doug Aitkin’s, which had over 100,000 views.

But two people who watched Aitkin’s video on MoMA’s channel were inspired to produce and upload response videos, and there are more than 75 comments, some in response to the video and some in response to other peoples’ comments. I got the impression that the people who made most of the comments were familiar with Aitkin’s work already, and love it or hate it and wanted to let MoMA know how they felt. This channel has become a place for people to speak to the Museum and to each other. You can see how the next step is for MoMA to respond to the commenters and begin to have to a real conversation.

While I was at MW2008 I interviewed Kevin von Appen, Associate Director of Daily Operations at the Ontario Science Center, about their web video strategy, and in particular their YouTube channel. Kevin and OSC have been active in this area since October 2006. He’s a firm believer in the potential and value of the conversations that are possible, and has some wonderful insights and useful advice for how to think about representing your museum using video on the web. That interview will appear here in the next few weeks.

On User Expectations & Personalization

Steven Smith, whose consulting firm United Focus is based in Australia, ran a mini-workshop on User Expectations. He discussed the types of personal factors that influence users, as well as the external factors - such as a visitor’s level of web experience, previous knowledge of your museum, their entry point, the page they land on when they arrive on your website.

He ended by highlighted key factors influencing web visitor expectations now:

• the rise of social networking sites

• sites that enable user generated content

• the improved speed of access.

• personalization

Increasingly sites are emulating Amazon’s personalized approach - that “Hello Robin” greeting I get every time I go there - and people will begin to expect to see content filtered to their taste on every content based site. He left us with this thought: “the visitor is king, not the content.”

Of course we all have to be more aware of our visitors these days, but actually content is the only reason that anyone goes to any site on the web, and museums are bursting with content. The challenge is to figure out how to make it more accessible and more appealing. Seeding your content to social networking sites by establishing FaceBook pages, Flickr accounts, etc, lets you create connections with niche audiences anywhere in the world.  You need a strategy for how to create this new, expanded presence on the web.

The Session on Metrics Was Great

Sebastian Chan of Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia gave an eye opening evaluation of the metrics generally used by museums to understand how successful their websites are. Typically you rely on information about the number of new visitors, page visits, amount of time spent on a page, and podcast downloads, for example, to tell you about the usefulness or popularity of various pages or features on your site. Yet as he explained in his excellent session, these statistics are seriously skewed - by search bots crawling your site, open browser tabs on people’s desktops, and RSS feeds, nor is there a way to track whether podcast downloaders actually watch or listen to your programs.

Chan went on to talk about social networking sites as places where museums can learn more reliable information about how they are perceived in the great big internet community, whether or not they have a formal presence in these spaces.

If your museum has pages on MySpace or FaceBook, videos on YouTube or Blip.tv, hosts blogs or has Flickr accounts or a presence in Second Life, take a look at the interactions occurring in these places to see how people are responding to your content. Chances are you will find comments that don’t appear on visitor surveys.

But even if you haven’t created a presence for yourself in these social spaces, other people will be creating one for you - blogging about a visit to your recent exhibition, posting pictures of your building to Flickr, etc. Chan recommends doing “what are known as ‘ego searches’ for [your] brand name, event or exhibition name.” You can search all of these sites to see what people are posting or saying about you, and do blog searches through technorati.com, for example.

These things will tell you more about how people perceive your museum, more about your “presence” on the web than straight metrics ever will. Then you can use this information to begin, or to continue, to develop your web presence in ways that serve your audience and your museum. His excellent paper is online here.

Virtually everyone who went to MW2008 in Montreal earlier this month is already deeply committed to moving their institutions further into the social media/web 2.0 space. There were 600 or 700 people there, so for a conference it was an intimate event, and also international, with participants came from museums in Australia, Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Germany, the US and 18 other countries.

Over the next few posts I’ll give you a round-up of the themes, good examples and memorable stories from the sessions I attended. If any of you were also there and have something to add, please do!

One of the themes I heard expressed most often was that you never know what knowledge visitors have about your collections until you give them an opportunity to share their comments. A terrific example of this is the Library of Congress initiative on Flickr. Several months ago they uploaded thousands of photos from their collections and have invited the public to add tags and comments. Why did they do this? Because, to quote from their Flickr page, “the identifying information that came with the original photos… can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and also your general reactions….More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.” If the Library of Congress trusts ordinary people to provide worthwhile information, perhaps your institution can take advantage of this untapped knowledge source as well.

Another related theme was that visitors have a very different perspective on objects and artworks than curators do, and those view points are often refreshing and help us see things in new ways. A case in point comes from The Brooklyn Museum. In her presentation, Shelly Bernstein reaffirmed the benefits they’ve experienced from making the Museum’s collection available on multiple social sites, and from inviting the public to respond to it. Their current example of collaborating with the public is the exhibition project Click.

Inspired by the high quality of visitors’ photographs of works in their collection, and posted on Flickr, they are now organizing an exhibition of photographs of the changing face of Brooklyn, taken by the public, and then curated by the public. As their website says, “The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.”Read all about it here.

Another point that kept bubbling up to the surface was that “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.” Often there’s no consensus within the museum about whether to embrace any of “this web 2.0 stuff” or how to do it. In these cases a common tactic has been for an intrepid curator, web producer, marketing person, or educator on staff to just start putting videos on YouTube, or blogging, or constructing a FaceBook page and calling it an experiment - for as long as possible, under the theory that it’s easier to sell an idea once you have some results.

I’ll be posting more on some of the specific sessions - about emerging audiences, user generated content, metrics, YouTube, social tagging and a cool very user friendly programming language, so stay tuned. The conference website has all the session descriptions, speaker bios, papers and of course, blogs, so check it out.

This is Part 5 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archive to access the first four parts.

Robin: Here’s a real world example of a museum actually soliciting ideas from its audience and acting on them.

The Brooklyn Historical Society started a project where they invite community groups to propose subjects for exhibitions, and then use material in the BHS collection to create those shows. They’re saying to the incredibly diverse population of Brooklyn, “It’s your history and your stories we want to tell” and people who never attended the museum before are coming. Right now there’s a show called Lost in Transition: South Brooklyn, Williamsburg & Coney Island, which includes pictures taken by teenagers in the Urban Memory Project.

Let’s not only capture your interest, but feed it!

Holly: Well, after collecting all this information about what web visitors are interested in, wouldn’t it be great if museums could respond by feeding their interests? Since you liked this, you may also want to know about that. Like Amazon and other vendors who lead customers from one purchase to others — how can museums tailor their information to the individual’s interests? The commercial world has set a standard for customer responsiveness that, for good or ill, museums must now meet.

Robin: Exactly – what Amazon and other sites use is called recommendation software. Museums could track visitors’ interests through the audio and video tour stops they select, for instance. For the moment though, it seems like visitors are feeding each others’ interests rather than waiting for museums to do it, and museums are offering blogs, and other platforms for them to do this. The New Museum’s new site, for example, has a Share link so you can share info from their site with your friends, either by email, or by adding the url to your del.icio.us account, or to a shared calendar, or to StumbleThis.

What’s happening is that the museum visitors are becoming the source of news – sharing information about common interests from myriad sources, rather than relying on one source.

Think about the relationship building that would occur if the museum’s experts also participated in these information-sharing networks. It will be great when museums figure out how to do that, and even how to position themselves as the go-to source for information about stuff that YOU are specifically interested in.

Holly: In the meantime, your stories –- at the Cantor Art Center, and the Austrian Museum — are wonderful examples of the interaction between museum and visitor becoming a conversation instead of a one way broadcast. It doesn’t in any way denigrate the authority or the knowledge of the people who work in the museum. It only acknowledges that everybody has a chance to learn something, and that both the staff of the museum and its visitors are still learning. And that’s very much in keeping with what’s happening in the larger culture, where exchange is increasingly peer-to-peer-to-peer and hierarchies of all kinds are breaking down. Because people have access to so much information now and our confidence in authority figures has eroded, perhaps beyond repair.

Robin: The days of the museum as wunderkammer are gone but they still have absolutely unique content, and things that can inspire a state of wonder in visitors. Museums need to take that message out to places where people are, and make it available on technologies that people use – their computers, iPods and cell phones.

Holly: It’s a much more competitive environment now than even ten years ago, with so much more information and choices coming at people, all the more reason why cultural institutions have to get very clear about their real intentions regarding visitors as well as very savvy about their public relations and marketing. They have to seriously confront cultural change –- demographic change, technological and economic change, global movements of population and money, even climate change. All these trends have an impact on museums, and if they’re not actively engaging these issues they’re going to be actively affected by them.

Robin: So we agree that while there are unprecedented opportunities for museums in using web 2.0 technologies, implementing them is a challenge. Museum leaders need the vision and commitment to genuinely open their doors wider on the web, but they also need a strategy for how to do it most effectively. Only then can they take charge of defining their presence on the internet, and engage on many levels with old and new audiences.

This is Part 4 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Robin: Museums are putting their videos on YouTube and creating a presence for themselves on other social networking sites to cultivate new communities of viewers. An excellent example of how to do this successfully is the Brooklyn Museum.

Why make the commitment to be on YouTube, FaceBook and Flickr? Because that’s where everybody else is – not only your potential visitors but also your competitors. Every other type of major entertainer / content provider - movies, games, sports teams, travel and tourism promoters, etc. - is using these vehicles for the same reason. They’re going to where people are, rather than waiting for audiences to come to them. The Warhol Museum is another example of a success story in this environment. They were so effective at creating an attractive profile on MySpace that 10,000 people wanted to become friends of the Museum, creating quite a backlog of people to respond to!

Holly: In the work we did at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, we learned many things, but two “rules of thumb” emerged from that experience which are especially relevant here. First, in the matter of engaging audiences, you have to start where people are. You cannot expect the “uninitiated” to leap in one jump to your level of knowledge and engagement. A second “rule” is that you will be more successful if you cross the river where it’s narrowest – that is, reach out first to people who are most like your current audience. That is not to say that museums shouldn’t try to diversify their audiences culturally, economically, and in other ways, but it will cost a lot less in time, money and effort to reach people who are similar to the museum’s current demographic.

Robin: Yes and museums can use social networking technologies to engage their current audience, and through them bring in new visitors. SFMOMA’s use of a blog for the Olafur Eliasson show, which we talked about earlier, is an effective way of doing this.

And of course social events provide some of the best opportunities for reaching out to friends of friends. But I still think one of the most compelling experiences you can have at a museum is talking to the experts – going on a curator led tour, for example. Obviously I’m not the only person who thinks this is cool because often museums offer curator led tours and conversations as a perk for higher membership options - to the people who are already on the bus, so to speak.…You know, when visitors get to talk with curators, and see how their passions can breathe life into art, history and science, this greatly enhances the chances they’ll have a positive experience, and come away with new things to think about. We’ve already talked about a few examples like this.

Holly: But I go back to where we started this conversation. Shouldn’t the basic motivation for a museum’s public programming be to get people to think – to engage with the strange, the unknown or maybe the very familiar, but basically to stimulate their minds? If that’s really the motivation, then shouldn’t these institutions be interested in what people are thinking as a result of their visit, isn’t that the logical next question? “Okay, we gave you our ideas, now what are your ideas?”

Robin: Yes, web 2.0 applications are all about that – encouraging people to share ideas. All of the content on Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, for example, comes from people contributing their expertise, opinions, experience, as well as pictures and videos. It’s experts and amateurs coming together. Del.icio.us and other sites allow people to collect and tag the web pages they’re interested in and share that with friends. FaceBook and MySpace allow users to present themselves, what they like and think, and find others with similar interests. And the museums that understand this phenomenon - the Walker Art Center, SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum - are inviting audiences to share their thoughts, pictures, and videos about exhibitions and events. The question is what happens as a result of all these comments? Museums are providing opportunities for people to share their thoughts, but then what? Are they taking action based on the comments? Have they figured out how to sustain an ongoing dialogue that deepens the connection and commitment to the museum? That’s definitely the next step. Our conversation concludes in Part 5: Sharing Content.

This is Part 3 of a five part conversation with Holly Sidford. Please see the Archives to access the other parts.

Robin: Science centers have been cultivating students for much longer than art museums have, in part because science is always part of the curriculum. Schools and art and history museums have only recently begun to see each other as natural partners.

Holly: Our culture values science, and we value the uncertainties of science. We believe that inquiring about the unknown – at least in the sciences – will produce something of value. We know that science is being made every day, and it’s “bringing good things to our lives.” We don’t have that idea about art and history. We don’t think: “There are historians out there creating history and what they make will be valuable to us,” or “There are artists out there asking questions and making us see things in new and unexpected ways and that will add essential value to my life.” In my view, the curators and the museums that do convey that sense of discovery and engaging value really stand out from the rest.

Robin: But also most people don’t see a connection between themselves and these subjects – science, history and art. And when they go out to spend their time and money they’re looking for places where they can make a connection, have fun, be entertained. And if they can’t find those things at museums they’ll go to other places, or stay home and choose from a zillion choices offered to them by Netflix, the web or TV – the phenomenon known as ‘cocooning.” So, what’s a museum to do?

Holly: Well, look at the the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturdays. They’ve become one of the hottest things happening that night. These events are wildly popular with people of diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. The museum has initiated “meet ups” and social networking strategies, Web 2.0, etc. They’ve developed a range of mechanisms for getting groups of young people in their 20s to think of the museum as the place to socialize. People want to have novel experiences, they want to meet their friends, they want to do things that are fun. The more museums understand that phenomenon and develop strategies to meet different cohorts’ needs, the more successful they will be. What you and I want to do is different from what our teenagers want to do, but we could both do it in a museum if that institution were sensitive to the varieties of experience that all of us want. But doing that is really tough.

Robin: But not impossible. And museums can provide experiences an opportunities that are absolutely unique. Actually, this summer the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna opened “Museum inside out” where they literally brought the work of the museum –registering, digitizing, evaluating objects from their collection – into the galleries so visitors could see what staff do, and ask questions. And they did it as an experiment to create a dialogue between experts and visitors. Like the Cantor Center show we were talking about in the Using Blog post, it’s a unique opportunity for visitors to interact with museum staff, to observe, ask, share, learn and increase their appreciation of the art and the work of the museum. Plus, it’s a reason to go there – you get to have an experience you can’t have anywhere else.

The American Museum of Natural History, used to do something wonderful once or twice a year: they’d invite people to bring in bones, rocks and other stuff they’ve found and show it to a curator who would identify – hopefully – what it was. One year we brought a little skull we’d found in Quemado, NM. My son was six at the time. And he was so excited to show it to a real scientist. Of course it turned out to be a rabbit skull instead of a little dinosaur head. But it was so cool to have a conversation with an expert about something that was important to us.Holly: Everybody wants to be in on a secret. The Austrian Museum certainly understood that. All these institutions have tremendous mysteries to share, whether it’s how you conserve a painting or prove it’s not a fake, or how you put a show together and discover connections between one artistic tradition and another. Let people in on the magic! Videotape and other media offer great ways to allow a lot of people “behind the scenes” without actually having them traipse through the Conservation Department. And why does it only have to be just one day a year? If you do it on a regular basis more people hear about it, more people get involved. You have to start where people are…and cross the river where it’s narrowest.

Robin: Sure – meet the curator, meet the conservator etc. Mystic Seaport has produced video podcasts like that - available for download from iTunes. Another theme is “behind the scenes in history” – the story of how something really happened. For example, we recently produced a series of video podcasts for the American Federation of Arts to accompany their traveling exhibition “Color As Field: American Painting 1955-1975.” It’s at The Denver Museum of Art now. We recorded a conversation between the exhibition curator, Karen Wilkin, and the artist Larry Poons. He describes very vividly the behind the scenes relationships between the artists, critics and dealers, and as a result you get a sense of what it was like to be part of that intense ‘60s art scene and you think about the paintings differently, even if you don’t get to see the show itself.

Podcasting is relatively easy to do and many museums are interested in it, so I’ll be doing two Video Podcasting Tutorials at the AAM Conference in Denver in April.