The British Museum has begun an unusual [[??]] collaboration with Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Or so we have been telling ourselves for ~2,357 years. This year, arts organizations and non profits are in a position to innovate . . .or else… How do these experiments in creating new economic models for supporting non-profits relate to how museums are thinking about financial sustainability?
I think we will see more museums looking at an expansion of services into new areas, and experimenting with hub-and-spoke strategies designed to reach into the community in new ways, or acting as an umbrella, a producer, and a curator of people, events, and opportunities rather than keeping all of those functions in-house, and the creation of new membership/rewards plans and other ways to raise money.
Asinine article from former advisor to Tory on Arts and Culture. Suggests "find your own money" as solution. Also, "And, can we any longer avoid deaccessioning, if acquisition funds are now empty and museums have to fund acres of storage for third-rate pictures?"
I promise (and I hope you will too) to have a cup of tea, put a few pennies in the donation box, or buy a little something in the shop EVERY time I visit a museum.
What can Ubimark do for you?
Ubimark enhances physical reality (books, places, objects) with stories, travel experiences, ratings or information.
» Ubimark Books. Paper books, such as “Around the World in 80 Days” are linked to the web through 2D codes.
» Ubimark Tours. Locations throughout the world are annotated with information, tips, reviews, personal testimonials, which are delivered through an Iphone App.
» The Ubimark atlas. This site is an online atlas for all the stories, information, or personal testimonials made available through the books or through the iPhone app. Information can be browsed by double clicking the markers on the maps. Each marker connects to a specific page and location. New information can be added to the books or to the iPhone tours by the users through this site. All you need to do is to create an account on this site.
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Part one is here. Here’s part two.
This year, Talisman had no strategy. The new Portfolio Direktor was a complete mystery. He couldn’t get close to him nor discover any information about him. The graven face Talisman wore was due to a real dread that this would have to be the first budget meeting ever where he had to wing it.
Talisman shuffled past the main entrance to Civic Centre with its sweeping stairway and strange neoclassical statues. Either side of the large doors was what the original architects saw was an appropriate symbol representing the triumph of man and the power of the people: a naked man punching out a horse. This entrance were for official visits, state ceremonies or high ranking-elected officials. People like Talisman didn’t use this entrance. He carried on around the side of the building to enter through two wooden double doors in dire need of a new coat of paint. Talisman signed himself in at the desk, took off his trilby-style hat and made his way through the less-than glamorous wing of Civic Centre. Most of the narrow corridors had faded blue walls with cancer-yellow strip lights. The difference in décor when he got to the floor of the meeting room was noticeable. The first being that everything had an extra six inches in every direction. There was elbow room here, despite Talisman not noticing another person since he got out of the lift.
One of the most intelligent things ever written on io9.com was by Matt Jones, Design Director of Berg. “The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future“. Radical architecture designing an urbanism that is “increasingly linked and learning”. I strongly suggest you read this article. This quote from Dan Hill stands out.
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Everything we need to survive the possible outcomes of the future is dependent upon the city becoming an organism. The Internet of Things video from IBM says the “planet has grown a central nervous system”.
I don’t doubt that claim, except I say that the cities of this planet are going to be the first that actually construct a that workable system of system. We can really ramp-up the hardware inside our City Battlesuit.
The role of the city in the future will affect the role of the museum. All this data, all this information, networked and communicating along the city’s nerves, adding to the superabundance. Cross-referencing stuff will just produce more stuff. There will be organisations who will turn this into some useful apps, like the intelligent alarm clock that will check your calendar and your route.
The museum’s part in this must be to get directly immersed in this city’s central nervous system. It’s role will be like the lymph node, distributed throughout the city’s body (networked/linked) and providing the immunity against the city’s ills. Culture will be the city’s white blood cells.
I don’t see this as another form of social engineering. You can distract museum’s with all kinds of outside missions. I remember one museum who had to try to deal with the city’s knife crime problem. I don’t see this response involving a political step.
By being involved in the system, the museum can make its own responses. That data will be analysed (maybe into the visualisations that are so popular) to give the populous something to make their lives a little better. This isn’t just market research. This is about audience development. This is to make sure the living-city-organism doesn’t die or brutalise itself. This is to make sure the City has a Soul.
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Here’s the first part of many more to come.
GLYPH
Chapter One
Ben Talisman’s 120th birthday was about a month away and the feeling coming from deep within his bones told him that retirement was rapidly approaching. He had been working at the museum for ninety years, serving as Head Curator for the past forty. Today would be the 50th budget meeting at Civic Centre he was summoned to. Every year, he walked alone with his craggy face set in a graven stare. He used this time to go over his strategy. It took an incredible amount of planning and research to make sure the museum wasn’t shut down of ransacked for financial reasons. The first few meeting, Talisman had relied upon presenting all the good work and all the beneficial effects the museum had. After one close call where the museum was saved from closure within the last forty-eight hours, Talisman took to gaining advantages from researching whoever was the current Portfolio Direktor.
The strategy had worked so far. The problem was no reason or excuse could be used twice. The trick was to stun the bureaucratic system whilst getting the desired result from whoever had the authority to sign off on the budget. This meant these meetings had become increasingly bizarre. One year, Talisman had planted false evidence in the Direktor’s house to suggest that his wife was a keen patron of the museum. He did is when he found out that the Direktor’s brave face hid a deep neurosis over his wife’s death six years previously. Another time, Talisman had found the Direktor was addicted to a rare hallucinogenic made from the sweat glands of poisoned West African Children, so he conducted the entire meeting dressed as a reptilian archangel sent by a Pulsar God from the other side of the Cosmos.
Wave # 1: Search. Wave # 2: Social Media So, it is time to jump on the next wave, Open Data, Semantic Web, LinkedData, whatever we want to call it… Social media has created masses of new information that flows in real time to and from our mobile devices. That is great, but it is also a problem. Our poor befuddled brains need a bit of help figuring out which bits of that fire hose will help us. We don’t have an information overload problem, we have a filtering problem. Semantic technology is key to that filtering. But great writers and editors are also needed! [[Not a single use of Curator! Doubleplusgood]] 1.Top Tier Experts. 2. Dedicated Offshore. 3. Crowdsourced On Demand Work. 4. Semantic Aggregation Technology. 5. Open Data.
The mobility of social media interaction disperses the public awareness of living histories and recognizes the role of the individual as a contributing element to the museums developmental process. “Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as its stationary parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with other participants."
At other times, a gift that the museum doesn't want at all may be accepted "as a commodity," specifically designated for sale after a three-year period (to qualify as a tax-deductible donation by the Internal Revenue Service). A "commodity," he stated, is an "in-house term" for an object that is not registered as a piece of art ("like office furniture") but segregated in its own storage area awaiting an opportunity to be sold. These sales "raise a modest amount of money" for the institution. [[You can't do this in the UK.]]
One of the essential components of the museum approach to disability detailed within these publications is the exploration of the Social model of disability, as a counterpoint to the medical model that permeates society. The other incredibly significant aspect of these publications is the framing of social activism as a museological method… However, when we consider museums approaches to disabled people, we do not see the issue of representation or inclusion in decision making protocols, instead we see a continuation of approaches of paternalism demonstrated by a focus exclusively on ‘access’: ramps, wheelchair accessible text rails, brail signage, etc. All of course needs that must be fulfilled, but, none of which challenges the underlying oppression of disabled people within society, and in fact by focusing on such approaches as if they were a burden museums in fact continue the oppression. [[Great post, Dan]]
Every architectural project is immediately exposed and assessed in comparison to all other projects. Global convergences are possible. This does not mean homogenisation and monotony… Parametricism implies that all architectural elements and complexes are parametrically malleable… Parametricism aims to organise and articulate the increasing diversity and complexity of social institutions and life processes within the most advanced centre of post-Fordist network society. It aims to establish a complex variegated spatial order, using scripting to differentiate and correlate all elements and subsystems of a design.
Paradoxically, even though the buildings have doubled or tripled in size, there seems to be less inside than in the old buildings, not more. They've become unintentional "air and space" museums of a sort, because they're filled with more "air" and "space" than exhibits or activities.
And the staff to run the new place?
Many of them have been "furloughed" or "downsized" or just "fired" which makes one wonder about the future of a much larger physical plant.
This UK-based project essentiall is encouraging people to catalog objects and share the associated stories in a public database. A prototype of the universal, dispersed, publically curated collection?… Will objects that have their own "accession" and "catalog" records be less likely to be discarded, and more likely to be treasured and passed to a new user?
However, Medical Museion is currently reframing its identity, from merely a ‘museum’ to an institution for science communication. The point of departure for this identity shift is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of science communication. Traditional dissemination of science through mass media (either printed, electronic, or web 1.0-based) is no longer viable. Science communication needs to embrace the rapid emergence of the full spectrum of social web media (web 2.0), and many museums are adopting the practices of museum 2.0.
Cybergogy focuses on helping adults and young people to learn by facilitating and technologically enabling learner-centered autonomous and collaborative learning in a virtual environment. At the core of cybergogy is awareness that strategies used for face-to-face learning may not be the same used in the virtual environment.
Location data leads to a list of nearby places arranged in a nice UI. It’s a good directory with links to Google Streetview. Lots of potential to add things to each venues profile.
Now, let’s look at something similar. French organisation CultureClic’s app, also for the iPhone and they also show a Blackberry, Nokia and a Samsung. I figure it works on others. Watch.
Kids nowadays. Remember when there was such a thing as standards?
The Internet, all you needed was a standard screen and any browser. Now its all ep-ods and ep-ads and tablets and apps that don’t work with Android. Everything’s behind a password. In my day, we didn’t have to lock our data.
Whyioutta *shakes cane*
Welcome to the Splinternet, where your website might not work and Google can’t search it.
Is the fact that so many fantastic innovative museum things are occurring on an exceptionally expensive pieces of kit a form of social inclusion?
As an Android phone owner, I can’t think of a single museum making apps for it. A quick search on the market brings up a bunch of tourism and picture apps. Not a single official museum app.
Where’s the inclusion? Where has that bastion of museum work “Access” gone? We were doing everything we could to break down the barriers to the museum-loving public and then we go and provide all this innovation to a technological elite. Then this innovation is at the mercy of the sanctioning process of the platform and the limitations of the device.
Just how are museums going to deal with the Splinternet?
“To build a set of tools and services, spanning mobile devices and built environments, that can transform a public space into a reactive, collaboratively mediated experience”.
If there is something that is on my mind more than anything right now, it’s how the future of museums will depend on the function it provides inside the city. I’m talking less along the lines of educating and providing culture to the populous, but as an ingrained node of a living city.
I hate kiosks. I’ve said it before. A sad leftover of late-20th Century museum design. Get some technology and put it in a box. Keep it sealed like one of the exhibits.
Technology now is flexible, mobile and information hasn’t been a strictly linear experience in years. There is nothing a kiosk (ie. a central information terminal) can do that’s better than my phone or my laptop. I sit and casually watch television, hitting into Google people, places or history and can do quick data mine for surrounding information.
It is painfully tricky to do this in museums. Mainly because of the general lack of space to sit or available WiFi. Museums that have this can be a godsend, especially if you feel you don’t have to buy a coffee first.
So I love museum mobile apps. I like to have a little control over getting more information. That’s why I like Augmented Reality so much. But AR is still a few steps too far from that plateau of productivity.
So then there’s TAP. Good old wireless networks, no fiddly barcodes and I can get a bunch of curated content that I can pick through. Properly curated too.
TAP is a content management system. And it’s Open Source.
You can have this in your own museum. Here’s five reasons why. They should have added a sixth: Made by a Museum. The Indianapolis Museum of Art is becoming the game-changer to the future of museums. It may be one of the first to become a resistant museum tribe (1. Localise production. 2. Virtualise everything else).
This hasn’t got anything like enough exposure over here in the UK, where Culture doesn’t have a… culture of early adoption of innovative technology. TAP can go, and you have mobile tours in your museum.
Shame its iPhone/iPod only. But the exciting part is that the IMA is looking to keep on developing this. There’s no end to the potential of a good UI and an easy-to-learn system behind it.
The [MRI] scans produced will measure blood flow to the firing synapses of their brain cells, allowing a united team of scientists and literature professors to study how and why human beings respond to complex fiction such as the works of Marcel Proust, Henry James or Virginia Woolf.
The Decade of Ubiquity is defined as the next ten years where every aspect of our lives will be permeated by digital, mobile, media, data, information, augmented, virtual, and so forth. It will be everywhere and accessible almost instantly. Everything will be connected, labled, monitored, tracked, tagged, and interactive to some degree or another.
Graduate students try to get entry level jobs that involve desks, not aprons. And senior professionals are not encouraged to waste their time talking to visitors in the lobby. While many museums are starting to institute weekly or monthly "floor time" requirements to help all staff become more connected to visitors, these policies are the exception, not the norm.
So why are these companies hiring curators in name only, rather than requesting real curatorial duties? If all you want is someone to list what is good and what is not good, you might as well call the job “office Nick Hornby.” Not to mention, identifying trends, context, and environment is something a writer should always be doing.
This is such a good article until Number 6. This could have been a like-for-like description of "Tomorrow's Curator" until it put curator and blogger *beneath* journalist.
He will be responsible for developing Tate Media, the organisation's drive to develop the brand across online, broadcast and social media, to "strengthen Tate's relationships with audiences and build social networks for the organisation". ***MARC, CALL ME!***
From there I thought – what if museums owned offsite bars? I say offsite because I have been to events at museums where people are drinking. I have seen a woman so drunk she actually reached out and TOUCHED A PICASSO. Seriously. Not good, my friends. Also, the overhead costs of keeping a museum open (electricity, security, heating, whatever) are astronomical. Not to mention the insurance risk!
I’m wanting to do something of a weekly poll in the vein of my Most Important Function of Museums and Role of the Curator posts from a while back.
This week, something about just how we choose to define the time we’re in now.
What Age of Museums is this?
Use whatever word from whatever terminology you wish. I would say something like this being the Supermodern age of museums, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.
An interesting addition to an exhibition design? This video shows what you can do with two big flatscreens, some easily available technology and a IR-emitting necklace. $3000 for the lot. You could look out onto a Roman city, Mars or the view Turner had from his Margate home.
Andrew Taylor of the Artful Manager writes about an interesting toolkit for measuring success in theatres aside from the usual headcount and box office. Some interesting quotes from the handbook.
Every time [The Arts Council of England] give money to us, at the back of their minds they are rehearsing arguments about why it hasn’t gone to a hospital.
The problem with only assessing numbers is that you get funding bodies wanting to put on more theatre, rather than necessarily better theatre.
It is easy to relate these to the museum world. There are more cuts coming despite being “out” of the recession and the lure of the blockbuster exhibition remains. The handbook lays out some really good template surveys and methodologies that creates scores for:
Concentration and Engagement
Learning and Challenge
Energy and Tension
Personal Resonance and Emotional Connection
Shared Experience and Atmosphere
There are a few things in the handbook which would need some translation to museums and some that just aren’t relevant. How much Tension is there likely to be in a museum experience? Well, that is if you didn’t work there. There’s a lot said about time passing, which makes sense for a theatrical performance and makes up the Concentration metric. How could this be framed for museums? “I saw a lot in my time there” doesn’t really offer much to measure. You’d think everyone would see a lot in a museum.
Instantly, I think there would need to be a Participation metric. Which brings up another issue to me. All this is done in the form of surveys. Participation, like engagement, could be argued that by filling out the form in the first place is a measurement.
Just how successful can carrying out surveys be? A museum audience would react differently to a theatre one, especially “after the event”. The museum goer is, in part, measuring themselves. The trick is to incorporate the metric-gathering into the experience.
What metrics would you want to see in a museum version of this toolkit? Sensory experience? Identity Building? Thematic Awareness?
It’s been a while, but I’m proud to say that newcurator.com is back with a whole new look. Been working hard behind the scenes playing with all the new mechanics.
First up, the brand new newsletter: TRANSMISSION. Sign up in the sidebar if you haven’t already and get (hopefully) weekly updates every Friday. One section I’ll announce now is Open Mic. I want people to be able to add small bits if I feel they are amazing. Email me if you want to reach some very interesting people.
Next, I said I wasn’t finished with forums. Was disappointed that Ning was turning to a premium model so I’ve created my own.
Go to newcurator.com/forums/ and sign up and get talking. The forums at the moment are Technology, News, Projects, Museopunk and General Discussions. Always willing to listen to new suggestions. Looking forward to what comes out of there.
There’s more to come soon. Watch this space for something really cool.
With a new launch there comes a new editorial. Going to be aiming for more posts per day with far more structure then what I’ve been doing lately. I’ll try to still have space for those kind of things. Also, I found that a more interesting process is sifting through stuff to find what’s good rather than trying to find what is brand new. Got a huge backlog of topics I’ve been saving up. Going to be fun.
Always on the look out for guest posts.
Any feedback/bugs or anything else to contact me with, I’m always available through pete(at)newcurator.com
The greatest financial threat to museums and their workers was the global financial meltdown. The shock to the global system sent the museum industries into a freefall regardless of nationality. Museums based on a model of philanthropic support found the rich were giving less. Local government institutions have had budgets slashed. Everyone found their investments suffering. The final outcomes are identical regardless of the route: there’s a lot less money going around and culture is often the first to be cut. I imagine there was a second shock to many museums when they found there was a globalised system that they were just as much a part of as multinational banks.
Whenever I think about new systems of survival within globalisation, I am always lead to John Robb. This time, I’m drawn to his interest in the Resilient Community. The Community is taken as the smallest unit of support as the nation-state fails to do so. This approach will hopefully tackle the problem of the museum industry having very low average wages. This is a revolutionary approach with many high risks and many obstacles that would required much more thought than this blog post. Museums that like their current situation and feel secure need not change and this revolution is not for them. For the sake of this exercise, this is an act against the slow rot and mothballing of museums and hopefully create something sustainable.
Newcurator is going through a major overhaul within the next few weeks. There are exciting plans afoot.
Right this minute, I invite you to sign up to the newsletter mailout I will be launching soon. Just enter your name and email in the form below and confirm your details. Usual privacy stuff: I will keep your details to myself. I will never give your details to spammers. I like you people.
The Information Superabundance. It flows all around us and drowns us. It saturates our increasingly mobile computers. It follows us around through our increasingly powerful phones. It engorges our still-infuriating television. It invades more and more space.
It managed to turn the music industry inside out. It turned the film industry into a paranoid delusional inmate. It scares the living daylights out of the newspaper and journalism industry. It has proved the fiction publishing industry to be delightfully stubborn.
In response to the Superabundance, the buzzword has become “curator”. There’s too much stuff and even that stuff is being repeated so how do we get to the good stuff? Well, curators just select stuff, don’t they? We need curators to sort this stuff out for us. The definition of a curator is becoming mutated. So, I’ve come up with the carefully designed test.
Ask yourself: Am I a curator?
The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.
You are, at best, a filter. You may make a name for yourself by excelling at some kind of selection process, but you are not a curator. “Curator” does not mean “I have good taste”. That just makes you some kind of fleshy gauze for the rest of us. The good come to us whilst all the pus and snot that came through your information media streams stay on your side. You are a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.
Also, anyone calling themselves a “curator” when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed. You are not trying to fool us into believing that your job is anything outside marketing, branding and selling. Be proud of what you do without assigning the make-believe title of “curator” to sound more important. You have not reached some cultural apex through the range of shoes you have on offer. You are not a Connoisseur of a Stock-Take.
You Are Not a Curator. Don’t worry, there’s no shame. Just keep repeating it to yourself. You aren’t an editor of a newspaper by just simply choosing what articles to print. You aren’t an army general by simply shouting, “Charge”. So an inflated sense of worth in your Pick ‘n’ Mix does not a curator make.
I have becoming increasingly frustrated by the nonsense being stuck to the term “Curator” because people struggle to find the word for “Someone (Else) to Sort Through This Rubbish”. I still maintain that a curator, a job with actual skills, is starting to be abused by people from industries notorious for abusing definitions. This is why I sometimes despair at my Museopunk group when they start straying into territory that I covered in the Death of the Curator articles and calling it punk. It’s all well and good to get lots of involvement from your visitors/users/patrons/etc. but if you don’t have it based around an honest-to-God curator, do you know what you end up with?
Reality television. Prove me wrong. Very high participation from an audience who get to crowdsource the answers/outcomes/selections to the most base and voyeuristic products of the underculture.
I believe an antidote to this may well be Nina Simon’s new book, THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM. At the very centre of everything Nina says in this book is the curator (or more specifically, museum staff) as facilitator, designer and collaborator. Not just a presenter, as I fear curators will become when someone thinks participation means voting for favourites.
I warn you again; there needs to be a proper handle on curatorship before others start claiming it or misrepresenting it (I’m looking at you, U.S. NEWS). The very notion of a museums is integrated with the action of analytical thought. We go to museums to define ourselves, the world and the civilisation around us. If the curator is devalued cheapened through this woolly thinking then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions. When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a singleperson said “selecting“.
HP has been developing 
Latest Comments