This session has been great for me, as this is very much where my head is at right now with ArtsConnectEd… My live notes follow:

Brian Kelly chairs a session on Search, announcing that with the smaller size both speakers are willing to make this a bit more workshop-like. Terry Makewell starts by introducing his project: 9 partners making up the National Museums Online Learning Project. He goes over some of the goals of the project, and the current state of things, and the realization that some sort of federated search was needed to span the partners’ collections.

How to do the federated search? Multi-institution project meant different technical teams, different technologies, and limited resources in some cases. See the paper for more details, but the two technologies they considered most carefully are OAI/PMH and Opensearch.

OAI, the path we’re going down with ArtsConnectEd, uses a central repository and runs the searches there. Opensearch spools the searches out to each institution and then re-orders them locally and returns the result.

Opensearch fit the project requirements and timeline most efficiently, so that was their choice. He discusses their prototyping effort: scraping search results to generate the RSS for Opensearch. They now have a single page with a configuration file they can drop on each partners’ website and it will “just work”. Potential caveats: what if the search result page changes? Also the Opensearch can only be as fast as the response from the slowest partner.

He shows the working prototype, and I’m excited to see they’ve got thumbnails where available – their scraper must be fairly robust for each partner.

Lessons learned: federated search doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated, and it can work with small and large museums equally well. Their method pushes the work offsite, requiring minimal or no effort on the museum’s part.

(Note to self: end slide show with a kitten and you’re in.)

Q&A – Scalibility issues come up, they’re aware of them coming. Asked if they considered Google Co-Op: yes, but quickly found that Google was unable to deeply crawl many of the partners’ collections due to dynamic urls. Lots of twitter traffic in this session too.

Very interesting debate for me to hear on OAI vs. Opensearch. Many institutions moving towards OAI, but the scope of implementing it is a barrier for most. My feeling that OAI gives more searchable fields is somewhat refuted by the idea that the average user has no interest or knowledge of these fields (culture, era, etc)…

(Mike Ellis shows off by building a co-op search during the session.)

Johan Mhlenfeldt Jensen from the Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark, speaks next on his paper. Trying to catch up, I was distracted for the beginning.

The example he’s showing now exposes some fields for filtering, rather than just keywords. Interesting. Another example showing map-based searching, says it’s immensely popular. Easy to make for photographic collections since the address is known, much harder for other sorts of objects sometimes.

Interesting discussion on “advanced search” – he says studies show it’s minimally used, Google has changed everything. People just want a single field. Hmm… Are we wasting time and overbuilding if we have anything more advanced than a single field?? This is the question I’m banging against as I listen to these speakers.

He asks “is the best the enemy of the good?” Good question. Do we wait forever getting it right? Clearly, no, but how far do we go.

They both have good input on the question I ask about overbuilding: move the advanced search behind the scenes and make it more semantic. Still need the metadata, but don’t ask users to know about it. Also need a way to drill down after search: start with simple search, and then apply filters.

Very good comment on positioning: where and at what point in the process do you expose filters and result counts?

Brian summarizes the importance of getting static URIs for resources: then Google will “just work”…

(Note to self: implement Opensearch for the Walker and ACE)

This session, lead by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum was packed to the brim, and well worth it. Seb gave a great overview of Google Analytics, as well as other stats tools and talked a bit about how to use them to create a big picture of visitor analysis. My notes are not very organized, but might prove useful for some.

The Search “Problem”

Google deep links.

Now google has search inside this site right there on front of results page, when you hit a high ranked site right away (search for Powerhouse museum). Not doing this to the Walker Yet.

Google hi-jacks these search results, shows ads, can hurt.

When someone enters from a deep link off google, hard to gauge intention from visitors.

Funny, jobs seems to be a top result on many museum sites.

Retailers hate this, they want to funnel your experience through all their ads. (Amazon wants to try to sell to you at all points, google thwarts this)

Traditional Metrics

Come out of the advertising world

visits, pageviews, time on site, etc

Ask people what they’re using

Almost everyone is using some sort of javascript based client side solution

Look at google analytics

13k visits, if were using a logfile based solution, would be vastly inflated by bots, spiders, harvesters

Javascript tagging solution resolves some of this

When switching to a logfile based solution, with inflated numbers, going to tagging solution, hard to explain big drop to the marketing department or the director

Benchmarking tool in google analytics. Interesting, haven’t looked at this before.

Demo of how unique visitor counting works.

Time on site: Seb showing a site with time on-site of 0:54 seconds. Break it out, 23K of visitors show a time on site of 0-10 seconds.

How many visitors have a depth of visit (Number of pages visited) of 1 page. Tons! Every visitor that hits only 1 page, they count as 0 seconds.

If you deduct the people that only hit one page (getting rid of 0 sec visits), you see that the median time on site visits are much better.

Looking at content drilldown, now looking at comparing regions and how to use drilldown.

Site search overview. Google can track search terms on your site, whether or not you’re using a google search on your site.

Traditional Metrics.

RSS feeds are not hit in GA, but can in logfile analysis. But problematic, because RSS hits are not really visits.

Email metrics

Useful to gather addresses of those who read email, take those addresses, and use them as seperate sub-group that are receptive.

Do the same, with those who clicked through, can drill down to specific exhibitions, etc. Allows very direct marketing to receptive people.

Realtime Metrics

Reinvigorate. My buddy paul loves this. Lets you see see visits in real time, what they’re searching for, etc…

Looks like tons of traffic from google. Wow!

Lets you expand visits, etc. Really slick.

Lets you pick up trends very quickly.

Outside metrics

Quote from Seb: “You’ve heard of Alex? Alexa is crap. Don’t use it.”

Instead, use AttentionMeter. But, it’s US only. Free!

Works that ISPs sell anonymozed logs, attentionmeter uses that for data.

Looks pretty nice.

Quantcast lets you look up similar sites, how you compare, etc.

Compete.com is another one worth looking at. Compete is better than Quantcast, according to Seb.

New Metrics

Flickr Metrics

For powerhouse, metric is not views, but how many things were tagged. Part of their goal with flickr commons, getting people to tag stuff.

Technorati Authority: Dubious, not all that great. Only measure blog links.

egoSurf.com: lets you check the “ego score” of a person and/or a site. Neat.

Domaintools: Lets you look up how much you’re being used as a reference in Wikipedia, amongst other things.

http://whois.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/walkerart.org

Side notes:

Tabbed browsing messes with things. if you open a tab, how accurate is it when you open a new tab and come back to it later? Not very accurate.

Question I asked about RSS Metrics:

Look at people who are nerds.

Captures a lot of machines, too.

Best metric is people who use feed my inbox.

Edit: Also some great notes here.

This session, lead by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum was packed to the brim, and well worth it. Seb gave a great overview of Google Analytics, as well as other stats tools and talked a bit about how to use them to create a big picture of visitor analysis. My notes are not very organized, but might prove useful for some.

The Search “Problem”

Google deep links.

Now google has search inside this site right there on front of results page, when you hit a high ranked site right away (search for Powerhouse museum). Not doing this to the Walker Yet.

Google hi-jacks these search results, shows ads, can hurt.

When someone enters from a deep link off google, hard to gauge intention from visitors.

Funny, jobs seems to be a top result on many museum sites.

Retailers hate this, they want to funnel your experience through all their ads. (Amazon wants to try to sell to you at all points, google thwarts this)

Traditional Metrics

Come out of the advertising world

visits, pageviews, time on site, etc

Ask people what they’re using

Almost everyone is using some sort of javascript based client side solution

Look at google analytics

13k visits, if were using a logfile based solution, would be vastly inflated by bots, spiders, harvesters

Javascript tagging solution resolves some of this

When switching to a logfile based solution, with inflated numbers, going to tagging solution, hard to explain big drop to the marketing department or the director

Benchmarking tool in google analytics. Interesting, haven’t looked at this before.

Demo of how unique visitor counting works.

Time on site: Seb showing a site with time on-site of 0:54 seconds. Break it out, 23K of visitors show a time on site of 0-10 seconds.

How many visitors have a depth of visit (Number of pages visited) of 1 page. Tons! Every visitor that hits only 1 page, they count as 0 seconds.

If you deduct the people that only hit one page (getting rid of 0 sec visits), you see that the median time on site visits are much better.

Looking at content drilldown, now looking at comparing regions and how to use drilldown.

Site search overview. Google can track search terms on your site, whether or not you’re using a google search on your site.

Traditional Metrics.

RSS feeds are not hit in GA, but can in logfile analysis. But problematic, because RSS hits are not really visits.

Email metrics

Useful to gather addresses of those who read email, take those addresses, and use them as seperate sub-group that are receptive.

Do the same, with those who clicked through, can drill down to specific exhibitions, etc. Allows very direct marketing to receptive people.

Realtime Metrics

Reinvigorate. My buddy paul loves this. Lets you see see visits in real time, what they’re searching for, etc…

Looks like tons of traffic from google. Wow!

Lets you expand visits, etc. Really slick.

Lets you pick up trends very quickly.

Outside metrics

Quote from Seb: “You’ve heard of Alex? Alexa is crap. Don’t use it.”

Instead, use AttentionMeter. But, it’s US only. Free!

Works that ISPs sell anonymozed logs, attentionmeter uses that for data.

Looks pretty nice.

Quantcast lets you look up similar sites, how you compare, etc.

Compete.com is another one worth looking at. Compete is better than Quantcast, according to Seb.

New Metrics

Flickr Metrics

For powerhouse, metric is not views, but how many things were tagged. Part of their goal with flickr commons, getting people to tag stuff.

Technorati Authority: Dubious, not all that great. Only measure blog links.

egoSurf.com: lets you check the “ego score” of a person and/or a site. Neat.

Domaintools: Lets you look up how much you’re being used as a reference in Wikipedia, amongst other things.

http://whois.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/walkerart.org

Side notes:

Tabbed browsing messes with things. if you open a tab, how accurate is it when you open a new tab and come back to it later? Not very accurate.

Question I asked about RSS Metrics:

Look at people who are nerds.

Captures a lot of machines, too.

Best metric is people who use feed my inbox.

Edit: Also some great notes here.

Standing room only at David Greenfield’s morning session. I’m looking forward to this session now that my head’s full of Web 2.0 / Museum ideas thanks to Nina’s recent presentation. David starts by tipping his hat to Shelley at Brooklyn, Gail at V&A, and a few others – this conference, he says, is full of people tackling different parts of the Web 2.0 creature.

Quickly goes into some theory: Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences, how one measure does not predict another. Roger Schank’s notion of “narrative and intelligence”, how learning is connected to the experience and situation of the learning. Seymour Papert: communities of learners, and how group learning is powerful: everyone of all levels in the same classes, and a hierarchy of learning. Finally, Ken Robinson: “schools are killing creativity”, based on an Industrial Revolution mindset which no longer works in today’s society. I’m intrigued by the theory, but I’m more intrigued by how he’s going to tie this to Web 2.0 tools.

(Seriously, people are sitting in the isle and standing across the back of the room. It’s packed.)

David moves to a list of common problems museums face with technology and learning, and mentions a few solutions such as partnerships.

He’s got a wiki set up to support the session: www.redberry.pbwiki.com.

Finishes with some examples from the Living Museum and their Web 2.0 efforts: blogging, Facebook, Youtube.

Q&A – Audience giving examples of Web 2.0 efforts in their institutions. The issue of in-house programming staff comes up again – I think people get it, but it’s still hard to convince their institutions that this is so important.

Exploring Museum COllections On-line: The Quantitative Method

Frankie Roberto, Science Museum, United Kingdom

Three problems with museum data.

Data from FOI requests include curator, object, country, year, and acquisition method. Need a mapping process, as not everything maps, and certain items can be mapped to something simplified, for example, “edged weapon” becomes just “weapon”. Same for countries, etc. However, there are several tricky ones, for example, what country is “asia”? This is when you say “Good enough”.

Frankie shows off a locally hosted website showing the aggregated data. By putting the data into more generic silos he’s able to parse things much more easily for view and searching.

Issues – all objects counted equally (small coins all counted separate, so there are many more of them), no photos, user interactions not available. Prototype at museum-collections.org.

Uniting The Shanty Towns: Data Combining Across Multiple Institutions

Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum, Australia

People like order, but if you look closer you get mess. But mess is good. Yet mess makes mashups hard. Can we agree on standards? Lets start with calendars. Figured can’t be hard, it’s just a calendar. But it was, everyone has different CMS’s or no CMS at all. How do we do it? Could just use people to do it by hand, but that’s too much work. So we scrape, aggregate, have a nice backend and use sites we can trust. Then we can get a nice frontend, RSS and iCal to all these aggregated sites.

Semantic web, why can’t we use it for collections? We write themes, tags, tracking searches, etc, but there’s gotta be a better way. Use Calais, a text analysis tool, creates dynamically generated meta data tags. It’s work humans can do, but this is automatic, which saves a lot of time. However, it doesn’t always come up with proper tags (but again is “good enough”). Once you have this data, you can then start connecting it to other data. Once you have the data identified, you can use it in mashups of other data (for example, if you have a company pulled out for Google, you can then do auto mashups of stock prices, locations, etc).

Take it to the next level. If you know where Google is in our example, you can mashup your own location, put it into a search page, and it will show you what things are near your current location (including Google if you happen to be near it for example), as well as all the other data associated with the original record.

Fiona Cameron

Object Orientated Democracies: Contradictions, challenges, and opportunities

Fiona starts by defining “Networked Objects” – collections now operate in a global flow of greater resources online. Collections information is becoming fluid. The meaning is created and re-created in various ways, especially due to influences in popular culture.

Here, controversy is seen as a positive element: objects take on a new role as mediator, rather than simply cultural symbols.

Example of interpretting a Palestinian dress – different readings of the same object depending on reader’s perspective. Placing these objects in an open wiki was seen as highly problematic as “public” meets “museum culture”.

She shows an incredible map: “complexifying collections interfaces” showing an overview of the various spheres of influence on collections and objects. I love this: translation of the object is ongoing, not fixed.

These maps are blowing my mind! I need to find this paper online and pour over it more to really grasp what she’s saying here: “the meaning and significance of objects can take many forms.” She describes four influences: local knowledge, expert communities, experiental, and the museum voice. All combine to create jointly-generated knowledge of an object.

Emphasizing the legitimacy of other types of knowledge, and embracing complexity in collections.

Peter Samis

Who’s responsible for Saying what we See?

Exhibition of the work of Olafur Eliasson, and online component. Peter starts by talking about the idea of a “phenomenon maker” – doesn’t exist without people experiencing it, participating. Objects don’t have a meaning that the museum could convey, it required people to describe how they were experiencing it. Allowed visitors to describe the work on a new blog: they came, they reacted, they wrote. However, as we’ve seen in similar projects, most people were lurking, wanting to read others’ comments but not add their own.

Who knew Peter spoke French? :)

Their online component allowed them to guage interest in objects: those that seemed to “require” a comment. People needed to talk about them – positive AND negative.

What’s the value of comments such as these? He asks this tantalizing question, and leaves it for the Q&A at the end.

Traces the evolution of museum blogs: from institutional to more public participation, and theorizes on the final step of merging this interaction. References Nina Simon’s museum social interaction hierarchy.

Aaron Cope, flickr.com

The API as Curator

About artists and institutions “opening up” – not giving everything away, but allowing sharing and seeing what people build. It’s really about “plumbing, and making plumbing not scary.” If you’re talking about the web, eventually you’re going to have to talk about computer programming.

EXCELLENT pitch for bringing the programming in-house for museums! Not everyone needs to be a programmer, but we need it: for the “plumbing”.

Threadless: t-shirt company online where users generate and vote on designs to be made into shirts. It’s essentially printmaking, in a new form.

Now into APIs and the importance of exposing the data. (Flickr commons) Story of Dan Catt creating GeoCommons using flickr APIs to get geocoding data into flickr tags (basically a hack) and mash it into a google map (using THEIR API). Flickr hired him and made it real, but he was able to built it in the first place because the “parts” were exposed. (That sounds dirty. But it’s important.)

Museums need FAST release cycles to keep up with this stuff. Small steps towards awesome: this required having programmers ON STAFF to build APIs and build off of other APIs.

Aaron: great slides!

Q&A:

how to attract in-house staff? Teach programming at more levels.

Where Do We Go From Here? Continuing with Web 2.0

Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum, USA

Year ago worlds worst bloggers (her words, not mine). Everything on the blog back then was just in an institutional voice. Now, the blog is about personal stories, direct from the staff members. Authors are identified by photo and bio. Asked themselves if the blogs were really worth it. Got some comments but not a ton. The answer came in January. Comment came on a blog post about a house in the museum. Gave an incredibly personal comment on information they didn’t even have in this house. Made a connection on their blog they probably never would have had if the blog had not existed.

Also did a video competition on YouTube. Tons of rules in order to put up a video. Barrier to entry is fairly high. However, one video submission was entitled “art thief”, which reminded people of a person who would walk into the Brooklyn Museum and hang his own artwork (much the chagrin of museum admins). Could have posed a problem because of what happened in the past, but the lesson learned is trust your audience. Not everyone is doing things in a negative light, even if you’ve been burned in the past. Don’t let one rotten apple spoil the bushel.

Brooklyn has a Flickr group where they let people post photos of the museum and the work. Had the idea of why not invite 10 top photographers on Flickr to come in and shoot the museum objects in their own way. Gives a personalized view of the artwork, which is very different from the normal object photo shot. Allows people to see the artwork in a new way online. Turned it all into one big video showcasing the museum. Visitor created, but showcases the museum really well.

Art Share. Facebook app, to share artwork on their Facebook profile. If you’re an artist you can upload your own artwork too. What’s interesting is what people put on their profiles. You learn more about people based on what they decide to display on their profiles. (note: Walker Art Center is part of Art Share)

Click. A crowd curated exhibition. Again, trust your audience, let them have a say in your museum.

Hat tip to the Walker: In the Q&A, Shelley mentions Robin last year talking about engaging younger members of your museum to blog, as many tend to actually want to be blogging (which is very true).

Ladders Of Participation, Social Media And Museum Audiences

Lynda Kelly, Australian Museum & Angelina Russo, Swinburne University, Australia

Classifying online participants, use Forester research questions to find out how Australians were working online. Compared that to the US. Found people that visit museums participate a lot more in 2-way activities than people who do not visit museums.

Classifications:

Liveblogging the opening Plenary at Museums and the Web 2008. The speaker is Michael Geist, a Canadian professor who writes about copyright issues and internet law on his blog.

9:31 – people still trickling in, Michael’s on stage with Jennifer and David. Looks like we’re about to start. I picked the wrong half of the room to sit in, they’re all on the other side…

9:33 – and we’re off. David Bearman welcomes us to MW2008, our 12th meeting! He says there are 650 attendees from 30 different countries and 360 institutions.

9:39 – Still thanking people. I like the slides showing the #mw2008 stream going by: flickr, twitter, blogs, etc.

9:44 – Just saw my tweet go by, guess it’s as live as it gets!

9:45 – Interesting update from Jonathan Bengston, from the University of Toronto & internet archive Canada on the Internet Archive, a sort of followup to Brewster Kahle’s plea last year to “send us your stuff!”. He’s discussing a book scanning project in Ottawa and which books are most popular. They’re on track to have 200,000 books scanned by the end of the year – these books will all be in the public domain, and he’s hoping to continue to lay more data over this include geolocation and cross linking.

9:52 – Michael Geist: self-titled “law professor and troublemaker.” He begins by bringing us back to the state of the internet in 1997, where the prevailing feeling online was that the internet should remain unregulated and free of government intervention. He feels this idea was actually mostly a myth, that some regulation was always in the works, and even desired: spam, privacy, etc.

Internet 2008: There is a role to play for internet public policy.

Fair Copyright for Canada facebook page: within two weeks, 20,000 members, generating huge volume of feedback re: government bill. More feedback than when they were soliciting it.

Giving several examples of “open” content, sans DRM, and how widely used they are. I.E. Flickr.com just passed the 2 billion mark, including 10s of thousands of CC licensed ones. More and more publishers are using similar licenses now as well: his own book In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law is released free online in addition to a dead-trees version. The publisher has acknowledged this model has been a financial success and is looking into it for future volumes.

(lots of traffic on twitter with the #mw2008 tag!)

Mentions several collaborative sites worldwide: Global Voices, reCaptcha, etc. Global Voices providing a central publishing location for hard-to-read areas of the world, oppressed areas, etc. Translating service included to make sure these voices are available to the broader world community.

(I’m having a bit of trouble keeping up with what’s beginning to feel like a laundry list – great sites, but I hope these slides are available afterwards for more leisurely perusal. Many good resources for open sites: Open Medicine, open science journal, etc.)

Summarizing Internet 2008: basic feeling is people are becoming more aware of the importance of paying attention to internet copyright law, and finding a more active voice in the legislation — at least in Canada. Also mentions a Columbian example, but the subtext is that the US is a bit screwed because the DMCA is already in place…

Policy summary:

• Broadband for all
  • access to knowledge across the board. Too many people on dialups = actually less access to information these days.
• Network Neutrality.
  • Move from 1997′s “dumb pipe” to todays “tiered networks”
  • Amazon and Google so far most vocal: they got big because the playing field was level. Now they could afford to pay, but they recognize that the little sites need the same platform they were given.
• Intermediary liability
  • Who’s responsible for third-party content that you host? Not your content, but on your servers
  • Need better protection for content on your site that’s not “your content.”
• Privacy
• DRM
• Public Domain

Finishes by advocating for less of a hands-off approach and more of a hands-on but informed internet.

We’ll be live blogging Museums and the Web 2008 from Montreal for the next few days. Our thoughts, notes and opinions on each session we attend will be broadcast for those of you who didn’t happen to make it out, or want to catch up afterwards. Stay tuned.