We just made a small addition to the Walker website: a social media page. In case you didn’t know, the Walker is on Flickr, Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube. The Walker has actually been in those spaces for some time, but there hasn’t been a good connection from the Walker site.
There are four different Walker-related groups for user contributed content on flickr: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker After Hours, and WACTAC. The social media page highlights the most recent Walker and Garden photos. We also post a good number of photos of our own, from After Hours to exhibition installation views. To make things clearer, we also added a official photography policy.
Since around September of 2008, I have been posting on twitter as the @walkerartcenter. Twitterfeed fills in some gaps with our blog posts, but I try to announce other notable things and answer visitor questions there. When the #snowmageddon happened, our twitter followers knew about it first. The social media page lists our latest 5 tweets to give visitors a good indication of what we tweet about.
We’re on the Facebook, too, and keep the page up-to-date with selected events and current exhibitions. Facebook doesn’t let Pages do a whole lot, but we’ve got 6500 fans.
And the Walker’s YouTube page has been around for over a year, first starting with the Tell us a story about your suburb project for Worlds Away. We’ve posted a few things from the archives there, and we’re slowly porting content from the Walker Channel to YouTube as well.
Setting the social media page up was made easier by using the Tweet! and jQuery.Flickr plugins.
Nice to see everything in one place.
Are you guys doing anything to keep a local or cached copy of the stuff in social media sites?
For instance does that stuff ever get pulled back into an archive owned by the Walker? Or do you ever keep a cached copy incase Flickr has a hiccup or YouTube accidentally takes down a video?
Been working through some of that stuff myself and would love to here your thoughts on the matter.
Comment by Eric Ishii Eckhardt — March 20, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
Thanks, Eric.
We definitely keep much of what goes into YouTube archived. We’ve slowly been uploading videos from the Walker Channel to YT, and all of that is archived, both on hard drive and to tape, included in Walker Archives. Not all of the stuff that goes into YT we keep. For instance, I uploaded a broomball clip, and if YouTube were to loose it for some reason, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
For flickr, we’re pretty much in the same boat. Exhibition install images are part of the archive. Less important stuff is not quite as rigorously backed up. The After Hours photos just sit on my hard drive, and photos that other staff upload are likely in the same boat.
So, the media itself is fairly well covered, where appropriate, and we could restore things if need be. But really, that’s only part of the equation and doesn’t cover the time taken to sort, edit, update, etc, which would be considerable. There’s also the issue of what happens when the institution moves more into these other services, what is our role to document on the same level as everything else… I don’t really know.
To a large extent, we’re betting that Google, Flickr, and Facebook are too big to go away soon, and if they were, there’d probably be some kind of migration path.
Comment by Justin Heideman — March 20, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
I think I get it. You basically have a push and (sort of) forget system. Which totally makes sense when you have a trusted internal system. i.e. you would rather edit images/captions in the Walker’s admin and push them to Flickr than the other way around.
I suppose the only thing you miss archiving then is the conversations around the Walker Images/Video/Tweets. I guess those are of questionable long term value, plus they happen on someone else’s space so are not up for archiving.
I find it surprisingly fun and informative to keep up with the twitter feed as opposed to just following the Walker RSSs. Nice work.
Comment by Eric Ishii Eckhardt — March 23, 2009 @ 10:34 am