3 ideas for museums and archives
I was down in London on Tuesday to give a presentation as part of a training & development day for museums and archives with the palindromic title of Engaging Users, Users Engaging, taking place at the London Metropolitan Archives (pictured below).
London Metropolitan Archives – photo by mermaid99, CC license
My role in the day was to talk about the process of designing social interactions online. I packaged this up as a list of ‘8 design principles’ (I was aiming for 10, but came up short), which included such words of wisdom as ‘pick your key verb’, ‘identify your users’s needs‘ and ‘design for visual affordances‘. I won’t list them all now (although let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll consider writing them up as a separate post), but I hoped that together they would give the attendees some useful frameworks and terminology with which to understand and design web activities where users can play a more active part.
One thing I was wary of though, when writing the presentation, was in just presenting a bunch of conceptual models for design, which were useful, but which bypassed that crucial step of actually having a good idea in the first place. I was also aware that there were a lot of people from archives institutions attending, and I didn’t want them to feel that all this exciting online social interaction was ok for museums, but not relevant to them.
So I tried to come up with a few examples of ideas for online social interactions that would be applicable to archives. They are only the seeds of ideas, but I thought I’d post them here in case they’d be useful to a wider audience (or indeed, to see if there are any better ideas). So here goes.
Idea number 1 is about acquisitions. Museums and archives don’t just have static collections, most of them continue to add stuff. I think it’d be really great to open this whole process up. Why not let people suggest what things they think ought to be conserved forever in the collections of a museum or archives centre? It is, after all, pubic money which often pays for this expensive process. I’ve not yet come across any institution that’s done anything like this, holding a public debate or vote on what should be collected, and I reckon the first one that does will get a lot of kudos and attention. This idea is easily as applicable to archives as it is to museums – people could nominate, for example, their grandparents diaries or letters to be added to a collection.
Idea number 2 is all about the process of transcription. Archives are usually collections of the written word, and so ‘digitising’ doesn’t just mean scanning the documents in, it also means turning those digital images into digital text. This is often seen as long, painstaking, expensive work, but I have a feeling that it could be turned into a much more enjoyable, engaging activity. If you could make the process of transcribing as simple as adding notes to a photo on Flickr, for example (which are often used for transcribing text in a photo), then I reckon people online would be interested in doing some of this. You could easily turn the process of transcription into a game, for example, with a leaderboard, and points for transcribing unusual words. This gives people an ostensible reason for taking part, but the real motivation would be that the process of transcription would be an act of discovery – reading documents that nobody has read before, and transcribing as you go.
Idea number 3 was thought up in consideration that many of those attending the workshop were from ‘learning’ departments, where a big part of their work is in dealing with school groups. It struck me that, whilst school groups are taking quite a lot of work to organise and manage, you could turn this perception on its head, and instead think of school groups as being a potential source of free labour – a mini workforce who could help museums and archives carry out some of their core work of scanning, cataloguing and interpreting their collections. This would take a bit of work to set up, of course, but it could be a really valuable and engaging experience for the school kids. Instead of learning about things that the museum already knows about its collection, they get to take an active part in uncovering new information and contributing to a growing body of knowledge and resources.
So those were my ideas. Mad? Or doable?
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About this entry
- Published: May 21, 2009, 11:15 am
- Updated: May 21, 2009, 11:15 am
- Category: Ideas
- Tags: acquisitions, archives, e-learning, Ideas, museums, transcription
- Comments: No comments
I have a vague memory that Suzanne Keene gave an example of a (botanical?) archive that crowd-sourced transcription but I can’t remember how it was organised. So erm, not very useful but at least evidence that it can work in the real world.
Hi Mia. Other examples might be the ReCaptcha project, or even Project Gutenberg. I think that making a lightweight game of it could be an interesting new angle though.
Some random thoughts about the ideas…
Idea 1: What about an RSS feed of new items added to the collection. It would help show that the archives were actively adding new stuff, and might encourage more discussion about what should be shown to the public
Idea 2: People have used this sort of content to provide Captcha images, thus distributing the work of transcription without anyone realising they’re helping out. Or you could look at the stuff that Bookoven are doing with their distributed Gutenberg proof-reading project – http://bookoven.com/gutenberg/
Idea 3: Sounds great, and could provide some of the labour needed in the previous ideas.
Hi Adrian – that’s very weird, I commented about those same examples at almost exactly the same time as you! We must be in sync somehow.
An RSS feed of new acquisitions would indeed be pretty cool, and an good start for encouraging discussion.
Very good talk it was too – I’ve been meaning to blog about it myself but haven’t had two minutes to sit down and think about it yet – sorry!
Frankie, having kids “work” of lasting value is indeed a viable proposition. one of the earliest examples i know of is also one of the best. Joris Komen reported at ichim99 about the insect@thon, a project in Namibia that included schools competing to transcribe catalogue cards of the collection in a retrospective digitization project. there’s an abstract at http://conference.archimuse.com/biblio/insect_thon_schools_museums_and_biodiversity
it kind of combines two of your ideas!
[...] and galleries http://bit.ly/1g270 #mtogo RT @frankieroberto: 3 ideas for museums and archives: http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/1444 Let me know what you think. #mtogo Powered by Fresh From fresh, [...]
jtrant – that sounds like a wonderful project! From the abstract:
“The target of the Insect@thon is to inventory 70,000 hand-written insect records (comprising 11 data-fields) in two days, employing 15 school teams of 4 – 6 students each.”
Maybe instead of ‘crowdsourced’, we could call this ’schoolsourced’!
Hi -
A massive, and highly successful example of Idea 2 is happening here in Australia – the National Library is mass OCR’ing scanned microfiched Newspapers and then opening it up to the public to correct the OCRd text. There is a leaderboard, and stats to add some level of competitiveness. So far the public have corrected 2 million lines of text in more than 100,000 articles and have added tens of thousands of tags… The top tagger has corrected over 100k lines of text!
See
http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home
http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/
http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/project_details/documents/ANDP_ManyHands.pdf
I’ve been working on building software to enable crowdsource transcription of handwritten manuscripts for the last few years. I think the idea is finally catching on — in addition to the insect database, the USGS is put together a bird phenology transcription project that’s been quite successful.
My review of the BPP: http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/2009/05/review-usgs-north-american-bird.html
And my own software: http://beta.fromthepage.com/
Oh dear. Substitute “crowdsource” with “crowdsourced” and “is put” with “has put”. That’ll teach me to have a heavy lunch.
Frankie – all great ideas – some partial precursors include:
Variant on #1 – many museums are offering an “adopt an object” approach – getting money and votes for conservation at the same time
variant on #2 – from the late 1990’s WGBH used volunteers to describe what was happening on broadcast video for the blind; some others at http://www.spellboundblog.com/2008/06/05/crowdsourced-transcription-collaborative-annotation/
variant on #3 – Since “ArtMobs” days, I’ve encountered a few projects in which school groups are invited to create podcasts on what they find at the museum. ….example near you: http://www.harrismuseum.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=256&Itemid=156 and nearer me:http://www.21cschools.org/21s-in-action/museums-and-technology-partnerships-for-21st-century-education
[...] Ok, so… developing engaging e-learning is all about appropriate use of methods and media in order to inspire users, it is not about it is not about the transmission and receipt of facts. So…if we’re aiming to produce engaging e-learning, we need design processes that are intended to…….produce engaging e-learning. Frankie Roberto gave us 8 (and 3 ideas): [...]
Nice post Frankie. I’m interested in a more detailed writeup of your design principles for social interactions online – it would be a good follow on from the MW2009 workshop you gave. Did you send us out the info from that? perhaps I missed it….
Idea 1: You just put that in here to wind up Pete at New Curator, right? Anything that potentially weakens the curatorial voice really trips his trigger. But, seriously, I think I know what you’re getting at. Oh, but I do think an “RSS feed of new items added to the collection” could be dangerous: as a former registrar, I would worry that my director would adapt this as a performance review metric
Idea 3: Speaking of my past life as a registrar (and, separately, an archivist), I’ve managed both groups of adult volunteers and high-school/college interns. I’d hoped that these teams could indeed be “mini workforce[s] who could help museums and archives carry out some of their core work of scanning, cataloguing and interpreting their collections,” and I tried to make them so. My results were…mixed at best; convincing people to obey collections handling procedures was surprisingly difficult. Training people to use new software and hardware was surprisingly difficult. Keeping your “free labor” on task was, at times, incredibly difficult. (And I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface and any number of volunteer coordinators could tell horror stories that easily best mine.) In the end, while we did have something to show for our efforts, I wonder if it was worth the staff time it cost.
Idea 3 is the strongest in my opinion in terms of cost versus benefit to those participating. The historic educational model results in attendees spending the majority of time learning what has already been learnt by others e.g. book report on Macbeth. This obviously has a place but with the technological revolution being so fresh and the large presence of young people in the school age bracket surely their input could be better used. Harnessing their effort towards clearly articulated objectives could be a huge benefit to museum and gallery collections. IN Scotland the Curriculum for Excellence aims to make 3-18 year olds more accountable for their own learning and accoutnability to society. A project rooted in producing ‘new work’ rather than repeating the same book report as generated by numerous generations before them would be more sensible for all the parties involved.