Sharing Open Museum with the World

You can share virtually every page of Open Museum with anyone you want, via social networking sites or email. Here's how:

Open Museum from a Curator's Perspective

We asked some of our curators to give us feedback about their experiences on Open Museum. Cecily Herzig, artist and curator of Strafford ARTWORKS, offers her perspective on working with art and other artists on Open Museum.

Object of the Week Widget

I wrote a somewhat sanctimonious and snarky series of emails to the editor of our local paper last night after registering on their web site and discovering that I had been asked to provide my age, address, real name and myriad other details for the right to leave moderated comments on the editors blog. (You can't even comment on news stories!)

He probably concluded that I was a complete nutcase. In any case, I didn't hear back from him. I did leave him with at least one actionable piece of advice:

Create a widget that folks can put on their blogs, facebook pages, etc that displays a thumbnail of the front page and links to the corresponding day's web page when you click on it. This would be very easy to implement and would draw people to your site."

This afternoon, I thought that I would just go ahead and implement the widget for him to show how easy it was. Then it occurred to me that my time would be better spent following my own advice and building one for Open Museum. So here is my first shot at a widget. This one displays the current Open Museum Object of the Week and links to the corresponding object page when you click on it.

Here's the embed code if you want to try it on your own blog:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.openmuseum.org/widget/ootw"></script>

Let me know if you have any problems.

Google Translator Opens up Open Museum

Perhaps it's more of a gimmick than a tool, but Open Museum now supports Google Translator.

You can find the application widget on the bottom of every page. Although it is neither thorough nor stable (it doesn't translate the hover text and causes the pop up text to wiggle), it is somewhat useful and very fun -- especially if you enjoy contrasting mechanical translations with meaningful ones.

To test the widget, scroll through the pull down menu provided by Google to select one of the 51 languages (!!!) they support.

Learning to Look with Slow Art

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound stresses the importance of approaching poetry through a "careful first-hand examination of the matter." He illustrates his point with the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: 'That's only a sunfish.'

Agassiz: 'I know that. Write a description of it.'

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

Phil Terry at A Reading Odyssey advocates a similar approach to looking at art, and he has organized the Slow Art initiative to encourage museum visitors to take the time to really look at art and see it in a new way.

There were Slow Art events at sixteen museums in the U.S. and Europe on October 17. Participants were invited to look - really look - at a number of artworks (ten minutes minimum per piece) and then gather afterwards to discuss the experience.

I went to the meet-up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and looked at Jackson Pollock's Troubled Queen (1945) and John Singer Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). For those of you who couldn't be there, I made this video to try to capture one representative minute of the experience of looking at Troubled Queen.

Note: I do not know whether Madonna is a troubled or an untroubled queen, but the music that you can hear in the background comes from the nearby multimedia installation of Queen (A portrait of Madonna) by Candice Breitz.

How to Handle Hot Stuff? Part 2

So fears about Open Museum allayed -- even the fears of the nervous museum pro -- "How can you participate in Open Museum?"

I'll keep this brief and to point. Giving myself 10 minutes to make 10 points, I'd say that you can...

1. Be a visitor. Take in the fascinating content of the pilot museums and keep an eye out for the release of charter partner museums in the coming months. Register so that you receive the Object of the Week, an automatic email notification of a selected object.

2. Test the features. Register and try out the full range of Open Museum's nifty participatory features -- ranging from rating, tagging, and friending museums to commenting with texts and images.

3. Test the overall site. Give any and every aspect of the site a work out; look at its flow, design and performance; and let us know what you think.

4. Contribute content to a selected museum. As an amateur or expert, help enrich a particular museum's content and online community, by posting comments and questions, participating in discussions on the wall, or contacting the curator directly with pertinent information, in the form of text, audio, image, video, links.

5. Friend a museum. With a simple click on the heart icon, you can friend a museum, thereby showing them support and signing up to receive periodic notifications of updates to the collection. Of course, notifications can be turned off if you prefer!

6. Follow this blog, Museums without Borders. It features general museum issues, like photo policy and copyright, as well as specific information about Open Museum.

7. Follow us on twitter: @OM_o. Let us know what you're thinking and re-tweet the stuff you like.

8. Curate or co-curate a museum. Open Museum will eventually accommodate the full range of museum types, from institutional, bricks and mortar and fine arts to individual, born digital and natural history. For starters, we're working with selected bricks and mortar institutions to launch the public release. Contact us to inquire.

9. Spread the word. Invite your friends, family and colleagues to check it out, by sharing the link: www.openmuseum.org or using the Share this widget inside the site. Soon you'll be able to share from your cell phone, too.

10. Talk about Open Museum. In your digital communications and in person. At your staff, board and professional meetings. The talk doesn't even have to be good! (Though I hope that most of it is). Talking will help get the Open Museum ball rolling and in the right direction.

Open Museum, Too Hot to Touch? Part 1

There have been a lot of ooohs and aaaahs over Open Museum this past week, in face to face meetings at museums and online via email and member comments. It's very heartening, but there have also been a number of people -- especially museum pros-- who have asked, "How they I (safely) participate in Open Museum?"

It's a reasonable question. Not only is the site still under development, but the concept is new. Who can blame their squeamishness? Nothing like novelty to set off the alarms for professionals who have their reputations -- not to mention their bank accounts -- in mind. We all know that novelty does not always entail quality. How many gimmicks or fads have floated in and bombed out of most any sector we can think of? I remember the Open Classroom model with much amusement. For us kids, it meant lots of free, unsupervised time, but it led to a backlash, which resulted in the seats being re-bolted to the floor. Though I imagine some curators would like to see their assets attached firmly to the floor, I don't think Open Museum is going to be what sends them running for a Makita drill. In fact, I think web-based participatory sites like Open Museum will become the status quo in the very near future. One look at Google Wave and you see what I mean.

Nonetheless, it seems that a little framing of the situation and a list of safe to-do's might go a long way toward diffusing some of the anxiety surrounding Open Museum.

For starters, there are precedents to sites like Open Museum in the museum world; namely, the Brooklyn Museum's award-winning online collections. Like the Brooklyn Museum, Open Museum supports participatory exhibits in many of the ways available to the Brooklyn Museum Posse and extends this support to cell phone access to in-gallery audio guides. (You can see more on how Open Museum brings together the in-gallery and online experiences here.) Very unlike the Brooklyn Museum, however, Open Museum requires no special financial, technical or staff resources: no money, no IT infrastructure, no tech expertise. Open Museum, which is web-based like Flickr and Facebook, and not-for-profit like Wikipedia, costs nothing for either the visitor or curator.

Second, Open Museum costs nothing but the user's time, which is valuable, but not an asset that will be marked in the profit and loss statement.

Third, museums have already made themselves at home (or at least have established a presence) in social media. Open Museum, which is designed for museums, harnesses the power of social media while keeping the museum's core business -- its collections and information about them -- at the center of people's interactions. Imagine a kind of Facebook for museums, where a work of art or history, is at center stage.

Finally, despite being under development (officially in alpha release), Open Museum is fully functional, robust and stable. The lingering alpha designation indicates the fact that there are features remaining to implement (especially the people part of Open Museum) and the content is limited to pilot partner museums. Beta designation will follow soon, along with new content from additional bricks and mortar museum participants.

Screencast: How to Create a Location for an Object

The screencasts continue: this one shows how to map objects in a collection. It's a particularly interesting and useful feature for collections such as Christian Creutz's "One Photo, One Story," where the objects are from distinct parts of the world.

Here's how to do it:

Screencast: How to Embed Audio Files

And the screencasts keep on coming! This one explains how to embed an audio file into an existing object. Our plan is to have simple screencasts that cover all of the major functions on Open Museum. We'll embed these screencasts in our FAQ section of the site, so anyone who needs some help getting started curating--or a refresher if it's been awhile--can create collections of rich, muti-faceted objects using all available media

Screencast: How to Embed a Video

Let the screencasts continue! Next up is a short tutorial on how to embed video in Open Museum. We've been using our demo museum to create these screencasts, so visitors can view the screencast and then go to the collection, object, or facet on the site to see the actual exhibit as it is made. It's a good way for us to show how Open Museum works and provides a record for visitors and curators who are still getting their curating feet wet.

Screencast: How to Create a New Object

We're moving along with our digital curator's guide--creating screencasts for all of the major curation features on Open Museum. Here's a look at our screencast on how to create a new object. One thing is pretty clear: Steven Spielberg is in no danger of losing his job.

Please let us know what you think--we'd love your feedback.

Screencast: How to Create a New Collection

This 4-minute video is the first in a series of screencasts demonstrating how to curate in Open Museum.

We're just getting used to Camtasia, so feel free to let us know what you think of the video, both in terms of its content and form. Is it helpful? Clear? Accurate?

Museums Without Borders

Draw a circle around the museum.

(Make sure that you don't leave anything out!)

I Just Want to See Objects?

The FIDO study done at YouTube may be relevant to user expectations for online museums. The YouTube study says:

One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users -- often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!"

Perhaps we are over-designing the virtual museum experience to meet the expectations of the exhibitors when all the visitors want us to do is "Just let us look at the objects, please!"

Or, as one elderly woman from a Quebec historical society put it: "I don't see why we should start trying to be teenyboppers all of a sudden."


On the other hand, the user's conceptualization of what they want often has more to do the desired user experience (simple) then the overall feature set (possibly more complex.)

Digital Outreach Viral Loop Screencast

Our take on how museums can use the mobile web to connect with visitors and use social networking to pass the good news on to new audiences.

What is Open about Open Museum?

We've been having a lot of discussions about what we are, what we do, and how to explain ourselves to people. One of the big questions we've been discussing is the significance and implications of our name. We are Open Museum for a reason--but what exactly is "open" about Open Museum?

The easy answer is that it's open because it's online, which makes it available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's open because it's free, which means anyone with an internet connection can have access to remarkable works of art and culture. And it's open because museums and their collections are aggregated, so visitors can jump from museum to museum, object to object, without ever leaving the site, getting a giant culture fix in one location. But those are obvious reasons.

The more philosophical response to what's so open about Open Museum is that we think everyone should have access to works of art. That means we strongly believe in free, public access to public domain images, regardless of where they are located. The painting known as the Mona Lisa belongs to the Louvre; no question. But the image of the Mona Lisa doesn't belong to anyone; Leonardo da Vinci painted it more than 500 years ago, so we can safely say it's out of copyright. We believe that people who have access to the internet should be able to view the objects that reflect our shared cultural past in a way that doesn't require looking through a magnifying glass.

We also believe that everyone who wants to have a conversation about art and culture should be able to do so. Open Museum offers people a forum for talking about art and culture, whether they are a museum professional or someone who just likes beautiful things. We all have opinions, questions, and comments to make about the art and culture we experience, and Open Museum gives people an opportunity to share them.

And we also think that people who like museums and what they experience in them should get the word out to others. We are strong supporters of using social networking to open museum doors--to pull people in to museums, and push them to tell others about what they find.

So tell us, are we open enough for you? We are open to suggestions.