Year: 2009

Categories
Conferences and event reports Social networking

Twitter and upcoming presentations and workshops

As many of you know I’ve got a large number of workshops and presentations coming up.

Next week I’m speaking at the State Library of NSW’s Perceptions and Connections conference then later in the week running two workshops on metrics and giving a presentation at the Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne. A little later it is Museums and the Web 2009 and then Museums Australia.

Now I can almost be certain that I and a lot of other presenters these days are coming to terms with the #backchannel. Twitter is suddenly taking off in an almost mass culture big way and this year at MW09 you can be sure it is going to be almost ubiquitous.

The question then is, how does a presenter cope with mass Twittering?

Olivia Mitchell has some good ideas – both for presenter and audience. Here’s an excerpt.

1. Ask a friend or colleague, or a volunteer from the audience to monitor the back channel and interrupt you if there are any questions or comments that need to be addressed. Jeffrey Veen calls this person an ombudsman for the audience.

2. If you can’t find someone to take on this role take breaks – say every 10 mins – to check Twitter. Robert Scoble calls this taking a twitter break. You can combine this with asking the audience for “out-loud” questions as well. It’s good practice to stop for questions throughout your presentation – rather than leaving questions till the end.

3. If you’re courageous and know your content backwards, display the back channel on a screen that everyone (including you) can see. This is potentially distracting for you and has the downside in that the visibility it provides can provoke silly tweets from some (eg: “Hi Mom”). But it does mean that you can react immediately to any issues. Spend some time at the beginning of your presentation explaining to your audience how you will respond to the twitter stream and audience members are more likely to use it responsibly.

Categories
Social networking

Mapping your social network

What you see above is a map of my Facebook friends and their interconnections. The core mesh shows the tight interlinking of my social friends who I went to university with or are involved in some way in musical pursuits. The smaller, less dense cluster to the right are my ‘museum tech’ acquaintances – drawn from all over the globe and less connected to each other.

There’s been quite a few Facebook applications that have offered simpler maps but Nexus is probably the best as it lets you navigate your network and explore similarities and visualise your network map in different ways. (Like any Facebook app, read the Terms of Service first).

How diverse is the social network map of your organisation’s fans/friends?

Categories
Imaging Web 2.0

Sydney Observatory and astrometry bots

Over at the Sydney Observatory blog you can read about our astronomy curator’s experiments with the ‘astrotagging bot’ behind the Astrometry project and group on Flickr.

Today 20 February 2009 (Sydney time) the above image and five others were posted on the image sharing website Flickr here. Within a few minutes astrometry.net found the image and analysed it to provide full details such as the astronomical coordinates of the image centre, its scale, its orientation and marked the main objects visible on the image.

About the Astronometry project –

The removal of astrometry as a barrier to using legacy and badly archived (or not archived) data will greatly extend astronomical time baselines into the past, and greatly increase time sampling for sources all over the sky. It facilitates work with distributed, heterogeneous data sets. It also provides a channel for professional and amateur astronomers to collaborate, as the installation of correct WCS makes currently hard-to-access amateur imaging data interoperable with professional projects.

It is a quite amazing use of citizen-contributed data (via photographs of the night sky) to hard science. The use of Flickr as a data source is quite magical – read the interview with Christopher Stumm from the Astrometry project.

Categories
Museum blogging

The Powerhouse Museum library now blogs

Another thing I’ve neglected to mention is that our Research Library now has a blog. They are the fourth internal unit to blog publicly about their day to day work (joining our Image Services and Photography team, Conservation team, and of course the Digital group – which you are reading now).

The Library is home to a great collection of books and journals with a particular speciality in design all of which can be browsed in a ‘research visit’. Other libraries can make an inter-library loan request.

The Library is a bit of a hidden treasure known primarily to researchers, although we do a brisk trade for design students doing courses at the nearby UTS. The blog is intended to document some of the results of the ‘specialist research services’ our reference librarians undertake. This research is often fascinating and has, until now, been locked away in monthly reports and the like.

Now we hope some of the great discoveries and interesting people – filmmakers, designers, writers – who ask our library to undertake research for them, will be revealed to the public.

Enjoy another side to the Museum’s research work and services.

Categories
open content Web metrics

Attempts at quantifying social behaviour in the Commons

Over at the fantastic Indicommons blog there has been a flurry of activity around generating data from the various collections in the Commons on Flickr.

Patrick Peccatte initially posted on his blog a set of figures extracted using the Flickr API across the institutions in the Commons. Patrick has reworked these figures a little and they’ve been re-blogged on Indicommons.

The Powerhouse Museum figures work out like this – (as on Feb 7/8)

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

Launched on 7 April 2008, currently has 1,101 photos in 27 sets.
1,464 comments,for an average of 1.33 per photo. Max = 97
4,619 tags, for an average of 4.20 per photo. Max = 34
305 notes, for an average of 0.28 per photo. Max = 19
Images with no social behaviour (identified in a separate post) – 336 out of 1,101 (30%)

(source: Patrick Peccatte)

Incidentally these images have been viewed just over 600,000 times at the time Patrick generated the data – which gives some indication of the participation rate (0.2% comment/view rate).

Now as with any quantitative measures these figures have problems. For some institutions the way the Flickr API extracts and reports data has been an issue. But for us these figures are useful given the very Australian and Sydney-centric content of images we’ve been uploading.

Anecdotally we’ve seen a huge increase in viewing as our relatively geographically-specific images have been exposed more widely by Indicommons and others.

Some questions worth exploring further –

– Who is doing the commenting, tagging and note additions?
– Are the repeat viewers?
– How diverse are they? Is it a lot of people doing a little, or, a few people doing a lot?
– Do those who ‘participate’ become ‘contacts’ (do they want to stay notified of future uploads?)

Categories
Social media Social networking

Engaging audiences with exhibitions in early development – Signs and the 1980s

Much like other museums we’ve started in earnest committing to engaging collaborators in exhibitions from the earliest stages possible. Our next two big(-ish) exhibitions are using different methods to collate, curate, and select content and ideas.

Our upcoming exhibition on Signs which will open around the time of Sydney Design 09 in August has just launched a Flickr group focussed on collecting the best, strangest, and ‘altered’ signage from around Australia.

By encouraging the use of a Creative Commons license we are hoping that some of these images will be featured in the exhibition and those that are geo-tagged may end up being used for walking tours. There will be specific challenges issued to the group over the coming months so if you have some great photos of signage around Australia, join up and participate. 6 days in we’ve already collected 173 photos form 114 people!

Another exhibition planned to open a little later this year is focussing on Australia in the 1980s. Now given the period in focus we’re operating on three different fronts. Firstly we launched an exhibition development blog written by the two curators, Peter Cox and Rebecca Bower. The blog introduces and teases out the key exhibition themes and is allowing the curatorial staff to ‘test’ ideas and ‘talk out loud’ about their plans.

Second, the blog links to a Flickr group where, like the Sign Design group, we are inviting people to submit photos of themselves and others in the 1980s. This is going to be a tricky challenge as relatively few people people have digitised their photos from the 1980s compared to the huge volume of digital born material of current times. We see this as an opportunity.

Thirdly there’s the Facebook group – an obvious choice – where we’re expecting a different kind of community will emerge around the exhibition content – less image-based and more conversational.

(Apologies to regular readers – it has been very busy and the blog has had to lay idle. However a large backlog of posts which will emerge over coming weeks along with the fruits of some exciting projects.)

Categories
Policy Social media

Demspey on libraries, networked services and mobile communications

The latest First Monday contains a great essay titled Always on: libraries in a world of permanent connectivity. Written by OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey it gives a broad overview of the changes in networked communication and service delivery and explores the coming issues for libraries (and by extension, museums) wrought by mobile communications and mobile patrons.

Here’s a few pithy quotes.

On how libraries ‘present’ themselves:

One clear development is a blurring of our social, business, learning and educational lives as the pattern of our communication and interaction across time and space changes. For example, the Blackberry has raised the expectation of anywhere, anytime availability in some work environments. Think of this in institutional terms. This blurring raises interesting questions about how libraries are ‘present’ to their users, and how their users see the library. The position of the library as a functionally integrated, discrete presence, whether on the Web or as a physical place, becomes diffused through various manifestations (a physical place to meet, a toolbar, a set of services in the course management system, a FaceBook application, a set of RSS feeds, office hours in a school or department, and so on). It also changes the relation between the library and other service providers on campus as organizational boundaries track less well to learning and research behaviors. As more activities move onto the network, and as the network becomes more diffused through mobile communications, then workflow and information management become pervasive issues which prompt interesting questions about how academic support services are best configured.

On ‘timely services’:

Participation in a shared communications space blurs boundaries between work, social interaction and leisure. This is related to our altered relationship to time and space, as it becomes possible to engage in different types of activity wherever we are and at whatever time. This may be both liberating and stressful, and poses interesting questions for service providers tied to ‘office hours’. If assignments are prepared at two o’clock in the morning, should reference services be available at those times?

On the centrality of network services:

As a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. On the network, there are only services. So, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. Increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on.

Grab your favourite beverage and read.

Categories
Conferences and event reports Interviews Social media

Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication 2009 conference and short interview with Shelley Bernstein

In early March at Melbourne Museum the follow-up conference to last year’s Social Media & Cultural Communication takes place. This time the conference has been re-named and slightly refocussed as Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication and has a great lineup of speakers from around the country and overseas.

Join leading national and international experts at the Conference to share their experiences of the Web 2.0 revolution – and how it is changing museum and library practice. The four conference sessions will explore:

1. How to communicate with non-traditional visitors, and capture new audiences.
2. How social networks allow audiences to form communities of interest.
3. How scientific knowledge can create and sustain cultural participation.
4. How organisational change is critical in a world of user-generated content and social media.

The Conference builds on the themes of the 2008 Sydney event by looking more broadly at how museums and libraries can contribute to the development of general understandings of science and culture by communities and publics. How is museum and library knowledge created and disseminated in the Web 2.0 environment?

Read the full conference information and programme and book your tickets.

I am doing a presentation as well as running a workshop on metrics and measurement for the cultural sector (which is an alpha version of the one I am running in April in the USA). If you are interested in the workshop then book in early as spots are very limited.

I’m very excited because amongst the speakers in the conference session I’m speaking in is Brooklyn Museum‘s Shelley Bernstein. I asked Shelley a couple of questions.


(pic courtesy of Shelley Bernstein)

Q: What are you going to be talking about at the conference?

I tend to be one of those neurotic presenters that changes and tweaks everything until the very last minute, so I’m not entirely sure at the moment. Every day changes my perspective just enough to keep me rethinking, so I’m still mulling things over and bet that’s going to be one long plane ride with me and my laptop. Generally, I’ll be discussing what we’ve found to be the rules of the road: community is not marketing; personal relationships are key; transparency is essential; personal face on the institution in social areas is vital; trust your audience, they rock.

Q: The Brooklyn has an enormously impressive online presence. I’m really interested in your 1st Fans initiative and also how the museum has been connecting the local community in the galleries *and* online.

1stfans is a membership program that Will Cary (our Membership Manager) and I started with the aim to lower the barrier to entry in terms of joining and supporting the museum. The idea is to engage two groups of supporters. Those in our local area who come often, but have not gotten on the membership escalator yet. Also others who may have seen what we were doing online the past several years and would consider supporting us from far away. The challenge for us to make sure the far away supporters feel just as involved with their membership as the local ones and we are experimenting with that.

For instance, during the Swoon printing event, we asked Swoon’s studio to make a handful of prints for the 1stfans we knew lived outside of the area. We knew they just couldn’t make it to Brooklyn and we wanted to go out of our way and surprise them for being early adopters, so we are shipping those prints which is pretty cool. For the next event at First Saturday, we are planning to video the event then do a Facebook Q&A with the presenter in our 1stfans FB group. I think in each case, it just requires us to think outside the box and say…OK, how can we involve the supporter half way around the world via the web? … and then perhaps go a little out of our way to create something special, so those far away supporters feel less like outsiders. Each time it will be a little different – it will depend on what each event entails and how best to adjust it for everyone…and we are learning as we go, so our 1stfans are learning with us and that’s kind of cool.

Q: Everyone is talking about how social media (and museums) will fare in the economic downturn. What is your view of this in light of recent events?

I’m obsessed with one of Surowiecki’s latest New Yorker Columns and think it’s an interesting example of how people may need to adjust their ideas of what is and is not sustainable. I’m going to be blogging about that soon, so stay tuned.

Q: Melbourne and Sydney, especially, are renowned for their diverse and well priced cuisine. Which Australian native animal are you most looking forward to eating?

Ha! Well, I’m a vegetarian, so I’m more hoping to meet a ‘roo than eat one :) I tend to raid the cookie aisles of the supermarkets in foreign countries, so I’m sure you’ll find me there endlessly fascinated by the differences in cookies Down Under.

Q: Given that you are visiting the country with the most deadly animals on the planet, which are you most afraid of – the spiders, the snakes, the jellyfish, the sharks, or the octopi?

Sharks, for sure! I grew up in the Jaws generation, but I will say I’m way more afraid of being on a boat than being in the water with a possible shark lurking about!

Read the full conference information and programme.

Categories
open content Social media

Community resilience – the emerging Commons community

Courtney at the National Library of NZ beat me to it but as she writes, Flickr staff and Flickr users have visibly self-organised to grow the Commons on Flickr.

There’s a new public Flickr Commons group on Flickr and today, a new Commons blog – Indicommons. These point of presence are acting as meeting places for Flickr users helping research and explore the images that have been placed in the Commons

This has been a very heartening response from the community to the unexpected departure of George Oates. It is also a very positive initial rebuttal to the early fears that the Commons might disappear (which was very unlikely to happen unless Yahoo pulled the plug on Flickr altogether).

But as we’ve seen with recent announcements from Google, AOL and others, niche projects – even popular ones – can disappear overnight in the current economic climate. It is also a reminder that social media platforms like Flickr, and user-generated content as a whole, pose a huge conundrum – being community-built assets under corporate ownership.

Whose data is it?

Whilst Paula Bray is engaging with this emergent community, I am particularly interested in how the geographic makeup of this self-organising community evolves. The majority of Flickr users are still from North America and there had been a focus on keeping a good balance in the Commons of material from other parts of the world.

At the Powerhouse we’ve been uploading more quirky photos from the Phillips Collection and there are still more to come over the next couple of weeks.