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Channel: Beyond the Printed Page: Museum Digital Publishing Bliki » Conferences

Welcome from BookExpo International Airport

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To the dumpy Sheraton on West 52nd Street: all is forgiven.

Obviously you can’t have 20,000 or so, ahem, “industry insiders” rolling suitcases around a giant exhibition floor trolling for Advance Reader Copies (ever heard of ebooks?) in just any old venue, but if there’s a worse place to have a conference than a convention center masquerading as a Las-Vegasian-glass-enclosed-airport terminal, complete with overpriced food courts, escalators to nowhere, wifi that could have traveled forward in time from the center’s other possible inspiration (London’s mid-19th-century Crystal Palace), a VIP lounge, and no good way to get there short of taxi or bus, I’m unaware of it. Expos and Cons are one thing, conferences quite another. THIS. IS. A. TRADE. SHOW. MOVE. THE. CONFERENCE. SOMEWHERE. ELSE.

There. Now back to your regularly scheduled post.

I was at BEA on a panel, organized by the indefatigable Anne Kostick, dedicated to the MetPublications portal I worked on with co-presenting colleagues Gwen Roginsky and Amy Liebster (The visionary project leader Teresa Lai was not in attendance). I’ve described MetPubs here before so I won’t do so again, I’ll just mention that the panel, covering how the project was pulled together and lessons learned since then, was well-received by the 60 or so in attendance. (Anyone there when the feedback from the lectern mike became a sonic riot-control weapon, I trust your hearing has returned.) The questions afterwards, as expected, were dominated by concerns about rights and the impact of a digital publishing route on the Met’s print program. Our answers were pretty much the same as they’ve been since the project launched in October. 1) There’s no easy answer on rights but don’t be predatory, don’t be greedy, and with that and good boilerplate language and a sign-off by a lawyer you should be okay. 2) Our print program is not going away as long as mission-driven publishing matters and as long as easy digital publishing solutions for art books remain elusive. (More on that in many future posts.)

The MetPublications presentation was a coda to my attendance at the sidebar-y International Digital Publishing Forum, overlapping BEA by one and a half days, and providing a kind of shoulder-season Tools of Change nostalgia. There isn’t too much to say that wasn’t already said about Digital Book World and the late-lamented TOC. I can’t tell if IDPF was a remake of a movie that everyone pretended not to notice (like Never Say Never Again and Thunderball), or a sequel that had nothing really to recommend it other than, you gotta have something to do for a couple of days in late May (Hangover 3). So let me try to focus on what might be of interest to us in the museum publishing field.

IDPF started with a keynote by four “visionaries” who all attempted to provide a metaphor for the digital book vis-à-vis print: Corey Pressman of Exprima Media, Richard Nash of Small Demons, Hugh McGuire of PressBooks, and Craig Mod, an independent designer and writer who byted an influential essay late last year proposing a emphasis on super-low-entry-barrier publishing. The specifics of their metaphors are less important than the fact that we are in a stage that lends itself to such activity, searching for metaphors to provide the intellectual underpinnings of our still-unproven business models. (Pressman’s “Book as Electronic Incunabula” sent the early-morning pre-caffienated audience onto their smartphones for a definition.) To paraphrase the sports maxim, digital books are what we think they are, or, more precisely, what we use them for. If we want connectivity and conversation with our pages, we can tweet or tumble; if we want easy storage, we kindle them; if we want disruption, we look for the avant-garde, the app-y; and so on. (And all print books are not created equal, either, or else there wouldn’t be a thing called a trim size.) And Pressman read a poem by Neruda about books. I appreciated that.

After a conversation between digital publishing journalist extraordinaire Laura Hazard Owen and HarperCollins chief digital officer Chantal Restivo-Alessi, the next panel discussed different platform technologies–ePub3, HTML5, Open Web–and their impacts on digital publishing. Think rock-paper-scissors, or perhaps Spy vs Spy vs Spy. You can find evangelists for any of the three to be the primary focus of a publisher’s digital strategy. (From a realistic, skill-set-teachable point of view, I would put my money on HTML.)

I’ll skip the next two presentations, by Writer’s Digest and Goodreads, respectively, except to say: slides with tables and graphs and lots of data. DON’T DO IT. Presentations starting with reading off said facts. DON’T DO IT. Send us links or Slideshare them.

The panels I attended over the next 24 hours were basically on different aspects of digital workflow, whether involving coding (ePub guru Liz Castro in a really interesting, well-received talk) or ePub features of the new InDesign Creative Cloud version (Adobe, whose presenters had the earnest smiles of the near-monopolists). Of all these, a panel on the pros and cons of in/out sourcing may have been closest to my workflow wonk heart, with speakers from Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Open Road Media, and Parragon (yes, that’s the correct spelling) taking turns saying that some degree of internal workflow evolution and coding quality-control knowledge is essential.

In terms of takeaways, I did get a sense that the age of XML-first hasn’t so much passed as been recast as a debate over workflow, and by workflow I mean keep it the old way or transform it, probably at the point of a staple gun. But otherwise, and perhaps typified by the metaphor slam of the first day, there’s a certain stasis right now–the publishers who have gone all in on digital are either fine or out of business, the publishers who haven’t are either fine or out of business, and those people dabbling in apps and all sorts of interesting content approaches are probably closer to being out of business but having a lot more fun doing so. (Those in traditional publishing having fun are those who love workflow. We aren’t the Borg, we just have resonant voices.)

For the next year, I’m targeting events which have a more creative vibe, with whiteboards and raised hands and people shouting out ideas. (Or maybe I’m thinking of an improv performance.) Seriously, though, I’m on a mission to get museums, and the amazing things that we and other non-profits are doing in digital publishing, a seat at the table at these kind of “mainstream” publishing events. Maybe the enthusiasm that pervades our more focused gatherings can help breathe some life into the staggering conference corpses of the publishing industry.

Oh, and I was the fourth most active tweeter at IDPF, according to Epilogger. So unless one of the people ahead of me turns out to have been doping, I’m out of the medals.


Fall Conferences

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Here in Chicago, the wind is starting to get chillier and the days are getting shorter, heralding that autumn is going to soon be upon us.  And with the arrival of fall comes a number of conferences. Presentations like “Print to Digital, Digital First, Simultaneous Publishing–What’s Your Strategy?” will at the Publishing Conference and Expo in New York next week. And in October, hear talks like “Digital Books and dotRights” at Books in Browsers in San Francisco.  If you are attending a conference or presentation this coming season, let us know your reaction and takeaways. The Bliki community would love to hear about it!

September: Publishing Business Conference and Expo: Building Bridges Between Content, Technology and Business, September 23-25, 2013 (New York, New York)

October: Digiday Publishing Summit, October 20-21, 2013 (Miami, FL); Books in Browser, October 24-25, 2013 (San Francisco, CA)

November: Museum Computer Network Annual Meeting: Transforming the Museum, November 20-21 (Montreal, Canada)

For future conferences and information about past conferences, see “Conferences and Events” under the “Wikis” tab above.

Museum Computer Network, or Museum Content Network?

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I made the joke many times in the lead-up to my presentation at the Museum Computer Network annual conference in Montreal that, coming from a print background, I was a caveman (complete with image from classic Phil Hartman Saturday Night Live sketch). I expected to be living Future Shock for three days, aswim in acronyms.

I was wrong—not because I was unfamiliar with the terminology, which I was to a degree, but because the museum computing community is warm, welcoming, and, most of all, open. Open access, open minded, open to experimentation, open to audiences. (“When you’re experimenting, there are always people who want to help you,” as one speaker said.) And best of all for my part of the world, open to print …

But there I go again, getting my print-digital dichotomy on. The techie vs old-school antagonism is overblown. Even calling the group the Museum Computer Network is anachronistic. To borrow the corporate buzzy term of the moment, this is a conference about museum Content, in all its forms, and if that doesn’t include print, it’s because print isn’t asking (demanding?) to be included. Considering that the preparation of a printed catalogue is now 99 percent digital, that’s at best silly, at worst inefficient and wasteful of finite museum resources.

The issue here isn’t the container—platforms come and go, and if you think you know what visitor experience will look like in five years you’re lying or else in possession of dangerous time-travel technology—but the connections that museums undertake, and I mean internally. My own brainstorming about content flow showed that there are tons of ways that museum departments currently reach the outside world, and a lot fewer ways that they reach each other. That’s the real openness challenge.

Technology itself is a descriptive term, a symptom of civilization, not its driving force. Hence Douglas Hegley’s talk, “WTF: Technology,” during the first evening’s slate of ignite talks. He noted that the only changes worth making are those that impact people, not devices. Know your audiences, not technology, as per the panel “Beyond the Visitor Survey: Using Research to Drive Design Decisions.” We need to align our personal values with our work values (with our institutional mission, my addition), as per the MCN keynote from Tina Roth Eisenberg of Brooklyn-based creative endeavors Tattly and others. We need to always be experimenting, prototyping, iterating, and collaborating, as Beyond the Printed Page‘s own Liz Neely of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Micah Walter of the Cooper-Hewitt, so ably demonstrated in their talk on rapid prototyping in the museum.

Museums have done an admirable job inculcating forward-thinking departments within their walls, but maybe not as effectively connecting them to other departments in order to create a culture of experimentation. Or, as Charlotte Sexton, recently of the National Gallery, London, said, “there’s a difference between being ‘risk aware’ and ‘risk averse’.”

It’s the internal risks that we have to take, the internal pitches we have to have ready, as Micah Walter said. Those are the risks that require that we step outside of our job descriptions, that we make extra work for ourselves beyond the deadlines we already have. Those are the demands we need to start making: for our HR departments to hire the right kind of people, for the content-oriented conferences to make space for non-profits, for the museum-oriented conferences to make room for content specialists and publishers. Sometimes we have to be a little bit rogue within our own buildings, as Kris Thayer, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, said during her presentation with Douglas Hegley, on using Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite for a new line of digital publications. (How’s that for a report to your boss? “What was your takeaway from the conference that we paid to send you to?” “That we have to GO ROGUE!”)

It’s overkill to call any conference transformative, but I know that my own sense of my place—and print’s place—within in the current museum content landscape changed over the course of MCN. I only had to listen to myself at the “Speed-date Networking” event the second morning of the conference. At the first couple of tables I was telling other attendees that I had come to bring print departments closer to their digital colleagues; by the third table, I was going to bring both print and digital closer together; by the sixth or seventh pitch, I was going to bring all museum departments together into a larger content universe. That’s the prize we in museums should be aiming for. The old antagonisms of print vs digital have given way to the new relationship between curatorial and “interpretorial,” to use a great term I heard from Cleveland Museum of Art’s Jennifer Foley during “Working Across Boundaries,” which featured a curator discussing in real time the positives and negatives of the Gallery One project from a curatorial point of view.

We need to push together to compete for our potential visitors’ attention spans against the Xboxes of the world. We have to evaluate our internal processes, asking questions with real answers and real action plans, as Kate Tinworth of Expose Your Museum said during her presentation on improving internal evaluations.

I write all this in the full knowledge than many institutions have done all of the above. The Met has done some of it, and can do better. But we as a community have to have these priorities or we’re not going to gain the synergies our corporate counterparts have gained (at no small cost in jobs and tension, I add, but that’s the nonprofit-sector horse we all rode in on).

I said about 18 months ago when I first started blogging on this Bliki that I wanted to get past dichotomies. Not to get all Buddhist/Matrix-y, but there is no dichotomy. It’s all the same museum content world, and we continue to think of ourselves in opposition to other interpreters to our peril.

Off the Press: Electronic Publishing in the Arts

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A5_OFF_THE_PRESS_web_flyer_frontIn March 2013, The Institute of Network Cultures of Amsterdam University in Rotterdam put together a consortium of publishers, cultural workers and technologists in a research project called the Digital Publishing Toolkit. As they state it, they seek to answer: “In what way can a platform be created with new tools for open source-publishing, by which publishers in the art- and cultural sector can produce interactive e-publications by themselves?”

Last week, May 22–23, 2014, they held a conference, Off the Press: Electronic Publishing in the Arts, exploring their work so far and that of others in the field working toward the same basic goals.

Short blog accounts of many of the talks have been posted and it looks like there may be more to come, as well as some video coverage. I’ll update this post with that when/if it comes. In the meantime, if you’re interested in digital publishing in the arts, or in open and experimental publishing in general, you have some reading to do.

A wide-ranging and rather quixotic report of the conference as a whole was written by Arie Altena and is available for download as a PDF. What no EPUB?

UPDATE: Videos of the talks are now available.

From the Sub-Basement to the Imperial Ballroom, Digital Publishing is Moving on Up

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Imperial Ballroom, Boston Park Plaza

At this year’s National Museum Publishing Seminar, I moderated and spoke on a panel on digital publishing. Joining me were e-book production artist Tina Henderson, whose current obsession is “dual-orientation multi-touch ibooks”; Elisa Leshowitz, who works with a terrific roster of client publishers and oversees the growing e-book program for ARTBOOK | D.A.P.; and Edyta Lewicka of Potion design who, with Yale University Press and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation produced the amazing Interaction of Color app released with much acclaim last year.

We were given the Imperial Ballroom at the Boston Park Plaza hotel (pictured above), which was certainly the largest and grandest space in which I’ve ever spoken about digital publishing. Much more typical have been small rooms, in obscure hallways, in front of a crowd of a couple dozen, rather than the maybe hundred and fifty people we had in attendance in Boston. A good sign for the state of digital publishing in museums!

Then again, the title of our session was “Digital Publishing 101″. How (you might ask) could we be in such a grand space and yet still talking about such mundane and basic topics? How have we not progressed past the 101 stage in the seven years since the first Kindle, and four since the first iPad? I think, however, that the juxtaposition between the grandness and size of the space and the very introductory nature of our panel sums up the state of museum digital publishing perfectly: We’re really interested in digital publishing and we know what an important role it should play in our work, but we still have no idea what we’re really going to do to make it happen. Our task then was to give attendees some tools to that end.

Sessions on digital publishing tend toward the hyper-specific—practical talks about single projects using single platforms or formats—or the hyper-theoretical—inspiring oratories about the grand digital possibilities before us. What we don’t see often if at all is a practical overview of all the choices before us. So that’s what we aimed for in our session, subtitled “The Complete Picture from EPUB to App”. Elisa covered reflowable e-books; Tina talked about fixed layout and the e-book/app hybrid formats produced with iBooks Author and Adobe DPS; Edyta talked about custom apps; and I rounded out the group with web books. It was tight and a lot to get through, but somehow we covered the complete range of digital publishing options that museum digital publishers are using now, or might want to use in the future. Not bad for 75 minutes work.

We also created a handy chart breaking it all down as best we could. Well, it’s probably more overwhelming than handy at first, but hopefully it will ultimately prove useful. The whole thing is available to read and comment on at http://bit.ly/digpub101. Enjoy!

digpub101_chart

Every Other Summer, Somewhere in the Museum Publish-Verse …

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When I wrote about my first trip to the National Museum Publishing Seminar two years ago on this site, I addressed the reasonably new task given to publishers of managing digital content without being any less of a print publisher.

Much as happened with the three times I attended Digital Book World and Tools of Change (my reviews are here for DBW 2013, TOC 2013, and the later whacking of TOC), conferences seem to have a set conversational style: even if the substance changes, it’s more like Mad Libs than Socratic debate. If at my first NMPS I was new to the conference game, wide-eyed about the discussion over print and digital while still believing it was more a matter of workflow and willpower than technology and money, this time around I was more attuned to the willingness of institutions to experiment on their own terms, to find a style of publishing that matched their sense of mission.

Greg Albers of Getty Publications detailed last week the excellent panel he moderated on digital publication technologies, and the chart he presented and ensuing demonstrations by iBook Author maven Tina Henderson, Elisa Leshowitz of DAP/Artbook, and Edyta Lewicka of Potion design, is a thorough primer on many of the options available to get content out into digital spaces.

But if Greg’s panel represents “EPUB 101,” particular approaches to creating digital publications, there was no shortage of other platforms described to audiences over the two days of meetings. Among the highlights:

  • Harvard Semitic Museum Egyptologist Peter der Manuelian in the opening keynote presented a 3D rendering, complete with cheap red/blue glasses, of the Giza plateau during its antiquity heyday, made by French company Dessault Systems.
  • Museum professionals from the Met, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, presented digital-first projects aimed at connecting directly with audiences through social and admissions programs.
  • A panel on guidebooks feating Scala Art Publishers, Smithsonian Books, and the Museum of Modern Art ran the gamut from walking tours to trade guides and a wide range of digital walkthroughs.
  • The MetGuggenheim, and MoMA detailed varied approaches to keeping backlists alive through digital means.
  • The final day’s opening Pecha Kucha (yes, folks, it’s a real thing) slammed out five presentations in a series of 400-second blitzes. I had to miss that first morning session but heard a lot of interest about the Hirshhorn’s multi-channel publication approach to their Ai Weiwei show and the Albright-Knox Gallery’s crowd-pubbed Anselm Kiefer catalogue (links to their unique takes on publishing, sadly, are hard to find).

Whew. That’s a lot of takes on digital publishing. Is that a good thing, part of the problem, solution, both, neither? Two years since my first NMPS, digital publishing possibilities are exploding, but print-raised publishers aren’t explicitly in the possibilities business, at least not according to budget-conscious, admissions-concerned, merchandising-worried museum directors. Still, many of the museums presenting, such as the try-anything Guggenheim and the data-inhaling MoMA, are out there, collecting data on what works, seeing what gets downloaded, what makes money and what draws a big collective meh. So museum publishers are moving into try-mode, it’s just that answers don’t abound. Yet. Maybe 2016 in Chicago.

For me, an interesting meta-approach came from what was probably the least publishing-focused panel, on Creative Collaboration. Lynda Hartigan from the Peabody Essex Museum, David Small of Small Design Firm, and designer and Rhode Island School of Design professor Lucinda Hitchcock discussed wide-open creative ideation that seem to be exactly of design-school and improv-comedy methods which would be laughed out of any curator-driven institution. And yet PEM is doing it in regular curator meetings–and before you say, yeah, PEM is small, the Met worked with Small Design on its massive reworking of its American Wing a few years ago. For people who think that the process is as important as the product (okay, me on this site here and here), this is the kind of panel that really makes you think. And that’s a good thing.

Books in Browsers V: A digital publishing nerd’s heaven

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Twenty-six talks lasting twenty minutes each spread over two days, Books in Browsers is scrappy, inspiring, humbling, exciting and exhausting. God, I love this conference.

I trolled the scrawls in my notebook for some highlights from this year’s edition (held October 23–24, 2014, at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco) to  share with our staff here at the Getty, and have further annotated them here. Read below, on SlideShare, or download the PDF.

These were my main takeaways, and I think there are some important things in there to sink your mental teeth into, but I’ve still missed some fantastic material. The talks by James English & Leonard Richardson, from New York Public Library; Derrick Schultz, from Atavist Books and Creatavist; and Adam Hyde, from PLOS come immediately to mind. And there are certainly even more. So read the notes, check out the videos, and I’ll see you in San Francisco next year for Books in Browsers VI!

——
The notes were built as a live HTML file with deck.js (open source under the MIT License) and use Reenie Beanie (SIL Open Font License) from Google Fonts.

Times ergo sum

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Is the increasing digital reality of museums any more real now that the New York Times has picked it up twice in a week?

Growing up in the DC area with New-York-born parents it was easy to think that nothing really existed until it was reported in the New York Times, or, in a stretch, Time magazine. (Yes, Millennials, it was once important.) Working in the New York museum world for the past [mumble-mumble] years only reinforced that, and maybe added “written about in The New Yorker” and “spoken about on NPR.”

So it was exciting to see that the Met, which sometimes gets the reputation of a limestone edifice, has been in the New York Times a few times recently for its ongoing digital transformation, whatever that might mean.

One story, “Museums Morph Digitally,” mentions the Met among other institutions—MoMA, the soon-to-be-reopening Cooper Hewitt and its amazing pen, the greater Smithsonian presence in DC. The article also discusses art-focused augmented-reality projects at Stanford University. There’s even a mention of Watson, the IBM computer that did really well at “Jeopardy!” (That sound you hear is a million curators rolling their eyes.) What exactly does it mean for a museum to morph?

What’s interesting is that the article cites the Met’s deputy director for collections and administration Carrie Rebora Barratt emphasizing that digital hasn’t hurt attendance or the museum experience, which can encompass those who want to use their devices and those who just want to wander through galleries. That of course is good news, though the question is, just who is that supposed to be reassuring—Luddite members or museum administrators and trustees?

The other Times story was a follow-up by the same writer, Steve Lohr, entitled “Digital Lessons from the Museum and Art World.” As if nodding extra-hard to digi-skeptics, he says, “As in most overview articles, some people interviewed were quoted in the piece and other voices were left out. The usual reason is for space and the related reason of sticking closely to the story line.”

Let’s get meta! His digital extension of a print-ish article includes two digital “voices,” those of the director of astro-visualization at the American Museum of Natural History, describing the very, very cool Digital Universe project, which uses big data to fill in a map of that biggest of data sets, the universe. (Okay, I guess the multi-verse is bigger. “It’s data all the way down,” to paraphrase.) The project was also the centerpiece of a very cool “Hack the Universe” event at AMNH last weekend (check out the hack-a-thon’s twitter feed at #hacktheuniverse). The other additional voice comes from Google’s data arts team, with a link to its Johnny Cash project. (Sounds like a good time to be a “project manager”.)

The point here isn’t that museums are doing great digital stuff (you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t believe it). It’s that perhaps this trend, years old, is finally reaching the most mainstream of the writing about the arts. The existence of tablets doesn’t scare the readers of print any longer. How many of us still provide long-distance tech support to parents trying to program their VCRs?

That this all is coming from the Times is slightly ironic, considering the role digital has had in its recent staff shakeups, including the firing/departure of executive editor Jill Abramson back in May. The “leaked” internal report on the need to improve the paper’s adoption of digital in the newsroom itself became required reading.

Museums know they’ve gone digital. What’s important to remember is that they haven’t stopped being analog. If the Times can find the point of digital among all the physical art, then we may be doing something right. If the Times acknowledges that it still has a ways to go to make digital work for something as fleeting as news, then we know we have a ways to go as well. 

PS: Hope to see you all at the Museum Computer Network in Dallas next week. I’ll be on two panels, and Beyond the Printed Page’s Greg Albers will be on one. Check it out!


The future of digital publishing is …

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Web books, html5 books, web apps, open ebooks—whatever you call them, I am a proponent of these approaches to digital publishing and I’ve been happy to see they are gaining support in other places as well. Still, the big question remains: What do they look like, and how might we make them?

At the Museum Computer Network conference this year, I and two other panelists sought some answers for the field. After a quick overview of digital publishing today, we broke the session into three parts: I spoke about Git, GitHub (09:50) and open source software as an ad hoc and distributed approach to digital publication; Curtis Fletcher spoke about Scalar (29:57) as one of the leading examples of the packaged, open authoring and publishing platforms available today; and to demonstrate the possibilities of fully customized from-scratch web publications, Avery Swartz spoke about the rapidly growing collection of online books at the heart of the Art Canada Institute (54:36). The full audio synched with the slides is embedded below and available on YouTube.

I say at some point in the talk that I enjoyed putting these panels together to learn about the panelists’ projects for myself, as much as for the audience to do so. And that was definitely the case here. Some standout points for me were that Scalar includes built-in direct connections to a number of different image repositories, including the Getty’s collection, from which authors can import images directly and with complete metadata and caption information while also still maintaining a link to the original source (!); and I loved that Avery shared that even only a few years into the ACI project, they’d already had some lessons learned including a preference for responsive web design and the value of more extensive user testing.

All in all a very positive session, a good sign of things to come, and a great opportunity to learn more about what’s going on in digital publishing and some of the people making it happen!

What We Talk about When We Talk about Museum Tech: MCN 2014

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I wrote last year about my first Museum Computer Network annual conference, so I won’t reiterate my enjoyment and sense of wonder at this positive, upbeat, forward-thinking event. 

I participated in two panels last month in Dallas at MCN 2014, which, just as last year, was filled with the kind of people who make you hopeful for the future of museums and their ability to reach audiences who are changing  every day, both individually and in the aggregate. The first panel I was involved in, “Strategic and Smart Upstart? The State of Today’s Museum Digital Publication,” was organized by Kris Thayer and Diane Richard of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and covered how Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite can be used to make enhanced art publications. Kris and Diane have created a beautiful digital magazine called Verso, which you should absolutely check out. (They wrote about Verso in Beyond the Printed Page back in the spring.) Since the Met hasn’t proceeded as far with its own pilot project in DPS, I spoke more about the experience of winning stakeholders over to a new type of publication, one ally at a time.

I also organized a panel called “User Experience: Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Museum Content.” Apart from the title’s megalomania and getting the first name of Jorge Luis Borges wrong on a slide, I think the panel went very well. The three speakers all provided very interesting takes on the way that museums talk about themselves, their missions, and their relationship to ideas and scholarship:

  • Corey Pressman, Anthropologist/Strategist (what a title!) at Metal Toad Media in Portland, Ore., toured the long history of ideas and scholarship and how museums turn these notions into the stuff that visitor experience is made of.
  • Jennifer Foley, Director of Interpretation at the Cleveland Museum of Art, delved into the language by which museums describe that stuff. What to even call it? Content? [Too corporate, Family-Feud-X-noise here] Ideas? Stories? [Jennifer pointed out that one antonym of "story" is "truth." Try telling your curators that their scholarship is the opposite of truth!] Narratives? [snore] Even her job title, Interpretation, is a word that the Met doesn’t use. Language itself is very much part of the discussion inside the museum.
  • Kimon Keramidas, Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center showed how digital tools can enliven curatorial research as well as gallery and visitor experience, giving examples of current and upcoming shows at the BGC.

Something about this year’s conference made a particular impression on me. One of the most well-attended panels was “How to Be an Agent of Change,” moderated by Allegra Burnette (formerly of the Museum of Modern Art and now Principal Analyst at Forrester Research) and featuring Douglas Hegley (Director of Technology at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Nik Honeysett (Director of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative), Carolyn Royston (a consultant who was until recently the Head of Digital at Imperial War Museums), and Charlotte Sexton (also a consultant, formerly Head of Digital at The National Gallery, London, as well as a past president of MCN). The panel was a who’s who of people who’ve engaged with and inside museums on the highest levels where technology meets scholarship and audience.

The discussion was very much about how one goes about working inside the institution to make change—and not just digital thingies—happen. If these are the “superheroes” of the museum content field, Douglas made the point that there are no true superheroes, no battles, no fights even, because when there’s a battle and someone wins, someone else loses—and it’s the museum that’s supposed to win, not one department or staff member. Institutions need frameworks and the maturity to handle the radical change that technology can bring to museums, both within and without.

Dealing with adversity

Dealing with adversity, or museum tech career advice?

The audience was transfixed, with plenty of questions that represented the frustration that technophiles and -phobes alike feel every day as they try to advance a seemingly innocuous and obvious agenda in the face of opposition. Is it all just about staying positive, banging your head into the nearest available wall, and then smiling and brushing brick dust off your forehead? Some of the advice both during the panel and in concurrent tweets suggested having a shared sense of mission, routing around failure, not waiting until everything is “ready,” and, most of all, “having the courage to be bold.”

While these slogans could all be the material of inspirational posters, the vibe in the room was dead serious—change is supposed to be hard. As Allegra said, we have to focus on helping museum visitors, not on being in our silos. People loved this panel, and though I’ve only been to two MCNs, this was one of the first and best attempts I’ve seen to focus on career arcs within the hybridized field of museum technology, where every museum is doing it a little bit (or a lot) differently, where one museum’s fear of change is another museum’s race to the future. To quote Oliver Twist, may I have some more?

A later panel, “Strategic Planning for Digital Success,” featured Douglas along with Anne Bennett (CIO of the Toledo Museum of Art), Richard Cherry (Deputy Director of The Broad Art Foundation), and Mike Osswald (Vice President for Experience Innovation at Hanson Inc.). This was also a packed house and provided a useful continuation of the Agent of Change panel, and I also felt a relationship to the User Experience panel I had organized: these internal discussions can become the very thing they’re talking about. It’s not about technology but about thinking about technology, or maybe thinking about thinking about technology. It’s planning all the way down. If your institution can’t properly have these discussions, you’re not going to get very far with new initiatives.

But what makes MCN special is that the planning always leads to something. Director of Digital Adaptation at the Blanton Museum of Art Koven Smith‘s tweet about how a minimum viable product isn’t a shortcut, it’s how you get a test ready for testing, is an important reminder that we have to get things done. “I don’t believe in failing often. I believe in building products that will test hypotheses,” he wrote. There’s a heavy presence of perfectionism in museum culture because its internal essence—scholarship—has to be as perfect as possible. Yet perfection isn’t what technology, with its agility and endless iteration, is about (a perfect technology is usually a recipe for dystopian sci-fi), and neither is visitor experience, with its constant tweaks and feedback loops and audiences moving on to the next platform to the alarm of museum directors. (Speaking of, the conference started off with its usual ignite session featuring several speakers, one of whom was Dallas Art Museum director Max Anderson. He told the room that it was progress leading to crowds and buzz and not big tech words and gadgets that got directors’ approval. “Help solve the museum’s problems using digital platforms,” he said.)

Is this tech perfect enough for you?

Is this tech perfect enough for you?

There’s a certain openness to failure at MCN because it gets us closer to success, and if that sounds like a recipe for getting fired, it’s more about being able to quickly turn challenges into lessons and then even more quickly into the next plan, in a cost-effective and no-bodies-strewn-about kind of way.

So if I do have a takeaway, it’s that we have to learn to look at ourselves and our institutions while also at the same time acting upon what we’ve learned. Considering what museums are up against today, it’s not supposed to be easy. 

And, of course, Because Karaoke …

Somewhere outside of Dallas …

Somewhere outside of Dallas …





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