Getting in on the cyber-action

This month, museum geeks everywhere are converging on Montreal for Museums and the Web 2008, the conference for all things webby in the museum world.

There are several professionals from the UK giving talks and running workshops on various aspects of Web 2.0, which has been the buzzword in the online world ever since web design guru Tim O'Reilly coined it in 2004.

It's been attached to everything from sites such as YouTube and Facebook to reverent talk about a digital utopia where the world's information is at everybody's fingertips.

But what actually is Web 2.0 and what does it mean for museums and galleries? It's a nebulous term at best, which is why it's wielded by anyone who wants their project, product or site to sound new, relevant and above all, cool.

As defined by O'Reilly, Web 2.0 is a new way of interacting with the web, characterised by collaboration and sharing rather than passive consumption. People can now comment on what they read, generate their own content, and exchange views with like-minded others. The days of being wowed by flashy websites that don't do much are over.

Some museums are gingerly dipping their toes into the Web 2.0 stream, using established sites such as photo-sharing community Flickr and video-sharing YouTube. Others are forging ahead, building systems that allow people to actually work with their online collections. But most are still getting to grips with the web and working to put their collections online.

The Natural History Museum is getting its feet wet with the successful Antarctic conservation blog. This chronicles a conservation project in the polar wasteland. The blog is an ideal platform of communication for the isolated conservators and personalises the project for visitors to the museum and its website.

The National Gallery is also joining in. As part of its Grand Tour project it invited people to contribute their photos of replica paintings - hung on the streets of London's West End and Soho - to a group set up on Flickr. This allowed people to comment on, discuss and post their own versions of the famous paintings online.

Charlotte Sexton, the deputy head of new media, says that it was a real success. "Getting images into Flickr worked really well. It generated a real buzz around the project."

Both of these projects were well thought out. But that's not always the case. Too many people seem to be rushing to join in the Web 2.0 fun without knowing what they want to achieve.

The curator's blog attached to the otherwise excellent modernism exhibition, Breaking the Rules, at the British Library is a classic example.

There are posts about the queues in Frankfurt airport, friends in Paris and when their children go to bed. None of which has anything to do with modernism. Unsurprisingly there are barely any comments left by readers.

This is one of the biggest problems with Web 2.0, says Sexton: "People are starting the wrong way round. Rather than aiming to achieve a particular outcome and deciding which of these new tools would be best, quite a lot of people rush in without thinking about what it means… If you're doing a blog, you have to know why."

One place that has a very good idea of what it wants to achieve is the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Robin Boast, the senior curator for world archaeology, is heading a project to allow people to add their own descriptions and interpretations of objects in the museum's collection.

He believes that opening objects up like this is important. "We need to think a lot about how objects are going to travel out of the museum so people can contextualise them locally," Boast says. "You need to be able to accumulate many layers of meaning, interpretation and biography around them."

To achieve this, he is working with communities at Zuni in New Mexico and Nunavut in Canada. He's given these communities access to digital collections from their cultures so they can comment on and use them as they want. In doing so, he's created new and contemporary interpretations of the objects and garnered insights that wouldn't necessarily come through research.

"I think the benefits are enormous. There is much more community engagement and access than before," says Boast. "This sort of social computing is going to give rich meaning to objects and bring them to life."

Shared experiences

But opening up collections like this requires careful thought. Nick Poole, the chief executive of collections management specialist MDA, explains: "When people talk about open content and getting it onto the web, I see copyright being infringed left, right and centre. We've got this wild west attitude of, 'It's alright so long as we don't get caught', because it's so new and exciting.

"But if you can sort the copyright out and you trust users with your collection, to add key words and so on, you're massively increasing the workforce available to work on these collections. That can only be good."

David Dawson, the senior policy adviser to digital futures at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, is also in favour.

"This use of technologies unlocks people's experiences of the objects, and once that's done, those experiences can be shared," he says. "The curator then becomes a facilitator, not a controller of access and knowledge."

That's not to say expert opinion will count for nothing. Research from the University of Edinburgh shows that even when they have access to collections, users still want experts on-hand. "They want to have their say, but they also want curators around to validate what they think," explains Siân Bayne, the senior lecturer in e-learning at Edinburgh.

That these users, for the most part, have museums' interests at heart can be seen by the proliferation of Facebook groups, Flickr communities and independent blogs dedicated to UK museums.

One such is the Save Southwark Museums Facebook group set up by museum consultant Bridget McKenzie. In two weeks it attracted more than 400 members interested in saving the Livsey Children's museum from closure, and is the focus for a campaign (see news p6).

With the rise of sites such as Facebook and YouTube, Web 2.0 does seem to be the direction in which the online world is moving, dragging everybody else with it.

But Jon Pratty of the editor of Culture24 (formerly the 24-Hour Museum) sounds a note of caution. "Every year there's another cool internet idea, but if you asked the people creating them, 'Can we rely on the service for a year or two?', they can't give that assurance."

Get a clear idea

The institutions successfully using the ideas of Web 2.0 are those that use them as an adjunct to their museums, have a clear idea of what they are going to use them for, and are willing to commit the resources to making them work.

And to get that, people must look outside the museum sector and see what other evolving successful sites, like those run by the Guardian or the BBC, are doing.

"We have to be much more aware in the cultural sector of what is going on outside," emphasises Pratty. "You see people making amazing sites using software that can be downloaded off the web without spending vast amounts of money on bespoke sites."

Unless the sector becomes more aware, it risks being left further behind. Online content is increasing at an exponential rate and museum sites could get lost in the vast sea of data. The days of putting your content online and sitting back and watching the visitors arrive are long gone. If people can't interact, they'll go somewhere else where they can.

Aaron Davies is a freelance journalist.

Museums and the Web 2008 is in Montreal, 9-12 April, www.archimuse.com/mw2008