John Coburn, the digital programmes manager at Tyne and Wear Archives and
Museums (Twam).
“As a sector, and as an organisation, we have a lot of material – but a lot of our audiences don’t have the inclination or specific interest to identify one particular part of the collection that they’re looking for,” says Coburn.
Supported by a
grant from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts programme, Twam worked in partnership with Newcastle University and Microsoft
to create a user-friendly interface.
The resulting portal, Collections Dive, which took around 12 months to develop and went live in May 2015, was also supported by the Collections Trust. It uses infinite scrolling – a mechanism deployed by Flickr, Pinterest, and other social platforms – to provide access to about 33,000of the museum’s digital records.
The interface is based on the premise that the speed at which a visitor scrolls through the collection reflects how engaged they are with what they are seeing. It uses algorithms to display records in different orders, according to how fast visitors scroll.
When they scroll slowly, records thematically related to each
other are displayed. When they scroll quickly they see randomised records, as
they are assumed to have lower engagement.
There is also a midpoint, where moderately paced scrolling results in a mixture of related and randomised objects. A sidebar allows visitors to look back over objects they have viewed and explore the connections between them.
Twam’s research found that its previous online search interface was off-putting to visitors, both because of the scale of information and the terminology used.
“What we found was that it presented the collection as something more alien, and something too large for people to find a way into,” says Coburn.
By contrast, the new interface aims to gently introduce the idea of scale and complexity by presenting large images on screen that become gateways to further exploration.
While the majority of visitors to the museum service’s digital collection are referred through third-party platforms such as Flickr, there is still a sizeable portion that arrives directly at the site looking to be inspired.
Collections Dive is aimed at this “casual, curious audience, with no specific search destination in mind”, explains Coburn. Twam found that this group was twice as large as the number of visitors (professional researchers, hobbyists and school pupils) who arrive with a clear goal in mind.
Coburn says the project suggests that many museums need to do more to design experiences for casual online visitors. “The way we traditionally generate structure in museum collections is quite strange, unfamiliar and off-putting to a lot of people who would otherwise happily engage with multitudes of online content,” he says.
The new interface
aims to be simple and visual – inspired by the digital collection of Amsterdam’s
Rijksmuseum, which takes an “image first, information second” approach.
For Twam this philosophy appears to have been vindicated by the way that some people use the site, which challenges traditional ways of measuring depth of engagement.
“Typically, an
assessment of engagement might look at the number of items people looked at in
detail and dug into to find out more about.
But what we found was that there
were a lot of people who engaged with the interface for a very long time and
hovered over images to get a sense of what they were about, but were not interested
in diving any deeper.
The holistic presentation of all these artefacts collected together was the experience for this audience,” says Coburn.
Another important
finding was that some records contained incomplete or insubstantial information
– a problem that stems back to how data was stored with the original physical
item.
Coburn says that curators and collections teams are now encouraged to think about how they catalogue information, and “consider the eventual user experience at the point of data entry”.
Some museums hope
that engagement with digital collections will encourage visits in person, but
in Coburn’s view, this is not a requirement for digital engagement to be valid.
He adds that digital engagement can often be a richer experience than engaging
with objects in a physical venue, pointing to the Wellcome Collection’s online
stories.
“There are some who are moving away from the idea that online collections engagement is really about object engagement,” says Coburn.
While Maria Economou, a lecturer in museum studies at the University of Glasgow and curator at Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum recognises the benefits of novel approaches. She still believes that online catalogues should remain the foundation of digital engagement.
“Without any suitable introduction, contextualisation or related tools, online catalogues can be hard to use for a non-specialist audience. However, it is important to link digital storytelling games and other interpretative and educational applications with the catalogue,” says Economou.
The
Hunterian Museum is partnering in the Kelvin Hall refurbishment,
together with Glasgow Museums, the Scottish Screen Archive of the National
Library of Scotland, the local authority and other organisations.
The new collection storage, study and sports facility is due to open this year and will see the digitised collections of the three partners united in the Kelvin Hall portal. This will become the basis for “exploring interpretative digital tools for connecting and understanding the collections,” explains Economou.
Innovative digital resources can develop “a life of their own” and start to be used in ways that were not anticipated she adds. While it is important to use metadata and appropriate standards to trace this process qualitative analysis is also important.
“There is a lot of talk in the field about web metrics and statistics. I think that these have an important role to play. However, it is also important to combine this quantitative information with qualitative criteria,” says Economou.
Museums need to try to understand how users build upon digital resources to create new content and knowledge. “It is important to try to understand the value that digitised content has for the diverse users and audiences we try to reach,” says Economou.