The international brotherhood of museum web geeks were walking
tall last month at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis.
The worldwide success of social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube means even people who may never engage with these online social tools are now fascinated by their cultural implications (including museum directors).
So thanks to Web 2.0 we museum web managers are no longer the invisible drones in the boiler room digitising mountains of content for the benefit of two specialist researchers in Alaska. Instead, we are emerging as facilitators of the online-landscape, a fertile breeding ground for future museum visitors and donors.
As Nina Simon, who runs the blog Museum 2.0, puts it, "People in positions of power in museums are finally getting interested in the internet not just as a dumping ground for content but as a starting point for innovations... They are looking for information about how the rise of the social web will affect the business model and viability of museums. (We) need to be the source of that information."
Yes, but can we make ourselves heard? We haven't traditionally been encouraged to operate strategically or harness our bottom line to corporate museum objectives and if our work is ultimately tangential to the goals of the museum, we'll stay outside the decision-making loop and our insight into visitors' online behaviour will leak away.
Reliance on crude key performance indicators such as annual unique visitor figures (akin to a shop calculating its annual turnover by counting how many people walked in the door) hasn't helped us communicate the real successes and failures or our increasingly sophisticated understanding of online visitors.
After all, it's not always in our direct interest to de-mystify our work. As one British delegate confessed to me, his colleagues are reluctant to switch to the Google Analytics statistics package because it notoriously shows lower (if more accurate) topline figures.
As the manager of the Untold London website one of the most effective experiments I've tried was a simple Facebook group to publicise an event for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender History Month at the Museum of London. It doubled the audience, as I had stumbled onto a receptive and under-served online community of interest.
But unless I can turn this "virtual learning" into real institutional change such online investments risk being as unsustainable as traditional on-site exhibitions and educational programming have always been.
Sara Wajid is the web editor of Untold London
tall last month at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis.
The worldwide success of social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube means even people who may never engage with these online social tools are now fascinated by their cultural implications (including museum directors).
So thanks to Web 2.0 we museum web managers are no longer the invisible drones in the boiler room digitising mountains of content for the benefit of two specialist researchers in Alaska. Instead, we are emerging as facilitators of the online-landscape, a fertile breeding ground for future museum visitors and donors.
As Nina Simon, who runs the blog Museum 2.0, puts it, "People in positions of power in museums are finally getting interested in the internet not just as a dumping ground for content but as a starting point for innovations... They are looking for information about how the rise of the social web will affect the business model and viability of museums. (We) need to be the source of that information."
Yes, but can we make ourselves heard? We haven't traditionally been encouraged to operate strategically or harness our bottom line to corporate museum objectives and if our work is ultimately tangential to the goals of the museum, we'll stay outside the decision-making loop and our insight into visitors' online behaviour will leak away.
Reliance on crude key performance indicators such as annual unique visitor figures (akin to a shop calculating its annual turnover by counting how many people walked in the door) hasn't helped us communicate the real successes and failures or our increasingly sophisticated understanding of online visitors.
After all, it's not always in our direct interest to de-mystify our work. As one British delegate confessed to me, his colleagues are reluctant to switch to the Google Analytics statistics package because it notoriously shows lower (if more accurate) topline figures.
As the manager of the Untold London website one of the most effective experiments I've tried was a simple Facebook group to publicise an event for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender History Month at the Museum of London. It doubled the audience, as I had stumbled onto a receptive and under-served online community of interest.
But unless I can turn this "virtual learning" into real institutional change such online investments risk being as unsustainable as traditional on-site exhibitions and educational programming have always been.
Sara Wajid is the web editor of Untold London
Links
www.untoldlondon.org.uk
World Wide Wonder, museums on the web one-day conference, 10 June, London
www.untoldlondon.org.uk
World Wide Wonder, museums on the web one-day conference, 10 June, London