research

Screen capture of Twitter page for @POTUS44

Collecting and Using Social Media at the National Archives

Talk/Presentation

What is the role of the U.S. National Archives (NARA) in preserving social media records and using social media platforms to engage audiences? This talk presented at IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2018, provided guidance for other national libraries and archives around the world to consider as they provide guidelines to their own governments and elected leaders for capturing, managing, providing access to, and preserving social media records. It provides a case study for how NARA took a dual approach of access and preservation in archiving the tweets and posts of our first social media president, Barack Obama. The presentation also covered how to effectively leverage social media and social business tools to engage audiences with the work of the archives and crowdsource support for citizen researchers.

Download the Google slides here.

Serving researchers in a self-service world

Published Writing, Talk/Presentation

In a world in which a family historian can type her grandfather’s name into Ancestry.com to start building a family tree, and a journalist can Google to download public domain images, where do the collections searches, online tools, and APIs that museums and archives provide fit in? This paper outlines strategies for better serving people who are looking for the knowledge and expertise within your collections and staff. At the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, we undertook a significant user experience (UX) research project to better understand the online experiences of professional researchers, family historians, and history enthusiasts. Research methods included audits of existing user data (e.g., Google Analytics, survey data) as well as new user interviews, usability testing, a survey, and a landscape analysis. Key findings include the fact that researchers struggle to complete their tasks using existing online tools; people researching family history are particularly unsatisfied and in need of better support; and all audiences require just-in-time help and appropriate orientation to archival research. A major challenge highlighted by this research is how to meet user expectations for item-level records while providing access to digitized records at massive scale.

Read the full paper, originally published in Museums and the Web: Selected Papers from Museums and the Web 2018.

View slides.

Variety, Evocative Labels, and Clever Interactives Make for a Memorable Group Visit to the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Published Writing

Note: This exhibition critique first appeared in Exhibitionist (Spring 2014) Vol.33.1 and is reproduced with permission. Download PDF of article.

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#smwMuseSocial – Defining and Measuring Social Media Success in Museums and Arts Orgs

Blog Post

Social media practitioners from local museums and arts organizations gathered during Social Media Week DC for a lively discussion about the value of social media to our institutions. You can find a full recap, including presentation slides, in the Storify archive.

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Bar chart from survey report

Survey Report: Guidelines for Designing Computer-Based Interactives in Museums

Published Writing

The following publication was written in 2007 as part of a graduate research project at The George Washington University.

Background

The Smithsonian’s policy on accessibility for people with disabilities states that the Institution is “committed to providing full and dignified access for people with disabilities to all programs, structures, and sites in its care.”1 In 1996, the Smithsonian Accessibility Program published “Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design” which have been widely adopted within the Institution as well as adapted and implemented by other institutions around the world. In 2000, the Institution issued “Guidelines for Universal Design of Exhibits” for the National Museum of American History, which emphasizes our responsibility for “being the leading advocate for a universal approach to exhibit programming and design so that our product, the exhibit, can reach a very diverse audience.”

Touchscreen in a museum. Flickr photo by alykat.

As interactive and multi-media experiences in museum exhibitions increasingly are implemented as digital experiences, the Institution’s goal of providing full and dignified access using a universal approach to design needs to be revisited. Computer-based interactives offer museums many new opportunities but also may create new challenges for our diverse visitors. Museums—and the professionals who serve them—need guidelines that address the design of computer-based interactives that are “usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.”2

An online survey was distributed by the Smithsonian Accessibility Program in June 2007 as a first step towards creating a set of guidelines for computer-based interactives. These guidelines will be designed to supplement the “Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design,” which do not adequately address the content and design of computer-based exhibition components.

 

References

  1. Smithsonian Directive 215, Accessibility for People with Disabilities Policy, May 9, 1994.
  2. From the definition of universal design by Ron Mace, Center for Universal Design.

Summary of Results

The purpose of the survey was to gather information about the extent to which museums and cultural institutions, accessibility and universal design professionals, and multimedia and exhibition designers working for cultural institutions have embraced the principles of accessibility and universal design in creating computer-based interactives. While many museums and cultural institutions have begun to meet accessibility requirements and/or to follow the principles of universal design in exhibition development, our assumption was that this practice has not been fully extended to the development of computer-based interactives.

Bar chart from survey report

Our assumptions were confirmed by the survey results. The data show that a vast majority of museums and cultural institutions feature computer-based interactives in their exhibitions, although most have not adopted mobile digital interactives. The majority of respondents do not use guidelines for accessible exhibitions, generally, and an overwhelming majority do not use guidelines for computer-based interactives, specifically. 90% of respondents who are practitioners at museums and cultural institutions reported that 1 or more of the exhibitions in their institutions feature computer-based interactives. Yet, out of 145 museum practitioners, only 15 (10%) have implemented guidelines for computer-based interactives. A slightly more promising 17% (12 out of 70) of exhibition or multimedia designers that serve cultural institutions reported having adopted such guidelines.

The survey results offer readers insights into the reasons why cultural institutions and those who serve them have not yet adopted guidelines for computer-based interactives. The data show that half of those who do not currently use formal guidelines still try to stay current on best practices. The top concern among all respondents is that guidelines relating to technology quickly become outdated.

For those that have created and implemented guidelines, the survey results illuminate what is covered by such guidelines and what has been left out. Half of the museums that report using guidelines for computer-based interactives are science museums. A majority of those using guidelines created them based on published sources and professional experience. For those who have implemented guidelines, a majority have not established priorities. And while kiosks are almost always covered, mobile devices, cell phone tours, and other types of interactives are usually not addressed.

The survey findings provide a glimpse into the landscape of universal design for computer-based interactives—it is a landscape that has yet to be fully explored. While guidelines are not widely implemented, much of this has to do with a lack of resources to create them and a lack of knowledge about what information may already exist. The Smithsonian Accessibility Program, working with the wider museum community, is faced with a great opportunity to create and share best practices and examples and taking the lead on creating guidelines that will encourage practitioners to create experiences with a universal approach to design.

Recommendations

This survey has yielded twelve sets of existing guidelines for the Smithsonian Institution to analyze as models. It has also gathered contact information for a population of nearly 100 knowledgeable respondents who are willing to be interviewed further about the challenges and opportunities presented to museums and other cultural institutions by computer-based interactives.

This survey is the first step in a process towards development of guidelines for accessible computer-based interactives in museums. The Smithsonian Institution will continue to solicit advice and feedback from museum practitioners, designers, and universal design experts through more in-depth interviews. The Accessibility program will also continue its literature review of existing resources and tested guidelines.

A few specific areas have emerged from the survey data as places where further investigation is need. More research on what science museums and technology centers are doing to tackle universal design of computer-based interactives should be undertaken, as they are clearly leading the pack in implementing such experiences. More research should also be done into what Australian and European museums are doing. And the unique challenges of mobile technologies should be considered.

The thoughts of one survey respondent should be kept in mind as the Institution embarks upon writing guidelines for computer-based interactives: “These guidelines should aim to both set standards for accessibility, and inspire creativity in curators, developers, and media designers.” In order to create guidelines that will be used—rather than sitting on a shelf or on a hard drive—we must strive to put them in a format that is extremely sharable, searchable, and updatable. If possible, the Institution should take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies such as photo-sharing, wikis, and blogging to create a dynamic set of guidelines that may be added to and changed. Research findings produced in the wider museum and interactive communities should be incorporated, as should newly developing technologies. The guidelines should be promoted and shared widely, with ongoing feedback from the field welcome and encouraged.

It will be a challenge to balance updatability with simplicity. We know that museums have limited resources and that guidelines that are simple to decipher and provide examples of inexpensive solutions will be most useful. With so many outputs available to museums and a dizzying array of technologies, it will also be a challenge to create guidelines that balance specifics with flexibility. With such a great need and an equally great interest, creating guidelines to share with the museum field will be a challenge, but also hopefully the next great success for museums in improving the museum experience for all of our diverse visitors.

Full Report

Download the full 26-page report for details on findings and methodology.

Closed to the Public: The Impacts of Closing a Museum for Construction

Published Writing

The following publication was written in 2006 as part of a graduate research project at The George Washington University.

Executive Summary

The end of the 20th century marked the beginning of a multi-billion dollar building boom in the museum field. While in the past few years several major construction projects have been dropped or scaled back1, the “Age of Expansion”2 in the U.S. and across the globe has continued to produce new, renovated, and expanded museum spaces at a considerable rate. While the building trend is fairly recent, thinking about how facilities fit into the mission of a museum is not. In a 1917 essay, American librarian and museum director John Cotton Dana wrote that the worth of a museum “is not in direct ratio to the cost of its building . . . A museum is good only insofar as it is of use.”3

Nearly a century after Dana penned these words, museums are working to sustain and increase their usefulness to the public. Renovation and expansion projects offer the opportunity to extend the museum’s mission by increasing exhibition space, for example, or by adding and improving facilities for educational programming. A museum in the midst of a building project, however, must balance staying useful and open to the public, on the one hand, with completing the project in a safe, cost-effective, and timely manner on the other. In this study, I explore how and why museums make the decision to close their facilities during construction, focusing particularly on the impact the decision has on the museum and its audiences. I also pay attention to ways in which museums attempt to stay “open” to the public through alternate spaces, partnerships, and outreach activities.

Much has been written in the past ten years about the building boom, about the architecture of the latest museum structures, and about the financial issues involved in construction projects.4 However, very little has been published on the fact that these projects often involve some sort of closure. The goal of this investigation is to present a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding closing a museum facility and to provide case study and best practice recommendation for museums considering such projects in the future.

In order to successfully recover from closing a building, museums must carefully plan and orchestrate the work of the museum in the name of the mission. Feasibility studies and strategic planning help to keep the organization on track while a marketing communications plan nurtures the institution’s ongoing relationship with its constituents. Special events to mark the closing and opening of the building generate buzz and create fundraising opportunities.

Closing a museum facility impacts key stakeholders in significant ways. Visitors, members, researchers, staff, volunteers, sponsors, partners and affiliates, and local schools and businesses are all affected. A museum must work diligently to minimize the negative impact of closing in order for its overall building project to be considered successful.

Museums considering building projects can learn from the insight of other institutions that have recently completed similar projects. It is, therefore, to the benefit of all museums that institutions conduct and publish evaluations based on their experiences and suggest best practices to others in the field.

References

  1. Morris, Martha. “Expansionism.” Museum News, July/August 2004. 30-35.
  2. Dan Monroe suggests that the “Age of Expansion” covers the period between 1995 and 2010. Monroe, Dan L. “View from the Top.” Art Museum Network News, October 2005.
  3. Dana, John Cotton. As quoted in Perspectives on Outcome Based Evaluation for Libraries and Museums. Institute of Museum and Library Services (2000).
  4. See, for example: Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, for architecture; Lord & Lord, The Manual of Museum Planning, for finances and project management; and major newspapers for general commentary on construction projects in the museum field.

Full Report

Read the full report (62 pages) including a list of 38 case studies.