Lecture on social media and museums, libraries and archives given to the The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling) in Oslo, December 2009.
Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challenges
1. Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector opportunities and challenges
2. Hei! Jeg heter Mia I work for the Science Museum, London. I’ve also worked for the Museum of London (UK), the Çatalhöyük Research Project (Turkey), Museum Victoria (Australia), the State Library of Victoria (Australia). I’ve been working on the internet since 1994. Blog: http:// openobjects.org.uk |Twitter: @ mia_out
3. What about you? How many of you are active on: Facebook? MySpace? LinkedIn? Twitter? Flickr? specialist social networking sites? mailing lists? YouTube/Vimeo? How many of you actively create and share content on: blogs tweets photos Videos Podcasts?
13. Audiences The web has changed our audiences and changed their expectations about content and interactivity: mash-up, re-use, re-mix
14. It’s 2009 “ The ten most heavily used web brands account for 45% of total UK internet time . Facebook is the most heavily used web brand, accounting for 13 percent of all UK Internet time – or one in every eight minutes . Communication and entertainment are central themes amongst most heavily used web brands” http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090513_UK.pdf
18. Go where your audiences are In the first year on Flickr Commons: “ over 750,000 image views , with around 2,000 comments and 4,000 tags .” Photographer Hope’s images had previously been viewed “irregularly – perhaps 20 times” since the museum had owned them. By mid-2009 “the Hope photographs have been viewed around 400,000 times on Flickr Commons.”
In my current role, I act as web developer and producer; in the past I’ve worked as a web analyst and programmer as well as a consultant on digital programmes in cultural heritage.
Am not going to spend long on the challenges now, might come out in questions
Archive project found longer visits for visitors from “ Web 2.0 initiatives ... suggesting that they were users particularly interested in the resource” instead of random visits through Google ‘ First World War Poetry Digital Archive’ discussed in http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/marchionni/
Blog posts about objects - curator’s voice creates better relationship with readers; links from social media make the objects more visible in Google. Use visitor questions to write posts. Social media allows you to add layers of audience-focused content to your existing sites. Self-expression for curators and researchers. Can quickly address topical questions. About 1 hour per post. http://www.ssplprints.com/image.php?id=82768&idx=6&keywords=de%20havilland%20comet&filterCategoryId=&fromsearch=true http://sciencemuseumdiscovery.com/blogs/collections/flying-into-wroughton-thirty-years-on/
Crowdsourced corrections and research
Excellent match between content, goals and audience. Rewarded and recognised correctors.
Share your research processes. Once you have set up the process, it requires no extra effort but has benefits for visitors It sets a good example for visitors - learn by example Improves discoverability of authoritative sources
This can be challenging, but start with small projects and make time to reflect on the lessons you’ve learned
Where are your online audiences? Your website has to compete with that.
Separate digitisation of images from big infrastructure builds - get the content right, learn about audiences, then build the big sites. Visually oriented audience.
Audience engagement - added to user galleries, favourited, added notes, comments, tags. Helped Library of Congress identify individuals, locations, events...
In an ideal world, the conversation would start before the project proposal has been written, before the overall goals of the project, audiences, key messages, etc have been set. The most obvious solution might not be the best, or the solutions suggested might not be taking advantage of improvements in technology and development methods.
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html – set for Sweden as it doesn’t list Norway