The document discusses Mobeum, a mobile tour app designed for small museums to share their content and connect with visitors. It was created using the same content from Open Museum, an online participatory exhibit space. The initial goal was to use mobile tours to establish ongoing relationships between museums and visitors through social interactions around digital objects. An initial test was conducted at the Hood Museum of Art, focusing on 24 artworks. Lessons learned included that QR codes weren't ready, not all phones are equal, and balancing authoritative content with hospitality towards visitors is a challenge.

1. Mixing Social Glue with
Bricks and Mortar
Experiments Using the Mobile Web to Connect
People, Objects, and Museums

2. Jeff Doyle
Open Museum
www.openmuseum.org

3. Mobeum
A mobile browser based tour for small museums and
galleries

4. Mobeum is designed for sharing
• Parallel content with Open Museum
• But presented in a tour-oriented format
• The same content is also accessible via the web
• So it can be shared with friends
• Bookmarked, and commented upon

5. Digression:
What is Open Museum?

6. Open Museum is a
Participatory Exhibit Space
For Artists, Museums, and
Art Enthusiasts

8. What kind of
Museums?

9. • Art Museums
• Individual Artists
• Artist Collectives
• Art and Design Schools
• History Museums

10. “Open Museum is a Participatory Exhibit
Space For Artists, Museums, and Art
Enthusiasts”
What does ‘participatory’ mean?

11. Visitors can friend
individual museums
and subscribe to
museum
announcements by
email or in their
personal news feed.
(Fewer than 3% disable
email notification.)

12. Visitors can favorite and comment on objects
And they do...

13. Open Museum visitors are social
• 11.11 Pages per Visit
• 00:07:10 Average Time on Site
• 584 comments last month (out of 76,000 page
views)
• 28% of traffic comes from Facebook

14. Why am I telling you
this?

15. Open Museum is not a
Collections Management System

16. Open Museum is a
Digital Outreach Tool

17. Digital Outreach:
creating, building, and sustaining relationships
between museums, artists, and visitors

18. Our specific recipe for digital outreach:
building relationships and
fostering social interactions
around thick objects

19. Thick Objects

20. Social Objects
• Commenting
• Favoriting
• Sharing (Facebook & Twitter)

21. The Fine Print
N.B. This is not going to appeal to everybody.

22. Back to Mobile

23. Our Initial Goal
Use mobile tours to establish
ongoing relationships between
museums and visitors
... and between visitors and objects
(and encourage visitors to share those relationships
with their social network)

24. What we were smoking
The Digital Outreach Viral Loop

25. Preliminary Mobeum Specs
• For Small Art and History Museums
• Adult Audience
• Mobile browser (Smartphone +)
• Audio, video, text, images
• Linear and random access

26. Pilot Partner
The Hood Museum of Art
at Dartmouth College

27. About the Hood
• A university teaching collection
• 18 Full-time staff (down from 24)
• One web guy who also does publications
• Static web site (no google analytics)
• Facebook page has 381 fans
• Tried twitter and didn’t like it

28. Pilot Content
24 Paintings and Sculptures from the European Collection
• Object label as displayed
• Panel text
• Related images
• 7 - 10 thematic audio clips

29. ‘Agile’ Development Plan
• get something working fast
• test
• fix the most broken things
• rinse and repeat

30. Lessons Learned
(four easy, two hard)
• QR codes aren’t ready for prime time
• All phones are NOT created equal
• You can’t kill two birds with one stone
• Earphones
• The content iceberg
• Authority vs. Hospitality

31. Getting there
is half the fun
For the first test session anyway

32. QR codes aren’t ready for
prime time
• A lot of people had never seen them
• Nobody had ever scanned one
• Nobody had a QR code reader installed
• This was not what they wanted to think
about on a visit the the museum
On the other hand, they are a great attention-getter

33. All phones are NOT created Equal
• Not everybody has a smart phone
• Not everybody knows if their phone is ‘smart’
• Some people will try to use the site anyway
We decided to wait this one out...

34. You can’t kill two birds with one stone
• Learning curve - don’t make them think
• The sense of the visit
• Search vs. Lookup
• Missing objects
• Preferred content
We decided to build two different mobile interfaces
One for tours, the other for browsing

35. The Mobeum tour interface
just shows content from the tour

36. Mobile browser interface
provides access to all site content

37. But the underlying objects are the same

38. Earphones
• Cell phones are noisy even just for listening
• Not everybody carries earphones
• Sell them or loan them or give them away
• You can sell them for $2 and not lose money
The Hood hasn’t decided what to do about this yet
But they don’t get so many visitors that they need to worry...

39. That was pretty easy
...
Now for the hard ones

40. The Content Iceberg

41. If you are spending more time/money on technology
than you are spending on content,
You are probably misallocating your resources

42. And in closing,
a hard question I don’t have an answer to...

43. Authority or Hospitality?
• Who decides what is said?
• Who vets the content?
• Who interacts with the visitors?
Not everybody wants to interact with the ‘rabble’
But if you don’t interact with visitors,
then how can you know what they care about?
I don’t have an answer to this...