We’ve recently been involved in in a proposal for a brand new museum, putting together ideas for a large number of different interactives which address a number of gallery needs and look at a wide range of content.

We always hit the same problem with these projects: that the ambition of the work far outstrips the available budgets. And one of the reasons for this is that we seem to re-invent the wheel for each new interactive.

I can’t talk about the museum in question for obvious reasons, so let’s invent one for a thought experiment. Let’s call it The Ian Museum.

It opens next year and has four main galleries - Piano Heroes, Tea,  Why Football is Dull - and Ian: the Man, the Myth. So that’s a wide range of topics that will typically require a wide range of interactives.

In the traditional model we look at each of the galleries, identify the gaps that could be filled with digital content and then try to come up a wide variety of interesting routes through that content. Let’s have some games, some digital microscopes, a huge electronic encylopedia, a virtual film studio, a massive interactive timeline, a live ‘Video Nation’ style board, a large image of me… the list can go on and on.

Here’s the thing. Why should we re-invent digital content delivery from gallery to gallery? We don’t re-invent the signage or images, beyond gallery or thematic styling, so why do it when bits and bytes are involved.  ‘Hey, we used English in the last Gallery, that’s old hat - let’s write these signs backwards!’

Maybe a better way forward is to create a more standard set of interactives for a museum, the ‘bread and butter’ digital access points to more content. And maybe we shouldn’t give users access to vast swathes of content, maybe we should concentrate on smaller areas and really do them justice in terms of storytelling, design and on-screen/on-wall/on-PDA/on-whatever interaction. Maybe less is more.

Let’s be clear here. I am not advocating a reduction in digital content in museums. For one thing, I’d be doing myself out of a job. There is still room for ‘big ticket’ items in each gallery (that Big Experience thing I’m always going on about) but if we can streamline a large chunk of digital delivery and exploit the efficiencies inherent in this approach then there is more budget left in the pot for the ‘wow! factor’ installations we all love and want.

With that in mind, here’s my Less Is More Manifesto (drum roll…)

We should spend more time doing a smaller number of things really, really well

We should not provide endless amounts of information that the general public don’t want.

Let’s not provide high production value study areas for students and academics. Give them the content they need but deliver it in a more straightforward (i.e. cheaper) manner.

The average museum visitor (and yes I know there probably isn’t one but I never said my manifesto was perfect)  does not expect to come out of a gallery suddenly raised to the level of subject expert, so there’s no need to bombard them with too much information.

The onus is on museums and companies like Cogapp to provide simple and compelling digital experiences that concentrate on the key information, the most relevant stories.

Digital storytelling is a fabulous and flexible way to impart information and just because it can show a million pictures, doesn’t mean it has to.

Finding common ways to distribute information around a gallery or museum frees up budget and time for The Big Experiences. And every gallery needs some of those!

Finally, free 3G iPhones for all museum developers would be nice. But I might be out of luck with that one.

Of course this approach doesn’t work for every gallery and there is always a place for digital collections (at which Cogapp are notable practioners cough cough) but perhaps if we can find some simple but engaging ways of delivering smaller amounts of premium content, which can be duplicated and distributed around a gallery/museum (with due reference to gallery styling etc.) we can free up limited budgets for fewer, but perhaps more successful, big installations. It won’t work all the time, but it might work for some of it.

Right. I need a cup of tea. Now which museum would tell me about that..?

This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can’t do with it.

Okay, deep breath…

So you’re a major cultural institution; you’ve got fantastic content and you’re an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days). What happens when your most precious commodity leaks out online and starts appearing all over the place? What happens when the general public start to - gulp - edit it?

What can you do? Luckily there’s a simple answer to this one: nothing. You can’t do anything at all. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We can’t control the content other people generate, even if it borrows heavily on our own work (although certain ultra-rich authors might disagree with that). The cost involved in having staff trawl the web for doctored content and then try to fix it would be enormous - and pointless.

So if we accept that we have no control over this unauthorised content, we must ensure that there exists a definitive set of our ‘official’ content. If a Wikipedia article on a famous painting in your collection is wrong, that’s clearly not great. You can try policing all of those articles wherever they crop up but it’s probably easier to paint numbers onto waves. Better to provide tools that enable wikis and others to link back to your site - where you can provide your definitive guide to the work. You can’t really do much more than tell users where your opinion is held - and protect that site like a fortress!

Case in point - on a previous blog I wanted to include an image from a major institution’s collection, clearly mark it as their copyright and provide a link back into their online collection. But it turns out I can’t do that without emailing them, waiting for a response and possibly even paying them. I simply don’t have time for that, and of course there are lots of similar (free) images around. Result: they lost a link and free publicity.

We can’t stop people taking our content and doing what they want with it. And so the easier we make it for users to legitimately use or reference our content - in a way that you can control e.g. an object widget that users can embed in their own pages - the more likely they are to do so. A great commercial example of this is the iTunes Music Store. Why pay for a song that is wrapped up in DRM when you can ‘borrow’ one from peer-to-peer networks? Well, using those networks can be difficult (I am told) you have no guarantees as to the quality of the content you are accessing, download times vary, connections often drop… and the result is that Apple sell billions of songs a year. In this case - for the majority of users - it’s more work to break the law than to follow it.

So be as open as you can with your content but know where to draw the line. And User Generated Content? Well it has a place - although personally I’m not that interested in what Bernard from Skipton-Under-Lyme thinks of Marriage a la Mode - provided there is no confusion between users’ opinions and the curatorial one.

Rather than harvesting individual opinions it is perhaps more interesting to find out what society in general thinks of art - or as large a section of it as you can canvas. With that in mind do have a look at Brooklyn Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Click! in which they are creating a public-curated gallery based on online submissions and voting. Anyone can vote; the process is simple, effective and quite eye opening. It could be a triumph, it could be a disaster - but it’s a fascinating experiment and one which I will watch with interest.

And he takes another breath at last!

Most people use Flickr to say, here I am, here is this object or building and tag it so people can find it. I think I like the reverse more though.

A good friend Trevira is one of those people who collect the interesting and bizarre, mostly for aesthetic reasons alone, with out knowing what it is.

Flickr provides the perfect universe of Miss Marple’s and Dr.Watsons to do your detective work for you without having to resort to the long queues at the antiques roadshow and the humiliation of being told, in front of the masses on Sunday night television, that your prize Bakelite Elephant is a 2003 copy made in Southend-on-Sea.

Trevira’s identified items range from the ‘Billy Fury’ (way cooler than Adam Faith!) type.

…to precision Blackpool bus identifications.

VFR372 Leyland Atlantean PDR1 with 50 seat Weymann body. New in June1961 to Standerwick as No.30

It’s a real ‘History Reunited’ for extraordinary items and their past, with no alternative motives for one-upmanship on the class bully.

“I’m constantly amazed by the knowledge and helpfulness of Flickr people - and very, very grateful. ” says Trevira

This system might not be so applicable to some objects.

‘Here is an atom, can anyone describe its rules and behaviour?’ Might not get such measured results from undiscovered quantum physics geniuses out there, but as far as recognising your great auntie Nora on her holidays in Butlins Bognor Regis, just from her knobbly knees, it’s got real potential, and Flickr agree.

Just as Nasa images are not generally copyrighted the status of many ‘found’ objects is being re-described, until we know otherwise, as ‘no known copyright restrictions,’ specifically for Flickr’s The Commons project.

Organisations such as The Public Catalogue Foundation catalogue the nation’s resources of publicly owned images, many of which linger in museum cellars with unknown artists or subjects, currently fitting the ‘no known copyright restrictions’ model perfectly, and missing story or history.

The Flickr commons project first attracted our attention though the circulation of the amazing images The Library of Congress have put up, and secondly by the idea of crowd sourcing its research on the photos content.

Flickr say

“Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.”

And from the reaction on the Flickr blog it seems to have been a raging success so far.

“In the 24 hours after we launched, you added over 4,000 unique tags across the collection and just over 500 comments (most of which were remarkably informative and helpful), and the Library has made a ton of new friends (almost overwhelming the email account at the Library, thanks to all the “Someone has made you a contact” emails)!”

The Library of Congress Flickr albums are unusual and breathtaking. Women workers in the second world war have an otherworldly beauty akin to Hollywood stars. Sports stars of the past have a surprisingly natural physique. Unknown soldiers are brought to life. Pastoral dust bowl farms with subjects clearly uncomfortable in front of the lens give a real sense of the making of America.

Hopefully, the positive response will also encourage the Library and others to allow more of their materials to be tagged, enhanced and used by us “ordinary” people.

On a purely selfish note, I have owned this postcard for years –

Can anyone tell me more about it?

There are two kinds of people in the world - those that believe that there are two types of people in the world, and those that don’t.

When it comes to collecting, there probably are two types of people in the world. Those that collect, and those that don’t. I am a collector (or hoarder).

We work with a lot of Museums who are in the business of collecting, but I am intrigued by individuals that are compelled to put their own collections online.

The Stewardess Uniform Collection

The Cigarette Packs Collections
(This website is about cigarettes packs collection ! One of the biggest website on this subject in the world !)

This Is My Badge Collection

Welcome To My Police Hats Collection

The Incredible World of Navel Fluff

Looking at the examples above, it makes me wonder, in the new socially networked web, if there isn’t a service that could be offered to those who want to publish their own collection online; and to join these disparate collections together.

What do you think?