Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

Crowdsourcing can mean a variety of things, but it’s all about people helping you reach your goals. This is ideal for museums, because crowdsourcing can make people feel like they are contributing and engaging directly with us – because they are. Volunteer projects is a type of crowdsourcing that museums are very familiar with.

An offshoot of crowdsourcing is something called crowdfunding, which allows you to ask people for money for a specific project. It differs from donations because it usually has to relate to a specific project, making it time-bound and setting milestones and outcomes that need to be achieved. Kickstarter is a popular website for such projects, and it’s certainly the kind of thing museums should be looking into more. Earlier this year the Bowes Museum launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to re-display some artwork, for example.

This isn’t limited to exhibitions or full-sized museums, however. There’s a current project on Kickstarter in which a freelance conservator asks for funding to go to Bhutan to conserve sacred Thangkas. I genuinely hope she makes it. Conservation is engaging and interesting – there’s definitely a place for us on Kickstarter, whether we’re freelancers or companies or part of a museum. I hope to see a lot more of it in the future!

On a more quirky note: sometimes projects crop up on Kickstarter that challenge what you’d consider a museum to be. This is long since funded, but I love the concept nonetheless – the Mini Museum. Interesting!

What 3D scanning can do

I don’t know about you, but when I was an undergrad I was introduced to 3D scanning by my archaeology lecturers. We were given a demonstration of the equipment (mainly for giggles) and were told they used this technique to record Stonehenge. That was it.

I think the problem here is that they forgot there were heritage and museum students in the crowd, as well as archaeologists. They never told us what 3D scanning could be for. It was an archaeology recording tool, end of story. Scanning of objects was mentioned briefly, but not given any real weight in the talk.

Turns out 3D scanning can be a wonderful tool for heritage conservation. I found this little talk on TED by a man who preserves ancient monuments using this technology, and it’s pretty exciting stuff.

He makes an important point – we will lose our monuments and treasured buildings. Maybe not today. But at some point there will be an earthquake, a fire, or an act of extremists. It’ll be gone. At least this way it can be recreated digitally, and preserved for everyone to enjoy, no matter where they are.

It could also bring heritage sites to people with mobility problems. I have family who can never travel to see all these wonders – their health just won’t allow that. But what if we could bring the wonders to them, in exquisite detail?

Apps in conservation

The other week I wrote about apps, and this week I want to draw attention to something I thought was fantastic: apps in conservation.

There was a recent post on the Conservation DistList about a new iPhone app called ArtiCheck. I was all over it immediately. I love the concept of a standardised way to condition check objects using tools we all carry around anyway (smartphones).

Symbols used by the app to signify damage (Articheck 2013).

This app allows you to create condition reports on the fly, using standardised symbols and all sorts of nifty features to help you with the process. Reports are time stamped, kept securely in the cloud, and can easily and quickly be shared as needed. The app is currently designed for artwork, but over time it may be tailored to other types of collections as well (I’m an object conservator, so I need a more versatile solution).

The drawbacks for me are the fact that you have to pay a subscription fee to produce the condition reports (to me a more sensible option would be to pay for the app and then use it as much as you need to for no extra cost), and that the app is currently only available for iPhones and iPads. That’s no good to me. I’m poor, museums are suffering from budget cuts, and I my smartphone runs Android. That neatly cuts me out of the market for this.

But I do look forward to what they come up with in the near future. I hope to see more of this sort of thing!

Apps, apps, apps

Let’s talk about smartphones.

Most people have smartphones in one form or another these days. No, really. 60% of the UK population has a smartphone in 2013, according to New Media Trend Watch. Opinions diverge on whether there are more female or male users currently, but we’re pretty even overall. Smartphones seem to be popular with most people under 55 years of age – older users still favour traditional mobile phones.

Have some tasty statistics.

That still leaves us with a pretty huge chunk of the population though. How many of your visitors actually use smartphones? Tricky to say. There are no decent data sets for that yet, so you’ll have to ask your visitors yourself (although the V&A has an interesting article about their experiences). Depending on your demographics, smartphone users among your visitors could realistically be 10-60%.

56% of smartphone users are avid app users, according to Nielsen and MobiThinking earlier this year. Others are occasional users or don’t deal with apps at all, but numbers are likely to increase over the next few years as the range of both apps and users expand.

I personally love to see what museums and heritage organisations can do with smartphone apps.

Some interesting examples include:

• Love Art by the National Gallery: an iPhone app which allows visitors to access audio and other additional information about the paintings on display. Includes interviews with artists and experts.
• English Heritage Days Out by English Heritage: an Android app that shows you local events and other useful information about their historic properties.
• Streetmuseum by Museum of London: wonderful iPhone app that allows users to compare artwork of old London with modern London, street by street.
• World Heritage Map by Pikunosuke: an Android app that brings up a map of the world and lists all the World Heritage sites, alongside some basic information.
• Tate Trumps by Tate Modern: an iPhone app that encourages users to play a game and collect art around the galleries.
• National Trust by NT: basic Android app that allows you to find nearby historic properties and the relevant information. Covers Wales, England and Northern Ireland.

Let your imagination run wild. What could you do with apps? What could you do with apps that already exist? Museums in Sweden have had great success with using Instagram as a way of getting visitors to share their experiences via their phones.

Granted, there are obstacles. Do you have the ability to develop an app in-house? Do you develop an Android or iPhone app? Can you do both? Could  you hire someone if your organisation doesn’t have the skills needed?

I also hear people advocate that we cannot spend resources on something that only concerns those rich enough to own a smartphone. Well, we already cater to niche audiences. Why not technology-based ones? Not everyone is visually impaired, a school child or a born-and-bred local either. We cater to different people all the time. It’s what we do!

Webcams in Heritage

Today I saw a delightfully odd piece of news on the BBC – apparently the Andy Warhol museum is using a webcam to allow people to visit his grave, in honour of his 85th birthday.

I’ve noticed how zoos and animal shelters have had great success using webcams to attract online attention. Last summer I spent hours looking at bumbling kittens at a cat shelter while trying to stay sane during my dissertation – and so did my other coursemates. As Fox pointed out though, animals move and are thus generally interesting. I’m not suggesting webcams would work in exhibits all that well, but there may be other uses for them.

Aww, kittens!

Archaeology

People find excavations genuinely fascinating, but they can’t always visit the site themselves. Excavations can be in remote places, people can be housebound, or any number of obstacles. Putting up a few webcams – possibly utilising 3G to stream the imagery – around the excavation site may be a wonderful addition.

One could give an overview of the site, one could provide a glimpse of a current trench, and another cam could be placed wherever the finds are being processed. Imagine how intriguing it would be to tune in and see a piece of beautiful ceramic emerge from a muddy lump! Well, it gets me excited, at least. I’d love to see more of that stuff, and I’ve worked on things like that!

Conservation

This seems to be a huge opportunity to show the world more of what conservators do. Sure, you could technically screw up on cam, and that would be bad. But say you just want to show something basic, say the difference some solvent cleaning makes, or how to mix up some Paraloid B-72 and using it to stick something together. Not necessarly tutorials, just showing everyday activities to website visitors.

Behind-the-scenes activities are usually appreciated, and this may be a way of getting conservation in the spotlight. Perhaps a once a week conservation drop-in online would make a great addition to your digital presence?

Historic Houses and Museums

Like I said initially, I can’t see this working for exhibitions or individual objects. However, there are other things people may be interested in streaming from home:

• special events they can’t attend (talks, workshops, seminars, demonstrations, re-enactments) and that are fairly stationary (and thus lend themselves to webcams as opposed to full on filming);
• sneak peeks of preparations for a new exhibition (things getting installed, models being prepared, people scurrying around), perhaps with a countdown for the upcoming exhibit;
• behind-the-scenes activities.

Examples of possible uses.

The Nitty Gritty

Webcams aren’t all that expensive in the scheme of a museum budget. They’re not usually free, unless you can find a willing sponsor, but I imagine you can pick them up at a reasonable rate online (a quick browse on Amazon and eBay indicate a price range of £8 – £20 for a realtively high quality cam). You may even be able to pick them up second hand, depending on where your organisation is based and what your needs are.

They may be tantalizing to steal, but if you secure them properly and buy a cheap webcam to start with, this is a very small concern. A bigger concern may be getting permission from everyone involved to have their image broadcast on the internet – especially as many people are quite camera shy!