MCN 2019 sessions recordings

Anne, Director of Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property at Newfields and editor of the book "Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions", Aleksandra Strzelichowska, Collections Engagement Team, Senior Online Marketing Specialist from Europeana, and Mikka Associate General Counsel at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

SPEAKERS:

Ariadna Matas, Copyright Policy Advisor, Europeana Foundation

Sarah Pearson, Legal Counsel, Creative Commons

Andrea Wallace, Lecturer in Law, Exeter University

Organized by the Special Interest Group on Intellectual Property, Museum Computer Network and friends from the Open GLAM community!

The current global health emergency forced libraries and museums to organize digital engagement strategies, from #MuseumFromHome to making digital broadcasts. However, this doesn’t mean that copyright laws have been suspended from working. How do we deal with copyright in this public health emergency? What are the important things we need to be looking at when we make our digital engagement strategies? Where can we go to find openly available content from museums and libraries? How do we make sure that we can legally preserve some of the current records being created by these digital engagement strategies?

Friday, November 8, 2019

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh was interested in creating a virtual experience of We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene, an exhibition that looks at how human behavior is impacting the Earth and creating what some scientists call a new era. The exhibition invited visitors to explore the evidence and to consider how the changes that are occurring affect their lives in practical ways. The museum's goal is to reach a wider audience with this story and to convince funders to support an expanded version of the exhibition.

GuidiGO, in collaboration with MediaCombo, produced the virtual and interactive tour experience of “We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene." Users can visit the entire exhibition with an Oculus Go headset and "wander" into the gallery as if they were visiting a real space with interactive hotspots. The experience is based on a 3D capture of the exhibition shot in photogrammetry in August, 2018, as well as more than 150 HD 360 panoramas.

Panelists will talk about their collaboration and what they learned along the way about creating a completely new version of a museum exhibition, and the different objectives this project can achieve.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

- hear first hand about the work flow between one museum and two vendors to produce this product
- gain a better understanding of how to apply VR to the exhibition experience
- consider how creating a virtual reality version of one of their museum's exhibitions would benefit their institution
- consider other ways to enhance the VR experience to provide more information for visitors
- experience We Are Nature exhibition in an Oculus Go headset and compare that to the desktop experience

Speakers

Session Leader : Robin White Owen, Principal, MediaCombo

Speaker : Becca Schreckengast, Director of Exhibition Experience, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Speaker : David Lerman, CEO, GuidiGO

Friday, November 8, 2019

In the Fall of 2018, de Young Museum organized a pioneering exhibition entitled, ‘Contemporary Muslim Fashions’. The exhibition focused on the complex, diverse nature of Muslim dress codes worldwide. As we were the first major US museum to have ever explored this topic, we were up against a large amount of misinformation and Islamophobia. The questions quickly became: how do we educate our visitors on this subject while ensuring the museum is a welcoming environment to the Muslim community? We will tell the story of how we created a Facebook Group within the official museum Facebook page that grew to 500+ members sharing discussions on Muslim fashion, what it’s like to be Muslim in America, etc. These weren’t topics this community would have felt comfortable discussing in a public digital space, but by carving out a platform within our brand’s ecosystem, we fostered discussion that led to productive community engagement. By integrating representation and community outreach into our digital strategies rather than layering it on top simply for show, we can build spaces that amplify the voices of our communities and build more authentic connections.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have tangible examples of ways they can more authentically engage the communities they strive to represent. They will have guidance on how to broach intimidating topics and speak authentically, even when their staff may not represent the voices they aim to amplify.
By learning to ask the right questions, create with a purpose, and set clear goals at the outset of a project, attendees will also now be able to create more effective digital platform strategies by asking, “What is our goal in creating content for this platform? Who is our audience? What will they get out of this, and will they feel represented?”

Speakers

Session Leader : Jessie Ayala, Digital Engagement Manager, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Co-Presenter : Miriam Newcomer, Director of Communications, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Friday, November 8, 2019

How can museums utilize technology to co-create content with the public in ways that feel equitable and rewarding to all parties? Through our digital interpretive practice, Mia has come to view its work in relation to the public in rough terms of push, pull, and partner. We broadcast (“push”) museum-generated content; we commission (“pull”) content from members of the public. And sometimes we share authority over decision-making and content development (“partner.”) This panel will present two of Mia’s digital content partnerships through this push/pull/partner schema.

In one case, Mia sought to co-develop digital interpretive materials about traditional Somali artworks with Somali students enrolled in a University of Minnesota course on oral history. This project challenged our assumptions about how and when to use digital tools and the necessity of partnership and shared commitment to see a project through. We will also present our use of Hearken, a digital tool designed for public media newsrooms, to partner with our public on the development of an interpretive strategy for a Buddhist sculpture exhibit.

We will conclude with a set of considerations to bring to future opportunities to partner with the public on digital content creation in meaningful and dynamic ways.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Attendees will:

Learn how to strategically craft museum/community content partnerships that adapt to the skillsets and knowledge bases of the participants

Learn how and when to leverage technology based on community partners

Gain insight into how to manage through ambiguity

Think critically about the factors - funding, timeline, staffing - lead to successful projects

Speakers

Session Leader : Alex Bortolot, Content Strategist, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Co-Presenter : Gretchen Halverson, Digital Program Coordinator, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Friday, November 8, 2019

Over the course of the Collections as Data: Part to Whole project, Carnegie Museum of Art has not only increased points of access as related to the Teenie Harris collection data, but we are currently expanding our role as stewards by building in-gallery interactives for the public. Significantly, new information gathered from these interactives will then become a part of the collections as data that is then provided back into the community, beginning the cycle all over again. In the fall of 2019, CMOA will open a semi-permanent exhibition and community engagement space in its permanent galleries. This will be a dedicated Teenie Harris gallery space for exhibitions, community relations, and the omni-directional exchange of information with the public. This space will be staffed periodically by “citizen archivists” who will have a public facing presence to aid patrons in research and retrieval of images, as well as collecting image information of the who/where/when/why of Harris images. In addition to prints and gallery panels, these interactives will allow patrons to engage with faceted search, heat maps using GIS technology, personal and family identification using facial recognition technology, and public history using an amalgamation of newly developed programming.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After this session, attendees will walk away with concrete examples of how to consciously uplift the voice of under documented communities simultaneously within the walls of powerful institutions. All while using technology that has traditionally silenced those same under documented voices.

Speakers

Session Leader : Dominique Luster, Teenie Harris Archivist, Carnegie Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Teenie Harris Archive Specialist, Carnegie Museum of Art

Friday, November 8, 2019

Even in the year 2019, wayfinding continues to be one of the major challenges faced by museums and cultural attractions. With the arrival of augmented reality (AR), there is a light at the end of the tunnel for addressing the navigational needs of all visitors with new, innovative wayfinding tools that don’t rely on expensive hardware infrastructure. In this session, we will: - Provide a brief history lesson and examine all of the approaches that have attempted to address wayfinding in museums over the past decade. - Discuss the commonly known challenges to past hardware/sensor-based approaches to indoor wayfinding. - Show how AR and machine vision (AI) can be used to create a new type of wayfinding experience where directions appear overlayed on the visitor’s real-world view. - Convey how this new technology can be used to assist visitors with accessibility needs.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will be able to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the various benefits of augmented reality (AR) as it relates to wayfinding, ease of use, and accessibility.

Speakers

Session Leader : Brendan Ciecko, Founder & CEO, Cuseum

Co-Presenter : A. Andrea Montiel De Shuman, Digital Experience Designer, Detroit Institute of Arts

Friday, November 8, 2019

Over the last 12 years, Isuma’s Media Player technology has brought high quality indigenous language videos to remote, low-bandwidth Inuit communities in Nunavut, the territory in the Canadian arctic where we are based.

We launched IsumaTV in 2007 as an indigenous language video streaming platform. Yet soon after we realized that the majority of the Inuit were unable to watch IsumaTV through the cloud, due to the fact that Inuit communities have one of the most expensive and slow internet connections in the world. We were pushed to find a way for Inuit to access the Inuktitut language videos on IsumaTV.

We came up with the idea of our Media Players, an edge computing network that gives remote communities access to their videos and films by locally hosting the entire content of IsumaTV (now 8,000 videos in more than 70 languages). The media players gradually synchronize and transcode new videos, audio, images and other large files to and from the central website as they are uploaded.

We have since installed Media Players in more than 15 indigenous communities. Many of these communities have used them as a repository of Inuit content in their libraries, schools, and local television stations.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will learn how our Media Players and edge computing can make multimedia archives engaging and accessible for remote, low-bandwidth communities.

Speaker: David Ertel, Developer, Isuma

Friday, November 8, 2019

With the introduction of the Pen in 2015, Cooper Hewitt established itself as a pioneer in digitally-integrated visitor experience. Four years on, we’re creating what’s next. Rather than working behind closed doors, we’re opening up our design process and living our mission – “to educate, inspire and empower people through design.”

The recently-launched Cooper Hewitt Interaction Lab will introduce a user-centered process to the museum’s visitor experience design process. We’ve designed the Lab’s activities to bring our strategic plan to life - emphasizing inclusive, digitally-integrated design.

As a space for research, experimentation and assessment, the Lab will keep with the pace of new technological development, grounded in visitor insight. In addition to an already collaborative design process, we will also launch a slate of public programs to involve an even wider community.

This year’s MCN theme aligns beautifully with our aims for the Interaction Lab, which itself will be a collaborative, transparent interface between the museum, art/technology/design communities and the audiences we’re designing with and for. This session will provide an overview of the Lab, with emphasis on “Lab as interface” and the methods and approaches we’ll use to bring this to life.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have learned about a new way to approach visitor experience design that is collaborative and transparent, and how to align it with your organization’s mission and purpose.

Speakers

Session Leader : Carolyn Royston, Chief Experience Officer, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Co-Presenter : Rachel Ginsberg, Interaction Lab Director, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Friday, November 8, 2019

Human-centered design, service design, and design thinking represent the current zeitgeist, deeply embedded in how we think of our practice. Potentially a reductionist, jargonistic approach, these terms are at times used interchangeably. Yet the origins and use of each signify a distinct, specific approach to relationships between staff and visitors. We declare that museums are not neutral, and while well-intentioned and sincere, we as a field are actively choosing frameworks that are built on “othering”.

In this provocative session, I argue that human-centered design and related ideologies are important critical steps towards more inclusive institutions, yet they are ultimately hampered by their capitalist corporate roots. In adopting such an approach, museums can improve the visitor experience for the better while still neglecting larger community and mission-driven goals.

Our current practice values inclusivity, visitor input, and evidence-based practice. Yet through the choice of specific frameworks such as human-centered design for the development of our tools, programs, exhibits, and evaluation strategies we ultimately risk perpetuating a culturally dominant paradigm. By striving for empathy rather than sharing authority, we miss our mark. Seeking input on specific individual needs and motivations for use of a product feeds the tragedy of the commons.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Participants will be armed with deeper knowledge regarding choice of frameworks, and the implications on how inclusive and authentic our work truly is. Rather than choosing design frameworks that intentionally or unintentionally maintain inequity, participants will gain a broader set of frames to question, and then address, the underlying structures and processes related to how we develop technology and other museum content.

Speaker: Kate Haley Goldman, Principal, HG&Co

Friday, November 8, 2019

This session will provide helpful insights and tips to the MCN community about IMLS’s funding focus on digitization, digital platforms, applications and professional development. Information shared will help the sector focus on gaps, potential partnerships, opportunities and challenges. Case studies of awarded grant projects around the themes of learning, community and collections will further enlighten attendees about lessons learned. The session will be chaired and moderated by Paula Gangopadhyay, Deputy Director of the Office of Museum Service who brings years of visionary leadership and experience around leveraging assets and providing greater access to digital museum resources.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy

Key Outcomes

After attending the session participants will be able to learn about:
o New funding opportunities offered by IMLS for digital projects
o Case studies of few successful projects and lessons learned
o Idea generation for future projects that can address some of the sector gaps and forge new collaborations

Speakers

Session Leader : Paula Gangopadhyay, Deputy Director, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

Co-Presenter : Wendy Derjue-Holzer, Education Director, Harvard Museums of Science and Culture

Co-Presenter : Jessica York, Deputy Director and Chief Advancement Officer, Mingei International Museum

Friday, November 8, 2019

Launching in June 2020, this online exhibition will be a digital platform for youth to discover and rediscover Toronto’s music history and its impact on Canadian history and culture. Sounds Like Toronto encourages visitor engagement with known and unknown stories, by layering them through digital interpretation and storytelling tools: visitors will interact with 3D objects, listen to audio and video interviews, watch archival material, and walk through two 360-degree interactive digital photography experiences of Toronto’s most iconic music venues – Massey Hall and the Concert Hall.

Through extensive youth audience research and evaluation, using mobile responsive design, timelines graphic treatments, embedding online listening experiences through Spotify, and encouraging accessible first compliancy, Sounds Like Toronto creates a meaningful, engaging, and relevant online music exhibition.

To develop emotional connections with musicians that a younger audience has limited exposure to, we developed a timeless mobile first, design patterns. We discovered the proper balance between a contemporary and historical visual language that connects with all users.

Funded through the Virtual Museum of Canada, Sounds Like Toronto will become part of the largest source of online content shared by small and large Canadian museums and cultural institutions.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will be able to apply new strategies that engage younger audiences digitally by communicating with them in ways that they are comfortable. We will explore how to select and prepare content in an engaging way that connects with the target audience that may initially feel disconnected based on different generational perspectives. Participants will recognize the importance of preliminary, formative, and summative audience research, and discover how accessible projects are not limited creatively and that are mobile responsive.

Speakers

Session Leader : Warren Wilansky, President & Founder, Plank

Co-Presenter : Emily Berg, Interpretive Planning Specialist, Heritage Toronto

Friday, November 8, 2019

If you could wave a magic wand and create an instant, organization-wide content strategy, what would it do? What problems would it solve? How would you measure its success? And how would it be sustained over time?

This panel will discuss strategies that balance mission-supporting principles, aligning the disparate desires of internal stakeholders, and the day-to-day work of creating effective content. In an age of increasingly diversified technology platforms and their never-ending evolutions - from social media, to onsite kiosks, to voice assistants, and mobile web - the process of creating robust content has never been more complex. An enduring challenge is measuring success across digital experiences and for different audiences, and going beyond traditional numbers-based metrics to define outcomes like “engagement.” For museums and cultural organizations, this is where meaningful, mission-centered content strategies can be born.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Session attendees will gain insights in:
1. Defining internal stakeholders, external audiences, and understanding their roles
2. Identifying and creating organizational goals
3. Questions and organizing principles to consider in a content strategy initiative
4. Creating and maintaining best-practices
5. Measuring success against mission-based goals, and cultivating internal support

Speakers

Session Leader : Ariana French, Director, Digital Technology, American Museum of Natural History

Co-Presenter : Brad Dunn, Web and Digital Engagement Director, The Field Museum

Co-Presenter : Jessica BrodeFrank, Digital Collections Access Manager, Adler Planetarium

Co-Presenter : Susan Edwards, Associate Director, Digital Content, Hammer Museum

Co-Presenter : Laura Mann, Principal, Frankly, Green + Webb

Friday, November 8, 2019

Our collections may be digitised, and our exhibits interactive. Our channels may be multiple and our infrastructure technical. And yet, whatever the level of connectivity we might have in our museums, whatever prevalence of technology there may be, everything, always comes down to the skills of the staff at the heart of the organisation.

That is why for the last two years the ‘One by One’ national research project in the UK (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) has been attempting to understand the conditions that need to be in place in any museum to allow digital skills to thrive in the workforce.

Bringing together leading professional agencies within the UK (including the Museums Association, Association of Independent Museums, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Culture24 and the Collections Trust) this 30-month project is now nearing completion and is ready to explore its insights with the MCN community.

This session will share the findings of the six action research projects (led by a network of ‘Digital Fellows’ embedded in museums across the country), each exploring the critical importance to digital skills development of: clarifying values; distributing leadership; centring people; ensuring agency; and cultivating creativity.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session participants will be able to:
- Identify the conditions that need to be in place in any museum to allow digital skills to thrive in the workforce.
- Use workable and modern definitions for museums of ‘Digital' (something we use, something we manage, something we create, something we understand), and ‘Skills’ (differentiating between competency, capability and literacy).
- Apply a range of practical interventions and activations in their own institutions to kick start the move to digital confidence.
- Question how the MCN community (specifically) and the US (generally) could build its own sector-wide collaboration to support the development of museum digital skills.

Speaker: Ross Parry, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Digital) / Professor of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

Friday, November 8, 2019

This professional forum will explore different types of academic museums as potential models for collaboration, iteration and public exchange. Digital roles in academic museums are highly collaborative while serving the needs of stakeholders from across their institutions. Participants from other types of museums can learn from how they operate as digital roles leverage their unique position in a broader organization. Academic museums are platforms for public interchange with a wide variety of disciplines, and they operate as “laboratories” of a sort in which digital roles are well suited to the “start small and scale up” models of development. The discussion applies to the conference theme as it focuses on digital roles in academic museums that are at the center of public interchange with a variety of disciplines. Digital roles in academic museums are uniquely positioned to collaborate with a variety of internal and external communities.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After this session, participants will be able to:
*Identify how their museum might collaborate with museum technologists in academic museums to leverage their abilities to work with a variety of disciplines.

*Think about how their museum could look to digital in academic museums as a model for how they develop projects.

*Know how digital roles can be supported in academic museums.

*Identify opportunities for positioning their own museums as a resource for researchers from academic institutes to engage in public discourse.

Speakers

Session Leader : Max Evjen, Department of Theatre/Digital Humanities Coordinator, Michigan State University

Co-Presenter : Chad Weinard, Independent Museum Technology Strategist, Independent

Co-Presenter : Megan Reel, Assistant Collections Manager - Ethnology, Museum of Texas Tech University

Co-Presenter : David Nunez, Director of Technology and Digital Strategy, MIT Museum

Thursday, November 7, 2019

As museum, library, and digital practitioners, we work regularly with many diverse communities. The desire to best serve curators, researchers, students, faculty, and staff is built into the core mission of cultural heritage institutions. On cross-functional and cross-institutional projects, we need internal collaboration to bring our external offerings to the next level. On collaborative digital projects, we not only have to mediate how we interface with each other, often across disciplinary boundaries, but also how technological systems and infrastructure interface as well. So how do we negotiate between the often competing needs of our communities and make decisions that move our work forward? In this panel, participants from five institutions with different perspectives, circumstances, and processes address how they have approached negotiating among interfaces and communities. All of the institutions have embarked on projects supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to encourage collaboration between libraries and museums and to make arts and cultural heritage resources more widely discoverable and available. Our aim in this panel is not to present “one-size-fits-all” solutions but to reflect the range of communities, decision-making processes, institutions, and choices available to museums and libraries embarking on collaborative digital projects.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will gain a better understanding of how to approach collaborative decision-making and how to structure and sustain a grant-funded project. Participants will be able to:
-Identify important collaborative considerations for applying or thinking about applying for a Mellon grant
-Use these case studies as examples for how to make choices that reflect their missions, visions, and commitments
-Understand diverse internal institutional and external community perspectives

Speakers

Session Leader : Juliet Vinegra, Project Manager, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Abigail Shelton, Outreach Specialist, Mellon Museum Library Collaboration Grant, Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame

Co-Presenter : Jessica Breiman, Librarian, University of Utah

Co-Presenter : Adrienne Figus, Project Manager, Mellon Museum and Library Collaboration Grant, Smith College

Co-Presenter : Karina Wratschko, Digital Initiatives Librarian; NDSR Art Program Manager, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Thursday, November 7, 2019

An Adler Planetarium Survey of Visitors and Supporters conducted in 2018 by Cygnus Applied Research Inc., showed that 32.8% of guests responded they came to the Adler to learn about our artifacts. 62% reported attending for Sky Shows, and 50.9% reported wanting a hands-on experience. While the Adler is working to create larger changes to address these survey results, new exhibits can be a great opportunity to directly address the issues above. They allow a museum or institution to create a new, fresh, and interactive experience for a more diverse, young adult audience. However, time and budget can often restrict our ability to meet these challenges. Keeping these challenges in mind, the Adler Collections Department worked with Zooniverse team members from the Adler’s Department of Citizen Science and with the Guest Experience team to create a new interactive for the upcoming “Chicago’s Night Sky” exhibition, opening in November 2019. In this panel, we will look at the creation of the “Mapping Historic Skies” in-gallery experience from our various points of view: as subject matter experts, interactive designers, and visitor experience representatives.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will be able to gauge visitor data to create content for audiences, turn large data sets into crowdsourcing projects while identifying reasonable goals for these projects. We will also hope to inspire the use of an existing platform for exhibition work, while focusing on the development of interactive workflows that engage both guests and the institution's mission. Participants will also see best practices for interdepartmental collaboration, and fitting an interactive within a larger exhibition narrative.

Speakers

Session Leader : Jessica BrodeFrank, Digital Collections Access Manager, Adler Planetarium

Co-Presenter : Samantha Blickhan, Humanities Research Lead/ IMLS Postdoctoral Fellow, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium

Co-Presenter : Michael Stellfox, Guest Experience Admin & Project Manager, Adler Planetarium

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Ranging from open-access collections to interactive maps and new forms of digital media, museums have expanding opportunities for presence online. Through two case studies, this panel highlights new and in-progress digital resources at the Freer|Sackler, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art. It especially considers the role of curators in the development of websites and in-gallery digital features. The two case studies will open discussions on collaborations between curatorial and digital departments.

The Southeast Asia Collections Website is a portal into all related objects, exhibitions, events, and resources at the museum. Its centerpieces are a filtered collection search and a robust interactive map of sacred sites in Southeast Asia, built from firsthand field research and amply illustrated with site photos.

The exhibition, Body of Devotion: The Cosmic Buddha in 3D, resulted from diverse team effort. In-house curators and digital experts collaborated with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office to create 3D scans and modeling. These allowed us to interpret the work in new ways and pushed us into innovative technologies and display possibilities, including augmented reality. Working with the museum’s accessibility task force further resulted in an upcoming touch- and audio-based presentation of the sculpture’s visual stories.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

valuate and prioritize collection-based narratives that lend themselves to repurposed digital delivery
Strategically identify partners in the ideation, digitization, and implementation phases of an interpretive project
Leverage existing assets and evergreen content to (re)contextualize collections

Speakers

Session Leader : Ryan King, Project Manager, Open Access, Smithsonian Institution

Co-Presenter : Keith Wilson, Curator of Ancient Chinese Art, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art

Co-Presenter : Emma Stein, Curatorial Fellow for Southeast Asian Art, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art

Co-Presenter : Liz Cheng, Web Team Lead, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art

Co-Presenter : Farrokh Rezaei, Database Administrator, Smithsonian central office of IT, Smithsonian Institution

Thursday, November 7, 2019

The complexity of software-based art continues to challenge media conservators in their quest for best preservation practices. An ever growing body of literature on case studies has been written and published underlining how often multiple and concurrent preservation strategies are needed in order to ensure the perpetuation and unfolding of these works in the future. In the last few years, institutions have started collecting iOS mobile applications. Multi-faceted in their platform dependencies and distribution systems, App-based software preservation is intrinsically linked to the the breakneck pace with which mobile phone technologies and related software are released, adopted, and rendered obsolete. This process is further heightened by the reliance on the authoring and delivery restrictions enforced by Apple which limits the control the creators have over the availability and sustainability of their iOS App-based artworks. How can the preservation challenges of these artworks add to our understanding of software based art? Which strategies, tools, and workflows can be applied to mitigate risks associated to iOS App-based art obsolescence? This talk will examine cases studies of mobile app artworks from two institution's collections - Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have a more informed understanding for what enables a mobile application and the many interdependent systems that must be frozen in time in order for these applications to be accessible and usable into the future. It will hopefully instill thoughtfulness around how to promote advocacy for digital preservation within the app-development community and find pathways to sustain these objects through creative partnerships (e.g. with developers or producers of these diffuse technologies).

Speakers

Session Leader : Joey Heinen, Digital Preservation Manager, LACMA

Co-Presenter : Morgan Kessler, Media Collections Manager, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Thursday, November 7, 2019

We are now living in a post-app digital world. In 2010, Apple trademarked the phrase “there’s an app for that.” Since then, it really did seem like there was an app for almost everything, including every museum. Now, a decade after the launch of the App Store, what’s happened to all those apps?

In 2019 the Jewish Museum unveiled a new platform-agnostic mobile tour for the smart phone-equipped visitor of today—no app downloads required. Designed as a Single-Page Application, the platform is accessible across all devices and browsers, lowering the barrier to entry. Equally important, the platform facilitates multiple layers of rich storytelling, allowing visitors to “choose their own adventure” as they select various thematic pathways through the collection. Audiences may take a tour from artists like Kehinde Wiley and Isaac Mizrahi, hear a rabbi discuss the origins of Jewish ritual, or join the conversation with a group of 5th graders as they explore the museum.

This panel will bring together team members responsible for the mobile platform design and new approach to storytelling to discuss the ways technology and content were developed in tandem, as well as in response to the Museum’s unique operating model and functional needs.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent

Key Outcomes

This panel aims to stage an in-depth conversation about the ways that technology and content may be developed in tandem to serve the larger interpretive and audience development goals of an institution with many, layered stories to tell. Attendees will gain insight into the process of developing a technology solution and content strategy that invites many voices and perspectives into the interpretative conversation. Participants will be able to identify the thinking, rationale, approach, and lessons-learned which drove the Museum’s platform and content development, and reflect on the strategies which might best fit their own institution.

Speakers

Session Leader : Nora Rodriguez, Visitor Content Coordinator, The Jewish Museum

Co-Presenter : John Simoniello, Executive Producer, Creative, Acoustiguide, Inc.

Speaker : Claudia Abrishami, Design Director, Code & Theory

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Meet the MCN 2019 Scholars! Each year MCN awards scholarships to 15 emerging leaders in the field of museum technology—and this is your chance to hear from them. In each session, 5 scholars deliver a series of lightning talks to present key findings and guiding questions from their current (or recently-completed) projects/research. From strategy to systems, content to the visitor experience, scholars share their diverse interests, expertise, and perspectives. Join us in this annual conference tradition to celebrate their work.

Featured Scholars

Session Leader : Andrea Ledesma, Digital Content Coordinator, Field Museum

Thursday, November 7, 2019

In late 2016 the Minnesota Historical Society set out to update websites for the twenty six historical locations it manages.

The project introduced necessary, and difficult questions about what the relationship should be between web and physical sites; and how could we, designers and developers, best represent the shifting output of this ongoing conversation. This work was further complicated by an aggressive timeline necessitated by technical, security, design and accessibility issues that plagued the current sites. The sites needed to be built a.s.a.p., which, when the last site was launched in Nov. of 2018, translated to approximately one site per month.

Additional requirements included: •Allowing the sites to represent the historical scope of various locations ranging from the Minnesota State Capitol to a vacant field that was the site of an historic saw mill. •Working with various departments and a network of dispersed site managers. •Building something that would be used.

This presentation will focus on the modular design and development steps employed to achieve these goals. Attention will be given to a range of processes both analog (using paper wireframes to envision the template for the new sites) and digital (building a custom suite of content layout tools).

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackStrategy

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will be able to understand the process the Minnesota Historical Society undertook to synthesize the diverse amount of content, departmental knowledge, and technical requirements in to a flexible web presentation.

Speaker: Meleck Davis, Senior Designer/Developer, Minnesota Historical Society

Thursday, November 7, 2019

In 2018, Knight Foundation funded a dozen project through their Prototype Fund to test new approaches to technology in cultural institutions. This session will gather insights from these projects, speak to the prototyping model and advocate for approaches to taking smart risks with technology.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have insights to recent experiments in audience-centered technology. They will hopefully take home an appreciation for iterative approaches to project development.

Speakers

Panelist : Pattie Reaves, Principal UX Developer, Alley Interactive

Panelist : Shane Richey, Creative Director, Experimentation and Development, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Panelist : Brian Kirschensteiner, Head of Production, MSU Broad

Thursday, November 7, 2019

A native mobile or progressive web app can provide the opportunity to create a personal connection with each visitor. Offering the visitor with fun and engaging mobile tools to explore your institution and its cultural objects in their own language, their level of interest, adapting to their accessibility needs and to their age group, are just some of the criteria for a personal and valuable companion tool. Over the past year, augmented reality (AR) has been one of the most talked about breakthrough technologies in the museum and cultural sector.

During this session, the panel will provide an inside look into a variety of mobile and AR initiatives. We will have an open discussion around the opportunities, approaches, ethics and how museums can participate and encourage experimentation by outsider developers and artists, and how AR can be used to further drive engaging experience.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Participants who are looking for a mobile strategy should benefit from this session, they will be able to get resources to move their mobile project forward, including links to documents and the mobile code framework.

Speakers

Session Leader : Marquis Côté, Director of Digital Technologies, Canadian Museum of History

Co-Presenter : Brendan Ciecko, Founder & CEO, Cuseum

Co-Presenter : Ryan Dodge, Head of Digital Experiences, Canadian Museum of History

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Museums for Digital Learning (MDL) is a special initiative funded by the IMLS with the goal of building the capacity of museums to connect K-12 teachers and students with digitized collections and related resources. During this two-year pilot project, the technology team at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, the education teams of The Field Museum and History Colorado , and a cohort of K-12 educators are collaborating to build a shared platform with a pilot suite of educational resources that will make it possible for museums of varied types and sizes to leverage their existing digital collections and media in the creation of open educational resources.

In this session, representatives from IMLS, Newfields, TFM, and HC will provide an overview of the MDL project. This will include not just a demonstration of the in-development pilot platform, but also a discussion of the methods employed by the museum partners to foster meaningful communication and collaboration with a team of educators from around the country. As co-creators, the educators have played a crucial role in shaping both the platform and an initial collection of educational resources. Come to this session to learn about how your museum can potentially get involved!

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have in-depth knowledge of the model for cross-sector communication and collaboration employed by the MDL partner museums to foster meaningful interfacing with a cohort of K-12 educators during the 2-year pilot project. Following a demonstration of the pilot platform and an initial collection of educational resources created in the platform, participants will have the opportunity to provide feedback to inform continued development of the pilot platform and materials. Attendees will also learn about how they and their institutions can participate in the pilot phase of MDL as additional museum partners, creating and publishing digital educational resources that feature museum collections.

Speakers

Session Leader : Patrick Cavanagh, Manager of Technology Development and Implementation, Newfields

Co-Presenter : Paula Gangopadhyay, Deputy Director, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

Co-Presenter : Carla Lents, Learning Resource Coordinator, Field Museum of Natural History

Co-Presenter : Stuart Alter, Principal, The Getty

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Meet the MCN 2019 Scholars! Each year MCN awards scholarships to 15 emerging leaders in the field of museum technology—and this is your chance to hear from them. In each session, 5 scholars deliver a series of lightning talks to present key findings and guiding questions from their current (or recently-completed) projects/research. From strategy to systems, content to the visitor experience, scholars share their diverse interests, expertise, and perspectives. Join us in this annual conference tradition to celebrate their work.

Featured Scholars

Session Leader : Jessica BrodeFrank, Digital Collections Access Manager, Adler Planetarium

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Regardless of our institutions’ physical locations, our online collections are accessible worldwide. As museums embrace open access, the call to make digital surrogates of public domain assets freely available, and the associated requirement to evaluate and declare their rights status, increases. Yet, duration of copyright varies across countries; works that are in the public domain in one may remain under copyright in another. A work may be created in one jurisdiction, published (or the equivalent) in a second jurisdiction, housed and digitized in third, and aggregated and accessed worldwide. Exceptions, legal decisions and practices may also vary, while international copyright treaties aim to provide a baseline across countries. In a potentially groundbreaking development, Article 14 of the new European Union Copyright Directive codifies the equivalent of the US Bridgeman decision (i.e., no separate copyright in reproductions of public domain works) across EU member countries, which have two years to enact local legislation in compliance. What are the practical implications for online collections and collaborative digital projects with stakeholders from both EU and non-EU collections? And what are the corresponding ethical and moral rights implications related to digital cultural heritage? Does online access make every copyright question an international copyright question?

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have a greater awareness of recent developments in international copyright law and intellectual property in cultural heritage, will have a better understanding of what challenges this may present for their projects, and understand the considerations of an international collaborative digital project (PHAROS, an international consortium of photo archives) surrounding these issues.

Speakers

Session Leader : Melissa Fournier, Head of Imaging and Intellectual Property, Yale Center for British Art

Co-Presenter : Mikka Gee Conway, Associate General Counsel, The J. Paul Getty Trust

Co-Presenter : Emily Lanza, Counsel, U.S. Copyright Office

Co-Presenter : Andrea Wallace, Lecturer, University of Exeter

Thursday, November 7, 2019

This panel will look at the lessons learned from the experience of IIIF practitioners in terms of what it takes to institutionally adopt IIIF, and what it takes to collaboratively define the ever evolving IIIF specifications.

The panelists will share experiences from deploying IIIF as a shared standard across different collection types within an institution, such as different curatorial departments within a museum, or across several GLAMs collections within an institution, such as an academic campus. Questions to be explored will include: what are the strategic motivations behind such institutional deployments? What are the challenges of a collaborative approach to designing multidisciplinary collections interfaces? How are user research findings balanced with the temptation to roll out innovative interfaces? What are the implications for teaching and learning?

A high-level description of the mechanisms governing the IIIF community will be also provided, including an overview of its international community groups and organizational structure, as well as its distributed model for the development of its technical specifications. The panelists will reflect on how the IIIF Consortium can engage more deeply with GLAMs, and museums specifically, especially on issues around technological requirements.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, attendees will have learned about the benefits and challenges of community shared standards, especially with users in mind. They will have learned about recently deployed IIIF instances in academic centers such as Yale University, J. Paul Getty Trust, and others.

Speakers

Session Leader : David Newbury, Enterprise Software Architect, J. Paul Getty Trust

Co-Presenter : Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Collections Data Manager, Yale Center for British Art

Co-Presenter : Thomas R. Raich, Director of Information Technology, Yale University Art Gallery

Thursday, November 7, 2019

We set out to address the question, How can we create an engaging experience that allows people to interact with the Field Museum’s newest—and biggest—dinosaur? The result is Message Máximo (fieldmuseum.org/maximo), a chat experience that lets users text or online message Máximo the Titanosaur. Seeking to develop an easy-to-use, friendly, and welcoming interface that creates opportunities for personalized interactions, we placed a particular focus on persona definition, content strategy, and conversational logic.

In a discussion of our process, challenges, and learnings as we developed Message Máximo, this session will cover topics that may be relevant to a wide variety of content-heavy projects: identifying content scope, creating interactions that are both engaging and also integrate learning opportunities, and anticipating users’ needs and expectations.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

As a result of this session, participants will have a better understanding of the functionalities of Dialogflow, a free AI chat platform, and its capabilities in creating educational and conversational chatbot experiences. Session attendees will understand one approach to navigating a large-scale, ever-growing content project with time and resource considerations and be able to apply these learnings to their own digital engagement projects, whether a chatbot or other content-driven project.

Speakers

Session Leader : Caitlin Kearney, Digital Content & Engagement Manager, Field Museum

Co-Presenter : Caitlin Pequignot, Senior Digital Strategist, Purple, Rock, Scissors

Co-Presenter : Katharine Uhrich, Social Media Manager, Field Museum

Thursday, November 7, 2019

In a digital ecosystem of 24/7 communication we are fielding alerts, following relevant news, and responding to never-ending social media comments, messages, requests and more. But with the ever-growing list of responsibilities and expectations for digital communication professionals, how can we keep our mental health priority #1? Social media managers have unique challenges when it comes to mental health: it's not easy to just "unplug" for self-care. In this session, we will discuss how social media can affect your mental health, how to identify burnout and explore strategies to handle and recover from it.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will be able to better understand digital burnout, explore ways of avoiding it, and also how to overcome burnout when it happens.

Speakers

Session Leader : Kaytee Smith, Chief Content Officer, NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources

Co-Presenter : Claire Lanier, Senior Manager of Social Media, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Lucy Redoglia, Digital Marketing & Social Media Specialist, Consultant

Co-Presenter : Lynda Kelly, Director, LyndaKellyNetworks

Thursday, November 7, 2019

In 2018, the Hirshhorn Museum unveiled the Hirshhorn Eye, an in-museum mobile site that uses image recognition to let Hirshhorn visitors hear directly from artists. It won three first place awards and was described by the media as “a museum mobile guide that’s actually cool.” However, this marked the first step in an iterative and collaborative vision for furthering accessibility and increasing visitor engagement across the near-museum network. In 2019, with help from the Hirshhorn, the United States Diplomacy Center is adopting the technology for their exclusive primary source material. The technology is also expanding to the wider Smithsonian museum network. Panelists from Hirshhorn, the Diplomacy Center, and National Air and Space Museum, share three perspectives on the strategy, data insights and implementation of this technology.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will gain insight in evaluating and utilizing technology to deepen and widen physical exhibits. Participants interested in acquiring this technology or something similar will walk away with a roadmap to adoption. They will understand expectations and criteria for implementing this technology. All participants will gain data-driven insight for in-museum mobile sites, testing models, and an overview of related technology, such as real time imaging. There will also be applicable marketing takeaways.

Speakers

Session Leader : Kelsey Cvach, Digital Content Producer, United States Diplomacy Center

Co-Presenter : Jacob Kim, Web and Digital Manager, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Co-Presenter : Samia Khan, Project Specialist, National Air and Space Museum

Thursday, November 7, 2019

A class of 15 Media Arts students from New Mexico Highlands University, in partnership with NM Historic Sites and the tribal governors at Jemez Pueblo in Jemez Springs, NM completed a full redesign and installation of the visitors center at Jemez Historic site during a semester intensive. The goal was to shift the focus to a pueblo/indigenous perspective, rather than the just the Spanish conquest. Using scalable digital media, the students designed, developed ,and installed extensive large-format projection mapping, screen-based interaction, responsive exhibits in restrooms (it is a small building and we had to maximize gallery space!), and a lasered/CNC floor to illustrate a map of yet-to-be- excavated native ruins.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will gain some insight in to the practice of working with a council of tribal members to re-envision a traditional visitors center that welcomes about 40,000 visitors per-year, one where most visitors possess no prior knowledge of the history of indigenous culture or contemporary indigenous life.

Speakers

Session Leader : Miriam Langer, Prof of Cultural Technology/Media Arts, NMHU

Co-Presenter : Terence Garcia, Graduate Student, Media Arts NMHU, New Mexico Highlands University

Co-Presenter : Ethan Ortega, New Mexico Historic Sites Instructional Coordinator, New Mexico Historic Sites

Co-Presenter : Ali Romero, student, Media Arts, New Mexico Highlands University, New Mexico Highlands University

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Over the last 20 years, staff in museums have built up scores of documents, images, and videos, that were used for a myriad of planning and creating activities. Among these files there are many legacy files from staff members who have come and gone throughout this time period. Now our on-premises systems are at capacity and we are moving to the cloud! Applications and backups are hosted outside the museum facility, and staff members are independently moving their files to sharing applications to facilitate collaborations among themselves and with outside partners. How do we begin to look at what we have, cull unneeded files, permanently keep parts of our institutional history? What are the driving forces behind the need to clean up? And how should we put into place guidelines for sharing and saving files moving forward? In this Deep Dive session, we will review file management throughout the lifecycle of institutional records and the problems that museums face in assessing the overall data environment, and we will open the discussion about figuring out how best to sort through these materials given that many of us are working with little time or resources.

Session TypeDeep Dive

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Speakers

Session Leader : Rebecca Menendez, Director, Information Services and Technology, Autry Museum of the American West

Speaker : Bryon Thornburgh, Director of Technology, Denver Art Museum

Speaker : Abigail Cramer, Digital Asset Manager/Digital Archivist, Harvard Art Museums

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Now more than ever, museums hire storytellers of all types to create content that is central to museum experiences and museum identity. It can be in all kinds of media, including text, audio, video, interactives, and totally immersive. The storyteller can be a solo freelancer, a production company, a large design firm, or any combination. In this Deep Dive, three storytellers who have worked with a huge range of museums in the USA, the UK, and Europe talk honestly about how to get the best out the relationship. What are the best processes? What makes everything easier? What makes things harder? What makes for the best outcome? What causes stumbling blocks that result in a less inspiring outcome than you were hoping for? What causes cost overruns? This session, in the form of an open give-and-take, will air it all. The goal is that you will come away with greater confidence about how to structure your future storytelling projects and how to create happier working relationships that lead to more creative outcomes.

Session TypeDeep Dive

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Speakers

Session Leader : Sandy Goldberg, Principal, sgscripts

Co-Presenter : Christine Murray, Senior Creative Strategist, Antenna International

Co-Presenter : Bradley Baer, Partner + Director of Strategy, Bluecadet

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Fifteen years ago, museum technologists rarely discussed visitors, much less data related to visitors. Today the landscape has changed. Museum technologists have an intense hunger for data on how visitors experience cultural institutions, and data-centric sessions at museum technology conferences are now common. Many factors have helped intensify this interest in research about visitors -- their needs, motivations, and behaviors -- including the spread of human-centered design (personas, visitor journeys) and the emerging availability of “big” data, social media and the internet of things. This is a fantastic development for our field.

When approaching data from a design and prototyping perspective, almost any data is seen as good data. Creating process around dealing with data, moving from data to insight, shaping your work in response to those insights, and institutionalizing those findings-- those actions are the next steps beyond collecting data. That’s the truly hard part. How do those that handle data in museums professionally deal with these issues?

Approaching the issues from a social science lens, we will discuss data strategy, the missing links in data-based decision making, and tease out the whole process of how we think about data and work with museums to make it actionable.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackEvaluation
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Attendees will be able to better understand the current climate of demand for data and evaluation in context, and apply that understanding to data and/or evaluation practice within their own work, whether they are in leadership, design, technology, or education.

Speakers

Session Leader : Kate Haley Goldman, Principal, HG&Co

Co-Presenter : Cathy Sigmond, Research Associate, RK&A

Co-Presenter : Elee Wood, Fielding Curator/Educator for Early American Art, The Huntington

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Artificial Intelligence technologies including machine learning, predictive analytics and others, bring exciting possibilities of knowing more about visitors and collections. However, these technologies also raise important ethical questions for museums. With an increasing awareness and regulations about data usage in wider society, museums, must approach AI with both caution and fervour. As such exploring, critiquing and understanding the ethical implications of AI within a museum context is increasingly becoming a pressing need for museums.

At the beginning of 2019 the “Museum and AI network” was founded to discuss the opportunities and challenges that AI brings to museums. The network led by researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London and Pratt Institute is formed of senior managers in museums including The Met, National Gallery, AMNH, Science Museum, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum among others. Through a series of industry workshops, the network participants have taken part in in-depth discussions designed to open up debate around the key parameters, methods and paradigms of AI in a museum context. During this professional forum the findings of the work undertook by the network will be presented along with a conversation with some of museum professionals that took part of this research.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

The session will bring a discussion about the opportunities and challenges of AI in museums. Participants will learn from the case studies presented about the possibilities of the application of these technologies to their collection and user data. After this sessions, participants will be able to think critically about the ethical considerations that need to be taken into account with AI.

Speakers

Session Leader : Elena Villaespesa, Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute

Co-Presenter : Oonagh Murphy, Lecturer, Goldsmith, University of London

Co-Presenter : Jennie Choi, General Manager of Collection Information, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Carolyn Royston, Chief Experience Officer, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Co-Presenter : Casey Scott-Songin, Senior Manager: Data & Insight, National Gallery, London

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Museums and other cultural organizations face ongoing pressure in the public arena. Private funding sources may carry restrictions, and public sources of financial support face repeated threats to their very existence. Added to this, the public may not be aware of the benefits museums bring, both in support of the local economy and as part of developing healthy, vibrant communities. In this environment, it is more important than ever that museum professionals advocate on behalf of our museums with the public and government officials. Attendees will learn specific techniques (and be given examples of resources) to craft a narrative about their museum, its story, and specific, measurable benefits it provides.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this panel, attendees will understand the value of advocacy as a way to support their museum. Attendees will learn how to find their local, state, and federal elected officials, how to communicate with them. Attendees will be given resources with which they can build a message, customized for their own institution, about its value to the community.

Speakers

Session Leader : Sean Blinn, Programming Director, Heritage Trail Association

Co-Presenter : Claire Blechman, Digital Asset Manager, Peabody Essex Museum

Co-Presenter : Celeste DeWald, Executive Director, California Association of Museums

Thursday, November 7, 2019

As rapidly as technologies change, so does the employment landscape for digital professionals. Hiring managers are increasingly challenged to find not just the right talent to fit organizational needs, but also to hire people who can join their existing teams as rapidly and seamlessly as possible. At the same time, job seekers want to present their best work and highlight the skills and characteristics that will make them the perfect candidate for the job. Whether you are an emerging professional, switching up your career after many years in the field, or anywhere in between, we want to help you ace the interview and get the job of your dreams.

Through short presentations, mock interviews (demonstrations), and ongoing interactive discussion, attendees will witness the good, the bad, and the ugly of the interviewing process and learn how to handle its twists and turns. Topics will include: managing your resume, interview questions and how best to answer them, communication strategies throughout the hiring process, negotiating salary, and a few potential “gotchas.” Attendees will leave better prepared to navigate the complexities of the interview process.

Session TypeOTHER: 90 min session
TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Attendees will gain insights into interviewing techniques for both employer and prospective employee, the skills today’s employers are looking for, identifying jobs that align with chosen career path and values, and how to determine whether a job/organization is right for you.

Speakers

Session Leader : Victoria Portway, Head of Digitization, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Co-Presenter : Douglas Hegley, Chief Digital Officer, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Co-Presenter : Rob Lancefield, Head of IT, Yale Center for British Art

Co-Presenter : Karina Wratschko, Digital Initiatives Librarian; NDSR Art Program Manager, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Thursday, November 7, 2019

During Mingei International Museum’s website redesign in 2019, we made accessibility the forefront of our strategy and implementation—from UX research and design, to the creation of a custom typeface, Mingei Mono. In this case study, presented in partnership with San Diego-based creative studio Raygun and type designer Yomar Augusto, we’ll discuss how we applied modern design principles to accessibility, and accessibility principles to design, to create a branded digital experience that invites audiences to engage in our work and become a part of our community.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will learn:

- What makes a website accessible, in human terms
- Research methods to promote empathy and understanding of audience needs
- Ways to blend aesthetics and accessibility that enhance quality and style
- Basic accessibility principles that can be applied to your own design process

Speakers

Session Leader : Alexis O'Banion, Creative Director and Technology Strategist, Mingei International Museum

Co-Presenter : Stacey Edelstein, Co-founder, Raygun

Co-Presenter : Dalton Rooney, Co-founder, Raygun

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

The Met's Primer, the Whitney's Mobile Guide, and The Shed's "At the Shed" functionality are three examples of modern web-based features considered and designed to support meaningful experiences across the traditional visit journey. From before, to during, to after, each of these tools reflect specific visitor needs as they come into contact with our institutions, and the art they hold.

Built upon considerable user feedback, and deployed through each Museum's website, these app-like experiences are designed to be supportive of what is truly useful for visitors. For the Met, this includes extensive consideration of where and how users are accessing interpretative content, and how it engages and prepares them. For the Whitney, how to break out of the limitations of a traditional inaccessible audio guide experience and expand to reach new audiences. And for The Shed, how to explain and support a fundamentally different range of cultural experiences in a positive, affirming, and clear manner.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will be able to understand the broad ideas and methodologies behind the visitor-centric projects each institution undertook. This will include aspects of product design, community outreach for user testing and feedback, and general website and app strategy. The presentations will touch on technical decisions, and methods of evaluation for launched features, that should assist others in similar web-based product development and planning.

Speakers

Session Leader : Colin Brooks, Senior Web Developer, Whitney Museum of American Art

Co-Presenter : Dan Michaelson, Partner, Linked by Air

Co-Presenter : Bora Shehu, Senior Manager of UX, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

We've used journey maps to track the customer experience, the visitor experience, and our online users. But how about inside your organization? Do you find yourself in endless meetings where departments talk about process, or defend processes, and want to work together but can't figure out how? This session will show you how we used journey mapping across seven departments, with a whole bunch of people in the room, and came out with empathy, understanding, and a list of action items! Learn how to facilitate a meeting like this and be a change-agent at your organization.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will be armed with a recipe for going back to their organizations and gently leading cross-disciplinary departments into a journey-mapping process that will lead to happier, more productive departments.

Speakers

Session Leader : Liz McDermott, Head, Web & New Media at the Getty Research Institute, Getty Research Institute

Co-Presenter : Andra Darlington, Head of Special Collections Management, Getty Research Institute

Co-Presenter : Tracey Schuster, Head of Permissions and Photo Archive Services, Getty Research Institute

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

From 1976 until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol was never without his camera. He snapped photos at discos, dinner parties, flea markets, and wrestling matches. Friends, celebrities, passers by: all captured Warhol's attention. In 2014, after a competition among a selection of leading American art museums, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts designated the Cantor Arts Center as the permanent home of Warhol’s archive of over 3,600 contact sheets.

In this MCN program, Cantor representatives will present on how receiving this extraordinary archive became the catalyst for achieving a long-standing desire to partner digitally with the Stanford University Libraries and help expand awareness of the University’s research holdings at large. The unprecedented partnership was not without challenges, given the different digital systems, technical requirements, legal constraints, and staffing needs to scan and process over 130,000 images.

By 2018, the Warhol archive ultimately resulted in a multitude of audience interfaces: three comprehensive websites; a 4,000 sq. ft. exhibition at the Cantor featuring a digital tabletop interactive as its centerpiece; a 230-page catalogue; and an undergraduate course. The Cantor’s experience is a case study of collaboration and intense adaptation to leverage the reach of digital technology.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will be able to better realize the nuances and challenges of digitizing a vast quantity of images, appropriately cataloguing them, and making them accessible across multiple platforms (used by Stanford's museum and libraries). Participants will understand how this type of project was organized, and where the various critical points of adaptation occurred.

With the scanning and cataloging complete, the Warhol contact sheets were deposited into both the museum database and server, which together provide access to the museum’s website. They were also then uploaded to the Stanford Digital Repository managed by the Libraries, which allows for access through the Libraries’ "Searchworks" online catalogue and focused "Spotlight" web-based exhibit. Each site provides a slightly different functionality, allowing visitors to explore the images in different ways.

Within their own institutions, participants should be able to better strategize how to navigate the issues that arise between object ownership and image rights ownership, down to the details of specified digital file types, sizes, and formats. The Cantor, for example, had to solve how to display images online of high quality for research purposes, while controlling access and preventing downloads of what could essentially be considered valuable Warhol artwork for commercial use.

Speakers

Session Leader : Tiffany Sakato, Exhibition & Publication Project Manager, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

Speaker : Clarissa Morales, Director of Collections & Exhibitions, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

Speaker : Peg Brady, Collections Department Manager & Senior Registrar, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford

Speaker : Dianne Weinthal, MLIS Candidate, UCLA 2020, The Getty

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

This presentation will be an unveiling of the first phase of the Musetech Charter, an online resource designed to provide museums of any scale or scope with methodologies for implementing technologies in strategic and ethical ways. Presenters will discuss the processes behind the creation of the Charter (which began with a session at MCN2018 in Denver and continued with a Kress-funded, MCN-supported convening in May 2019), the outcomes from those processes, and the near-term road map for future developments.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will have an understanding of the Musetech Charter, including the goals of the project, the process that has been followed, and opportunities for getting involved.

Speakers

Session Leader : Koven Smith, Principal, Kinetic Museums Consulting

Co-Presenter : Jennifer Foley, Director of Education and Community Engagement, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Co-Presenter : Nikhil Trivedi, Senior Systems Analyst and Web Architect, Art Institute of Chicago

Co-Presenter : Desi Gonzalez, Product manager, City of Austin

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

In 2018, The Met added subject keyword tags to 300,000 artworks in their online collection. The goal of the project was to improve search and discovery of the collection, increase user engagement, and provide a new access point around depicted subject matter. The keyword tags have also opened up the collection to new types of exploration with artificial intelligence (AI).

The Met recently collaborated with the Wikimedia community using the keyword dataset to explore the use of AI around the museum’s collection. The keywords were connected to Wikidata terms which predicted tags for artworks the machine learning (ML) model had never seen. In many cases depicted subject matter was recognized with accuracy, but results were still mixed. With its global network of skilled volunteers, the Wikimedia community was able to add the additional element of human judgment in reviewing tags generated by AI.

An analysis of both machine and human-generated tags revealed issues around accuracy, completeness, relevance and bias, highlighting the challenges in describing subject matter depicted in art.

This session will examine the tagging process, discuss the collaboration with the Wikipedia community, and identify areas where AI models succeed and fail.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesThe session will provide insights about the opportunities and challenges of adding subject tags to museum collections. Participants will gain a better understanding of using AI for tag prediction and learn how human judgement is still an important factor in describing art.

Speakers

Session Leader : Jennie Choi, General Manager of Collection Information, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Elena Villaespesa, Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute

Co-Presenter : Andrew Lih, Wikimedia Strategist, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Digimentors Group

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

In 2018 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a custom developed system, called the Move Object Request Application (MORA), designed to track the movement of art throughout the museum and replace a previous decade-old work order site. LACMA’s robust acquisition, loan, and exhibition calendar averages over 140,000 art location updates a year. Museum staff use the new web-based system to communicate with art preparators and collections managers about anything from gallery rotations and viewings to unpacking crates and sending objects for conservation or photography. To develop this application, the team performed extensive requirements gathering and employed an iterative, design thinking approach to the project. Rather than upgrading the previous system - with all the same assumptions - to a newer iteration, the project began with the question “What problem are we trying to solve?”. Adding to the complexity of deeply ingrained workflows and departmental dynamics was the fact that the primary user department operated in a mostly paper-based environment, which provided an opportunity for creative solutions in the usability testing stage of development.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesThis session will encourage participants to think critically about the systems they have in place using key concepts in design thinking for the benefit of internal users and to apply the methodology they use for public-facing projects to their coworkers. Participants will walk away with tried-and-tested tools for paper prototyping and testing, which are especially important for implementing digital tools and workflows for visual learners and non-digital natives.

Speakers

Co-Presenter : Amanda Dearolph, Database Administrator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Session Leader : Yvonne Lee, Head of Collection Information and Digital Assets, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Meredith Steinfels, Digital Platforms Manager and Archives Specialist, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

In museums today, we employ user-centered design practices while developing projects to define our audiences and align with their needs. All too often, though, we lack the time and resources to do the equally valuable post-launch work of user-centered evaluation—work that could take us from the theoretical to the practical by shedding light on who actually uses these projects, and how. This knowledge is especially critical in cases where content design methodologies span multiple projects, or even multiple institutions, as in the growing field of online collection catalogue publishing. This session presents the findings of an ambitious evaluation of online scholarly catalogues produced by four museums: The Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art. The study, conducted by Rockman et al, draws upon evaluation of web analytics, user surveys, and in-depth user testing and focus groups. By addressing questions such as how the digital publications compare to scholarly works in print, what platforms and features create the best experience, and how the digital interface facilitates engagement with museum collections, it aims to close the gap between the audiences we plan for, and those we are truly serving.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackEvaluation
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants will have a better understanding of user expectations and desires for online scholarly publications, and of the associated metrics for measuring success. They will see the benefits of cross-institutional partnerships, and be able to use the success of the project as a case study in their own work.

Speakers

Session Leader : Katie Reilly, William T. Ranney Director of Publishing, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Lauren Makholm, Assistant Director of Production, The Art Institute of Chicago

Co-Presenter : Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager, J. Paul Getty Trust

Co-Presenter : Emily Zoss, Managing Editor for the Permanent Collection, National Gallery of Art

Speaker : Claire Quimby, Research Associate, Rockman et al

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Has your museum been circling the idea of digital publishing but remains unsure of how to approach it or which project to feature? Ours was too–until we took the plunge by marrying a promising platform to a complex, multi-partner project that didn't fit our existing publishing channels. The digital publication "Alcohol’s Empire: Distilled Spirits in the 1700s Atlantic World," built using a beta version of the Getty’s Quire publishing tool, was a joint effort of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Wangensteen Historical Library at the University of Minnesota, and Minneapolis’ Tattersall Distilling. Created as a stand-alone publication to present academic research, it contains a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of distilled spirits in Europe and the Americas. But it was also conceived as an audience-friendly complement to a museum exhibition and a series of public events, and it includes video documentation of the project plus adaptations of historic drink recipes–like plague water–developed by Tattersall’s head distiller. This presentation provides an inside look at how we created the publication, what roadblocks we encountered, how integrating a digital publishing component helped structure and amplify a research initiative, and what we consider to be the project's return on investment.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAttendees will:
–Receive a behind-the-scenes view of what it takes to produce a digital publication with open-source tools like Quire

–Gain perspective on the broad range of museum-based projects that are good fits for digital publishing

–Gain insight into the unique distribution opportunities inherent to digital publishing

Speakers

Session Leader : Alex Bortolot, Content Strategist, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Co-Presenter : Kris Thayer, Digital Designer, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

The open access movement has empowered museums to connect with their audiences by providing unprecedented access to digital collections. Now that a number of museums have had an open access policy for the better part of a decade, how have their policies stood the test of time? How have their policies made an impact on their institutions and communities? Have standards of “openness” changed? How can policies be updated to address changes in community practice? What lessons can those still advocating for an initial open access policy at their institution learn from early innovators? Representatives from several museums with open access policies will share how their policies are evolving and lessons learned from their experiences implementing open access, and a representative from Creative Commons will give an update on the work the OpenGLAM community is doing to support open access policies.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

After attending this session, participants from institutions with open access policies will be ready to review their policies for areas that may need updating. Participants who are still lobbying for open access at their museum will come away with strategies for gaining institutional support for open access and crafting a policy that reflects current practice.

Speakers

Session Leader : Margaret McKee, Digital Asset Manager, The Menil Collection

Speaker : Andrea Wallace, Lecturer, University of Exeter

Co-Presenter : John French, Director of Visual Resources, Yale University Art Gallery

Co-Presenter : Melissa Fournier, Head of Imaging and Intellectual Property, Yale Center for British Art

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Many multi-sensory exhibitions aim to create immersive experiences, yet remain inaccessible for a variety of visitors. This session will examine multi-sensory exhibition design and how engaging various senses can provide not only a rich and immersive experience, but can facilitate greater accessibility, widening audiences, increasing demographics, and facilitate inclusion. Examples from different museums will be examined for not only what they achieved, but the potential they hold (or held) for increasing inclusion and access.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience

Key Outcomes

.. recognize the opportunity that rich experience design holds for greater inclusion and accessibility.
... inclusive design approaches can facilitate rich experience design for everyone.
... make the case that inclusive design is an important provocateur of immersive and digitally rich design.

Session Leader : Corey Timpson, Principal, Corey Timpson Design Inc.

Co-Presenter : Sina Bahram, President, Prime Access Consulting

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Meet the MCN 2019 Scholars! Each year MCN awards scholarships to 15 emerging leaders in the field of museum technology—and this is your chance to hear from them. In each session, 5 scholars deliver a series of lightning talks to present key findings and guiding questions from their current (or recently-completed) projects/research. From strategy to systems, content to the visitor experience, scholars share their diverse interests, expertise, and perspectives. Join us at this annual conference tradition to celebrate their work.

Featured Scholars

Session Leader : Andrea Ledesma, Digital Content Coordinator, Field Museum

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

With over a hundred museums sharing an astonishing 1600 repositories on GitHub today, our sector has embraced publishing open source code. Indeed, the values embodied within open source are a good match for museums’ public-serving missions, but what does it really mean to make a project open source? Much of the code we’re posting publicly may primarily be intended for our own institution’s use, in which case, putting resources into support for external use doesn’t make sense.

But what if we have something that might be useful to others and that we want to see used and supported? Is publishing code enough, or do we also need to work toward building a community and sustaining the project?

A set of tools and best practices exist for successfully launching and sustaining open source software projects. This session will explore some of these resources, such as Mozilla’s Open Leadership Program, and the “It Takes a Village” guidebook from LYRASIS, and look at case studies of open source projects of all sizes that are putting these practices to use. Attendees working on, participating in, or thinking of launching an open source project will take away the tools to help take the next step.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackSystems

Key Outcomes

- Make better use of the OSS development work they are doing by meaningfully sharing it with other institutions and individuals.
- Assess and contribute to the sustainability of OSS programs they are working on, contributing to, or thinking of launching.
- Understand different methods of open source management and sustainability planning - in theory and practice, and how they may apply to digital projects of all kinds.

Speakers

Session Leader : Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager, J. Paul Getty Trust

Co-Presenter : Megan Forbes, Program Manager, CollectionSpace

Co-Presenter : Hélène Martin, CTO, Nafundi

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Cultural heritage collections can reflect societal biases and sometimes leave out important stories. As studies show visitors invest significant trust in the information cultural organizations provide, it is critical we examine what we share online especially as researchers bring more sophisticated tools to bare. This panel will examine two projects as they work to create a diverse American history online; The Smithsonian American Women’s Initiative and The LGBTQ Digital History Project.

In 2017, the ONE Archives Foundation and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) launched a partnership to develop an open source digital platform connecting LGBTQ archives and community collections from across the nation, with the ultimate goal of developing a collaborative digital framework for documenting and sharing LGBTQ history. The Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative (AWHI), launched in 2017, has a key goal of telling a more complete American women’s history to include more stories of women from multiple cultural and gender-identification backgrounds. With the call from U.S. Congress to survey its 155 million collections for women’s history stories, what are the steps it will take to improve representation when only 150,000 of the over 40 million digital records are explicitly tagged with women-related topics?

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Participants will gain an awareness around what their digital collections represent, how they contribute to representation online, as well as some of the tools and processes they can leverage to represent a more diverse history.

Speakers

Session Leader : Effie Kapsalis, Senior Digital Program Officer, Smithsonian Institution

Co-Presenter : Sherri Berger, Head of Digital Programs, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Co-Presenter : Darren Milligan, Senior Digital Strategist, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access

Co-Presenter : Robert Horton, Assistant Director, Collections and Archives, National Museum of American History

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) invested in a system of Cisco Meraki routers that track mobile devices, based on Wi-Fi. CMA collected this data but did not know how to best leverage it. We partnered with Pandata, a data science firm, to use this location data to better understand visitor behavior and determine how they move throughout the museum and engage with exhibit spaces. This information works in conjunction with the insights gathered in the “Developing New Metrics to Measure Visitor Engagement” study by CMA’s in-house evaluation team.

Through these live dashboards, we discovered that visitors who spent at least 5-10 minutes in ArtLens were likely to spend an hour more, on average, visiting the museum. We compared this affect to visitors who did not spend any time at ArtLens but spent 5-10 minutes in the Impressionism and Modern galleries and found that these visitors only spent half an hour more on average in the museum. These early results of location analytics at CMA demonstrate a novel way for museums to overcome the challenges associated with measuring engagement qualitatively.

This 30-minute session will use this project as a case study of how museums can find meaningful stories using data.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackEvaluation
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will learn:

-How the CMA augmented their findings from qualitative data with location analytics

-What technical challenges CMA overcame to implement location analytics?

-How to drive adoption of location analytics among CMA team members

Speakers

Co-Presenter : Ethan Holda, Director of Technology, Cleveland Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : Cal Al-Dhubaib, Chief Data Scientist, Pandata

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Everyone loves a good story. There is something about a good story that draws people in. It communicates something we can relate to, or teaches us something we carry along. Perhaps that is why one of the strongest tools to connect with audiences, to build community, and to create engaging tech experiences is storytelling. However, storytelling is no easy task. It is a craft that needs to be practiced and learned. So how do you tell a good story? Where do you start? This session aims to help you answer those questions. Through a combination of a presentation and hands-on demonstration, we will be introducing different storytelling models. Attendees will gain an understanding of the different storytelling models and use this session as a launching point to craft their storytelling skills and apply them with their collection at their museum. Some of the models that will be introduced are The Hero’s Journey - the story of the departure, revelation, and return of the hero; The Pixar Model - “Once upon a time there was” and then fill in the blank; and Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories - graphical representations of a main character's ups and downs.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will understand different models showing how to create and tell well-constructed stories using their own collections. The audience will leave with the core outline of a story started with at least one object from their museum.

Speakers

Session Leader : Castle U. Kim, Doctoral Student, Florida State University

Co-Presenter : Max Evjen, Department of Theatre/Digital Humanities Coordinator, Michigan State University

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Knowing how visitors will understand and use a product is critical to its success, but getting inside their heads is hard. This session will present a case study from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that describes a few different techniques we used to learn from and with our visitors. In the fall of 2018, we launched a space in one of our temporary exhibition galleries for the express purpose of testing prototypes and conducting formative evaluation. While a dedicated space for testing is a luxury that not all museums can pull off, the spirit is one all museum professionals should embrace. In this session, we will present a few of the tests and share the results and lessons learned that could be applied by anyone who is looking to incorporate formative testing into their workflow. Talking to visitors reveals insights that will not only lead to a better product but also make you a better listener. This season will inspire you to create reasons to talk to them, whether you have a project in mind or not.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesAfter attending this session, participants will be inspired to create opportunities for learning from visitors and will learn techniques for evaluative thinking. We should be vigilant about testing our assumptions and finding our blindspots and this session will present one way to approach that challenge.

Speaker : Silvina Fernandez-Duque, Product Manager, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Approaches to creating data structures in the museum sector are evolving rapidly – seemingly almost daily. There’s little consensus on how to do it, and no one-size-fits all approach, as every set of requirements differs. One of the things that makes Cooper Hewitt’s requirements unique is our need to develop a data structure that will support both in gallery digital and online experiences.

The success of the Pen provided insight into how visitors access museum data in the gallery and use it to interact with the museum at a physical level. As we look to the future, this session will offer a view into our own process of designing and building data infrastructure that supports a unified experience across physical and digital environments.

The session will combine a technical look at our internal workings, with a work-in-progress overview of our internal roadmap and the prototyping model that is helping us to define our own requirements and answer questions around best practices in the gallery, for accessibility, and across the web. We’re in the process of reevaluating everything under the hood and giving session attendees insight not only into how we’re restructuring, but the decision making process along the way.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Key OutcomesParticipants will leave with an understanding of how they might approach evolving legacy technologies, and understand their own requirements to meet the needs of today’s search engines and the ever growing use of AI to search collections and museum data.

Speaker: Adam Quinn, Digital Product Manager, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Audio content for adults has gone through numerous changes and evolutions over the past years. The old standard of the narrator-driven tour has been replaced by interview-centric, non-curator, crowd-sourced, podcast-style, and so many other approaches. Now, younger visitors are reaping the benefits of those experiments – and so are the adults that accompany them – as the popularity of the “Family Tour” has grown, replacing the “Kids’ Tour”.

We will examine two projects, one each from The Jewish Museum (New York, NY) and The National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Both intended to create audio content that appeals to and engages younger visitors while also creating opportunities for interaction between them and the adults that are visiting with them.

In each case, we will begin with how the goals for the project were set. From there, we will discuss the thinking behind the each creative approach, and the decisions driving the range of narrative styles present in these tours. Discussion of the production and feedback process will follow and, finally, we will assess how the projects met expectations, and address lessons learned.

Keeping the discussion on track will be the Producer/Writer/Editor of the projects.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackExperience
Chatham House RuleNo

Key OutcomesBy exploring the thinking behind each of these three projects, attendees will gain insight into a range of creative approaches to audio storytelling for young audiences. Attendees will learn about challenges, obstacles, and lessons learned from the process. Attendees will also become familiar with best and next practices for designing audio tours for families and will learn practical tips for setting strategies, making decisions, course corrections, and evaluating audio projects for this audience.

Speakers

Session Leader : John Simoniello, Executive Producer, Creative, Acoustiguide, Inc.

Co-Presenter : Sarah Durkee, Head, Interpretive Resources, National Gallery of Art

Co-Presenter : Nora Rodriguez, Visitor Content Coordinator, The Jewish Museum

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

From 2018-2019, Lord Cultural Resources, Nordicity and OCAD University convened 18 nationally and provincially-mandated arts and culture organizations, 6 city economic development departments and a multitude of digital technology advisers to brainstorm and develop a series of strategic initiatives that would help these partners leverage big data and maximize digital solutions for the benefits of all involved. Using two pilot project case studies – the Toronto Arts of Tomorrow Initiative and the Canadian Arts Discoverability Initiative – this session will explore the successes and set backs of bringing multi-discipline (museums, visual arts, dance, festivals, etc.) and multi-sector partners together from across the country in collaboration. Attendees will hear about the convening and collaboration process used, key questions and issues raised, new insights gathered, and lessons learned. In sharing this knowledge, we hope to encourage other cultural organizations, cities and digital leaders to seek out new partners for collaborations and to develop their own unified digital initiatives to solve a range of common problems; from audience analytics and discoverability, to content distribution and monetization.

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackStrategy
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes- Understand the process used to garner buy-in, convene the partners and promote collaboration throughout both projects;
- Understand the process used to gather information, encourage participation, produce strategic insights, and develop common digital initiatives in collaboration with partners;
- Understand the important take-aways of the research, convenings and workshops including key questions and issues raised, findings gathered, connections made, and lessons learned;
- Apply the lessons presented to their own efforts to seek out new partners for collaboration and create buy-in; and
- Use the process presented and apply the key findings to their own work with other partners to develop unified digital initiatives to solve a range of common problems.

Speakers

Session Leader : Sarah Hill, Senior Consultant, Lord Cultural Resources

Co-Presenter : Mila Dechef-Tweddle, Manager, Nordicity

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

This is Collection Explorer, a generous interface for the collection at the Williams College Museum of Art. The concept of a “generous interface” was developed in response to the limitations of the search box, which acts as a roadblock to many users of online collections. Instead, interfaces like Collection Explorer shows the shape of the whole collection and invites visual exploration. Collection Explorer is one of the first of its kind.

We wanted our audiences to dive into the collection and find objects, connections and ideas that they didn’t even know they were looking for. More than precise answers, we hoped faculty and students would find interesting questions in our collections. We aimed to provide open conversation starters rather than definitive endpoints. Moreover we knew that even world-renowned math scholars could find an art collection intimidating, and come up short when confronted with a keyword search.

The Collection Explorer was created to help faculty and students—especially non-art specialists—to find works of art to use in their own teaching and learning. In practice, the online tool has allowed many audiences, including curators, staff, and specialists, to see the collection in new ways and make unforeseen discoveries.

Session Type30-Minute Session (Presentation or Case Study)

TrackSystems
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes...recognize the value of generous interfaces for online collections, see an example of one in production, and learn how to implement such an app for their own institution. (Code is open source)

Speaker: Chad Weinard, Independent Museum Technology Strategist, Independent

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 

Microsoft is proud to support the Museum community, and sponsor this plenary panel about emerging technologies today and in the future. We'll cover a number of key themes including 1) technology has always been emerging and will always be emerging. What is the framework for incorporating it in your Museum? 2) Current emerging technology examples - artificial intelligence, Mixed reality, Internet of Things, Quantum Computing 3) the costs and downfalls of adopting technology too soon or too narrowly. 4) Framework for experimenting with emerging technology early in its lifecycle and including in future plans and strategies.

Session TypePlenary Panel

Key OutcomesThe outcomes are for participants to understand what can go wrong when adopting technology too early, an understanding of the maturing of technologies and how to start to plan and experiment with them to include in future plans, as well as to broaden the view of emerging technologies that go beyond very visible experiences and extend to behind the scenes applications that are equally transformative.

Speakers

Co-Presenter : Jane Alexander, Chief Digital Information Officer, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Co-Presenter : David Nunez, Director of Technology and Digital Strategy, MIT Museum

Co-Presenter : Carolyn Royston, Chief Experience Officer, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Session Leader : Catherine Devine, Business Strategy Leader - Libraries and Museums, Microsoft

Speakers

Session Leader : A. Andrea Montiel De Shuman, Digital Experience Designer, Detroit Institute of Arts

Co-Presenter : Alicia Viera, Interpretive Planning and Visitor-Centered Exhibitions Consultant, Independent Museum Professional

Co-Presenter : Megan DiRienzo, Interpretive Planner, Detroit Institute of Arts

Speaker : David Lerman, CEO, GuidiGO

During this 60-minute session, we will share details of how we took a visitor-centered approach to the three-year development of Lumin, the Detroit Institute of Arts’ augmented reality tour. Topics will include the museum’s collaboration with mobile tour development company GuidiGo, the process of selecting objects and developing experiences to foster meaningful connections with art, and the evaluation findings that guided us along the way. We will end the session with a reflection about lessons learned and what’s next for AR in museums.