 |
|
Archives &
Museum Informatics
info @ archimuse.com
www.archimuse.com published April 1998 updated Nov. 2010
|
|

 |
A Museum is a Museum is a Museum...Or Is
It?:
Exploring Museology and the Web.
Lynne Teather, Ph.D.
"A digitally networked world could fulfill Marshall McLuhans
hopeful dream of a global village, with in-depth personal involvement
for all. The global village could be a corporate systems monoculture,
or it could be an extension of existing human communities in all
their vital diversity. The local could be an extension of global
uniformity, or the global could be an extension of local diversity.
To claim that second choice, we must reclaim our own powers
of naming, and use them to articulate a new critical discourse
on technology and the information highway."1 Heather
Menzies, Whose Brave New World?
|
OUTLINE
I.Introduction
II.The Missing Discourse
III.Musing On the Muses
Problematique
#1 What Is A Museum?
Getting To New Museology,
the New Museum and Web Museology
Problematique #2 The Museum For
Whom? From Object To People: Experience, Memory, Meaning and the
Ideas of Knowledge-Building
Memory and Meaning
Problematique #3 Whose Museum Is
It? Corporatism or Cooperation
IV. Meta Data Meets
the Meta Visitor: Musing on the Public Experience of the Museums and
the Web
Evaluation of Museums &
The Web
Museum Web Evaluation
Types
1. Summative- Post-mortem Evaluation
2. Front-End- User
Needs
3. Formative- User
Test While In Development
Museums And
Participatory/Collaborative Web Work
V. Moving
to Participatory or Collaborative Approaches to the Design of Web:
Implications for Museums and the Web
VI. The Muses On
the Web- Conclusion
I. Introduction
As museums in recent years rush to get on the web profound, yet very
familiar, questions arise about the role of the museum at the beginning
of the 21st century.2 It is no longer justifiable,
however, for museums to claim the pressures to get on the Internet,
and the speed with which this has to happen, as an excuse for our
failure to engage museological discussion about the museum web phenomenon.
If, as some have argued, the museum presence on the web is still technically
driven, how can we get it to be museum-driven? And exactly what do
we mean by museum-driven when discussing the museum presence on the
Internet?
As Max Anderson has warned,3
the two positions of the nethead enthusiasts and netlash critics are
difficult to translate into the museum world for it is possible to
be an enthusiast and be foreboding about museum impacts. Others who
are critics are often the very ones engaging the new technology in
meaningful ways.
Still, there are two fundamental questions that separate museum people
in a discussion about museum phenomena on the web. First, can or indeed
should the museum fundamentally be transferred to the web? If you
believe that the web is a revolutionary, new form of human communication,
you will see attempts to carry museums onto the web as ridiculous
and doomed. Others see the Internet, particularly when looked at historically,
as yet another technology. Perhaps the Web will end up as the video
disk once expected to revolutionize the museum experience and now
used in quite ordinary ways.4 Whatever their differences, both groups
view the Internet as something to be wary of and therefore probably
inappropriate to museums. Where can the Internet, built upon a new
form of representation, fit a museum's mandate if you believe that
a "museum is an institution that is dedicated to the belief that
the material-three-dimensional artefactual world, the bit of
wood,' is something valid in its own right and represents an important
aspect of human culture" as does Tom Wright of the Science Museum,5
There are those, then, who would argue that the museum, as we have
known it, is over: or at least the museum experience before real,
authentic and three-dimensional objects, art works, or specimens,
in a specific museological space. Of course, millennial pessimism
about museums exists in a number of fields of museology. Museologist
Tomislav Sola writes of a global identity crisis and the end of the
museum as we know it, "In a short while the traditional museum
will not be able to respond to the new challenges of our world (...)
the very idea of museums will become obsolete."6 Others extend this argument to the web
experience: the museum on the web is not about art, not about objects,
and not museological in essence, but a new, a completely different
and revolutionary phenomenon, still to be discovered. Let the museum
be the museum and the web be the web.
We even disagree on the future impact on visitorship to museums.
Howard Besser cautions:
"In this day and age, when time appears so scarce,
people are less likely to make a special trip to a museum
to see an original object if they can see a quite reasonable
facsimile at their home workstation--especially if they can
play with it."7 |
|
 |
Or will it? In sharp contrast, Max Anderson hypothesizes another
vision:
"The demand for the original work will
increase rather than decrease, following repeated exposure
at an institutionally authorized site on the World Wide Web
or its successor."8 |
And:
"The growth of wired museums of all kinds may provide
a younger generation steeped in this technology with more
reasons to connect to us. It seems likely that it will contribute
less to our eclipse as institutions than our transformation."9 |
Many see transformative qualities of the web. For Anderson it will
be positive:
"Although we may bemoan the extent to which we are
different in our contributions to society today from what
we were 30 years ago, we cannot return to a time when audiences
were tolerated rather than listened to, information was sporadically
shared, and amenities were an afterthought. And for that we
are without question better institutions."10 |
Besser, though, seems cautious about the losses to be incurred in
the transformation of museums on the web as "the aura
is lost," referring to Walter Benjamin, "the viewing of
a unique object within the same context and setting as everyone else."11 As the museum
becomes more like a library rather than an archive, he predicts that
visitors will want an interactive role, the authority of the curator
will be diminished and that of high culture in general.12
Actually such a transformation is what many museologists have
been waiting for. Douglas Worts and Chris Morrisey13 with their strong
backgrounds in issues of museum education and visitor research, point
out the potential of technology in museums but only "if we adopt
new paradigms of understanding our visitors and their experiences",
adding:
"Technology has the potential to perpetuate (or even
inflate) what is wrong about museums and their communication
with visitors by reinforcing the authoritative perspective
to the exclusion of other voices. Alternatively, at its best,
technology can help all of us see new relationships between
objects, information, the experiences of others, and our own
personal responses to the world in which we live."14 |
We are led to our second question after we have settled the first
question of the web suitability to museum expression: what is it of
the museum experience that we want to convey? And in what manner?
What evaluation approaches will we take to get us to our goal and
to see that we have reached it?
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
II. The
Missing Discourse:
Strangely, thus far in the evolution of discussions of museums on
the web there have been only a few murmurs about museological precepts
and in particular about the importance of the public experience of
the museum in our discussions of museums and museology on the web.15 So far in my readings
about museums and the web, the conceptual museum approaches of collections
managers, of information scientists or even research enthusiasts overwhelmingly
inform the museum web discussion; at the same time in practice museum
efforts reflect a public relations and commercial impulse in web development
with some important educational and interactive exceptions. In discussions
about the web, we also see the development of the argument that the
museum is essentially about information, although sometimes linking
this informational view to the social and transforming nature of museums.
This viewpoint it would appear has very much been adopted by those
who are involved in the development of new technologies in museums.
Are there other views of the museum that can expand our view of the
web presence?
For one, the field of evaluation of museums and their publics has
a century of study behind it and a way of thinking about museums that
has fundamentally altered our way of conceptualizing a museum but
some of the older notions remain in museum discussion as permanent
and repeating themes. The existing approaches to museums and the web,
for the most part, ignore yet another idea of the museum which has
had some support for decades. This view holds that museums are about
people and the meanings that they are trying on the one hand to convey
or, on the other the meanings that they are making of the museum experience.
People then, not the object or the information, are at the centre
of the museum experience. It is people who use and save the objects,
it is people who form collections and then it is people who create
the power structures and environments of the four-walled museums.
It is also people -- whether individually, in a group or a community
-- who make up both the visitors and the non-visitors to museums but
who are still museum clients. It is these people whose view of the
museums give it existence whether in practical terms of tax dollars
or legislative validity or in the sense that they come to the museum,
accessing it directly or indirectly, for research,enlightenment, education,
entertainment or status. So, too, by extension, it is people who are
at the centre of the museum experience on the web.
If so, then the work of studies about the public in, as well as general
attitudes to, museums become critical to our thinking about the museum
in its myriad of forms including that of being on the web. Yet, it
is noteworthy that little bridging has occurred between the museological
fields of visitor research and web development. Is it just that the
web museum displays the same characteristics of all web endeavour
that undervalues the user-perspective in design and development?
At the same time I would argue our impulse to go to the web occurs
without the context of the whole area of Human-Computer Interface
or User-Centered design work, built from fields such as computer science
and industrial design, information studies, education and cognitive
psychology and Human-Computer Interface and now turning to look at
the web.
This paper, then, will attempt to begin to bridge several fields
of interest including that of research about the museum learning and
experience and new museological perspectives as a context for our
museum web vision. It will follow with a discussion of user-centred,
or Human-Computer Interface research and some of the nascent museum
web evaluation work going on with suggestions for future development.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
III. Musing
on the Muses.
Before we begin to lay out the state of research about museums and
their publics and the web and its publics, then, we need to set the
stage of the museological discussion. Current research about the museum
and the museum experience takes us into a museum paradigm based in
the user-created experience of museums that goes to the very essence
of making museums. This is an idea of museum that could adapt to the
web in ways that support, and extend, the museum idea. From this viewpoint,
then, what is the essence of the museum experience that we wish to
transfer to the web and what can we effectively create in web technology
given current developments? More than the object fetishism, more than
information and data transfer, and certainly more than public relations
and sales opportunities, the museum experience is about meaning and
knowledge building that is based in the visitor, or in peoples
experience of the museum. Such a perspective, I suggest profoundly
alters the way in which we would approach museum web making.
Let me just unpack some of the views of museums that are around us.
It is possible to map the concepts of recent, and indeed past, discussions
of museology around a number of problematiques of museological models-of-knowing,
at the root of all reflective practice and the essence of thinking
about museums.16
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Problematique
#1. What is a Museum?
The fundamental question that divides our thought about museums on
the web is the elementary question of what is a museum? For at the
heart of this discussion is the idea of museum that you have, and
consequently the idea of museology that goes with it. Let me try to
release you from the notion that there is any one, correct, historically
accurate definition of a museum. As Francis Henry Taylor wrote in
1945 in Babels Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum,
"Each generation has been obliged to interpret this vague word
museum according to the social requirements of the day."17 Too
often, we work within stereotypical definitions of museum arguments
within the museum profession that are quite ahistorical. Furthermore,
we operate without the benefit of an overview of the conceptual frameworks
of museology that are available to us and make up the over one hundred
years of the study of museums.
Many of the philosophical discussions about the museum center around
the questions of definition and terms like "traditional"
and "new" museums are part of the historical landscape.
It has been an unproved axiom of museums that museums are at their
essence unique institutions devoted to concrete objects, physical
things, the material remains of the past. From this view another variation
on the definition of museums is framed, as Weil and Harrison 18
have pointed out, in terms of the functions and operations of museums
as concrete and tangible phenomena, much like the collections on which
they are based. First, there are the collections; using a linear view
one evolves to what to do to them, to collect, conserve, present and
interpret in some combination of terms. It becomes difficult to include
museums or museum-related organizations with living collections or
even no collections, or those based on an exhibiting model wherein
the material shown comes into the place rather than being held there
permanently. It is also difficult to include a museum model based
on experience or concept as in the case of science, interpretive centres
or art centres where the experience of electricity, of nature or of
art becomes the component of the museum experience. Within this view,
starting as it does with the things on which museums are based, people,
those who view the museum, are often thought of last in the line of
functions -- the auxilliary function of museums.
All too often this interpretation of museums sees the museum in terms
of a building and the functions within it. The praxis of museums would
dominate the discussion in terms of the how to, the what rather than
the why. Most often, thought about the museum -- and certainly education
or training to work in one -- is reduced to expertise about a specific
discipline with some add on techniques that support the application
of that knowledge within a museum.
Most often the view of museums centres on "things" or "objects"
as the essence of the museums role and function, the beginning point
of the collecting function at the heart of museums role. Interestingly,
Maxwell Anderson with his enthusiasm for new technologies and the
web still retains the strong belief in the museums special role
as a place of "objects". For him, the power of the web is
that of bringing the visitor to the museum for the unique confrontation
with art and to share in the same experience known to curators and
connoisseurs.19 But is it the objects or the ideas
they represent that museums hold and nurture? This is a question long
argued in the museum world. The classic debate between Benjamin Ives
Gilman and George Brown Goode,20 that every museology student
is introduced to in the early months of their study, was reenacted
in the debate between Cameron and Knetz and Wright in the late 1960s21 and reappears in the web discussions.
MacDonald and Alsford echoed these earlier debates when they raised
the view of museums as information within their models of museums'
roles,22 claiming that the "advantage
of a shift in orientation away from objects towards information is
that it should make it easier (when formulating museums mission,
for instance) to balance the traditional functions of collection,
preservation, research and display. A more recent version of the debate
has occurred around the Information Highway discussion. Deirdre Stam
proposed "the importance of the information base
underlying museums missions and functions, and its potential for supporting
more cohesive and integrated institutions."23
Stam interprets the axioms of The New Museology as invoking the museums
information base, "The full complex of data supporting institutional
activities ranging from the pragmatics of acquisition to the abstractions
of interpretive display."24
Although usually separated conceptually by a functional view of museums,
the information elements of the museum, although generated by different
departments and processes, are conceptually tied, because they are
connected to the whole purpose of the museum and its mission. Stam
also raises the implications of tying the information base of the
museum to the axioms of The New Museology of "value, meaning,
power, control, interaction with visitors, interpretation, understanding,
authenticity and authority."25 She then continues
to take the ideas of information and The New Museology to museum praxis,
internal and external operations, to see how they can be reworked
to respond to the new conceptualization of museums with information
as a resource at the heart of its functions:
"The approach involves integrating internal information
such as coordinating curatorial and conservation files, providing
wider access for staff and public to newly coordinated institutional
data, drawing more deeply from sources that reveal the context
of objects (through more assiduous use of published material
and original archival resources), and preparing more sensitively
for relating to the community at large (by conducting research
on and with visitor constituencies)."26 |
Others, often with information science, library science or collections
management orientations, have picked up on this approach to the new
reform of museums in the Information Age and describe the museum and
its survival in terms of the Information revolution. But there is
a big difference between the terms information and concepts,
at least in their implications. While I value the view of museums
as information places, I think that this definition of museums can
stretch the museum off balance as much as traditional notions of museums
as pure object collections generated phenomena and could lead to a
philosophy of information for informations sake. This is an
approach to the technological iterations of the museum that forsakes
the experience base of the museum as places of meaning making and
knowledge and understanding. Even George MacDonald and Stephen Alsford
have written of the other equally important modes of museum including
the Museum as symbol, vision, showcase, treasure-house, memory, communicator,
mentor, celebration, host and resource.27
With the mention of George MacDonald, we cannot escape another related
debate, what are the appropriate roles of museums as especially defined
as seen between the oppositions of education and entertainment and
the move to Disneyfication? Echoes of these arguments are found within
the web and the differences of design approaches from the entertainment
thrust of a David Siegel to the user orientations of Jakob Nielsen.
28
So Negroponte can actually refer to himself as P.T. Barnum, a great
museum man of a type for the nineteenth century. One feels that some
of the discussions about museums on the web have to do with old ghosts
of the "dime museums" of earlier museum history as recast
in the onslaught of the "heritage industry" and the movement
of museums to web entertainment forms.
An alternative view to any of the above is one that is essentially
phenomenological, moving to the view that museums are steeped in the
human psyche. The museum is defined in more abstract terms as an idea,
even a human process, that takes a variety of forms from the personal
collection to the formality of the British Museum. Flipping the traditional
model of museum functions, the visitor is the start of the museum
phenomenon. Beyond this it is also possible to go beyond the visitor
to people in general. At the heart of this view, lies the idea of
the making of museums, possible to all peoples, across all cultures
and all classes and a wide variety of forms, that can include material
evidence, animate or inanimate from art to artifact to anteater, or
ideas and experience, encompassing the phenomenon of living.
If you believe that the museum today is one static form, resembling
the large state museums of nations, then you will see the trend to
the web as a fundamentally new entity, which resembles that of its
forebears only in small part. In contrast, it may actually be possible
to posit that the museum, is a dynamic, complex and variable human
form of endeavour, an entity which has shown over time adaptive qualities
as it transforms to new societal developments at least in some form.
Therefore, the museum with the web is yet another adaptation of this
human phenomenon of collecting and showing, which has been in evidence
in human civilization for many, many centuries, and hence can be analyzed
with museological ideas and tools.
At this point, we must acknowledge that we have fundamentally inverted
the definition of the museum, to one that is much more about human
experience, about people as museum makers and as those who make meaning
in museums. This is a person-centred model of the museum idea. This
shift in emphasis acknowledges that museums are not set in time, but
are still constantly being created and re-created. In North America,
I believe, that our notions of the living foundation of museums comes
as much from the nearness of living cultures that contest attempts
to put them in cases, whether that be of First Nations or other cultural
communities.
By this argument, clearly, I am not suggesting the transferring of
the museum as traditionally and statically defined over to the web
but a definition that is more dynamic and historically set in its
complex forms of human act of saving and showing material culture,
and its reflection upon the individual and social psyche.29 Thus, it is in the personal experience
of museums that the essence of the museum lies. The museum as idea
then can rest in the museum that you make in the corner of your house,
in the eight-columned imitation of a Greek temple, or indeed on the
web in a virtual museum or of a museum virtually represented. The
museum then exists in a triad of modes -- object, meaning, and personhood.
It is in the interrelationship of these that the museum exists and
this multiplicity of functions knits the variety of views about museums
together into a dialectical argument that reasserts itself again and
again over time. Perhaps it is time to reject false oppositions and
accept the ambiguity of the museum definition as human and social
form that has its own permanence and longevity, that is inherently
about things, ideas and people and their interrelationships.
Consequently, if you believe that the museum today exists in a complex
of forms, sizes, types and intents, that is essentially mirroring
the idea of museums--a meta-museology, if you like -- rather than
one specific form of museum then you will see the museum on the web
as yet another form of communication that can be as museological as
any other and which shares some of the same tensions of politics,
and meaning of the four-walled physical spaces of museums. Perhaps
the very essence of museums and their relationship to people and objects
can actually be finally fulfilled through use of web and Internet
technology to invoke multiple discourses about the meanings.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Getting
to New Museology, the New Museum
and Web Museology
Ideas sympathetic to the interpretation of museums as phenomenological
as identified above have been brewing for decades, if not centuries,
and have gelled in the last twenty years in the form of what is sometimes
entitled "New Museology". It is a view of museums as places
related to social, economic and political contexts needing higher
relevancy and meaning to their cultures and the significance to community
and certainly to individuals and the process of identity. Although
Peter Vergo brought the term to book form in 1989,30
the term had been around for over a decade growing out of the ecomuseology
movement in France since the late 1960s and paralleling the museum
reform movement in various parts of the world. Probably, Julia Harrison
is correct in claiming our time as unique for the congruence of these
questioning perspectives:
"The why of the existence of the museum
is not a new issue, but placed in the context of the new historicism,
post-modernism and deconstructionism it takes on a new urgency
as these paradigms expose new understandings of museums." 31 |
Of course progressive theories of museums have existed for some centuries.32 Although not often acknowledged, there
is a long tradition of criticism of museums resembling this second
view that has existed since the first museums. Rejection of the old
and traditional museums, devoted as they are to the whims of an elite,
that might be defined as upper-class, sometimes middle-class or inside
groups of curators, directors or boards, is followed by a call for
a "reform", "new", for some form of change and
a movement to community.33 Instead museums
should be fundamentally for everyone in society. So T.R. Adam wrote
in 1937:
"To someone outside the world of art criticism, there
must seem an element of almost mystic faith in this belief
in the power of great paintings to communicate abstract ideas
of beauty to the uninformed spectator...When background is
lacking -- where there is no knowledge of what the artist
is attempting to say in terms of time, place, or social meaning
-- the resulting impression is confused and is likely to be
painful as pleasurable." 34 |
Another view of the question of what is a museum is discussed in
museology in terms of the appropriate role for museums; should they
be centres of research, education or entertainment. In 1971, Duncan
Cameron published his classic article "The Museum: A Temple or
Forum?" that has influenced so many modern museum discussions.
For Cameron, museums were in an "identity crisis," split
between their roles as a temple or as a forum. His answer was that
museums should be both, but especially they "must institute reform
and create an equality of cultural opportunity." For Society
would "no longer tolerate institutions that serve a minority
audience of the elite."35 Many authors
have written in similar vein, so we find echoes of the views of the
social and educational mission of museums in the AAMs Museums
for a New Century and reiterated forcefully in the AAMs
Excellence and Equity36 and in a myriad of books and articles
in various parts of the world dealing with museological exploration.
The approach was perhaps most clearly articulated by the ecomuseum
movement that started in France, crystallized in the work of George
Henri Riviere, one of the original and most influential museologists,
and Huges de Varine. The word ecomuseum was first introduced in the
1971 ICOM general conference in Grenoble and first depicted at le
Creusot, Montceau les Mines. The large established museums, like the
Louvre, represented "old or traditional museology". "New
Museology " was about the local communitys attempt to retain
its identity amidst extreme industrial transformation using the idea
of a museum as social action. These ideas were reiterated in the work
of René Rivard and Pierre Mayr and in the ecomuseology movement in
Quebec and used in the formation of the Musée dHaute Beauce.
37
According to museological thinkers like René Rivard, 38
we should note that the museum has evolved from the confines of an
institution to a territory and located in a community. The objects
have now become the community and the staff are now facilitators engaging
in empowering the people to curate and show their own things. Aside
from judgments of whether any ecomuseum can truly be participatory
in power and direction or whether the institutionalizing tendencies
soon take over, we can see that the idea of the ecomuseum has deeply
captured thinking about museums in different parts of the world. One
of the areas of the world that has been at the forefront in evolving
ideas of ecomuseology is that of the countries of Scandinavia that
influenced such ecomuseologists as René Rivard and in turn have been
influenced by them. In a 1992 piece, Ewa Bergdahl, Director of the
Ekomuseum Bergslagen (founded in 1984) shared the philosophy:
"To maintain the living spirit in museum work means
conducting a continual historical debate amongst the participants
in the museum project in which the attitudes to the past are
constantly remoulded and new questions are being asked ...
She therefore considers that one important task should be
to enhance understanding and knowledge of mans role
in his physical environment [sic] and the connection between
energy, raw materials and human activities...The goal of the
museum -- to develop an instrument of social analysis, identification
and active historical awareness -- is high but not unrealistic.
A process-oriented museum is never finished. The pursuit
of a balance between the body and the soul of the museum is
fundamental and never-ending." 39 |
The movement for New Museology was occurring in parallel to other
questionings of the museum that took the form of analyses of power,
ideology and representation and deconstruction combined with questions
of the cultural participation in museum by a variety of communities.
Museums are being analyzed in terms of their relation of museum to
society, economics and politics as part of the discourse of their
significance, relevance and meaning. By now many authors have focused
on the analysis of museums in terms of the authority they represent
and have begun to examine alternatives. Some have approached this
critique in terms of Marxian theory as in the work of Duncan and Wallach,40 (1978). Many others have used the precepts
of anthropology to develop a framework for the analysis of power of
representation particularly of one people by another, often in terms
of the problem of museums in holding and showing the "other."41 For some this is
through the lens of ideology, rampant in the museum setting.
Still others have adapted theoretical frameworks based on the literary
theories of linguistic and semiotic analyses of museums meaning.42 We have seen similar discussions
locate on the meaning of objects and material culture particularly.43 In the end, the ideas that museums
set a context for meaning and as a consequence that no environment
can be neutral have become part of the discourse on museums as we
meet the millennium.
Lisa Roberts sums up this rethinking of the role of the museum as
a place where meaning is created and negotiated:
"By omitting any mention about the decisions behind
the determination of objects meaning, museums exclude
visitors not only from an awareness that knowledge is something
that is produced but also from the possibility that they themselves
may participate in its production. ..Thus stated, the work
of interpretation becomes an act of empowerment, because it
provides with both the knowledge and the consent to engage
in critical dialogue the messages museums present."44 |
Peter Walsh, raises the question of the Web and the "Unassailable
Voice" of the museum experience, the tone, the attitude that
"pervades museum labels, brochures, exhibitions, catalogues,
the guided tour, audio-visual presentations, and now Web sites. For
the most part, it is both impersonal and disembodied: ... "45 Walsh
believes in the transformative potential of the linking of the museums
and the Web. "This collaboration, properly directed, can not only
bring the wealth of museums to a far wider audience, it can help replace
the traditional "Unassailable Voice" with one that is kinder, gentler,
less pompous, more interesting, and, ultimately, far more inspiring."46
If we were at all unsure that museums are places of negotiated meaning
that can translate into very real political situations the last twenty
years have, particularly in North America, brought us to an overwhelming
realization of the politicization of museum work and capacity for
controversy. Examples abound from the Mapplethorpe show and or "Enola
Gay" or in Canada "Spirit Sings", "Into the Heart
of Africa" or the more recent debate over the placement of a
Holocaust Gallery at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.47 At the
root of these contests is the question of the authority of the museum
especially of the curation, and sometimes an exhibition team, to control
the message and form of the exhibition. Museum anthropology and some
museologists have led the way in this discussion in Canada as evidenced
in the work of Michael Ames, Bruce Trigger, Julia Harrison and in
the work of the Assembly of First Nations and Canadian Museums Association.48
In North America over the last 10 years, some seminal works have
set the tone for the discussion about museums, partially in response
to these theories and controversies. Two of these resulted from conferences
held at the Smithsonian Institution that were followed by publication
of texts: Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum
Display and Museums and Communities.49 Questions of the museum's role in cultural
diversity have become part of the discourse as attempts are made to
broaden the base of museum support and involvement.50
No longer is it possible to see museum collections or displays as
"neutral" statements, even those that have attempted to
contextualize material culture in a culturally sensitive
way. Further museums are, perhaps awkwardly, exploring fundamentally
new ways of working with groups in society through advisory, consultative
and cooperative methods and even introducing the concepts of shared
ownership. Now we struggle to evolve methodologies of collaboration
with community groups that are impossible to define fully and to push
our exhibition means to allow for multiple voices and authorities;
yet within the framework of a civil society that pursues some degree
of fairness for all communities.
I am not yet aware of any museum web pages facing such controversy
but we can all imagine it. While we are all wrestling with the thorny
issue of copyright, political controversy and censorship are around
the corner.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Problematique
#2. The Museum For Whom? From Object to People: Experience, Memory,
Meaning and the Ideas of Knowledge-Building
Another premise of newer notions of museology as identified above
must involve the public(s), whether named as visitors, cultural groups
or community, within the power equations. We may discuss access to
the museum in terms of who comes or of the intellectual access when
they do come to a museum and in terms of the entire museum as an effective
communication system. We have for decades attempted to permeate the
four walls of the museums, to extend the physical reach of the museum
by means of outreach programs, circulating exhibits, school kits,
buses and trains, and satellite museums to open museums and access
galleries that bring the communities into the four walls. Further,
we have expanded the notion of access to museums beyond the physical
to that of the museum experience, thereby inviting questions of personal
and social identity, memorization and meaning-making as well as those
of politics and negotiation.
Worts and Morrisey invoke the words of Neil Postman who states that
museums express a need to answer the question of "What it means
to be human?" They continue:
"Part of our contention is that the museum is not simply
a building, a collection and expert information. Rather,
it is perhaps more fundamentally "a place of the muses,
which is first and foremost a creative psychic space with
the experience of individuals. The physical museum in which
we work is better understood as providing a set of conditions
that can facilitate an individuals experience of the
muses. If this is true, then the new communication technologies
need to be understood and developed with an awareness of their
role as facilitating experience- not delivering it."51 |
So what part will museums on the web have in answering the question
of "What it means to be human?"
In recent years, the philosophy of constructivism has had a major
impact on thinking about museums particularly in the areas of museum
education, learning and the nature of the museum experience. The ideas
of constructivism have been brought to the museum by theorists like
George Hein, John Falk and Lynn Dierking and last, but not least,
to museums on the web by the work of Jamieson MacKenzie among others.
Hein offers a good summary:
"Current education literature is dominated by discussions
of constructivism. This new name for a set of old ideas has
major implications for how museums address learning. Constructivism
is particularly appropriate as a basis for museum education
if we consider the wide age range of museum visitors. How
can we accommodate this diverse audience and facilitate their
learning from our objects on their voluntary, short visits?"52 |
Accordingly, MacKenzie, who also espouses constructivism, proposes
the idea of "Learning Museums" where students in classrooms
become the curators of virtual museums. These are museums that are
not only virtual but local and yet global, dynamic, multidisciplinary
and multi-sensory, and continually changing.53 According to MacKenzie, "Virtual
museums offer a different kind of learning-one which is fresh and
vibrant."54
It turns out that the philosophy of constructivism has been brought
to other places that are moving to the web. Dr. Carl Bereiter and
Dr. Marlene Scardemelias work on the concept of "Knowledge-Building"
has been honoured by a number of web thinkers including Seymour Papert
who prefers the words "Knowledge-Nurture". In the last few
years these knowledge-building ideas have begun to influence museologists,
like the Art Gallery of Ontarios Doug Worts, some of whom are
working on the web and ideas about the museum on the web.
Rather than following the models of "Ask the Expert," where
the exchange is person-to-person, one with the goods and the other
not, or of "Cross-School Research Project", where students
work together or alone to infer knowledge from sources, Bereiter and
Scardemelia propose the operation of "The Knowledge Society in
Miniature."55 In
this model, all kinds of people and organizations are linked, schools,
universities, museums, parents, businesses across a variety of localities
by means of an interactive database, CSILE. A constructivist premise,
these people who are involved in the actual work of society, "engaged
in the construction, utilization, and improvement of knowledge,"
are linked so that cross-sector interaction can occur built on participants
learning. The intention of this model is that through involvement
students do not work within enclaves but interact with the real world
of "knowledge work."56
These same ideas of knowledge-nurturing are at the root of the CSCW
(Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) and CSCL (Computer-Supported
Cooperative Learning) movements.57
As a result of many of these latest ideas of museums and their publics
have brought a shift in museum exhibition and education theory to
visitor centred learning and meaning making, as at participatory-learning
stations of science museums, or the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum
"Game Room", and at the AGO the "Share Your Reaction"
cards and "Explore a Painting in Depth" audio guide. Clearly
the implications of these museum learning philosophies will have an
impact on the making of web pages and their evaluation.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Memory
and Meaning
Along with ideas of the way in which learning takes place, constructivism
has shifted the emphasis both to the way in which individuals construct
personal meaning given the processes of memory, identity, and the
social context in which this occurs. One of the first works to bring
our attention to the human relationship to "things" -- i.e.,
symbolic objects, artifacts, and works of art -- was the 1981 volume
The Meaning of Things by Mihalyi Csikszentmihayli and Rochberg-Halton.58 Lois Silverman, following
on, has taken for her doctoral dissertation a mass media framework,
in which the interpretation of symbolic objects is viewed as a creative,
and audience focused process that happens in a context of social and
relational meaning of ones companions. Museums can be a case
for study of social construction of meaning particularly through a
study of peoples talking with each other.59
In studying visitor pairs Silverman deduces seven frames through
which to interpret their interactions based on verbal interactions,
like object description, evaluation, relation to special knowledge,
relation to personal experience. These seven frames fit into three
basic modes, the subjective, the objective, and the combination. Silverman
also finds that gender, education and age impacts to an extent on
which of these modes one uses. Most importantly, Silverman sees the
social context, such as the pair relationship, as the filter for the
museum experience; these frame constructs, forms of conversation or
talk, impacts on the construction and maintenance of meanings whether
in the museum or elsewhere. The museum experience, then, occurs within
the social context of meaning of messages and socially constructed
through talk with companions and for construction of identity. The
result is a complete challenge to the sender-receiver linear one-way
communication model transmission of intended meaning or messages.
Visitors value reminiscing, associating personal experiences, recognizing
their taste, appraising the worth of objects they own, expressing
their competence, expressing their identity.60
Silverman concludes that visitors as meaning-makers may be seen as
loss of power or as possible democratizing view of museum experience
in that visitors and museum practitioners all learn more about way
"things" have meaning in society. She sees that there is
a challenge to museum practitioners to reflect the "updated"
view of a more interactive, democratic, responsive visitor/museum
relationship in all their endeavors. This is not simply a matter of
listening to visitors to find out if they heard what we wanted them
to hear. It is also a matter of listening to visitors, to find out
if and why they are visiting museums and/or even listening at all.
By extension, the same process will be occurring on the web and invites
a test to examine her notions on museum web experience by users. The
importance of Silverman and others work, it would seem is in
allowing us to realize that there are a number of communication modes
in which museums operate for people, sometimes objective, sometimes
subjective, and in combinations of the two. While we may more often
choose one mode over another it is also probable that this is in flux
according to the moment and social circumstance. The importance of
user participation in the museum meaning making, a la Silverman and
others, though, has not escaped web makers like Peter Samis, of San
Franciscos Museum of Fine Art, who at the MDA 1995 conference
Information: The Hidden Resource, Museums and the Internet claimed:
"What were really after is the ability to share
in a story, to share each others stories around the
planet, and attach those stories to the things that have become,
for one reasons or another, our symbolic power objects."61 |
Maria Piacente in her 1996 research also identified several web sites
working with the premise of creating dialogue and multiple voices
on the web sites. So the Exploratoriums website "Remembering
Nagasaki", from 1995, with images from a Japanese photographer
that documented the horrors of nuclear bombing; with "Atomic
Memories" the web audience was invited into the discussion, opening
a forum of debate concerning the act of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I agree with Piacente that this web experience not only acknowledges
different points of view but looks to the nature of memory and its
power not only in museums but on the web.
< http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/index.html>62
Still, there are many questions left as to how museums can create
constructivist learning opportunities that value the aspects of personal
meaning making and how to translate this to the web effectively. We
may also need to examine the degree to which constructivism fits the
museum model. Clearly at this point the new discourse around museology
aligns quite well with constructivist interpretations of the museum
and museum experience and possibly for the web.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Problematique
#3. Whose Museum Is it?
Corporatism or Cooperation
At the same time as there have been pressures to open up the museums
to multiple voices, interpretations and negotiate meanings in political
and personal terms terms, there has been an equal if not stronger
tendency to corporatism in the museum and these ideas too have influenced
the phenomenon of museums on the web. David Bearman has cautioned
that museums on the web are not mere distribution systems for collections
nor are they cybermarkets but they should be based on the values of
museums especially that of interaction and the potential of this technology.
There needs to be careful study of the interrelations of economic
structures and museums, that I do not think is carried out often enough.
The web has come to the museum at a time of funding cutbacks and
pressures to move to revenue generation, creative fundraising and
new management i.e., retrenchment and downsized structures.
I have previously referred to the process of "the global commercialization
of museums and question the loss of our museological souls"63 and the impact
on our career paths.
So when Stephanie James, a student in our Museum Studies Program
conducted a survey on why museums were going to the web in the Spring
of 1997, she found the importance of promotion in the rationale for
museum web pages based on returns from 40 people, and 33 museums:
Purpose of Museum Web Page
Promotion/Marketing |
30% |
WWW Presence |
19% |
Education |
10.8% |
Corporate/Regional Initiative
|
8% |
Public Access |
8% |
Fulfills Mandate |
5.4% |
Entertainment |
5.4% |
Community Awareness/Outreach |
5.4%64 |
Other |
8% |
|
|
73.5% also mentioned that the purpose of the site had evolved in
the form of design and content and that there had been a shift away
from marketing and promotional work to:
Greater Access to Collections |
38% |
Greater Educational Focus |
23% |
Increasing Interactivity
|
15% |
Increasing Staff Input |
15% |
Increasing Public Input |
8% |
|
|
She also found that 42% could not identify any theory behind their
site, although others identified marketing, communication, education,
information, design, entertainment and common sense.65
54% had no testing of visitors to the site, 14% examined hits, and
9% in-depth survey. Most web endeavours originated in technical services
or marketing departments.66
This pattern may not be so unusual; as Bearman has reminded us that
technology tends to be introduced in traditional ways, such as in
treating the web as a brochure. Nor would it seem are museums much
different than any other group on the web. As David Bearman holds
out the vision of the RICH future (Repository of the International
Culture of Humanity), he also suggests the model of a consortium of
museums where the collaboration of numbers of institutions enhances
the perspectives of single institutions, where the pool of resources
of members can be strategically directed to a usable and desirable
product for the public, that can handle the problems of legal challenges
of info design and delivery.
"One of the clearest lessons of the Internet and GII is that
structural changes in museum economies and institutional mandates
must be anticipated and planned if the opportunity it presents is
to be truly transformative. Otherwise the Internet will prove to be
just another publication vehicle and the museum community may see
little benefit from it -- indeed it could be a threat as other purveyors
of cultural heritage squeeze the museums out of the position of being
primary providers of cultural experience.67
Essentially Bearman is asking how can museums in a digitized world
use their social position and content to find ways to pay for a future
that is universally accessible? The possibility of Web commerce holds
out some hope for many museums. and has been engaged by many. As a
client of the Shopping Channel and of web software and book buying,
I can see the possibilities of museum web commerce but the discussion
of our non-profit limits should also be engaged.
Further, there are also a number of new management models affecting
the approach to museum operations. Whether we think in terms of organizational
learning or cooperative work models and wait for the transformation
of the museum working space, we can see the importance of engaging
the whole museum in the planning, design and evaluation of the museum
web presence. Furthermore making new technology, according to the
literature of Human-Computer Interface, is complex requiring teamwork:
and a multidisciplinary process.68
The Internet and the Intranet are possible web worlds awaiting the
transformed management of museums. What does the movement of Computer
Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) have to contribute to our web working
methods in museums? Or how many museums web sites show a directory
to staff or begin to make transparent the work that they do and in
what manner so as to involve the public via the web? Further, are
we even using the web to build cooperative work models using the software
equivalents of Lotus Notes or CSILE?69 These are issues
that museums are only now entering and that will absorb much work
in mission discussion, user study and development in upcoming years.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
IV.
Meta Data Meets the Meta Visitor: Musing on the Public Experience
of the Museums and the Web
Given all of the ideas about museums and the museum experience indicated
above, what are the implications for thought about museums on the
web? Our Webmeisters have already raised questions about the user
and the importance of interactivity and participation in the web experience.
Are we yet reflecting the rich discussion of museological discourse
identified above? So David Bearman asks:
"How can we make the facts of these objects sing to
the virtual visitor? How can we enable them to have an experience?
The first requirement for museums is to recognise that the
networked environment is interactive, and therefore can be
user driven. It enables us to respond to the visitor rather
than pump information at him <sic>. If used to its best
purposes, the networked environment enables a user to construct
an experience with personal meaning."70 |
For Bearman and others, the answers lie in the provision of structural
metadata that allows for user understanding of context, method and
structure, bits in context, to allowing for usability. So thesauri,
schema, organic constructs, the terms of information architecture,
have to be blended into the user interface in a manner most useful
to the user and woven into the museological discourse. There is more
to this though: the rich texture of discussion about the museums
publics that has been building for over 100 years. Lynn Dierking will
in this session, and her parallel paper, look to the work of Museum
Visitor Studies and its implications for the web. Suffice it for me
to say that we must not assume the arrogance of the modern that only
we have invented thinking about users either in museums or on the
web. Perhaps, as important, work in the visitor experience of museums
may also have relevance for the field of Human-Computer Interface
research.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Evaluation of Museums & The Web
What do we know about museums and the Web? Gordon has
argued that, "The embryonic nature of the Web and its rapidly
changing state make evaluation of audience meaningless."71
Several recent studies those by Downs and Quinn -- have shown
that little assessment of Web site effects is being done by museums.
Findings from the later, the British Columbia Museums Association
study to measure the effectiveness of the involvement of cultural
heritage institutions with the Internet, showed that very few institutions
could assess Internet results in any objective manner. Although museums
were highly interested in the Web, their ability and "Professionalism"
was "abysmal."72
Nevertheless, there is some research occurring on museums' efforts
on the web and interest is growing. They are of three general types,
borrowing terminology from the Museums Visitor Research field: 1.
Front-End; 2. Formative; 3. Summative. In this section of this paper,
I will look at the valuations of the web and compare it to models
from the field of Human-computer Interface or Usability study in order
to explore newer forms of usability study for museum web study.
First though let us take a brief look at the field of Human-Computer
Interface or User-Centered Design and see what is of significance
to putting museums on the web. This is not so unusual a notion. There
has been an historical connection between museum presentation and
ergonomics and design, the forerunner of Human-Computer Interface,
that originated in the study of work practices earlier in century
eventually named Human Factors- a branch of applied psychology devoted
to guiding and enhancing the design of artifacts. Although Human Factors
gained attention during W.W.II when it was applied to complex new
weaponry it has been expanded to apply to everything from industrial
design to exhibit and multi-media exhibits in museums.
In the field of Human-Computer Interface (HCI), also called
User Interface, we see the extension of Human Factors to the computer
world. The premise is that computer systems do not work on their own
but are interactive, engaging human users in computer-assisted tasks.
It is this play between the user and the machine that is the most
significant factor in the success or failure of technology, new or
old.
"Narrowly defined, this interface comprises the input
and output devices and the software that services them; broadly
defined, the interface includes everything that shapes users
experiences with computers, including documentation, training,
and human support."73 |
Such user testing is now a large part of software development. For
example in a 1992 survey by Myers and Rosson that brought 74 responses
from software developers, 48% of the application code and a comparable
development time was assigned to the interface.74 Still, according
to many authors, this is an area of evaluation that is still poorly
understood and user study is seldom taken up either because it is
seen as too expensive or as beyond the abilities. So Wigand et.al.
have argued that most web sites are designed "from the organizations
rather than the users perspectives" and refer to one report
that noted that 90% of companies studied constructed their sites without
any consultation with users.75
Nevertheless the academics and texts recommend user study. Now, similar
arguments are occurring for user study and involvement for web product
and can be found on the web in the personalities of Jakob Nielsen
and David Spiegel and whose guidelines are being consulted by some
museum web designers.76
Surely the statistics would be similar for museum web pages.
According to Ron Baeker et. al. there is a core list of issues for
user-centred design that we can take to heart in our approach to museums
on the web:
- Make it easy to determine what actions are possible
at any moment (make use of constraints).
- Make things visible, including the conceptual model
of the system, the alternative actions, and results of
actions.
- Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system.
- Follow natural mappings between intentions and required
actions, actions and required effects, and between the
information. that is visible and the interpretation of
the
- Or in other words,
1) make sure the user can figure out what to do
2) the user can tell what is going on.77
|
There are many authors in HCI who have provided lists of design principles
for designing interactives. As in Museum Visitor Studies, there are
two methodological schools, the quantitative and qualitative. For
some authors evaluations must be based on behavioral analysis and
empirical measures. For example, Jakob Nielsens 1989, "discount
usability engineering" work promoted a rigorous quantitative
approach with a test of small subsets of the system with relatively
few users who think aloud as they work. Nielsen admits that in spite
of a process of iterative design, the interface was not perfect. On
reflection, developers had used intuition to generate initial user
requirements that could indeed be in error. We also see that
there is a spectrum of philosophies behind many of these user study
enthusiasts from those like Nielsen who evolve from the education
and computer school to David Siegel who evolves from the entertainment
and design fields. Both though urge extensive user study and involvement.
Here for example are Jakob Nielsens eleven steps involving
user-centered study in developing new technologies:
I. Know the User |
5. Participatory Design |
a. Individual user characteristics
|
6. Coordinated design of the total interface |
b. The users current and desired tasks
|
7. Apply guidelines and heuristic analysis |
c. Functional analysis
|
8. Prototyping |
d. The evolution of the user and the job
|
9. Empirical testing |
2. Competitive analysis |
10. Iterative design |
3. Setting usability goals |
a. Capture design rationale
|
a. Financial impact analysis
|
11. Collect feedback from field use78 |
4. Parallel design |
|
According to Gould, Boies and Lewis,79
on usability, the user-focus is central to the entire process of production.
Early Focus on Users
Designers should have direct contact with intended or actual users-
via interviews, observations, surveys, and participatory design.
The aim is to understand users cognitive, behavioural, attendant,
anthropometric characteristics -- and the characteristics of the
jobs they will be doing.
Early-- and Continual -- User Testing
The only presently feasible approach to successful design is an
empirical one, requiring objective and measurement of user behaviour,
careful articulation of feedback, insightful solutions to ensuing
problems, and strong motivation to make design changes.
Iterative Design
A system under development must be modified based upon results of
behavioural tests of functions, user interface, help systems, documentation,
training approach. The process of implementation, testing, feedback,
evaluation, and changes must be repeated to iteratively improve
the system.
Integrated Design
All aspects of usability (e.g., user interface, help systems, a
plan, documentation) should evoke in rather than defined s and should
be under one management.
Testable behavioural target goals
What would happen if we took a similar approach to the development
of web presence of museums?
Given this brief excursion into the world of Human-Computer Interface
and Usability Study, what are museums doing in the nature of web page
evaluation and what could be available to us.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Museum
Web Evaluation Types
I will use the three types of evaluation used in educational evaluation.
1. Summative- Post-mortem Evaluation
One of the first sorts of museum web evaluation came from web-based
search engines like Lycos that take criteria used to evaluate all
web sites and extend to the museum web page. Sometimes these are called
competitive analyses. For example the ROM is in the top 5 % as rated
by Lycos. Another example of this is Musee which grades museum sites
from 1 to 5 on the criteria of 1)Travel Visitor Information, 2) Education
Materials, 3) Research, 4) Fun/Entertainment, 5) Shopping and 6) Visual
Content. <http://www.musee-online.org/reviews.htm>.
I am not sure at this point to what degree such intermediary evaluations
affect the museums web page design and re-design. The winning of a
high rating is often advertised at a sites home page but do
museums actually aim to be highly rated on them. Operators of these
services do indicate that webmasters do ask for advice on how to get
a higher rating in their pages.80
Museums & The Webs Best of the Web contest provides
us with a peer review method of evaluation in which web pages are
divided by type and voted on the web about a month before the conference
is held each year. <http:www.archimuse.com/mw98/
frame_best.html>.
The most frequent type of summative evaluation is of one site by
its owner. Hits to sites are mentioned as one measure although it
is not very accurate or necessarily a record of any meaning beyond
a very general sense of use. Use comment pages and FAQs are the most
frequent methods for feedback from audience. Again, to what degree
this information is used in reworking web pages remains unknown. Some
institutional summative study is also occurring in terms of hits and
navigational patterns of visitors to the web. The user log analyses,
with the right expertise, can reveal some things about your web site
and its effectiveness. Software available for analysis records the
length of visit to the site and page, gives demographic information
like location of visitor.81 This is the type of study that James
Jensen has performed for the National Museum of Science and Technology
in Ottawa. Some sites like the Montreals Museum of Fine Art,
and Ottawa/Hulls Canadian Museum of Civilization have also created
a questionnaire that is filled out as part of the web visit that gives
the basics of information on demographics and perhaps even a hint
of motivational information. These methods resemble many visitor studies
in museums though such studies are biased to the web visitor who comes
to the site and not all potential web site visitors. They require
a higher level of technical knowledge of web site construction and
conceptual linkage.
Some museums have actually engaged in a visitor study of their web
site. The National Museum of American History held a meeting with
the Teacher Advisory Committee to discuss educational activities on
the web as part of an informal summative evaluation. <http://www.si.edu/nmah> At present,
Debra Luneau of the ROM has evolved a questionnaire that she is giving
to selected ROM library users who are cued to visit the web site terminals
in the Library and make comment. Her work is very much based on the
criteria of Jakob Nielsen one of the leading web page evaluators.
There have also been a number of academic or independent comparative
studies of web pages that are based on what the HC Interface folks
called heuristic study. To put this in plain language, the researcher
creates categories for measurement of effectiveness based on a personal
study of existing criteria, of ones own experience of the phenomenon
and the existing norms of design standards.82
One example of such a study is that of Maria Piacente in her Masters
paper for Museum Studies at the University of Toronto who identified
three types of museum web pages and examined them. The first was the
"Electronic Brochure", essentially an advertising sheet
format like the brochure or handout used at sites or to get visitors
to come to sites. The second was "The Museum in the Virtual World"
whereby the actual museum was projected onto the web by means of maps,
floorplans, images, online collections or exhibits, both real and
virtual. Here, the real-life museum is recreated83
online. Maria Piacente found this to be the case particularly with
some art galleries and used the example of the Philadelphia Museum
of Arts Cezanne pages (http://libertynet.org/). There are several
variations of this type. Sometimes the world-wide web is used within
an exhibition as in the AGOs "Oh Canada Project".
Some museums are actually using the web site as an archive for former
exhibits, that extends the life of special exhibits and gives rich
material to the web presence; Piacente's example is the Peabody Museum
of Archaeology and Ethnology. < http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/maria/default.html>
Some museums have designed their web presence as an extended collections
access. Examples of the collections based web are the Hooper Virtual
Palaeontology Museum, the University of Californias Museum of
Palaeontology, the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum < http://www.warplane.com/fighters.html/>,
and Reginas the Mackenzie Art Gallery material on Sask. artists
< http://www.uregina.ca/~macken/>.
And some have gone to the establishment of searchable databases for
collections information access, i.e Schools, National Museum of American
Art. Some of these sites represent deep sites, in the sense of hierarchical
connections and hyperlinks.
Maria Piacente identifies a third of approach to museum web pages,
"The True Interactives". Here, the pages may have some relation
to real museum but they also add or reinvent the museum and even invite
the audience to do so. Often these sites differentiate the web from
museum by its name, especially those of the science centres. So the
Exploratorium has the "Learning Studio". A few art galleries
have also taken this approach such as the Dia Centre for the Arts
http://www.diacenter.org/. Examples
of these engaging sites are the Saskatchewan Science Centre < http://
www.sciencecentre. sk.ca/>;
the Natural History Museum, London < http:// www.nhm.ac.uk/>;
Minneapolis Institute of Arts <http://www.artsmia.org/>;
the Childrens Museum of Indianapolis <http:// www.a1.com/children/home.html>;
and the Franklin Institute Science Museums Science Learning
Network <http://sln.fi.edu/>. Although Piacente
conducted her analysis nearly two years ago, many of her sites remain
the leading competitors in such events as the Best of Museums on the
Web.
Piacentes typology of web pages is very useful particularly
because it parallels the typologies we have developed for exhibition
analyses.84
It also admits that there are multiple purposes not only to museums
but to their web pages. Perhaps we should be developing some sense
of the complex of museum web page types and that there may be differing
purposes and evaluation criteria for them.
Some other summative comparative studies have been conducted by Katherine
Futers and by Dr. David Barr. Futers prepared a study for the Museum
Documentation Association in 1996 by surfing for several hours each
day to museum web pages and making notes about her experience. Futers,
herself a person new to the Internet, concentrated on what was available
and how accessible the pages were. She concluded, "There are
museums out there that are leading the way in providing strong, useful,
productive and entertaining web pages", noting in particular
the work of the Exploratorium.85
Dr. David Barrs study, although an heuristic one, tried to
place the examination within the critical needs of adult and life-long
learning. Barr distilled six measurements key to adult learning resources:
information content, communication properties, accessibility interactivity,
feedback/community and visitor services and three qualities of websites
in general: structure, complexity and dynamics. Each of these were
then sub-divided until he was testing for 70 indicators, to include
such items as total file size, links to related sites, cyberambiance,
image to page ration and pattern of hyperlinks. He used the program
Web Analyzer 2.0 from In Context Software to quantify the qualitative
variables and then performed the analysis.86 Barr found that four of the most
effective sites were highly valued for adult learning; only one, however,
was a museum site and the other three commercial adult learning sites.
"For museums, such sites may represent one of the few
effective vehicles for extending the museums lifelong
learning mandate beyond the museum walls and beyond the duration
of the individual museum visit."87 |
Two further types of visitor evaluation occur during the planning
and implementation of a projects, 2. Front-end and 3. Formative. There
are a few examples of each in the museum web world but not very many
as yet.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
2. Front-end- User Needs
Several sites have attempted to use the methods of focus groups to
look at web possibilities. The McMichael Canadian Art Galleries Artifice
project, originally planned as a CD-ROM and now also for the web,
began with focus groups with teachers and students from the North
York School Board. The Florida Natural History Museum Science has
also used front-end evaluation in developing its web pages. No doubt
there are some other examples; still for the most part museums have
not yet used the front-end methods of user study to any great extent.
There have been other projects that have more generally attempted
to get at the underlying premises of user needs for information from
museums. At the National Museums of Scotland Catechism project
was a survey of visitor questions by Helen McCorry and Ian Morrison.
Catchism was created to test the assumption that "the present
approach to museum information is too highly structured and too theoretical
and therefore discourages access instead of improving it." Many
of the information databases architectures, according to McCorry have
been created based on assumptions based on 1970s and 1980s systems,
including manual systems, and their demands, and bibliographic databases
where terminology and authority references are controlled and accepted.88
These approaches do not readily think about the user in ways appropriate
to this new media and usage.
Another project that must be mentioned is that of the Gettys
AHIPs Points of View Project, from January of 1995 to
Spring of 1997, under the direction of Jane Sledge. It focussed on
questions of users demands for data as a premise for understanding
the users use and need for museum information. Eventually through
three focus groups of museum staff and audiences discussions were
held regarding the nature of information uses. Then, a number of humanities
scholars were studied by Dr. Marcia Bates for their searching behaviours
of Getty databases89
with some surprising results.
Jane Sledge has suggested that:
"Museum information systems might be more successful
if they provided online assistance for users to develop meta-skills
about questioning, an understanding what information is available
to them, and knowledge about how the information is organized."90 |
To what degree, then, should the web presence contain a mediated
assistance with human intervention versus information architecture?
One suggestion has been that information design be set up on a "novice-to
expert continuum" depending on existing expertise and interest.
This approach has been criticized as too hierarchical and creates
a mistaken notion that scholars require "different entry points"
than other users.91 We can see that the
novice-expert approach is contrary to constructivist learning ideas.
Further there are issues of design and presentation to be investigated.92
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
3. Formative- User
Test While In Development
We have now a few examples. Over the last months, the McMichael,
with the assistance of Digital Renaissances usability architect
Diane Howie, has brought the technique of "discount usability
engineering" promoted by Jakob Nielsen into use through the development
phase of the prototype. Here five interviews were conducted in a one-to-one
relationship engaging the user with the product, Artifice, and recording
in detail the responses and behaviours.
In another example, the Indianapolis Childrens Museum has taken
a slightly different and more participatory procedure for developing
the web site. Inviting web visitors to contribute their ideas to the
web making.
Some museums now are cross-over thinking from exhibits or multi-media
to web development, and often have used visitor research93
and evaluation in these settings and are anxious to bring it to the
web work. At the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Linda Ferguson,
the Audience Advocate and Evaluator, has been conducting
a formative evaluation on the new website for logic and user-friendliness.The
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County engaged noted museum
evaluator Randy Korn to evaluate both a kiosk and the web page for
the traveling exhibit "Cats! Wild to Mild." These efforts
no doubt reveal the extent to which the web efforts are integrated
into the other functions, especially that of exhibiting and visitor
study, in the museum.
Again, the field of Human-Computer Interface gives us a sense of
all the possibilities of user-study that are open to us. Gould lists
the many methods available to us in user-study:
Methods to Carry Out Early Focus on Users
Talk with users
Visit customer locations
Observe users working
Videotape users working
Learn about the Work organization
Thinking Aloud
Try it yourself
Participative design
Expert on design team
Task Analysis
Surveys & Questionnaires
Methods to Carry Out Early -- and Continual-- User Testing
Printed or video scenarios
Early user manuals
Mock-ups
Simulation
Early prototyping
Early demonstrations
Thinking aloud
Make videotapes
Hallway and Storefront methodology
Computer bulletin boards...and conferencing
Formal prototypes
Try-to-destroy-it contests
Field studies
Follow-up studies
Methods to Carry Out Iterative Design
Software tools
System development work organization
Methods to Carry Out Integrated Design
Consider all aspects of usability in the initial design.
One person or group has responsibility for all aspects.94
Clearly museums have only begun to explore the possibilities of user-study
for museum web page development. Of course from the preceding argument
you will see that I would also like such evaluation to occur within
the museological frame of reference. So if we were able to take the
premises of New Museology and the newer learning paradigms for museums
and if we were able to take the work of visitor research and extend
it to the web, we could clarify the premises of web museum evaluation
and profitably meld them to the User-centered Design approaches appropriately.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
V.
Moving to Participatory or Collaborative Approaches to the Design
of Web: Implications for Museums and the Web
In this section I will attempt to meld the areas of museology, Human-Computer
Interface and web page evaluation around an emerging type of museological
web page experience.
One of the most interesting developments mentioned above is that
of the evolution of concepts of participatory design. Work in the
last two decades in Scandinavia and in some other locations in participatory
design for information technology offers some important opportunities
that parallel much of the thinking of the New Museology or what I
like to call Participatory Museology. Given that some of the thinking
of the New Museology (as discussed above) has also occured in Scandinavia,
there is an interesting parallel in thought. Such approaches in user-centred
design try to move from the lab to the workplace and to adjust to
the variety of users involved moving to User-involved design. This
approach rejects the catchall imprecision of user study concepts as
useless and fundamentally inefficient as, despite user study through
all the steps of development, the final test of a project often shows
that the results do not fit the users and so begins the remedial action
of design.
Liam Bannon has argued that we switch from the concepts of users
to actors to acknowledge the active and agency role of the participants
or clients should play in the process of the design. Bannon prefers
the word actors to humanize the study, and moves from a concept of
human as passive to participatory.95 Human Factors in his view has
often reduced the human element, the user, to "another system
component" that underplays issues of individual motivation, membership
in a community of workers and the complexities of human action. "People
are more than the sum of parts; be they information-processing subsystems
or physiological systems, they have a set of values, goals and beliefs
about life and work." For Bannon, they are "active agents"
in the design itself. Bannon trained at the University of Toronto
where some of the ideas of Scandinavian participatory design and evaluation
have made some inroads.
In Scandinavia, 1970s legislation brought workers into the development
of computers design on the principle of codetermination. By the 1980s
projects were developed to focus on design of new kinds of computer
support using skill and product quality to bring in the users
perspective, thus blending issues of quality management with participatory
design. In this practice, emphasis moved from system descriptions
to mock-ups and game-like design sessions, to invoke fantasy and imagined
futures and involved worker participants in the process.
Bödker, Grönboek and Kyng (1993) are participatory design
researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark who have developed applications
to enhance workplace skills through increased flexibility , interplay
between technology and the organization of work in a manner that requires
the full cooperation users and developers. So the Project Manager
becomes Project Facilitator, and cooperative design the goal:
"Cooperative design which in our perspective means
empowering users to fuller participation and cooperation,
changes the rules of the game...The cooperative design approach
begins by creating and environments in which users and designers
can actively consider the future use situation. It is a process
where users and designers dont have to wait until the
final act to know if the application will fit the practice
of the users."96 |
Similarly work in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)
and collaborative work (CSCW) offer some important conceptual shifts
extending our picture of the user experience beyond the solitary viewer
or web user to address more social forms of involvement in the museum
experience. These working methods have profound implications for the
way we develop new media in our museums that will require re-thinking
management structures and philosophies.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
Moving
To Participatory/Collaborative Museum Web Work:
We need to point out that museums are already working in ways implied
by participatory design and in the spirit of cooperative museology
as represented in the New Museology. The examples I would point to
are the L.A. Culture Net, a three year project that runs to June 1999.
<http://home.lacn.org/LACN/>
Here, the point is " people understanding and participating in
their community through culture" and through the Internet. So
they can hold a "Webraising" where the webmasters and others
act as facilitators to the web communities, virtual and other. Here
the style of interaction is participatory, and collaborative among
cultural and educational organizations and the private sector. Another
example of community approach to web making is that of work at the
AGO, first with the "Oh! Canada Project" and now with the
web cooperative working method of developing the 60s project.
Finally, I must admit that I am enamoured of another experiment with
the museum as a phenomenon, very much in the spirit of the "New
Museology" and the new person-centred museum discussed above,
that has been evolving for at least four years. Two artists, Michele
Kolnicker and Michael Kiselinger, created a virtual museum, the Heimat
Museum, for Castle Toller in Upper Austria. The intention was to gather
various ideas and represenations of "heimat", German for
connection to home or homeland, through the WWW. Topics were childhood,
community, food, language, living-spaces, surrounding, things, crane-school.
Then material would be put on display in multi-media installations
and sculptures of all the participants on the occastion of a Regional
festival. The project is still going on now, three years after, as
each day someone from around the world adds another story, memory
and often an image. <http://fgidec1.tuwien.ac.at/1002situations/>
This museological exercise symbolizes very well the idea of museums
as places of meaning-making and memory as well as that of community,
now defined over the Web.
The possibilities of the web expression of some of the premises of
New Museology and of the newer ideas of museums and meaning-making
it seems to me are endless and exciting. In the next few years, I
believe we will engage the groupware technologies and software to
explore Computer-Supported Cooperative Museology and in ways that
respond both to the New Museology and the new politics of community
and identity in museums.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
VI.
The Muses On the Web- Conclusion
With this discussion we have covered a lot of ground in an attempt
to tie together several areas of study necessary to conceptualizing
and evaluating museums and the web. From the questions of museology,
to the understandings of user /usability study, the context for looking
and evaluating museums on the web has been explored. What this discussion
does invite is the possibility of much more user study in the development
phases of museums web activities. It also raises the question of how
museums may in fact reconceptualize their relationships with people,
groups, and communities using the technology of the Internet and in
the spirit of the current discourse in museology. In a sense we have
come full circle from the participatory notions of museology to the
participatory ideas of user involvement in creating new technologies
like the web and both utilizing the study of users and publics to
greater benefit of all.
By now, I also hope that you are convinced that the discussions of
museology on the web should occur both within the larger discussion
of museums and museology as well as that of Human/Computer Interface
study in a manner informed by the nature of museums in all their complexity,
including their "Bodies and Souls" as evoked by ecomuseologist
Ewa Bergdahl.
[ RETURN
to OUTLINE ]
END NOTES
1. Heather Menzies, Whose Brave
New World? (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1996), p 19.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
2. This work has been influenced by the
work of Masters of Museum Studies students work; that of Stephenie
James and Maria Piacente. The treatment of issues of new technologies
and user study follows from my exposure to the work of various members
of University of Torontos Knowledge Media Design Institute including
Ron Baecker and Joan Cherry. In addition, Dr. David Barr, Debra Luneau
of the ROM, and Richard Gerarrd assisted in the ideas and the production
of the paper. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
3. Max Anderson, "Introduction",
The Wired Museum, Washington, AAM, 1997, p. 15. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
4. Doron Swade, "The Digital Superhighway
and the Curator," Museum Collections and the Information Superhighway
Conference, Science Museum 10 May 1995. < http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/researchers/confabs.html#swade>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
5. Tom Wright, " Museum Collections
and the Information Superhighway Conference, Science Museum 10 May
1995. < http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/researchers/confabs.html#wright>
[ RETURN to TEXT
]
6. Tomislav Sola, "Museum Professionals-
the endangered species," in P. Boylan (ed.), Museums 2000.
Politics, People, Professionals and Profit (London: Routledge,
1992), pp. 101-113. For more of this discussion, see Peter Van Mensch,
"What Museums, What Success? Some museums Are More Equal Than
Others," Conference Art Museums and Price of Success,"
Boekmanstichting, Amsterdam, December 1992, pp. 1-5, <http://www.xs4all.nl/~rwa/boekman.htm
>. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
7. Howard Besser, "The Changing
Role of Photographic Collections with the Advent of Digitization,"
The Wired Museum, Washington, AAM, 1997, p.120 [
RETURN to TEXT ]
8. Max Anderson, "Introduction",
The Wired Museum, Washington, AAM, 1997, p. 19. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
9. Ibid.,
p. 19. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
10. Ibid., p. 32. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
11. Besser, The Wired Museum, p. 120. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
12. Besser, The Wired Museum, p.
121. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
13. Doug Worts and Kris Morrisey, "Technology,
Communication and Public Programming: Going Where Museums Have Rarely
Gone," AAM Sourcebook p. 175-179. For more Worts, see
Extending the Frame: Forging a New Partnership with the Public",
New Research in Museum Studies, vol.5 (1994) and "Museums
Technology Frontier: How Treacherous is it?", in press for 1998,
Washington,D.C.: AAM. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
14. Ibid.,
p. 177. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
15. Exceptions are Suzette Worden, "Thinking
Critically About Virtual Museums," Andrea Witcomb, "The
End of the Mausoleum: Museums in the Age of Electronic Communication,"
and Peter Walsh, "The Web and Unassailable Voice," in Museums
and the Web 97: Selected Papers , Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum
Informatics, 1997. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
16. See Lynne Teather, "Museum
Studies: Reflecting on Reflective Practice," Journal of Museum
Management and Curatorship 10 (1991), pp. 403-417 and Peter
Van Mensch, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Zagreb,1992 at http://www.xs4all.nl/~rwa/boekman.htm.
[ RETURN to
TEXT ]
17. Francis Henry Taylor,
Babels Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York,
1945), p. 39. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
18. Stephen Weil, Rethinking the
Museum, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), and
Julia Harrison, "Ideas of Museums in the 1990s", Museum
Management and Curatorship 13 (1993), 160. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
19. Presentation to Museum Studies
Program, University of Toronto, Fall, 1996.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
20. Benjamin Ives Gilman,
Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, (Cambridge, 1923) and
George Brown Good, "Museum-History and Museums of History,.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
21. Duncan Cameron, "A Viewpoint:
The Museum as a Communication System and Implications for Museum Education,"
Curator XI, ( March 1968), pp. 33-40, and E.I. Knetz and A.G.
Wright, "The Museum as a Communication System: An Assessment
of Camerons Viewpoint" Curator XIII, (3 December
1970), pp. 204-212. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
22. George F. MacDonald and
Stephen Alsford, "The Museum as Information Utility", Museum
Management and Curatorship, 10 ( 1991), pp. 306-7.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
23. Deirdre Stam, "The Informed
Muse: The Implications of "New Museology for Museum Practice,"
Museum Management and Curatorship 12(1993), pp. 267-283.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
24. Ibid., p. 271. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
25. Ibid.,
p. 267. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
26. Ibid., p. 280. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
27. George MacDonald and Stephen
Alsford, George Macondald and Stephen Alsford, Museum for the Global
Village (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civlization, 1989). [
RETURN to TEXT ]
28. David Siegel is at <http://www.cea.edu/> and Jakob Nielsen
is at <http://www.useit.com>. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
29. Lynne Teather, "Reflecting
on Museum Practice", Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship
10 (1991), pp. 403-417. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
30. Peter Vergo,
(ed.) The New Museology, (London: Reaktion Books, 1990) [
RETURN to TEXT ]
31.
Julia Harrison, "Ideas of Museums in the 1990's". Journal
of Museum Management and Curatorship 13(2)(1994), p. 162. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
32. To
pursue the history of museum thinking, see Eileen Hooper-Greenhill,
The Shape of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Lynne Teather,
Museology and Its Traditions: The British museum Experience, 1845-1945,
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Leicester, 1984; Lisa Roberts, From
Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997, and for a European perspective,
see Peter Van Menschs web site where he has mounted chapters
of his doctoral thesis Towards a Methodology of Museology Ph.D.
Thesis, University of Zagreb, 1992, < http://www.xs4all.nl/~rwa/boek01.htm>
[
RETURN to TEXT ]
33. Paul Marshall Rea, The
Museum and the Community: A Study of Social Laws and Consequences,
( Lancaster, Pa.: Science Press) 1932. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
34. T.R. Adam, The Civic Value of
Museums (New York:: American Association for Adult Education,
1937), p.26. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
35. Duncan Cameron, "Museums,
Temple or Forum," Curator 14(1) (March 1971), p. 23. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
36. Bloom et al, Museums for a New
Century, (Washington: AAM, 1984) and Excellence and Equity
(Washington: AAM, 1992.) [
RETURN to TEXT ]
37. Stevenson, Sheila (1987).
"Balancing the Scales: Old Views and a New Muse", MUSE,
5,1: 30-33. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
38. For more discussion on ecomuseums,
see René Rivard, Opening Up The Museum or Towards a New Museology:
Ecomuseums and "Open Museums" (Quebec City, 1984) and Andrea Hauenschild,
Claims and Reality of the New Museology: Case Studies in Canada, the
United States and Mexico, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Hamburg,
1988. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
39. Ewa Bergdahl, "Summary,"
Paper in Nordisk useologi 2 (1996), pp. 71-86. <http://www.umu.se/nordic.museology/NM/962Summaries.html>
[
RETURN to TEXT ]
40. Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach,
"The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: an Iconographic
Analysis," Marxist Perspectives, (Winter 1978): 28- 51
and Duncan, Carol and Wallach, Alan, "The Universal Survey Museum",
Art History 4: 1980, 448-469 and Robert Lumley (ed.), The
Museum Time Machine: Putting Culture on Display, (London:
Routledge, 1988). [
RETURN to TEXT ]
41. See for example
George Stocking, (ed.) Object and Other: Essays on Museums
and Material Cutlure,, (Londong: University of Wisconsin,Press,
1984); Michael Ames, Museums, the Public and Anthropology, (New
Delhi: Concept Press, and Vancouver: Univrsity of British Columbia
Press,1986) and Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology
of Museums ( Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992) and Assembly of First
Nations and the Canadian Museums Association (1992) Turning the
Page. Forging New Partnerships Between Museums and First Peoples,
Ottawa: CMA, 1992. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
42. Edwina Taborsky, "The
Discursive Object," in Susan Pearce (ed.) New Research in
Museum Studies 1 (London: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 52. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
43. Susan Pearce, Objects of Knowledge,
(London: Athlone Press, 1992).
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
44.
Lisa Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative. Educators and the Changing
Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1997) p. 79. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
45. Peter Walsh, "The Web and
the Unassailable Voice," Museums and the Web, 1997, Los Angeles,
Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1997, p. 69. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
46. Ibid., p. 75. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
47. "The Hidden Peoples
of the Amazon exhibition" at Museum of Mankind in London (1986),
"The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Candas First
Peoples" in Calgary and Ottawa (1988), "Into the Heart of
Africa" in Toronto (1990), and Te Maori and the San Francisco
Fine Art Museum. For a discussion of "Hispanic Art in the United
States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors "(1984-7)
in Houston a travelling exhibition in the US triggered controversies
Livingston, Jane and Beardsley, John. "The Poetics and Politics
of Hispanic Art: A New Perspective", in Ivan Karp and Steven
Lavine, ()eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp.
104-120. [ RETURN to
TEXT ]
48. In Canada, Michael Ames, Bruce Trigger
and Julia Harrison. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
49. Ivan Karp, Christine Kreamer and
Steven Lavine, (eds.) , Exhibiting Cultures: Poetics and Politics
of Museum Display ( Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1992) and Karp, I., Kreamer, Christine and Lavine, Steven (eds.),
Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington:
Smithsonian Institutional Press, 1991). [
RETURN to TEXT ]
50. John Kuo Wei Then, "Creating
a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Muaseum Experiment",
in (Ivan Karp, Christine Kreamer and Steven Lavine, eds.) Museums
and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992. pp. 286-326, and Edmund Barry Gaither, "Hey,
Thats Mine": Thoughts on Pluralism and American Museums",
in Ivan Karp, Christine Kreamer and Steven Lavine, (eds.) Exhibiting
Cultures: Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992, pp. 42-56. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
51. Worts and Morrisey, p. 177. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
52. George Hein,
"The Constructivist Museum," Paper for Journal for Education
in Museums 16 (1995), pp. 21-23, p.1. http://www.gem.org.uk/hein.html
For an excellent discussion of Constructivism see the Miami
Museum of Science web page . < http://www.miamisci.org/ph/lpintro5e.html
> [ RETURN to TEXT
]
53. Jamieson MacKenzie, "
Museums and the Web 97, (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Archives and
Museum Informatics, 1997), p.79. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
54. Ibid., p. 80.
[ RETURN ]
55. Marlene Scardemelia and
Carl Bereiter, "The Challenge of a Knowledge Society", p.2.
For more information about CSILE see <http://csile.oise.utoronto.ca/CSILE_biblio.html
> [
RETURN to TEXT ]
56. Ibid., p.2. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
57. Ibid. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
58. Mihalyi Csikszentmihayli
and Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things:Domestic Symbols and
the Self, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). [
RETURN to TEXT ]
59. Lois Silverman, " Of Us
and Other "Things": The Content and Functions of Talk By
Adult Visitor Pairs in An Art and A History Museum", Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Pennsylvania, 1990. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
60. Ibid., p. 269. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
61. Anne Fahy and Wendy Sudbury (eds.),
Information: The Hidden Resource, Museums and the Internet. Proceedings
of the Seventh International Conference of the MDA (Cambridge:
MDA, 1995), p.25, as cited by Futers, p.1. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
62. Maria Piacente,Surfs Up:
Museums and the world Wide Web, MA Research Paper, Museum Studies
Program, University of Toronto, 1996, p. 12. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
63. Lynne Teather, Museology and
Its Traditions, p. 414. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
64. Stephanie James, "Survey
Results," March 5, 1997, p.1-9. <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sjames/museum/survey.htm>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
65. Ibid.,
p.3. [ RETURN to TEXT
]
66. Ibid., p.5. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
67. David Bearman, "Museum Strategies
for Sucess on the Internet," Paper for Museum collections
and the Information Superhighway conference, at the Science Museum
10 May, 1995. <http;//www.nmsci.ac.uk/researchers/confabs.html#bearman>.
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
68. Ron Baecker, et.al., p. 74. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
69. See Proceedings of CSC:
97, The Second International Conference on Computer Support
for Collaborative Learning, Dec. 10-14, University of Toronto,
Dec. 1997. [ RETURN to
TEXT ]
70. David Bearman, "Museum Strategice
for Success on the Internet," Paper presented at Museum collections
and the Information Superhighway Conference, Science Museum, London,
(May 10, 1995), p.4. <www.nmsi.ac.uk/infosh/bearman.htm>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
71. Sue Gordon, "Is Anybody Out
There?", Hands on: Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums:
Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Hypermedia
and Interactivity. Pittsburgh: Archives and Informatics, 1995. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
72. Clifford Quinn, BCMuseums
Association WWW, 1996.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
73. Preface, XI,Human-Computer:Readings
in Human Computer Interaction:Toward the Year 2000, Written and
Edited by Ronald M. Baecker, et al.D, San Francisco, Morgan Kaufman,
1995. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
74. See John Falk and Lynn Dierking,
The Museum Experience (Washington, D.C.: Whalesback Press,
1992). [ RETURN to TEXT ]
75. David Kline,
"Memo to the Boss: Your Web Site is Useless," <http://www.hotwired.com/market/96/15/index1a.html>
(April 1996), as cited in Rolf T. Wigand et.al, "Electronic commerce
and User-Based Design of a Web site: Targeting the Technology Transfer
Audience," Journal of Technology Transfer vol.22 (1),
pp. 19. [ RETURN to TEXT
]
76. Personal Communication
with 4 Museum Web page designers from Museum-L listserve. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
77. Ron Baeker
et. al., Human-Computer:Readings in Human Computer Interaction:Toward
the Year 2000, p. Xi. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
78. Nielsen, as cited in Baeker et.al.
p.72. [ RETURN to TEXT ]
79. Gould, Boies, and Lewis, 1991,
as cited in Baecker, et. al., 1995, p. 76. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
80. Personal Communication,
March 5, 1998. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
81. Patricia
Downs in her study of Web usage by museums points to the University
of Cambridge <http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/stats/stats.html>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
82. Jakob Nielsen, "Heuristic
Evaluation." < http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
83. Maria Piacente, Surfs Up_:
Museums and the world Wide Web, MA Research Paper, Museum Studies
Program, University of Toronto, 1996.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
84. Ibid.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
85. Katherine Futers, "Tell
Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want: a look at Internret
User Needs." <http:www.open.gov.uk/mdocassn/eva_kf.htm>
[ RETURN
to TEXT ]
86. Dr. David Barr,"Website
Learning," Paper presented at the OMA Education Colloquium, Fall
of 1997. < http://www.digiserve.com/adl_ss/research/>
[ RETURN to
TEXT ]
87. Ibid.,
p.6. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
88. Jane Sledge, "Points of View",
Paper presented to ICHIM/MCN 95, p.2.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
89. Marcia Bates,
Document Familiarity, Relevance, and Bradfords Law: The Getty
Online Searching Project Report No.5. Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies, University of California, L.A., 1997. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
90. Ibid.,
p.4. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
91. Ibid., p.5. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
92. Kody, Janney and Jane Sledge,"
User Access Needs for Project Chio," Unpublished, August 1995.Culltural
Heritage Online project of CIMi Consortium. Testing SGML and Z39.50. [
RETURN to TEXT ]
93. As discussed in Museum-L listserve
June/July 1997. The website is <http://www.nhm.org/cats>.
[ RETURN to
TEXT ]
94. Methods of Applying
the Design Principles: (Gould, 1988) as cited in Baeker et. al.
p. 76. [ RETURN
to TEXT ]
95. In "From Human Factors
to Human Actors: The Role of Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction
Studies in System Design," in Ron Baecker et. al., p. 205.
[ RETURN to TEXT ]
96. Susanne Bödker, Kaj
Grönboek, and Morten Kyng, "Cooperative Design: Techniques
and Experiences from the Scandinavian Scene, " in Ron Baecker
et. al. p. 215. [
RETURN to TEXT ]


Last modified: March 20, 1998. This file can be found below http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/
Send questions and comments to info@archimuse.com
|
|