Is the museum and gallery website a thing of the past?

Are museums capable of making a significant impact on the web? It’s a difficult question, with a potentially difficult-to-swallow answer.

Many of the larger museums have had a web presence since the mid-nineties. The Internet Archive reminds us how these early websites were focused largely on attracting and directing people to the building.

Yet our research suggests that a significant percentage of museum website visitors are still only interested in using the website for planning a visit to the physical museum: opening times, maps, exhibitions and event details. The developments over the last 15 years – online resources, games, social networks, user generated content, educational packages and collections interactivity – are potentially nothing more than a distraction.

This is no surprise to those working in the sector. Restrictive budgets (where the small ‘leather pouch’ origin of the word ‘budget’ is fairly accurate), outdated success metrics imposed by funding bodies, the shackles of public service and ‘value for money’, and a sometimes true-to-stereotype elitism and risk aversion at the highest level have all combined to make the occasional innovation a genuine achievement for those involved.

But we also need to look at an even bigger picture. As funding bodies evolve, a younger generation move into positions of power, and institutions divert greater resource into the increasingly favorable web platform, will we actually see any change? Or are museums and galleries – by their very nature – doomed to a ghostly online presence compared to their dominating physical counterparts?

Clearly, it’s a tough sell. Traditional retailers can offer their retail services online. Content providers can offer their content services online. Healthcare, local government, groups and clubs, even the entertainment industry can offer an equivalent or enhanced service on the web.

Museums and galleries, however, have always had the monopoly on the experience that they offer. That’s why you make the effort to visit the building: because you can’t see this stuff – this real, physical, unique stuff – anywhere else.

This experience just doesn’t translate online. I can see images of almost anything on the web. Increasingly, I can also get data about anything on the web. This is a real concern for museums, which have sometimes relied on their collections databases – essentially lists of images and associated data – to create value. With the advent of unthinkably large online databases like Freebase and dbPedia, this is not an option any more. The museums have no easily definable upper-hand.

So what can museums offer? Should they all give up on the web and re-direct their domain to the relevant Google Map?

It’s not as bleak as it sounds.

Museums and galleries do have an opportunity to make a real difference. To discover how, we need to examine their differentiators. In crass commercial terms, these are the Unique Selling Points that can be exploited.

• Expertise.

  These institutions employ experts in their field – global authorities in some cases. The web enables these experts to educate and interact on a vast scale.

• Reputation and Trust.

  It is often suggested that the web is a truly meritocratic platform; a level playing field where the kid in her bedroom has as much online authority as the mandarin on Capitol Hill. In reality, this just doesn’t ring true. Website visitors implicitly trust the online manifestations of organizations that they trust and recognize in real life, which unquestionably includes Museums and Galleries.

• Audience.

  Museums and galleries work hard to attract large numbers of visitors, with diverse backgrounds and interests. This pre-built audience is a huge advantage when launching new projects, where others may never achieve the critical mass sometimes required (e.g. for social networks). Museums and galleries also form obvious focal-points for people with similar interests (war memorabilia, craft hobbyists, bird watchers, and much more), and therefore have the ability to more easily drive these passionate users to a new web project, and convert them to advocates.

• Voice, Exposure and Influence.

  This is a by-product of the reputation and audience that museums and galleries enjoy. They are able to offer a voice and exposure for those that otherwise may not have the ability to be seen or heard, and can influence at a local, national and international scale. This is particularly important for smaller communities; museums are able to engage online with those in the margins, those that may not live in a city or have access to the physical building, and act as their voice or mediator.

• Media

  It’s not just digitized images that museums and galleries house, but often hundreds of hours of unique – sometimes publically unseen and unheard – audio and video too.

• The Physical Space.

  Perhaps ironically, it may be the physical space of the museum/gallery that permits them to offer the most exciting online proposition. Offering a web user the ability to somehow affect and influence the in-house experience is a tantalizing proposition.

Given these enviable differentiators, what kind of projects could museums and galleries undertake to make the most impact, and how should they be approached? Here are some suggestions to start the discussion:

• Museum and gallery websites often try to be all things to all people: teachers, students, academics, researchers, lifelong learners, tourists, and more. In order to better meet specific user needs, and attract a sustainable user base, niche ‘tribes’ should be targeted more specifically on a per-project basis.

  Referring to the differentiators above, the expertise, audience, voice, media and exposure potential of the museum can all be used to attract and service these niches. These may not attract vast audiences (and hence existing success metrics such as ‘unique users’ may not be met), but they will have a bigger impact on the user segments they target.

• People generally use the web in one of two modes: they are bored and are looking for entertainment (‘browsing’), or they have a specific need/task. Rather than creating generic ‘content’ based websites, museums and galleries must spend time analyzing end-user needs and creating services that address these specific needs. This may be a need for an artist to exhibit their work or find inspiration for their medium, a medal collector to identify potential fakes, or a pensioner to research their family history. In each case, the projects must address these needs directly, and not through a generic ‘collections search’.

• Take advantage of APIs as the new form of distribution. The knowledge being created by internal experts should be as widely distributed as possible; on SlideShare, Flickr, Scribd, YouTube, and other channels that the museum audience may be using.

  Less obviously, and perhaps more importantly, inbound APIs offer your audience a chance to contribute back. Given the reputation and trust, and the voice, exposure, and physical space on offer, a well-defined and flexible method for contributing content (art, exhibitions, leaflets, knowledge, data, services, didactic panels, etc) into the highly regarded institutions would be a massive draw, and a clear display of how trust flows in both directions.

• It’s not about the idea; it’s about the execution. Google wasn’t the first search engine, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and Flickr wasn’t the first photo-sharing platform: their successes are mostly due to their superior execution of an idea.

  Applied to the museum and gallery sector, it becomes apparent that a new approach to project development is required, in order to execute ideas to the best of their abilities

  Traditionally, galleries and museums have been forced to design projects around the often-archaic requirements of funding agencies. Instead of projects being designed to conform to outdated bureaucratic models, funding agencies need to restructure their programmes to allow and even encourage a shift from the huge linear waterfall of ‘plan, build, launch’.

  With their ready-built audience, museums and galleries are in the unique and enviable position to lead the way in best practices related to user experience. Projects can and should be quickly iterated and tested with real users throughout the process. With the ability to elicit quick and early feedback, there is also the opportunity to embrace and celebrate failure and accept the need to adjust, to ensure that projects are given the ability (and funding) to change (possibly even radically) with time, as the user needs are more accurately identified.

Afterword and Disclosure

Box UK works with a number of UK museums and galleries, including The National Maritime Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The Museum of London and The National Gallery.

This is a personal post, not necessarily one that Box UK as a company agrees with. I have a great passion and respect for the work of this sector, and a sincere desire to create opportunities to enhance its online potential.

This post makes a number of generalizations for the sake of getting my argument across; there are many museums and galleries across the world that are achieving astonishing things on the web, made even more astonishing because of the constraints on them.

Agree? Disagree? Leave your comments below to keep the conversation going.