Weisberg - Museums and the Internet of Things

Museums and the Internet of ThingsImpacts of New Frontiers in Data onCurators, Audiences, and Practice

Robert Weisberg, Senior Project Manager, Publications and Editorial Department, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Robert Weisberg Museums and the Internet of Things

22 years in museum publishing (books, then digital projects, now labels) at The Met. Four different job titles:

● Computer Specialist● Desktop Publishing Manager● Assistant Managing Editor● Senior Project Manager

But in common: a search for patterns in the huge amount of editorial content flowing through the Met: 20-25 art books, 5,000 object labels per year, and digital hybrid projects.

About me


So what is the Internet of Things to a museum? Data about objects in the collection?

Data about visitors (physical or digital)?

Data about educational or other programs undertaken by the museum?

Data about museum’s place in social media?

Data points within books and labels?

… but it all requires data!


Data at The Met: Objects in the Collection

1870

Ca. 19702015


Object data at The Met:Also used for …• Acquisition• Storage and Inventory• Research and Publications• Exhibitions• Loans• Shipments• Deaccessioning

Our Collection Management System feeds into The Collection Online, our online public-facing database.


Object data: tracking artworks in ConservationThe Met used JIRA (from Atlassian) for IT and Merchandising workflows. Now using for artwork in Conservation.


How museums are gathering data: some examplesThe Pen: Cooper Hewitt merges internal and external systems

Beacons: Guggenheim (Near Me feature), Brooklyn Museum (ASK app), Art Institute of Chicago (300 beacons), Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose (beacons to capture tons of visitor data), and SFMOMA (new audio app)

GitHub: Natural history museums of U of Colorado and Florida State U using this software-development sharing site to keep versions of their information stored.

Visitor data: Dallas Art Museum (Friends project), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (“visitor journey mapping”)


Data and library practice in museumsWatson Library at The Met: since 2007, 850k pages online, 50k books and manuscripts digitized, using a Content Management System called Content DM

Existing library field infrastructure helps when adding a new collection.

Staff add links to Wiki and social media.

Library practice = openness and copies versus uniqueness, copyright, and property


Data and publishing practice in museumsArt book publishing is resource-intensive and may not have a lot of bandwidth left over for data practice, including data inside of the print book’s digital files.

Print publishers are new to the idea of user (reader) data. Independent and digital authors have been more aggressive about data and reader experience.


Digital publishing endeavors (clockwise from upper left): Met, SFMOMA, Getty, MoMA, Art Institute of Chicago


Data and object labelsThe Met has about 60,000 labels around the museum.

In the museum field, labels have different relationships to databases depending on the institution (at MoMA, tightly tied into their CMS; at the Met, not so much, but we’re trying).

Also has data that can be captured, and in some ways this is more useful because labels are so tightly related to the collection. (“Low-hanging fruit.”)


Data and museum visitorsMuseums have many systems for Membership, Retail, Education, IT sides (Tessitura is a Customer Relationship Management system, but does it work with Development? Membership?). These are not always well-connected.

Like with their physical set-up, museum systems weren’t always set up with collaboration in mind.


Data and museum websites

Three views from the Met’s website: plenty of data, but what to do with it? Who wants it?


Data and museums: a question of cultureMuseum culture can be split between focus on collection and focus on visitor.

“Data” can be seen as a visitor concern.

Data, like dashboards regarding website visits, ends up in the Digital department and doesn’t always get distributed.

Tracking visitor usage to improve visitor experience can involve many, many departments. Culture is a big issue.

Museums have to decide to devote resources to data practice.


Data and museums: thinking of the visitor“[W]e need to be careful because the editorial perspective of the Times is one of the things that our subscribers value. They expect us to curate things they need to know, not just the things that they want to know. We’re thinking about how can we create a level of abstraction around the editorial judgment that we supply, so it can be potentially worked into an algorithm.”

“What I see is an organization that really, really wants to change, but which has deep-seated instincts that are different from what you would see in a data-driven organization.”

— Nick Rockwell, Chief Technology Officer, The New York Times


So where to go from here? Some silver bullets:Libraries: link library holdings with objects in the collection, improve vocabularies and discovery layers, combine idea of reader/user/visitor

Publishers: link print and digital formats at time of production

Curatorial: end the transactional nature of digital information about objects, decide how “open” research is going to be, build data into research at the time of set-up

Visitor experience: provide multiple tracks of label information based on preferences


The Internet of Things: the power of networks“Networks can’t just be neutral. They have to be instrumental.”—Arjun Sethi, Partner @socialcapital on Hackernoon publication on Medium

Networks gain strength as hives, exhibiting joint, instrumental behavior. Data (plural) affects and impacts other data (with API as interface).

Think of what Google and Uber are trying to do with self-driving cars. Museums as hives of art?

Again, it’s a question of culture and practice.


The Museum of the Future (might look the same!)Requires curators, educators, conservators, publishers, librarians, visitor specialists, IT, all working together.

For the museum, the Internet of Things is the physical and digital intersection of data and objects and visitors in all spaces.


Sources to check out● Center for the Future of Museums annual Trendswatch reports by Elizabeth Merritt● New Media Consortium: http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-museum-edition/● Twitter hashtags: #musetech and #musedata● Watson Library at The Met: http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm● My blog: http://www.robertjweisberg.com/tag-youre-it-museums-and-the-internet-of-stuff/● CODE | WORDS on Medium:

○ https://medium.com/code-words-technology-and-theory-in-the-museum○ https://medium.com/a-series-of-epistolary-romances

● Digital publications:○ MetPublications○ Getty online collection catalogues○ OSCI: http://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/osci/osci_browse_catalogues.html○ MoMA, LACMA


Thank you! My information:

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Twitter: @robertjweisberg

Blog: http://www.robertjweisberg.com

http://www.robertjweisberg.com