Outline - Virtual Museum: The Next Generation
Virtual Museum (of Canada): The Next Generation
Steve Dietz, Howard Besser, Ann Borda, and Kati Geber with Pierre Lévy
Executive Summary 4
Audience 5
Interface 5
Content 6
Infrastructure 7
Sustainability 7
The Idea of the Next Generation 9
Scope 10
Context 11
Museums 11
Networks 12
Learning 13
Formal Learning 14
Lifelong Learning 14
Emerging Technologies + Trends 14
Broadband 15
Rich Media 15
Computational Environments 16
Intelligent Systems 17
Experience Design 18
Authenticity 19
Sociability 20
Gaming 21
Globalization 22
Definitions 23
The Museum-Library-Archive 23
The Virtual and the Real 24
Born Digital 25
Virtual Museum 26
Virtual Exhibit 27
Audience 30
Background 30
Mass Audience vs. Personal Medium 31
Audience Profiling 33
User Profiling 34
Interpersonal Communication 36
Cybrid Audiences 38
Interface 40
Pattern and Randomness 40
Browsing 40
Recommendation Systems 42
Featuring 42
Personalization 43
Database Narratives: From Tables to Stories 46
Content 48
Rich Content 48
Rich Context 49
Richly Open 49
Poor Quality? 50
Born Digital Content 50
Infrastructure and Architectures 51
Modularity 52
Pointing vs. Copying 53
Addressing Stability 53
Interoperability + Standards 54
Sustainability 57
Integration 57
Capacity Building 58
Partnerships 58
The Public Sphere and Economic Sustainability 59
Business Models 60
Brand 61
Intellectual Property 61
Appendix 1: Pour une Mémoire numérique universelle 63
Avant propos 63
La culture à venir 63
La responsabilité des institutions de la mémoire 64
Repenser l’archive 65
Une nouvelle perspective 66
Le langage des idées 67
Digitong 68
Idées 68
Mèmes 68
Syntaxe et sémantique 69
Idéographie 69
Algorithmique 70
Calcul sémantique analogique 70
Moments, arches 71
Sèmes 71
Information 71
Biology, theory of evolution 73
Cognitive sciences 73
Collective intelligence in cyberculture 74
Culture 75
Digital Arts 75
Epistemology 76
Human development 76
Knowledge economy 76
Knowledge management 77
Medias 77
Networked society and social capital 78
Pioneers of cybernetics and cyberculture 79
Semantic Web 80
Sign and Language 80
Visualization & mapping 80
Appendix 2: Selected Bibliography 82
Appendix 3: CHIN Research on VMC 89
Appendix 4: CHIN Virtual Exhibition History 92
Pure CHIN VE History/Facts 95
Appendix 5: Glossary 97
Appendix 6: Contributors and Bios 99
Howard Besser 99
Ann Borda 99
Steve Dietz 100
Kati Geber 101
Pierre Levy 102
The Virtual Museum of Canada Rethinking Group 103
Executive Summary
The future of the virtual museum is increasingly that of a platform—for its audiences and its institutional clients. While authoritativeness will remain a critical differentiating factor for the Virtual Museum of Canada, the key to sustainability in every area investigated, from audiences to interfaces to content to infrastructure, is creating the tools and platforms that will allow others—both individuals and institutions—to create the compelling experiences that will ultimately make the VMC successful at the scale of its ambitions.
After reviewing the scope of this project, the general cultural and technical context in which museums and virtual museums are currently operating, and definitions of key terms, the authors investigate the literature and important examples regarding virtual museums in five key areas:
• Audience
• Interface
• Content
• Infrastructure
• Sustainability
Based on this review, critical issues for the VMC to investigate further and model for a next generation implementation are identified. The objective is to challenge assumptions and encourage discussion among CHIN staff, its members and partners, about which strategic directions in each area should be prioritized over the next two to three years. Once these are identified, it will still be necessary to determine which of many possible approaches should be implemented. This paper helps identify the general destination not the specific route to get there.
The VMC, as a curated and concatenated collection of disparate digital objects, is a hybrid of some of the traditional functions of the museum, library, and archive, particularly in relation to issues of access.
Some of the primary trends that this paper explores, such as the hybridization of the concept of the museum, the increasing interpenetration of physical and virtual spaces, the advantages of a modular, pan-institutional structure, audience participation in the creation of content, and the deployment of wireless, locative media devices might seem to be outside the current CHIN mandate. We are not incognizant of these parameters, but there is no question that significant aspects of a potential next generation virtual museum bump up against current institutional realities. These boundaries are understood by the authors, but we also want to present, in some cases, “what if” scenarios when we felt the potential benefit to the underlying mission of the cultural heritage sector is at least worth discussing. In the end, of course, it will be up to CHIN, following consultation with its membership, to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of such approaches and to determine whether or not and how to make them serve their needs.
In the Appendices, Pierre Lévy presents a speculative chapter on the idea of a universal ontology. There are also a selected bibliography of sources, an annotated bibliography of existing CHIN research on the VMC, a selected glossary of terms, and brief biographies of the authors.
As stated above, many of the specific recommendations of the report cut across the categories of audience, interface, content, infrastructure, and sustainability and relate to two primary ideas:
1. The next generation virtual museum should become exponentially more audience-centered, even if this appears to mean less focus on the goals and functions of individual institutions
2. The next generation virtual museum needs to understand for every single function it performs, how it can be a platform to support efforts by both individuals and institutions in that area, as well as creating model applications
Audience
• Sponsoring rigorous research about online audiences and their use of online resources is a critical building block for successful implementation of the next generation virtual museum.
• The VMC should focus on systems that allow users to create and manage content
• The VMC should focus on assistive systems based on what users need or want, not their demographic profile, however fine-grained; the VMC should think of the Internet as a medium to deliver customized learning opportunities—including customized interfaces—to a potentially vast number of widely distributed individuals.
• Without forgoing its commitment to collective memories, the VMC should focus on developing a lively communications platform that provides access, communication and social spaces to meet audience needs to collect, relate, create and donate activities; a platform that encourages individual points of view but provides access to usable authoritative information as the audience desires.
Interface
• The VMC should model open system projects that have a high degree of audience participation without undermining the value of the museum’s subject matter expertise
• If the audience is truly placed at the center of the VMC’s evaluation process, the trajectory will be toward ubiquity of delivery interfaces.
• The VMC should prototype various “meta interfaces” that provide alternative access to content with specific goals such as sociability, physicality, and location-awareness
• The VMC should prototype “entertaining” applications with game-like interfaces, which are rooted in appropriate learning theory
• Some “sociable interfaces” require specialized physical interfaces. The VMC should also prototype physical interface projects that activate sociability and have a level of functionality that is not possible at home on someone’s off-the-shelf computer.
• Browsing is a significant way to access virtual museums, especially for their non-textual information, and innovative browsing interfaces should be developed
• VMC should evaluate how interest in highly trafficked sites or information resources can be used to “push” visitors out to other resources via a contextual browsing interface.
• One of the main directions for the next generation of virtual museums should be personalization. Visitors to the next generation of virtual museums should be able to collect content from a virtual museum, a number of or all virtual museums, museum sites or any other information source, into their personal museum spaces and this should be the focus of interoperability research.
• Collaborative filtering is a potentially valuable tool for audiences, one which a meta-site such as the VMC should investigate implementing.
• In coordination with other “social platform” efforts, the VMC should incorporate a mechanism for its audience to be directly involved in at least some featuring on the site.
• The personal museum—like the virtual museum—needs to be a platform that can support interpersonal communication as well as knowledge management.
Content
• The VMC should model experimental projects, such as ones that have a high degree of audience interactivity yet attempt to retain the value of the museum’s subject matter expertise.
• The VMC should explore a pan-institutional, modular system of learning objects for the creation of new authored content
• The VMC should investigate a structured, external linking system to provide a richer context for item level content
• The VMC should strive to provide "rich content"—rich media that maximizes the appropriate use of images, video, audio, and computational media as much as possible and provides as comprehensive as possible context for individual items
• The VMC should investigate an open system that enables the audience to add certain types of information to the core museum content.
• The VMC should pursue a set of external content relationships to create the most engaging experience for the most objects for the most people.
Infrastructure
• The VMC should provide a platform for needed services, which the individual museum cannot sustain alone.
• In particular, an important role the VMC could play would be to create a preservation project that could act as an archival platform for any collection in Canada of virtual art creation.
• The VMC must develop a powerful modular architecture that can support the modularity of content that is proposed; one of the main challenges for the next generation of virtual museums is to find a common platform for the great variety of virtual exhibits produced by a wide range of creators, from museums, allied organizations as well as individuals.
• The VMC should assume that access to content will be ubiquitous through a diverse range of devices and should structure its delivery system accordingly
• The VMC should focus on developing a lively communications platform without forgoing its commitment to collective memories
Sustainability
Proposals for specific business models are beyond the scope of this paper, but some general principles apply regarding sustainability.
• The VMC as a national aggregator of content and links to content can act as a powerful hub for the entire Canadian cultural heritage community. As a platform of selected services, it can also ensure that the smaller, “link-poor” sites that nevertheless contain immeasurably valuable information can sustain themselves in the network ecology.
• To most reliably implement next generation services, the VMC should undertake rigorous evaluation of online audiences that goes beyond current available research.
• Only by adopting (and in come cases helping give birth to) widely accepted standards and protocols, will the VMC have the interoperability and sustainability that it will need in the coming years.
• The VMC can play an important role in developing institutional capacity for the integration of the “information environment” into something that is easily reusable in multiple contexts via the next generation virtual museum.
• The issue for business models, strategic alliances, branding, and marketing is as much cultural as an implementation issue. Parallel to the way that the VMC is in a position to test “entertaining” applications while remaining authoritative and pedagogically sound, the VMC also has the trust of its community to allow it to experiment with potential business models.
The Idea of the Next Generation
“Next generation” can mean many things, but generally it refers to something beyond incremental or evolutionary improvements. For instance, in the summer of 2003, at a symposium on the “post-digital library,” Clifford Lynch, the head of the Coalition for Networked Information, asked how the field would spend $1 billion (if it had it). The intent of the strategy was to get people to think about what next generation of digital libraries might mean beyond improving this or that strategy, as important and critical as such pragmatic matters remain. He argued in his written remarks:
“We should recognize the limitations of a research program focusing on digital libraries as we understand them today. This is likely to lead to mostly incremental rather than transformative progress . . .. Rather than considering how to re-design or recreate or enhance libraries we might usefully focus our attention on the human and social purposes and needs that libraries and allied memory institutions have been intended to address . . .. And we must be careful not to overly-emphasize the parts of this knowledge ecosystem that are familiar, that we are comfortable with intellectually, socially and economically, to the exclusion of the new, the unfamiliar, the disturbing, the confusing.”[1]
By the same token, attempting to plan for transformative progress to a next generation can be unpredictable. In the mid-90s the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began a program to design a next generation Reusable Vehicle Launcher—or space shuttle. It wanted to create a vehicle that would improve on the current technology by an order of magnitude in key areas.[2] NASA’s goals proved wildly unachievable, in part because there were too many variables that required breakthrough inventions.
Both Lynch’s exhortations and NASA’s experience are worth keeping in mind when considering the next generation Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC). On the one hand, it is important not to merely recreate museums online but to focus on the needs and desires of the user population, and to understand these within an information ecology that cannot be easily bounded as “museum.” On the other hand, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), and its members have equally real needs and desires that cannot be resolved solely through theorization. The VMC needs to address these as well.
This paper is designed to take a broad view of the potential for a virtual museum and from that to come up with some specific recommendations for VMC. Hopefully, we will not end up in outer space.
Scope
Several analyses of the current VMC have already been conducted.[3] This paper is not intended as yet another or as detailed design specifications for its next iteration. We identify broad areas that should be considered and why, if CHIN is to create a next generation VMC. The objective is to challenge assumptions and encourage discussion among CHIN staff, its members and its partners, about what should be prioritized over the next 2-3 years. Once these are identified, it will still be necessary to determine which of many possible approaches should be implemented. This paper helps identify the destination not the specific route to get there.
We do, however, limit our discussion to implementations for which baseline technologies that are available or may reasonably be assumed to be available in the next 3 years, even though they may not be widely deployed. Similarly with standards and other issues, the recommendations and discussions are based on implementable strategies, although CHIN/VMC may need to assume a leadership position in certain areas.
Some of the primary trends that this paper explores, such as the hybridization of the concept of the museum, the increasing interpenetration of physical and virtual space, the advantages of a modular, pan-institutional structure, audience participation in the creation of content, and the deployment of wireless, locative media devices might seem to be outside the current CHIN mandate. We are not incognizant of these parameters, but there is no question that significant aspects of a potential next generation virtual museum bump up against current institutional realities. The authors of this paper understand these boundaries, but we also want to present, in some cases, “what if” scenarios when we felt the potential benefit to the underlying mission of the cultural heritage sector is at least worth discussing. In the end, of course, it will be up to CHIN, following consultation with its membership, to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of such approaches and to determine whether and how to make them serve their needs.
Finally, the authors for this paper represent an international approach rooted in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. While we recognize that there are important differences among countries, we also believe that in the critical areas for a next generation application, the issues are trans-national, and background context from any of these nations is largely applicable to the issues CHIN faces in regard to a next generation of the Virtual Museum of Canada.
Context
The next generation of VMC is not being planned in a vacuum. This next section identifies key aspects of the broader philosophical, cultural, and technological contexts within which the planning is occurring.
Museums
Social, economic, and technological changes are causing transformation of many elements of the public sector, and museums are no exception. With less funding available for the public sector, museums are seeking new partnerships and funding sources.[4] Many museums are feeling pressure from their funding sources to broaden their audiences, in part to justify how many people are served per dollar given to the museum. As a result of these economic pressures, there is increasing pressure that museums be run “like a business,” sometimes at the expense of their chartered mission.[5]
As a result of technological and social changes, more and more job functions that were previously separated between museum departments are being handled by functions that cut across departments. For example, while on-site exhibitions require the collaboration of staff from registration, exhibits, curatorial, education, and even technology departments, online exhibits are often generated from a single department and often do not follow the same procedures. As a result, traditional museum reporting structures are becoming blurred. [6]
The relation between the museum and the visitor, and the museum and the creator are also undergoing rapid change. Prior to online exhibits, the curator had exclusive control over juxtaposition and contextualization. But virtual museums allow both other museum staff and the general public to perform their own juxtapositions and contextualization. Creators as well as museums are creating interactive contexts for the visitor (Figures 1, 2).
[pic] [pic]
Figure 1 (left): Gallery display of works created by previous visitors to Museum of Contemporary Art, Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro. Figure 2 (right): David Rokeby, Giver of Names. Visitors create “installations” from the materials on the floor, which the computer interprets.
The pressure for museums to become more business-like and more interactive presents significant opportunities but also potential pitfalls.
The VMC can help by providing a platform for needed services, which the individual museum cannot support, and by modeling projects that have a high degree of interactivity without undermining the value of the museum’s subject matter expertise.
Networks
In 1970 Simon Nora and Alain Minc argued that the convergence of computing and networks would “change everything,” writing in a report to the French government:
“Above all, insofar as it is responsible for an upheaval in the processing and storage of data, it will alter the entire nervous system of social organization . . .. This increasing interconnection between computers and telecommunications—which we will term ‘telematics’—opens radically new horizons.”[7]
Arguably, for the past 35 years, society has been testing—and tested by—these telematic horizons. There is nothing particularly unique about the virtualization of the museum. It is happening across every domain from libraries to gambling to just-in-time education to our very bodies. Today, as a recent UN report on e-commerce and development notes, the transformation that Nora and Minc foresaw is now global and nearly ubiquitous.
“It is now widely accepted by policy makers, enterprises and society at large that information and communications technologies (ICT) are at the centre of an economic and social transformation that is affecting all countries. ICT and globalization have combined to create new economic and social landscape. They have brought fundamental changes in the way enterprises and economies as a whole function.”[8]
Museums, like every other institution, must learn how to not only cope with but to thrive in a network society. One of the most significant issues for museums and the cultural heritage sector in general is what proponents of an emerging science of networks describe as the “power law distribution.”
[pic]
Figure 3 “The degree of distribution of a random network follows a bell curve . . .. In contrast, the power law degree distribution of a scale-free network predicts that most nodes have only a few links, held together by a few highly connected hubs.” [9]
Due to the so-called “tipping effect” of networks, beyond a certain percentage of use, networks tend to become self-perpetuating and the rich (in links) get richer. Google, for example, gets bigger in part because it is bigger. The standard curve for the distribution of many things in network society is not the familiar bell curve; it is the power curve, where relatively few number of sites are highly linked—and hence trafficked—while most are comparatively link poor. The reason this matters for the museum community it that if it is to meet its core mission, it needs to find ways to both compete on the power side of the curve and to sustain itself on the “very many nodes with only a few links” axis as well.
The VMC as a national aggregator of content and links to content can act as a powerful hub for the entire Canadian cultural heritage community. As a platform of selected services, it can also ensure that the smaller, “link-poor” sites that nevertheless contain immeasurably valuable information can sustain themselves in the network ecology.
Learning
An entire paper could be devoted to issues of museums and education. In terms of the role of the next generation museum, two key issues are at stake. Formal education often has specific requirements, which museums must help fulfill, if they are to find a lasting role in the classroom, and learning happens in many contexts outside of the classroom. The virtual museum has much to offer in both settings.
Formal Learning
Museums have begun collaborating both with formal educational environments (such as universities, grade schools, teachers) and with other informal educational environments (such as public television). These collaborations have taken a variety of forms, ranging from universities providing technological expertise to small museums, to educators creating learning modules for self-paced instruction based on museum artifacts and descriptive metadata, to educational researchers evaluating the impact of museum education departments on various age groups.[10]
In the context of K-12 schooling, teachers want resources aimed at their grade level, often in order to meet requirements mandated at the local, regional or national level. The VMC should incorporate lesson plans when possible that are written for a particular audience or suggest how the material can be used for a specific context, especially in regard to educational requirements.[11]
Lifelong Learning
Education is no longer viewed as age-dependent; it encompasses both pre-schoolers, senior citizens as well as, potentially, anyone outside of the formal schooling process. Issues of life-long learning become particularly important for virtual museums. The audience for a virtual museum is geographically dispersed, and potentially much wider and more diverse than the audience for a physical museum. In addition, it is possible to address both specific sub-groups of learners as well as learning needs based on functional requirements (see Audiences section for more about audience segmentation and user profiles).
The key to creating the next generation of learning functionality—for the classroom and lifelong learners—is twofold: 1) rigorous evaluation of online audiences and 2) for the VMC to implement a robust system that enables the creation of modules from disparate sources by both formal educators and users themselves, including the integration of information from outside of the VMC system-context.
Emerging Technologies + Trends
“The future of computing is ubiquitous, aware, embedded and distributed.”[12]
There are innumerable ways to break down research areas in technology investigations, but for the purposes of this paper and the VMC, we consider several broad, interrelated areas to have the most potential for impact.
Broadband
Broadband might simply mean that access to the Internet is becoming widespread and robust, from the Internet 2[13] and other high-speed networks to the increasing penetration of T1 and greater bandwidth at businesses to cable and DSL in the home. The U.S. Federal Communications Division defines broadband technologies to encompass “all evolving high-speed digital technologies that provide consumers integrated access to voice, high-speed data, video-on-demand, and interactive delivery services.”[14]
According to the International Telecommunications Union, global broadband subscribers grew 72% in 2002. Canada ranked third with just over 11 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants.[15] As a benchmark for things to come, Korea, which is generally considered to be approximately three years ahead of the global average in converting Internet users to broadband, 94% of Internet subscribers have broadband connections.[16]
The interest in broadband is not simply a matter of speed. Horrigan and Raine’s research for the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that “broadband users spend more time online, do more things, and do them more often than dial-up Internet users,” and that they use the Internet to:
• become creators and managers of online content;
• satisfy a wide range of queries for information, and;
• engage in multiple Internet activities on a daily basis.[17]
The ramifications of widespread fast access to the Internet and its impact on use patterns in relation to the VMC are discussed below, but it is important to highlight here the Pew findings about the observed behavior of users.
Rich Media
Faster Internet connections allow for greater deployment of “rich media,” meaning a range of possibilities from larger images to audio and video streams to complex, hyperdocuments using a range of software to real time communications. As Liroff puts it:
“The broadcast program is becoming the executive summary of the materials collected by a producer in the course of preparing a program. And, all of those materials, whether they ended up in the broadcast or not, are of interest to viewers of public television.”[18]
With broadband, not only does it become possible to deliver rich media productions related to a museum’s collections and exhibitions programs, but the traditional boundaries between museums, schools, and broadcasters become fuzzy.
The VMC will need to consider ways to both compete and cooperate with rich media productions that potentially use museum-based or museum-like information.
Computational Environments
The potential for ubiquitous networking—access to a network anytime, anywhere, from any device—is quickly moving from the research labs to practical applications. Whether it is the increasing number of location-aware, handheld audio (and some video) tours being deployed in museums, the soon-to-be standard RFID (radio frequency identification) tagging of merchandise, the increasingly common wireless “hot spots” in cafes and other locales throughout the urban environment, or the commercial appearance of Internet-capable coffee pots, the network is potentially ubiquitous.
As access becomes ubiquitous through the network, one key effect is to shift the emphasis in relation to content from the producer to the user. Where is the visitor accessing museum information? If it is on a cell phone, deliver it one way; if it is in a virtual reality environment, deliver it another way. If a visitor wants to know about a particular object or idea, what are the appropriate boundaries for retrieving information? Only information from institutions that are members of CHIN? Any museum? At a sixth-grade reading level? What about alternative points of view or comments by other visitors? Related “entertainment?” As sound? As video? As interactive? Labeled official and unofficial? And so on. Put another way, the information marketplace becomes a buyer’s market.[19]
We suggest that if audience is placed at the center of VMC’s evaluation process, the trajectory will be toward ubiquity. Users will have expectations and options, and what they want to know doesn’t always map precisely or solely to what any single institution has to offer. Often the user will want to be able to create her personal cache of information. This does not mean that the source or quality or authoritativeness of information doesn’t matter. This is the potential advantage of a VMC based on a modular architecture with the capability to create “personal museums.” The VMC can be a trusted vehicle for this exploration.
With the merging of ubiquitous networks, small and powerful computing capabilities, and location-aware devices, it is clear that one of the dominant arenas for future “experiences”—to use the broadest possible term—involves embedding the network in physical environments. “Computational environments” is intended to encompass a number of such approaches from the idea of “calm technology” promoted by Marc Weiser and Rich Gold at Xerox PARC[20] to HP’s Cooltown—“the intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web”[21]—to the kind of augmented reality capabilities being research at MARS Exploratory Media Lab in Germany[22] as just a small cross-section of current research efforts. For the purposes of VMC, computational environments can be considered and extension of ubiquitous access to networked content via specialized physical interfaces, which are also able to take advantage of location-aware functionalities such as global positioning satellites (GPS).
The next generation of the VMC should not only have a modular architecture of learning objects, which can be personalized, but it must be structured in such a way that it can be delivered appropriately to increasingly diverse environments, and the VMC should consider modeling a location-aware project that takes these issues into consideration.
Intelligent Systems
In some ways this is such a broad heading that it is almost useless in terms of identifying specific technologies or functionalities. However, we think it is useful for highlighting some particular issues in the coming age of ubiquitous, aware, embedded and distributed computing.
One is in relation to so-called information overload. A recent study from the University of California Berkeley estimated that in 2002, 5 exabytes of information were stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical media. An additional 18 exabytes of information flowed through the telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet. For comparison the 19 million books and other materials in the Library of Congress comprise approximately 10 terrabytes. 5 exabytes is 500,000 Libraries of Congress.[23] If, potentially, all of this information is accessible and inter-connectable, how can we avoid a Library of Babel?[24]
There is no easy answer to this question, and it involves a variety of answers from issues of trust in the network to legal regimes limiting the public sphere to unresolved questions about the semantic web.
One solution is for the VMC to produce and/or sponsor a necessarily limited number of rich media projects—virtual exhibitions on specific topics. Inevitably, these stellar results will be surrounded by literally millions of objects that do not have such a rich context. Is this the online equivalent of a museum only being able to display 1% of its permanent collection?
Development of the Semantic Web or a universal ontology[25] as a way to create pan-institutional context is an external process that the museum field should monitor and participate in, but it cannot be controlled by the VMC. There are other areas, however, in which museums are perfectly capable of innovating. For instance, a “meta interface,” mentioned above, can link not only the contents of the VMC but external databases and resources that could more automatically provide a greater context for any given object.
Together, these emerging technologies and trends will begin to create the kind of seamless and hybrid computing environments that are more than the sum of their parts. As one leading lab puts it:
“A premise of the Locative Media Lab is that next generation, location aware, mobile devices will be different animals. Their capabilities taken together and integrated will create a new platform quite different from the traditional understanding of what PC's, mobile phones, PDA's and the Internet are (and are capable of).”[26]
Experience Design
“In thinking about museums of tomorrow, we might ask what kinds of bodies, what kinds of sensoriums, are artists and visitors going to bring to the museum, if they are not already do so--distributed selves, multi-tasking, love of sensory derangement, high arousal thresholds. These are the people who have cut their teeth on computer games, chatrooms, extreme rides, raves, and the like.”
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett[27]
Authenticity
[pic] [pic]
Figure 4 Fort Kearny Regional Historic Park, Nebraska (left); The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument spanning Interstate 80.
A personal story. Returning from vacation in the Western United States one year, the family of one of the authors came to Fort Kearny, Nebraska, site of one of the fabled Oregon Trail “nodes.” Being a good museum family interested in authenticity, we went to the original Fort Kearny site. Basically, beyond the sod roof of a blacksmith’s shed, there was a large, grassy expanse more or less uninterrupted except by worn signage identifying a particular quadrant as formerly a sleeping quarters, a stable, etc.[28] It couldn’t have been more boring. A few miles up the road, actually spanning the 4 lanes of the interstate highway was The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, complete with an awesome entrance, realistic dioramas “playing” dramatic narratives, location-triggered audio devices, multimedia presentations, and so on.[29] Never mind that the overarching theme of the Great Platte River Road was the interstate highway system as the apotheosis of the Oregon Trail and the frontier spirit, it was an EXPERIENCE.
It’s an extreme example, perhaps, but the point is that authenticity and a space for contemplation may not be enough to lure the broader audiences that museums seek—or more importantly for them to fully understand what they are looking at. Too often, however, the issue of creating an entertaining experience is confused with being “just entertainment.” Especially if museums are looking beyond “museum-goers” as a potential audience, the quality of engagement and level of interaction is important.
Whether it is the Archway Monument, EuroDisney or the Millennium Dome, numerous commercial enterprises all around the world are consciously packaging “culture”—not just thrills and oddities—for contemporary audiences.[30] Ultimately, the issue is not whether to try and create such experiences, the issue is how to do so in a way that sustains institutions’ core values. As Rina Pantalony notes:
“The type of economy is changing from a product economy to an experience economy and audiences/visitors becoming more demanding and less focused, due in part, to the diversity and sheer volume of entertainment available. Museums are, like never before, required to understand and expand their “market share” and compete for audience so that they are able maintain their relevancy. Ignoring or downplaying audience satisfaction in developing museum programming may no longer be an option.”[31]
The VMC should experiment with creating an entertaining application to better evaluate how the strategies of entertainment can be used to meet mission goals.
Sociability
Most museum visits are made in groups of two or more. There is increasing emphasis on the need for museums to support sociable learning and social interactions, both in physical spaces and online.
[pic] [pic]
Figure 5 (left) The Dialog Table allows for multiple people to access digital resources at the same time, encouraging the possibility of social interactions. The table program is based on networks of relationships between objects a visitor might see in the galleries with other works in the collection based on a number of criteria.[32]
Figure 6 (right) Warren Sack, Conversation Map.[33]
Dialog Table, pictured above, is a project by Marek Walczak and others. Through the use of embedded screens that don’t cut off participants from one another; an innovative tracking technology that allows multiple participants to use the touch screen at the same time; and specially designed activities that encourage collaboration, the Dialog Table is a new type of physical interface to museum content designed to encourage—and take advantage of—sociability.
In the virtual realm, artist and theorist Warren Sack argues that there is an important new public space, which he calls “very large scale conversations.”[34] One of his goals is to create tools so that participants can better understand the social dynamics and meaning of these conversations, which are generally among widely distributed participants, who do not necessarily know each other well, and which take place at varying periods of time with significant intermediate “chatter.” It is notable that this new space of public discourse, which has never before been seen according to Sack, is really only made visible let alone more useful through a new kind of interface.
The VMC can and should create new model “meta interfaces” to its distributed contents of learning objects, similar to the idea of the Conversation Map, so that visitors can begin to better understand VMC also as a new kind of museological space that goes beyond the traditional search engine or exhibition-specific interface.
Some “sociable interfaces” require specialized physical interfaces. The VMC should also create model physical interface projects that activate sociability and have a level of functionality that is not possible at home on someone’s off-the-shelf computer, as the Dialog Table attempts.
Gaming
“We learned to crawl alongside the PC. We came of age with the Internet. Early-adopting, hyperconnected, always on: Call us Children of the Revolution, the first teens and tweens to grow up with the network. It takes a generation to unlock the potential of a transformative ecology – we are that generation. From IM to MP3 to P2P, we lab-test tomorrow’s culture. While others marvel at the digital future, we take it for granted. Think of it as the difference between a second language and a first. And imagine the impact when full fluency hits the workplace, the shopping mall, and the living room. In the past, you put away childish things when you grew up. But our tools are taking over the adult world. Check it out: The technology is trickling up.”[35]
Today’s youth are the “born digital” generation. It is impossible to raise the issue of entertainment without discussing gaming. In one study of British Columbia teens it was found that “Eighty per cent of teens said they played at least occasionally and the average amount of time spent gaming for the sample was 5 hours per week.”[36] Today, in the United States, more than twice as many people play video games as watch movies and three times more than read books.[37] Arguably, gaming is to current generations what the television was to earlier generations. The issue then wasn’t whether to make a TV show (although that is happening more and more, now), the issue was to acknowledge that potential museum visitors were used to getting their information in a format other than printed words. Today, video is an accepted exhibition strategy, and it is evaluated on how well it is used, not whether to use it.
Games have a particular resonance in relation to learning potential for several reasons. According to Janet Murray in her seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck[38], two of the key characteristics of digital environments are that they are immersive and they allow for agency. It is precisely these characteristics that a Natural History Museum (London) study identified as of greatest interest to younger audiences for an exhibit about Charles Darwin, allowing them to move about in a virtual, immersive recreation of the Beagle and to control various factors, such as the direction of the ship.[39]
The VMC must unashamedly create compelling experiences and should experiment with game-like interfaces that are strongly content-based for these born-digital generations.
Globalization
The VMC is presented via a global network. As such, its reach and its potential audience are global. Currently, VMC’s audience is “mainly composed of North Americans, particularly Canadian,” although there are visitors from 140 countries.[40] Whether and how to engage with this potential global audience is a significant issue that presents an opportunity but also implies a responsibility to understand the VMC’s offerings within a much larger context. This is perhaps particularly relevant in relation to language[41], but it is also a question of what knowledge can be assumed, which audiences are looking for information, and how to present Canada’s role in the world.
Definitions
The Museum-Library-Archive
Though libraries, museums, and archives all look like similar repositories housing cultural resources, there are some fundamental differences in mission, in what is collected, in how works are organized, and in how the institution relates to its users.
The traditional library is based upon the individual item, which is generally not unique. Archives manage groups of works and focus on maintaining a particular context for the overall collection. Museums collect specific objects and provide curatorial context for each of them. These distinctions of the fundamental unit that is collected, affect each institution’s acquisition policy, cataloging, preservation, and presentation to the public.
Libraries and museums are both repositories, but libraries are user-driven. The role of the library is to provide access to a vast amount of material, which the user freely roams, making his/her own connections between works. Museums, historically, are curator-driven. They have only provided limited access to holdings, usually through a particular interpretative exhibition context, as provided by curatorial and educational staff. The museum provides a framework of context and interpretation, and the user can navigate within that smaller context. Archives tend to be research driven. They are accessible, often by appointment, in non-public spaces. The archivist has identified an area of the collection a researcher might be interested in, but s/he must go through it physically, item by item, to find out more information.
Digital repositories, whether from libraries, museums or archives, offer users the possibility of navigating through representations of objects and cataloging records on their own, making their own links between works.[42] For example, the Online Archive of California provides users with a choice of navigating through works using context-dependent Finding Aids or of looking for individual items outside of any context (something that an Archive would never have considered if this was the sole method of access to its collection).
In the virtual realm, the formerly sharp distinctions between libraries, museums, and archives begin to blur. Functional distinctions remain. There is still a difference between curatorial context for an object and a MARC catalog record; there is a difference between collection level and item level cataloging, but the methods of access and presentation become hybridized and in the digital environment it is as likely to see fulsome context for certain library records as it is to provide unfettered access to museum records. These changes offer great opportunities for linking resources between these different types of collections, and may lead to exciting collaborations. One needs to be careful, however, to not let the technology drive changes in missions for these various types of organizations; professionals need to consciously evaluate and adopt mission changes, rather than merely accept them because of mission-drift caused by technology.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the VMC as a curated and concatenated collection of disparate digital objects, particularly in relation to issues of access, is a hybrid of some of the traditional functions of the museum, library, and archive. It may be more accurate (although not as mellifluous) to think of it as the VMCwsLAF—the Virtual Museum of Canada with some Library and Archive Functions.
The Virtual and the Real
“. . .the virtual, strictly defined, has little relationship to that which is false, illusory or imaginary. The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence.”
Pierre Lévy[43]
“Nevertheless, there has been a very real, or at least ‘performatively productive’—as Lyotard might put it, shift in the foundations of knowledge—and it is clear in which direction. Reality has left the physical world and moved into the virtual one.”
Benjamin Woolley[44]
These two quotes indicate both the importance of the virtual realm and how it is misunderstood. By some estimates, well more than 50% of what a museum does in information processing. The majority of a museum’s efforts, in other words, involve non-material or virtual resources. On the other hand, we would never, anymore, call a telephone conversation unreal. The other person on the end of the line is not physically present, but she is real. Similarly, the Virtual Museum of Canada is a “real” museum; it’s just distributed (and soon to be aware, embedded, and ubiquitous).
One of the most contentious areas where the virtual-physical distinction comes up is with audience. Many institutions do not consider online visitors to be “real” visitors unless they come through the doors of the museum physically. Clearly, this is not possible with VMC, although a study is in progress to try and quantify the relationship of online to on-site visits to the VMC and Canadian museums in general. Nevertheless, especially in the context of a global audience, it is important for VMC and its contributors to value virtual visitors as real visitors that not only often outnumber on-site visitors but also bring value to institutions’ efforts and are worth creating value for, independent of whether they visit the museum.
Born Digital
“Digital materials which are not intended to have an analogue equivalent, either as the originating source or as a result of conversion to analogue form. This term has been used in the handbook to differentiate them from 1) digital materials which have been created as a result of converting analogue originals; and 2) digital materials, which may have originated from a digital source but have been printed to paper, e.g. some electronic records.”
Digital Preservation Coalition[45]
Born digital is a term of art that is used, as stated above, to differentiate any digital information from digital objects, which begin life, so to speak, in digital form. The primary reason to do this is to understand born digital objects as “originals” not surrogates or metadata about originals, which is an important distinction for the museum field. The museum—and libraries and other cultural memory institutions—have a significantly different relationship to originals than to surrogates or metadata. All are important, but preservation/conservation of originals in an institution’s collection is a mission function.
While there are significant programs, primarily in the library and archives communities, for the preservation of born-digital information objects—database records, email, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, etc—arguably, preservation of complex collection-based objects such as those found in art museums present even more complex issues. While relatively few museums at this point do actively collect this work this may be in part due to concerns about preservation. There are some nascent programs such as the Variable Media Initiative[46], exploring the conceptual and pragmatic issues of preserving born digital artworks, but it is primarily in a research phase.
An important role the VMC could play would be to serve as not only a presenter of born-digital artworks, but to create a preservation project that could act as an archival platform for any collection in Canada of virtual art creation.
As more and more objects are “born hybrid”—the network is integral but not exclusive to the work or they are conceptually digital but have specific physical requirements—and as born digital objects become reusable in a modular, object-oriented information space and as digital surrogates of analog objects become primary from a user perspective, the distinctiveness of “born digital” information and objects will lessen, although the issues they raise will become ubiquitous. Amy Friedlander, in a report to the Library of Congress had this to report.
“This distinction [born digital] was not consistently useful to interviewees or to the writers. Historic film or news footage may be embedded in a newly created digital educational project. Re-release of older entertainment products partly or wholly in digital form, as either new editions of older works or re-used elements in an otherwise new work, further blurs the distinction. The production process itself is not hermetically sealed analog or digital. “Materials collected or generated for a television show,” writes the team from the WGBH Educational Foundation, ‘may consist of a great threaded mesh of digital and analog components, so tightly bound together that, at any point in their life cycle, one may serve as surrogate for another.’” [47]
For this reason, the VMC should not focus too-narrowly on “born digital” objects but recognize that something digital can be “real,” and that there are significant issues with the presentation and preservation of digital objects and information, even as they become hybridized.
Virtual Museum
The concept of the “virtual” in relation to museums has become more pervasive, and the revision of ICOM’s expanded definition of ‘museum’ may attest to this:
viii. cultural centers and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity);[48]
The definition of the "virtual museum" remains under practical construction, and in the museum and information communities a variety of terms are used synonymously for collections of digitized objects and/or exhibits, such as electronic museum, digital museum, on-line museum, hypermedia museum, and meta-museum, among others. Similarly, there have been variations on what actually constitutes a virtual museum or the extent of virtuality that is necessary for a museum to be termed virtual; for example, on-line counterparts of real museums, versus those exclusively accessible via the Internet.
In a paper dedicated to an overview of the concept of the virtual museum, Schweibenz (1998) follows on the Bearman (1992) definition of a “museum without walls.” which is comprised of a logically related collection of digital objects composed in a variety of media and which has the capacity to provide connectedness and various points of access. His premise is that whatever the extent of virtuality, the nature of the on-line museum allows for a richer integration of object and information. Schweibenz’s notion of “connectedness” was earlier considered by Hoptman (1992) who saw this as an essential feature of the virtual museum because it seeks to describe the interrelated and interdisciplinary presentation of museum information using integrated media. In other words, connectedness allows the "virtual museum" to transcend the abilities of the traditional museum in presenting information.
“The concept of the Virtual Museum demonstrates how limitations imposed by the traditional method of organizing and presenting information can be overcome in the context of museum visits. In a nutshell, the Virtual Museum provides multiple levels, perspectives, and dimensions of information about a particular topic: it provides not only multimedia (print, visual images through photographs, illustrations or video, and audio), but, more important, it provides information that has not been filtered out through these traditional methods.” (Hoptman 1992, p. 146)
Such existing definitions present a number of binaries: the physical and virtual versus the virtual only; the virtual of physical and the virtual of born digital; being connected online versus connected in a specific physical space. Given the aforementioned hybridity of the museum-library-archive, however, such distinctions are not, in Bateson’s terms “a difference that makes a difference.”[49] For the purposes of this paper, these binaries may be re-combined and are not exclusive of each other.
The VMC is an exemplary combinatory model whereby physical objects as well as physical spaces of museums are rendered virtual for audiences through different kinds of interfaces. Additionally, the VMC hosts collections of born digital objects (e.g. virtual exhibits), as well as content created by users and others which are not assets of an existing museum and for which the web is the only means of storing and making these digital resources available.
Virtual Exhibit
Virtual exhibitions,[50] though often based on physical exhibitions[51], are born digital resources. Any superficial scan of the Web would demonstrate that the virtual exhibition is a form of expression highly used, not just in the context of museum sites, but also that of corporate, commercial and personal sites.[52] Among visitors to the VMC, 70% to 75% of visitors go to at least one virtual exhibit during a user session.
Virtual exhibits demonstrate a great variability in content, structure, navigation, design and complexity. They span from a simple selection of images arranged in a given way to highly sophisticated multimedia architectures and narratives. Often, definitions of the virtual exhibit start with what it is not. It is not collections online, not directories or a search result set. The main difference between a virtual exhibition and other forms of online presentation is a stronger dependency established between context, form and content, and between the whole and its parts. Obviously, all of these combine with the specific attributes of the medium, among them attributes such as: procedural, spatial, interactive, encyclopedic, multimedia support and cybercultural.
The model Colorado Plateau project dedicated a part of its resources to published research material and theoretical conclusions related to the creation of virtual exhibits. The project was based on combining and integrating materials from many collections in order to tell an even greater story and create a deeper and richer experience, going beyond a database of disparate objects. The developers considered that visitors are looking for guided tours and exhibits that present information created by knowledgeable professionals that help them to understand and appreciate artifacts in their artistic and historical context. The design principle was based on studies showing that when users go to a Web site of arts and culture they want to do more looking and less clicking. Many online patrons have the necessary technology to view video and multimedia presentations and are looking for exhibits that take advantage of these features to present more vivid narratives and deeper contextual information.[53]
The VMC itself, launched in March 2001, is based on a history of experimentation with and development of online heritage content, starting in 1995 with the Christmas Traditions in France and in Canada virtual exhibition, developed by Canadian and French museums, the ministry of culture in France and the Department of Canadian Heritage, including the regional office in Montreal and CHIN. Since this time, CHIN’s understanding of issues surrounding collection description and access has been expanded due to constant experimentation with virtual exhibitions and the resulting evolution of the concept[54]. Based on these experiences, there was evidence that, in particular, collaborative efforts make for more meaningful results, due to the fact that they bring material and expertise from several sources together, as well as being more economical and efficient[55]. CHIN’s belief in the value of partnerships in relation to the development of online exhibitions, as seen in the criteria of the VMC Investment Program, is born of this experience. [56]
Jean-Marc Blais, Acting Director General of CHIN, in describing VMC exhibits, highlights specific attributes that would lead to categorization of collaborative virtual exhibits created by museums to function on the Web:
“For us, a virtual exhibition is therefore defined as a quality on-line product developed under expert supervision, which is destined to increase the public's knowledge of, appreciation for and desire to explore topics of interest in an engaging manner.[57]”
One of the main challenges for the next generation of virtual museums is to find a common platform for the great variety of virtual exhibits produced by a wide range of creators, from museums, allied organizations as well as individuals. The core platform will need to support a variety of functions: authoring and structuring information and knowledge in an electronic environment for expression, exhibition, presentation and representation, and processes of reading and learning are fundamental to the evolution of the virtual museum concept.
The next generation platform will also need to consider the following “what if” scenario – what if the aim of a virtual exhibit was to gather participants from different domains, inviting them to set up a dialogue, and integrate the more relevant insights into a new perspective? The virtual exhibit would be the place where the gathering takes place, revealing clues on how knowledge and technology come together, cutting across disciplinary boundaries.[58]
Audience
In order to meet audience expectations and to improve usability and user retention it is necessary to establish who is using virtual museums and for what purposes. An information resource developed without taking this into account is unlikely to succeed. As the issue was described at an IMLS symposium, “cultural institutions frequently to do not know who is using their information nor are they aware of who could be using their information, but currently are not.”[59] A lack of sound research into online users was also reinforced by John Falk and other researchers at the “”Beyond Productivity: Culture and Heritage Resources in the Digital Age” symposium.[60]
Sponsoring rigorous research about online audiences and their use of online resources is a critical building block for successful implementation of the next generation virtual museum.
Arguably it is the (currently) non-user audience that is the most significant, if the next generation of the VMC is to truly succeed. The VMC’s audience also, of course, includes CHIN and its members, but this section discusses the public audience.
The common rhetoric regarding the virtual museum suggests that it is possible to specifically address a number of discrete sub-audiences, who may be age-dependent (children, senior citizens or less well-versed in particular disciplines (art, history, etc.) or have particular content interests based on their demographics.
It is the position of this paper that while some audience segmentation is desirable by function—are you doing research or browsing—basing content delivery on demographics is not a significant avenue to pursue. Rather, the VMC should think of the Internet as a medium to deliver customized learning opportunities—including customized interfaces—to a potentially vast number of widely distributed individuals.
Background
Discussion and analysis of audience behavior is as old as the development of instruments of expression. Aristotle's Rhetoric represented the first serious attempt to systematically classify and analyze audience behavior. For Aristotle, audience behavior was predictable such that particular rhetorical devices could be used to elicit specific responses. Audience behavior has evolved into a complex, multi-disciplinary field of study.
The virtual museum construct has had a shifting relationship with audiences during its evolution from central repositories[61] to meta-centers[62] and to what is known today as a virtual or networked museum, which itself has evolved from representing an environment where museums could announce their Web presence to constructs that collaboratively expose rich public information resources. [63]
Museum collaboration based upon the central repositories model focused mainly on digitization and establishing collective repositories. The meta-centre model saw a series of relationships established among multiple information resources. These relationships shifted the direction of museum collaborative initiatives to interoperability of standards and networked information.
At the current virtual museum stage, issues of access and usage are priorities. Stakeholders place a priority on using the interactive capabilities and communications protocols of the medium to offer sophisticated interactive experiences that are tailored to users needs for access, retrieval and selection of information objects.
Mass Audience vs. Personal Medium
The number of participants involved in the process of communication significantly affects its nature. Mass communication for virtual museums focuses on reaching large numbers of the public through directories and brochures, followed by enabling public access to more complex structures such as aggregated collections, galleries, exhibits and narratives.
From their inception, the mission of most virtual museums was to connect to a wide range of publics with no geographic restrictions. For example, the VMC's mission is to engage "audiences of all ages in Canada's diverse heritage through a dynamic Internet service freely available to the public in French and English,” and is “a collaboration between Canadian museums of all sizes and the Canadian Heritage Information Network.”[64] But even though the virtual museum aims to have mass appeal it has become clear that it cannot function as a mass medium. The power distribution law referred to above clearly sates that only a very few sites will ever even have “mass audiences,” but more importantly, the medium of the Internet is significantly a personal medium. To use and invert a collections metaphor, via the Internet and interactive interfaces, the virtual museum is potentially able to deliver content to the “item level”—the individual user—not just at the collection level—a broadly defined demographic or mass audience. Even though the virtual museum aims to have mass appeal it has become clear that it cannot function as a mass medium. First, it consists of a range of media and second, and most importantly, its audience cannot be considered as a unified mass.
Audience Profiling
[pic]
Figure 7 Cultural Content Forum – Evaluation of digital cultural content: Analysis of Evaluation material[65]
Historically, museums have only addressed broad audiences. While occasionally museums have addressed programs to a particular audience (primarily a particular age group or ethnic group), these activities have been addressed to very broad audiences and constitute a small portion of a museum activity. But new technological developments will allow the museum to address finer-grain groups with a level of discourse that is appropriate for that group. This includes tailoring online exhibits and interactivity with: language which is appropriate to a particular age group or ethnic minority, discourse that is appropriate to a variety of different education levels or prior knowledge bases, and/or graphic use that is appropriate to particular language styles or visual impairments. This would mean that the same basic curatorial and exhibit information might be presented quite differently to particular audiences such as: specific linguistic minorities, specific ethnic groups, middle school students, people without an art history background, etc.
Audience-based interfaces can be achieved through a combination of techniques such as: mapping the specialized vocabulary of curators into vernacular through the use of thesauri and other vocabulary tools; creating layered architectures with middleware mapping between the object description and the user interface; and/or developing mark-up standards for describing objects in different ways for different groups.
User Profiling
“Instead of people thinking of their identities as fixed, they’re thinking of them as fluid. It begins to be a cultural value.”
Mary Catherine Bateson [66]
An individual user profile can be based on many factors, including demographic information such as age, country, marital status, education, interests, as well as information about users’ interests such as history or science or art or jazz and even preferences such as number of results to display at one time on a page or whether or not to include images or preferred language. Basically, this information can be acquired explicitly from the user via questionnaires, membership registration, etc. or attempt to be inferred from usage patterns. User profiling is the process of gathering information specific to each visitor, either explicitly or through inference. In either case, the core question is what does a profile tell the virtual museum about a user that is actionable?
Demographic profiling is a common technique for predicting audience behavior. For example, an assistive interface could direct teachers to the teacher section of the VMC. Demographics are not the same as preferences, however, and can be a tenuous basis for assuming what a user is looking for. What if the self-described teacher is just interested in browsing? [67] For instance, a recent survey question on the reasons for visiting the VMC demonstrated a discrepancy between the user profiles—initially defined as children, parents, and teachers—and the actual users of the VMC. The reasons cited for visiting the VMC included: curiosity, it looked interesting, researching a topic, to compare with other Canadian museum sites, to get museum locations, ideas for my own web site, work reasons, cool graphics, because it was advertised. How to correlate the profiles of child, parent, and teacher with these expressed usage goals remains an open question.
Log analysis and data mining are also techniques for the creation of user profiles. Matching interfaces and functionalities based on usage patterns potentially provides a better match to users’ actual needs. This statistical information reflects a relatively accurate image of the number of visitors, return visits, entry points, exit points and the time spent in specific portions of the site. By correlating the statistical data and interpreting return-visits and time spent on the site as indicators of engagement,[68] virtual museums can successfully measure engagement and the evolution of the relationship between a product and its audience over time. Traditional, in a physical museum setting, summative evaluation involves the cross-referencing of visitor tracking with focus group discussions, feedback or visitor questionnaires. To date, there is very little such research into online usage, and hence it is not possibly to definitively answer many of the fundamental questions related to virtual museums’ audiences.
The discrepancy between virtual museum visitors’ demographic profiles and their actual use patterns leads one to hypothesize that the best way to meet the audience’s needs is to allow for the tailoring of content based on what they do and/or want rather than who they are. But developing customized services and assistive tools for filtering and empowering users to become more participative in the knowledge production process has many unknowns. It may mean more work for users and become burdensome; dynamic adaptability may annoy users by not responding adequately or accurately to what they want; users may feel that their privacy is being invaded. What do users prefer: to customize their own experience or to let assistive tools do the work? Should content, structure, function, look and feel or context be changed based on either scenario? Which of these elements actually increase user satisfaction significantly?
Rigorous evaluation should be modeled in a VMC exhibition and other products so that a supportable and detailed understanding of how audiences actually use products can be analyzed and the results integrated into future VMC projects.
Interpersonal Communication
The Internet is blurring boundaries for virtual museums and creates a communication synchronicity continuum. Action and interaction, producers and users, presence and absence, mass and interpersonal, audience and user represent “both/and” logic (not either/or), which contributes to the convergence and hybridization effects we are witnessing online. Virtual museums traverse previously inflexible communication boundaries. They stretch the edges of the synchronicity continuum. Interpersonal communication, once either face-to-face or time delayed, can now be both at once.
Effectively blurring the boundaries between producers and users affects mass and interpersonal communication modes and leads to the re-examination of authority, voice, and point of view. It also generates a need to revaluate production and usage concepts as well as the roles of producers and users and their presence and absence during the communication process.
The geography and place-independence of the virtual museums and their collaborative nature encourage producers to create for themselves place-independent spaces to work together. Clay Shirky refers to this type of communication as “intercasting.” Virtual museums considering the creation of social environments for their audiences need to be aware that such “transmission spaces” behave differently. According to Shirky,
"I am beginning to think that a better model is shipbuilding, where the goal is to provide groups [a way] to gather and go somewhere together. It provides groups a way to say ‘We are going to use this medium, this vessel, to accomplish this goal.’ Ships are part space part tool. The ways they work are quite obvious: they divide roles among the people on them … and it assumes, among other things the group is going to come together, use the tool, achieve the destination and then leave.”[69]
Computer-mediated communication is a socially produced space as a communication continuum. It is a bridge crossing over, linking together, bringing closer a myriad variety of people, understanding others, over spaces and times, and tolerating differences, hence—communicating.[70] Developing an online collaborative network also should mean moving beyond the web as a means of publishing organizational information. Instead it should focus on moving towards using the Internet to develop outreach and a web-based relationship with individuals, communities or sectors. This enables a continuing dialogue with users, a closer-relationship with audiences and user bases, and is importantly a way of bringing together specific groups and knowledge chains across boundaries (e.g. sectoral, geographical).
Years of working together with communities of producers and facilitating intercasting has led virtual museums to the appreciation and understanding that the governance structures with which they experimented with communities of content producers, could be applied in creating new types of communities composed of producers and users. These virtual museum audience requirements can be clustered around two main tendencies:
• query-based access to long-term and invariable, authoritative “collective memories”[71]
• a newly emerging need for ubiquity and communication characterized by change, fluidity and transitivity and focused on events and conversations.
We argue, with Régis Debray,[72] that both approaches are necessary, but the fact is that while authoritativeness remains an important goal, the virtual museum as a platform for communication and exchange remains neglected in terms of actual implementation.
Perhaps the most direct idea of the next generation virtual museum as such platform is to imagine it as a place where conversations occur that are not necessarily mediated, at least directly, by museum staff; like a café, for instance. Some museums allow their conference rooms to be used as a site for book club discussions. Museum staff may participate. They may even have organized the general thematics of the club—women and art---but it is a conversation, not a lecture; it is intended as a platform for discussion rather than a podium for telling. A valuable role for the VMC is as a platform for conversations and other kinds of intercourse between people, not only for the dissemination of sanctioned information.
VMC should focus on developing a lively communications platform that provides access, communication and social spaces to meet audience needs to collect, relate, create and donate activities[73] without forgoing its commitment to collective memories; a platform that encourages individual points of view but provides access to usable authoritative information as the audience desires.
Cybrid Audiences
With the advent of mobile phones and handheld devices, particularly the hybrid variety that incorporate web functionality, there is a further rise in diverse groups accessing information from the Internet and wireless networks. Delivering the right information in the right context is not an obvious issue. For instance, at the Getty Museum:
“The results of the visitor studies are being used as the foundation for a three pronged approach to delivering meaningful information to visitors as they need it. For example, the interface for the internal kiosk is changing to provide visitors with what they need to know to use the Getty facilities while they are there. Everything from where is the nearest bathroom, to where is my favorite David Hockney painting. The handheld guide will present the same data but in an audio/visual guide format. On-line visitors will be led through the site by fewer menu items that try to connect the on-line visit with the on-site visit. The menu labels include Exhibitions, Finding Art, the Art Timeline, the Video Gallery, and visitors will be able to create their own space with the My Getty feature.”[74]
The CIMI consortium, with funding from Intel, has been trialing location-aware mobile devices across several museum institutions in the U.S. and Europe.[75] Hewlett-Packard has undertaken collaborations with museums in this area as well, notably, its work with the Exploratorium on enhancing user experience in gallery exhibits with augmented information and activities offered on handhelds.[76]
Beyond customized information delivery, however, there is the potential for museums to form a type of collaborative network with their audiences through outreach programs and visitor services using these new technologies. As a result, more museums may look to technology partnerships to create and tap into newer forms of communication channels.
The range of tools and techniques that could support more user-centric collaborative activity is wide-ranging and a growth area. Some other examples which could be made available for newer Internet devices, or using a newer generation of applications, and which could be championed by museums include:
• Online discussions
• Online seminars
• Forums
• Surveys
• Webcasts of net events
• Message boards
• Training
Significantly these channels can lend themselves to the development of communities within the museum sector and beyond in which groups of stakeholders can come together due to shared interests in a topic or an activity.
The result could be the evolution of smart communities where leaders and stakeholders form alliances and partnerships to develop innovative ways to extract new economic and social value from electronic networks and the Internet.[77] The VMC is ideally positioned to be part of this wider community and to strengthen existing communities and collaborations.
Interface
If, as Lev Manovich has suggested, the database is the new symbolic form for the 21st century, akin in importance to the discovery of perspective in the 16th century, it is only through the interface that we have access to the tabled information contained in the database.[78] And as Sack argues in his research around the project Conversation Map, the right interface—the right approach to a new interface—can literally map and help us understand new social spaces such as that of the very large scale conversation—but not only that.
Pattern and Randomness
In her essay Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers, Katherine Hayles analyzes the role of the producers and the users of messages. She remarks that there is a shift of attention in communication from presence and absence to pattern and randomness, which she explains in relation to features of the medium showing how coding technologies change the conditions of communication. Jesse James Garret comments on the same basic duality in the nature of the Web: a software interface (pattern) and a hypertext information space (random—unpredictable links). For Garret, these are the two poles of user experience that web applications designers should consider in their work. Producer and user communication in the virtual museum’s cyberspace can be seen as a “complex dance” (Hayles) between pattern and randomness or predictability and unpredictability.
The design of the virtual museum–viewed as content, structure, functionality, interaction and visual design–aims to create a highly pattern-based and architected user experience. For virtual museums, predictability has represented an essential goal and a measure of success. Randomness is mostly narrowed to search/selection (browse) functions within data pre-arranged into arrays or tables.
Browsing
“ Just as patrons in our galleries, stacks, and exhibits browse to discover what they did not know they were looking for, we demand that our systems provide specific answers at the expense of serendipitous discovery. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the distinctions between searching and browsing to better enable on-line users to experience serendipitous discovery too.”[79]
Although approximately 50% of VMC visitors arrive through a search engine, usability tests conducted during 2002 indicate that once at the site, 70% to 80% of the page views are the result of browsing.[80] Clearly browsing is an important user behavior in the virtual museum space. In addition to providing search or recall capabilities, the next generation of virtual museums should provide efficient and enjoyable browsing or recognition approaches that enable access to large spaces of information and offer solutions to information overload issues through visualization, summarization, aggregation and integration.
Christine L. Borgman explains:
“Cognitive psychologists distinguish between two fundamental types of memory: recognition and recall. Recognition occurs when you see something familiar, while recall requires that you remember something and are able to articulate it. Most information retrieval depends upon recall skills—the user has to describe what he or she wishes to retrieve. Browsing depends more on recognition skills—looking around until you find something of interest that you recognize as useful.”[81]
Recall approaches are most effective with text-based systems because words can be spelled and matched against a corpus of documents. Describing images and sounds is vastly more difficult, both for the indexer and the retriever. Recall approaches also depend on the availability of rich metadata or on sufficient amounts of text to match.
Recognition approaches are likely to be much more effective in large digital libraries of the future and in personal digital libraries. This is true for at least two reasons: One is the proliferation of non-textual documents in digital form; the second is the lack of metadata on which to base recall algorithms.
As early as 1995, the museum community had combined the perspectives of access and recognition. Kody Janney and Jane Sledge published their study on Points of View and paved the way to a number of research and experimentation projects that related access to user profiles and usage-based personalization.[82]
VMC should focus on creating one or more “meta-browsing” interfaces to the integrated resources of the entire VMC and evaluate whether interest in highly trafficked sites or information resources can be used to “push” visitors out to other resources via a contextual browsing interface.
Recommendation Systems
One strategy to encourage audiences to look beyond what they are seeking is recommendation engines. Common examples are on and Netflix. On Amazon, the buyer is pointed to other books that other buyers who purchased the same book you are looking at also purchased. On Netflix, viewers rate their interest in movies, and then are directed to other movies that other viewers with a similar profile of likes and dislikes in movies have also rated highly. In both cases, anonymously aggregated use patterns are used to direct the user from what she is looking at to other items. The potential interest in such collaborative filtering systems is that they work from the ground up; the results are not controlled, directly, by the provider, and it can often be a genuine means of “cultural word of mouth,” to coin a phrase.
There are also so-called recommendation systems that are essentially rule-based decision trees. For instance, for every search on a book site, do a search on a travel site. Doing a search for a book on the history of the Boston Tea Party can lead you to a special weekend deal for the Radisson in Boston—which is probably not what you are looking for. These are essentially marketing arrangements that attempt to direct the user in certain pre-defined directions based on the providers’ interests, not necessarily the user’s.
The difficulty for cultural recommendation systems is that while paying for a product is arguably a strong indication of interest in it, “just” viewing a results page is not, and the link to other results also viewed is more tenuous. Or, with a system like Netflix, it is better the more that people use it. While recommendations ratings exist on various museum websites,[83] it is not clear that any of them are used enough to reach the point of truly collaboratively filtered usefulness.
There is a fine line between marketing promotion and recommendation. The best approach is based on a clear understanding of the virtual museum definition, mandate, content, visitors and their needs. Developing recommender systems for both human users as well as non-human agents such as search engines, may contribute significantly to the virtual museum’s success. The challenge is to understand the specific needs and preferences of each and develop the recommender systems accordingly.
Collaborative filtering is a potentially valuable tool for audiences, which a meta-site such as the VMC should investigate implementing.
Featuring
In addition to recommendation filters, virtual museums have extensive experience with a different type of recommendation—featuring. Featuring is a coordinated presentation of content and resources in an effective and dynamic fashion, reaching various audiences, in a manner that is engaging, educational and informative. As featuring proved to have a significant impact on the number of accesses to content, CHIN initiated a research project gathering information on how featuring is conducted on the Internet. The three-phase research project, conducted by Barbara Lang Rottenberg, includes a literature review, a methodology for featuring analysis, and analyses of various sites. The research demonstrates the importance of featuring activity.
“By capturing the attention of visitors, features serve a multitude of purposes. In addition to their primary role of adding a topicality to a web site, features can draw attention to new and important information and can encourage interaction in various forms, sharing opinions, asking questions and even shopping. The research has also demonstrated the varied approaches to featuring. On some sites, features play a minor role. … On others, however, features act almost as the building blocks of the site content.”[84]
Features can be curated/edited or automated. Both of these techniques are well understood for virtual museums and many excellent implementations already exist on the VMC. Nevertheless, they can be expensive to maintain, particularly when curatorially or editorially based. An extension of featuring, however, is to let the audience or, alternatively, so-called “super-users” select sites of potential interest to the rest of the audience.
In coordination with other “social platform” efforts, the VMC should incorporate a mechanism for its audience to be directly involved in at least some featuring on the site.
Personalization
Current research and experimentation with personalization have opened the field of human computer interaction to a number of issues, including the anticipation of needs, the provision of efficient and satisfying interaction (with content, structure, layout, context and modality), the need to determine methods of assessing impact, and developing relationships with all parties involved.[85] Virtual museums and digital libraries have been hesitant to embark on personalization partially because of these questions and partially because they view the entire site as an assistive tool for the selection of content and the provision of answers to users questions and needs by providing access to organized bodies of information and providing some level of selection, filtering, and validation of the exhibited materials.
Users’ engagement and participation, content use and re-use in creative environments and responsiveness to change are key elements for the success and longevity of future virtual museums, however, and while the virtual museum represents the collective memory, the personal museum is a place or space where use and re-use, assemblage and manipulation of information resources, are open to any visitor or group of visitors, based on personal preferences and choices, with flexible, adaptive and adapting tools.
The next generation of virtual museum will have to develop efficient synchronous and asynchronous communication mechanisms between personal museums and virtual museums, and between museum professionals and personal museum creators.[86] According to Christine Borgman, personal museums should:
• … contain a heterogeneous mix of content from a variety of sources. Some of it will be created by the … owner / user, such as authored documents, images, drawings, datasets, web links, bookmark files, spreadsheets, PowerPoint files for talks and lectures, etc. Other content such as journal articles, texts, or messages may be captured from external sources.
• … allow people to capture available metadata and to add their own metadata that describes their uses for it, no matter how idiosyncratic their practices may be. This will allow them to manage their own resources better and to locate content for re-use.
• … enable individuals to upload their metadata to the common DL [digital libraries] from which an object came, thus creating community-based metadata descriptions.”[87]
These solutions facilitate access to information and services and make facilities and applications more relevant and useful for individual users. They also have the potential to improve the overall learning experience of the visitor before, during and after a physical site visit.[88]
[pic]
Figure 8 Conceptual diagram for proposed VMC "Personal Museum"[89]
From its inception, the VMC has created a specialized space called “My Personal Museum” where visitors are able to collect and re-use content. The space for collective memory, the virtual museum itself, is for the presentation of authoritative content developed by museums in response to the needs of their audiences and, preferably, in collaboration with them, for contemplation and information absorption. Conversely, the personal museum is an active space for interpretation and expression.
The rethinking of the virtual museum as a construct of two interrelated components, the museum and the personal space, underline the need for interoperability research and the identification of specific user needs in each of the spaces. While virtual museums will probably concentrate on enabling access to authoritative content and developing efficient and satisfying recommender systems, the personal museum will provide a variety of services and flexible tools to help individuals to meet their needs and manipulate information resources for their own purposes.
The creators of the next generation of virtual museums will have to rethink personalization as a component of creative practices. Creation of new associations and integrated knowledge are highly essential to addressing some of the most important and complex issues that we face as a society. As Borgman argues, “Real innovations occur when people can assemble information from a variety of sources, in a variety of types, often from a range of disciplines, to create their own new ideas, frameworks, models, questions, and so on.”[90] In addition, the personal museum—like the virtual museum—needs to be a platform that can support interpersonal communication as well as knowledge management.
Database Narratives: From Tables to Stories
Browsing, recommendation systems, and personalization are each interface strategies to take visitors beyond what they are looking for—but they generally still end up at the item level of an individual object. Personal museums are a way to allow the audience to construct their own narratives—but they are also interested in authoritative experiences. Virtual exhibitions authoritatively contextualize the individual object—but they are “expensive” in terms of resources and only possible for a fraction of the VMC collections. There needs to be a way for databases to tell stories—to provide authoritative context about specific objects that the visitor has selected.
Database tables—William Gibson’s “data matrix”—and narrative have traditionally been different forms of communication. As Lev Manovich explains in The Language of the New Media:
“After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.[91]
The challenge for the next generation of virtual museums is to create a new form of storytelling or as, Hayles puts it: “Data are thus humanized, and subjectivity computerized, allowing them to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative.”[92]
The VMC has experimented with the interplay between virtual exhibits and digital libraries in its Community Memories section. Users can randomly retrieve exhibits or memory objects. Any invoked memory object, accessed through the library is contextualized, when retrieved. It always appears within the context of its exhibit and its stories. But this still points to pre-existing narratives and doesn’t’
[pic] [pic] [pic]
Figure 9 Screenshots from Montreal.
An interesting model of transforming databases into narrative spaces and enabling the interface to incorporate synchronicity and interpersonal aspects is Montreal, where the user navigates through the city, spatially and temporally, creating a narrative based only on their interests.[93] In contrast to a traditional virtual exhibit, in this case, we do not have a “master narrative”; it is constructed through the user’s voyage based on her engagement and personal interpretations. The narrative is created dynamically, almost transparently as a product of exploring this highly immersive and experiential world.[94]
Content
There are many issues to consider regarding the content of and for the Virtual Museum of Canada. This paper assumes that the goal of the VMC is not presentation per se of content but the engagement and education of a diverse range of audiences about the resources of the VMC and, in particular, the ideas they animate.
Rich Content
Rich content is related to both the notion of rich media, addressed above, and a rich context that helps tell stories about individual objects, as discussed in the section on database stories.
Museums have spent the last 30 years building information management systems that can adequately track at least core information about objects in the collection. Making this information available to the public via the Internet has been a huge undertaking over the past 5-10 years. Too often, however, this information is little more than title and creator, some dates, dimensions, and medium. It is useful but not particularly compelling information in itself.
There are fundamentally two ways to make this core content more compelling. One is to specifically create additional content about the content using rich media; the other is to make links to create an additional context. These are complementary not exclusionary practices.
If we take the idea of an exhibition as a prime example of how museums best engage audiences, months and years of planning is put into creating an experience that involves viewing the objects, reading texts about them, participating in educational activities, browsing historical timelines, attending lectures and tours and otherwise attempting to create a compelling engagement with the objects and ideas in the exhibition. One of the problems for the virtual museum is that the systems that produce the catalog, manage the collection, or schedule a lecture are not the same, don’t generally talk to each other, and may not even capture the information in a reusable format (particularly with live events, such as a lecture).
Realistically, however, even with a sophisticated system for the capture and integration of all information that a museum has about an object in its collection, this will be true for only a small proportion of the collection. If one way to think about rich content is to provide exhibition-level context for every object, it will never happen. Even granting that not all objects need to be seen and that part of the museum’s function is to identify more important and/or representative objects, it is a Sisyphean task.
Rich Context
The other basic method for creating engaging experiences, then, is for a rich system of linking to a larger context, not custom building one for every object. The virtue of the VMC, of course, is that it potentially provides a much greater context than the individual museum. The more this ability can be automated across multiple collections, the better.
There is often the perception that linking beyond one’s site is detrimental because it encourages users to leave. In example after example, however, it is the site that has the most links that users gravitate to. This is the power law distribution described above. Visitors may leave during a session, but they are far more likely to come back, if they had a rewarding experience.
It is one thing to link from the Thompson painting in your collection to the exhibition catalog essay from another museum to a timeline from another site. These linkages are along clear axes—creator, medium, geography, time period, subject matter, etc. This is difficult enough across heterogeneous information sources, no doubt, but there are also other ways to think about linking that are not based on human-created metadata.
We highly recommend that VMC pursue a set of external content relationships, if it wants to create the most engaging experience for the most objects for the most people. In order to do this well, the idea of modularity of learning objects is important as well as experimental interfaces that create linkages that are not pre-defined.[95]
Richly Open
The other way to approach the “manpower” problem is to add more human processing. As Andrea Cliffolilli points out in his insightful analysis of Wikipedia, the “open encyclopedia,”
“Wiki technology in a way literally cancels transaction costs for editing and changing information. Hence, this reduction in transaction costs acts as a catalyst for the development of the community. In turn, these reduced transaction costs means that there is full exploitation of massive collaboration economies. Hence, in the case of horizontal information assemblages, we might argue that any incentive that allows more authors to freely join in a given task, the larger the assemblage of information that is eventually produced (or in the case of Wikipedia, a larger number of articles is possible).[96]
Again, we are not suggesting that Wiki is the strategy to use, but in the virtual realm, creating structures that allow users to directly add and modify content has proved hugely successful in a variety of models from to Wikipedia to any number of bulletin boards to consumer reports.
VMC should investigate an open system that enables the audience to add certain types of information to the core museum content.
Poor Quality?
“Using the web as the basis for a managed information environment immediately introduces questions about resource quality . . .. While quality assessment is certainly possible with human mediation, such mediation is economically infeasible at the scale of the information space we wish to build.”[97]
In his position paper for the Post-Digital Library conference, Carl Lagoze voices the concern that we all share about open content. How do you make sure it is any good? Again, there is no set answer to this, although Cliffolilli identifies a number of factors such as reputation values and the inverse of the economic advantage of Wiki. Precisely because it is so easy to edit—reducing those costs—it also makes it relatively “expensive” for a “graffiti” contributor seeking to disrupt the process. He must spend time “defacing” something that can be reset to its prior state with the click of a button.
In another thoughtful piece “Notes Toward a Moderation Economy,” Roger Williams suggests that experimenting with Slashdot’s moderation system could be worthwhile. As he writes:
“The goal of public moderation is to minimize the need for intervention by people with special privileges. The mechanism is a currency system that increases your capital if you are behaving correctly, decreases it if you're not, and provides some privilege which you can spend your capital on that makes it worthwhile to acquire equity.” [98]
This is the kind of research that only VMC would have the density of content and potential visitor participation to work with; it wouldn’t make sense for an individual museum.
Born Digital Content
One of the most exciting potential components for virtual museum content is online art. CHIN is in the process of a multi-pronged research initiative on the intersection between the VMC and online art, and it is likely to recommend ways that the VMC can serve as a platform to present and preserve online art.
Infrastructure and Architectures
“We need clear definitions, goals, and objectives for interoperability, sustainability, intellectual property, and partnerships. In addition, we need to understand the role of metadata within these contexts and make better use of it.”[99]
VMC architectures need to be able to respond to future technological changes and developments. For this, they need to be layered, modular, and scalable. They need to be able to interoperate with other digital repositories by adhering to standards for structural and administrative metadata, and by working with projects such as the Open Archives Initiative and other metadata harvesting projects.[100]
The VMC architectures must be both scalable and flexible. The VMC will undoubtedly grow over time, not just in numbers of objects and exhibits, but also in terms of applications and functions. The architectures need to be able to grow with the increased body of content, and be flexible enough to support the new types of applications that will be added over the years. (For example, if the VMC had been designed half a dozen years ago, it should have been flexible enough to support the addition of applications like: discussion areas and forums, personalized settings [like “French”, only museums in Manitoba, only works from the 20th century, …], access from mobile devices, personal “my museum” virtual collections, etc.)
Architectures need to be open, with modules connected through widely accepted standards and protocols, so that different pieces of software from different vendors can be swapped in and out over time. We expect that a distributed architecture will be preferable to a centralized, hierarchical one, and that the VMC will need to interact with the distributed collections of most of the participating museums. That kind of distribution cannot be achieved without strong adherence to protocols and standards, and an open and modular architecture.
Future architectures will need to more seriously address part-whole relationships, and allow annotations and other metadata to be attached to just one segment of a painting, or to only the lid of a teapot. Likewise, these architectures will need to permit creators of secondary works (such as museum staff creating new online exhibits, teachers preparing courseware, or end-users writing online essays) to display particular segments of an image or particular passages within a marked up text – without having to recreate new scans or details of a work.
The infrastructure needed to support these architectures needs to include not just hardware and software, but human resources to both support the system, and to engage in ongoing new developments. It would be a big mistake to view the VMC as reaching a point where it is “finished” and “fixed”; as long as technology continues to grow and change user expectations in other arenas, the VMC will need to continue to adapt so that its presentation to users does not look archaic to the public (like black & white television or arrow-key user interfaces look to users today).
Modularity
“On the theme of reusability or recombination, the current apprehension on the part of cultural heritage institutions about these activities speaks to how we see ourselves. Are our institutions owners of materials or are we stewards and facilitators of access to materials that represent our core community values, artistic and scientific endeavors? The path forward is directly affected by our answers to these questions.”
Clifford Lynch[101]
A modular approach to the VMC is critical. Computing system designers have long recognized the necessity of modular overall architectures to respond to future software and hardware developments. The VMC must also be modular at the level of works and their metadata in order to respond to new uses that will be made of these works, from educators to personal museums to database narratives.
Historically, museum computer systems have treated objects as if they are bounded, fixed, and viewed primarily in a particular way (as defined by the curatorial staff).[102] Occasionally others (such as museum education department staff) would be permitted to insert an object into a slightly different context, but the object would still be defined and described by the same set of curatorial metadata.
Many of the goals cited above require the next generation virtual museum to both free objects from their fixed boundaries, and to permit those outside the museum to incorporate works into different contexts. For context, most new artistic movements that arose in the 20th century were based upon combining existing works in new ways, in order to create new works. From collage art in the early part of the century, through Dada and Surrealism, to Pop Art, postmodernism, and rap music to online “mixers, shredders, and colliders,” new works are created by recombining previously existing works.
The VMC should have a modular structure that permits audience members to create new works that incorporate works that are already in the VMC, in the same way that an artist like Barbara Kruger can incorporate an archival photograph into one of her new works. Capabilities like this would not only act to further engage many audience sub-groups, but would through learning by creating also help address some of the information and media literacy objectives that are the goals of both formal education and informal learning.
In a similar way, the VMC’s modular structure also needs to support audience members creating new contexts from VMC works. Teachers should be able to create online courseware, authors should be able to illustrate online articles with VMC images, and individuals should be able to create online exhibits.
Pointing vs. Copying
The activities mentioned above can be (and are) done today, but in very primitive ways. Today, they can only be reliably done by copying works from the VMC into the new works. But one of the key lessons of the Worldwide Web is that related information should be linked in ways that allow a user to follow trails between related ideas and works. We have much to gain if we switch from a paradigm based upon copying old works into new works to a new paradigm based on pointing between works. Under the pointing paradigm, an audience member looking at a new work (or a new contextualization) can quickly be led to the original work (and original contextualization) as provided within the original VMC record.
The pointing or linking approach has the added virtue that from an evaluation perspective, web logs can help identify and count the number of end-users viewing VMC images (even when these images are part of online courseware at a school or university), as well as identify any online exhibits, articles, or courseware that incorporate VMC images. This would be a striking contrast to today’s world, where a museum has no clue about downstream use once an image is copied into another work or contextualization.
Addressing Stability
A major technical requirement in moving from a copying paradigm to a pointing one is having a stable addressing system. Works and contextualizations outside the VMC (as well as ones inside it) need to know that links to VMC works will not change. A host of other technical developments (such as being able to point to a particular section or cropping of a VMC work) could greatly increase the usefulness of a pointing system, but even without these developments, such a system should prove quite useful.
Being able to recombine content in a generically modular way holds great promise at addressing many of the issues raised elsewhere within this document. Such a pointing-based system could greatly extend the usefulness of personalization, and allow an individual to share his or her “my museum” with others, which helps enable the recommendation that the personal museum space also be a platform for interpersonal communication. Such a system might also increase the involvement of teachers, professors, and guest curators, who could share their own contextualizations of VMC works with a much wider audience.
Modularity is not without its issues. Curators or scholars may feel unfairly challenged when contextualizations done outside the museum contradict their own interpretations or views. And repurposed works can raise controversial views that the VMC might want to avoid.
Additional thinking and research needs to go into a pointing system. First, we need to better understand the level of granularity that should be used—how big is the module that should be pointed to? Second, we need to develop a vocabulary to discuss the features of a pointing-based paradigm. For instance, should we call online exhibits, electronic articles, and online courseware – “secondary” works? These and other issues will provide fertile ground for research into the next generation of VMC.
Interoperability + Standards
“Another theme that emerged from the workshop discussions included the unquestioning discussion of metadata. There clearly are problems with metadata. First, there are no overarching standards. Second, we continue to work with deeply held assumptions about metadata that simply are not working. If we look at the future and what is required simply in terms of metadata creation, we cannot sustain it, current approaches are not viable. Third, we are having real problems consolidating metadata. Research projects using the Open Archives Initiative are consistently demonstrating that harvesting metadata is not the issue, but that building meaningful metadata repositories is. Future directions should carefully consider metadata and how and where it relates to content based retrieval.”
Clifford Lynch[103]
In a digital repository, standards are absolutely critical for both interoperability and longevity.[104] Adherence to standards both helps the VMC interact with external collections and resources, and helps ensure that internal processes and resources will be maintainable for long periods of time.[105] Because of the VMC’s need to be distributed, flexible, open, and interoperable, it is essential that the VMC adhere to a wide variety of standards and protocols.
As CHIN has been a leader in supporting standards in the past, from CIMI, to the Getty vocabulary control and authority standards, to Internet standards & protocols like TCP/IP, it is not necessary here to describe all the necessary standards in detail. Instead, we will both highlight important families of standards, and also point out emerging standards that CHIN needs to be involved in either tracking or spearheading.
CHIN has been a long-term user of descriptive metadata standards for consistent description, and discovery metadata for retrieval. Important new uses of discovery metadata that the VMC needs to be involved in include metadata harvesting and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) for interoperability between varying collections.
Other classes of metadata standards that the VMC needs to examine include Administrative Metadata for viewing and maintaining digital works, and Structural Metadata for navigation. Examples of this include the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), and the Technical Metadata for Still Images Standard (NISO Z39.87).
The VMC also needs to be aware of the various efforts around metadata standards for digital preservation and architectures for preservation repositories. Examples of these include the variety of digital preservation standards projects (such as PREservation Implementation Strategies -- PREMIS) being jointly sponsored by the Research Libraries Group and OCLC), and the model preservation architectures being developed by the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Information Infrastructure Program (NDIIP). Other preservation-relevant standards include the various efforts to create persistent Internet addressing systems: OCLC’s Persistent URLs (PURLs), the National Corporation for Research Initiative’s Handle system, and the Internet Engineering Task Force’s work on Universal Resource Names (URNs) – all designed to correct the limitations in URLs.
Another area that VMC needs to closely examine is the metadata efforts around learning systems and digital objects. Projects to standardize metadata around learning modules are particularly relevant for both for designers of secondary works like online museum educational modules, and for managers of primary works like museum online catalogs that may provide the original digital works that educators use to build some of their learning modules. Any plan for VMC to provide access to secondary learning modules built by others will need to incorporate standards for these learning objects, such as IMS.
Finally, VMC may need to get involved in the creation of some of the new standards that will be necessary to tie secondary modules to primary works. This includes standards for addressing a particular part of a digital work (such as a detail of a painting or a paragraph of a digitized book, or a quote within a diary), and having only that particular subset appear in a secondary work that points to the stored “primary” work.
Only by adopting (and in come cases helping give birth to) widely accepted standards and protocols, will the VMC have the interoperability and sustainability that it will need in the coming years.
Sustainability
“Digital libraries are very expensive to build and maintain. Making digital libraries more cost effective requires that they serve multiple users for multiple uses.”
Borgman[106]
“Many of the promised economic benefits of the Internet seem to be materializing. Noting this, enterprises are preparing for e-business: while overall investment in IT has decreased by 6.2 percent since 2001, e-business budgets are estimated to have risen by as much as 11 percent in 2002. In 2003 annual growth in e-business investment fell to 4 percent, but this rate was twice as fast as the growth in overall IT investment.”
United Nations[107]
Dynamic virtual museums are expensive to maintain, with costs over the long run substantially unknown. In an era of increased economic pressure, museums and their virtual counterparts are looking for economic returns wherever they can: sponsorship, advertising, ecommerce, subscription, pay-per-view, print on demand, membership, applications service provider are just a few of the option being considered. It is beyond the scope of this paper to evaluate and recommend specific courses of action in regard to revenue production, but as with other issues in the virtual museum realm, it is likely to be a question of balance. When does pay-per-view for special resources undermine the ideal of universal access? At what point does sponsorship overwhelm the visual message of the core content? What are the arguments for providing which services at a loss, on the basis of cost-recovery and in order to make a profit? These and many others are legitimate questions being studied.
Besides ensuring a balance with core values, the other likely recommendation to come out of this research is likely to be the idea of shared infrastructure. Not every museum can afford an ecommerce system, but it may be possible to share one.
Integration
“New organizations and organizational models are needed that are sensitive to the dynamics of particular scientific communities, driven by academic mission, and able to sustain themselves over time as an integral parts of the broader cyberinfrastructure.”
Daniel J. Waters[108]
One of the keys to sustainability is the integration of the virtual museum function into the everyday functioning of the physical museum. As a relatively simple example, all museums sponsor important lectures throughout the year by internationally renowned scholars as well as members of the local community. Even though these activities are deemed worthwhile for a one-time audience of anywhere from a dozen people to a few hundred, very seldom are these events recorded adequately and even less often are they made available as a digital resource for viewing. Yet, the cost of the necessary equipment to do this is relatively small and digitization, either as a live stream or an archived stream can quickly become simply a few hours of staff time. What are the barriers that are preventing this from happening more consistently?
In general, from a systems or business processes perspective, similar information is being generated by museum staff for wall didactics, publications, and the website. Yet, very few institutions can afford the kind of workflow software that would more easily enable museums to leverage efforts in one area into the other—or at a minimum, capture for the digital archives, the totality of contextual resources being created around an exhibition.
The VMC can play an important role in developing institutional capacity for the integration of the “information environment” into something that is easily reusable in multiple contexts via the next generation virtual museum.
Capacity Building
“{VMC} Board members would like to see the Investment Program, or CHIN, play an editorial role in the production of exhibits. The role would not be as elaborate as for the Public Programs, but would assist museums through training for proposal managers (before, during and after the development of an exhibit: development of content, technology, evaluation of multi-media firms, presentation of their product, development of a communication plan). Results would produce good quality images and content, which could be picked up for different uses to promote museums and the content they produce.”[109]
Partnerships
In the age of the Internet, collaboration is shifting organizational focus and there is a subsequent need to consider online network strategies. Consequently, museums may need to re-define their potential partners, whether they are taken from the public or private sectors, for example, in terms of:
• Content partners
• Technology partners
• Partners in developing online services
• Joint funding bid partners
• Commercial partners
There are also benefits for museums and cultural institutions that have a leadership role in a particular area of expertise. Several existing initiatives are exemplars in this area and have been instrumental in joining-up resources and creating integrated access, but also using their leadership role within the sector to provide opportunities for wider engagement.
Such online initiatives have generally manifested themselves as portals and gateways offering central access to the nation’s cultural resources; and/or offering an authoritative selection of joined-up services to collective audiences and users. Some notable examples include:
• One example of a content-based network is the National Maritime Museum ‘PORT’ initiative, which is one of the foremost portals on maritime information on the Internet.[110]
• SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources and Art Network) founded by a partnership of the National Museums of Scotland, the Scottish Museums Council, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland is a centrally coordinated network of digitized resources collated from a number of participating cultural institutions all directly accessible through a central portal.[111]
• Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) focuses on the museum and heritage sectors in Canada. However, it is more than a gateway to culture and heritage online, offering resources for heritage professionals, discussion groups, job listings, and online training on technology issues.[112]
The Public Sphere and Economic Sustainability
Never loose sight of the big picture. The overall purpose of the institution, especially in the development and distribution of digitized cultural content must be omnipresent to ensure that the initiative maintains the institutions’ overall quality. If an initiative includes the generation of revenue, it should also maintain a balance to ensure that a museum’s educational and public policy objectives continue to be met.[113]
Museums, like many participants in contemporary culture, both own and use intellectual property. Its interests are on both sides of the issue of more and less restrictive IP regimes. Historically, the museum’s position could be said to be protecting IP. In the same way that the museum is mandated to protect the physical objects in its collections, it wanted to “protect” the cropping or inappropriate use of images of its objects. Over the past 20 years, however, as museums have come under strenuous financial pressures, there has been a shift toward maximizing the legal exploitation of IP rights the museum controls. Somewhat paradoxically, this has meant both the loosening and tightening of controls. It is now easier to buy towels and shower curtains with your favorite artwork on them, but if you are a scholar or a publisher or another museum, use of the image in a catalog or simply for research may be costly.
In the last 5 years, with the rise of “network society,” as outlined above, the value for audiences of aggregated and linked resources is exponentially greater. It is our position that where and when it is necessary to maintain security over intellectual property, whether for appropriate use or for economic transactions, it is important for network infrastructure to support this to the extent feasible, precisely because the usefulness to individual audience members of aggregated and linked information is so great.[114]
•
At the same time, it is our philosophy that, as Henry Jenkins writes [Henry Jenkins quote] that supporting a robust public domain is a core value and critical mission of the cultural heritage sector. We advocate making as many IP resources as possible available for a wide range of public uses without restriction, from educational use to individual use to re-use by community members, including institutional community members. This may impact economics to some extent, but we feel there are several significant mitigating factors:
• the necessary infrastructure to support secure IP management is not affordable to individual institutions. By creating a common infrastructure, shared costs can be reduced, arguably more than potential revenue from exclusivity.
• Potentially the economic pie becomes greater. A bookstore selling books on pays x% of the sale to Amazon, which it would normally keep. However, it can expect far greater traffic to its offerings through than it would as an independent only site.
• It is possible to create legally enforceable licenses such as [get example from Creative Commons} that are unrestrictive for public domain uses, relatively unrestrictive for other uses by other members of the community (such as CHIN/VMC partners), and relatively restrictive for commercial uses by non-community members.
There is no doubt that sustainability is a core value for real stewardship, but we believe that supporting a robust public domain is equally critical for society-at-large and a critical area for leadership by cultural heritage institutions.
Business Models
There is no clear—or at least easy—way for museums to solve their ongoing financial burdens, shoulder the additional costs of digitization and expanded virtual services, and remain true to their mission and core values. Nevertheless, it is critical to explore possibilities from strategic alliances to print-on-demand business to persuasive arguments about cultural heritage institutions as economically productive drivers of “creative community.” As the VMC board put it during its brainstorming session:
“Content could be developed in an engaging, interesting way to generate cross-media products and for CHIN and museums, individually and collectively, to be a part of the entertainment business as equal partners with big players. This could in turn generate revenues for museums to be sustainable (every-day operations of a museum, collections development, special projects, etc.).”[115]
Brand
Regardless of any particular business models the VMC may develop, a critical underlying issues for any possible success is a successful brand, which cannot be ignored, simply because museums are in the public sector. Again, as the VMC Board describes it,
“Marketing has played a very important role in creating a brand (VMC), and strategic alliances (Sympatico, Canada Post) to promote our membership. Some museums may not know how to react to these changes yet.”[116]
The issue for business models, strategic alliances, branding, and marketing is as much cultural as an implementation issue. Parallel to the way that the VMC is in a position to test “entertaining” applications while remaining authoritative and pedagogically sound, the VMC also has the trust of its community to allow it to experiment with potential business models.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property and copyright are complex subjects for museums and related institutions and the laws may differ depending on the governing country of a museum organization. Intellectual property rights in general ensure that museums and individuals can profit from their creative or intellectual endeavors; more specifically, they prevent others profiting at the creator’s expense.
Of particular significance to museums is the advent of technological change, such as digital capture methods, which have now facilitated the ability to make copies. However, all material placed on a website is protected by copyright. This includes the images/special features that make up the design of the site.
And as such this material must be treated as any other piece of copyrighted work and a process should be in place to gain permission, copyright clearance, etc. Consequently, it is critical that a museum set up a program of intellectual property rights management.
Appendix 1: Pour une Mémoire numérique universelle
RAPPORT AU MUSÉE VIRTUEL DU CANADA
Par Pierre Lévy, CRC en Intelligence Collective, Université d’Ottawa
Avant propos
Le principal objet de ce rapport est d’exposer les premiers plans d’un langage de structuration sémantique de l’information apte à organiser la mémoire numérique résultant de la convergence en ligne des musées et des bibliothèques. Ce langage, nommé Digitong, propose une architecture de l’information fondée sur une idéographie. Or le support graphique est indispensable à l’exposé d’une architecture comme à celui d’une idéographie. C’est pourquoi la partie principale de ce document, qui donne une vue d’ensemble du langage, est de nature graphique. Dans cette brève introduction au document principal, j’expose les motifs qui m’ont fait concevoir Digitong et je me contente d’évoquer quelques-unes de ses caractéristiques saillantes.
La culture à venir
Nous sommes en train de construire une nouvelle civilisation, une société planétaire de la connaissance en réseau. Le développement des communications, des transports et des échanges commerciaux nous engage irréversiblement sur la voie de l’intégration mondiale. Naguère paysanne, la majorité de l’humanité vit désormais dans les mailles d’un filet de mégapoles. Le développement rapide des télécommunications et l’extension du réseau numérique universel nous obligent à repenser radicalement les données de la culture et à pratiquer la vie en société autrement que nos ancêtres.
L’ouverture du cyberespace est en voie d’accélération : lente construction des réseaux téléphoniques, naissance de l’électronique, invention de l’ordinateur, puis de l’ordinateur personnel, interconnexion des ordinateurs, numérisation générale de la communication, développement des connexions sans-fil... Le Web n’existait pas en 1992. Dix ans plus tard, des centaines de millions de personnes naviguent sur Internet. Si nous regardons vers l’avenir, nous voyons, à coup sûr, une augmentation des capacités du réseau, tant en termes de stockage, que de puissance de traitement ou de bande passante. Les accès au cyberespace vont se multiplier, devenir de moins en moins coûteux et se faire sans fil de manière ubiquitaire. De plus en plus de personnes vont se connecter, notamment dans des pays très peuplés et dotés d’une riche culture, comme l’Inde, la Chine, le Brésil ou le Mexique, ainsi que dans de nombreux pays de tradition musulmane, dont le patrimoine culturel est ancien et raffiné. Les cultures vont se rencontrer dans le réseau numérique.
La naissance du cyberespace comme instrument de communication interactif transfrontière amorce une nouvelle échelle et une nouvelle forme d’espace public. Nos messages convergent et s’échangent sur la nappe ondulante d’un hypertexte en expansion. Une méta-ville se lève à l’horizon de la culture planétaire.
L’économie dépend chaque jour davantage du développement des savoirs. Nous sommes confrontés au défi de la gestion de plus en plus complexe des flux d’informations numériques qui alimentent et expriment nos communautés entremêlées. Le prolongement des mouvements en cours semble pointer vers l’apparition de nouvelles formes politiques, économiques et culturelles pour les générations qui vont nous succéder. Au milieu de l’incertitude, quelques grands principes semblent se dégager, comme celui qui veut que les idées, les connaissances et le patrimoine culturel constituent désormais la richesse des nations.
Ce phénomène d’interconnexion massive remet en question, souvent violemment, les anciennes manières de transmettre la culture. La vague actuelle de transformation de la vie symbolique engendre des craintes, fort compréhensibles, de dissolution ou de perte d’identité. Parallèlement, une multitude de subjectivités personnelles et collectives s’affichent de plus en plus et de mieux en mieux sur Internet, tandis qu’un nombre croissant de « communautés virtuelles » explorent de nouvelles manières d’être ensemble avec des paroles, des images et de la musique numérisés.
La responsabilité des institutions de la mémoire
Les gens de culture - et tout particulièrement ceux qui ont pour mission de transmettre la mémoire - ont une responsabilité capitale. On ne reçoit pas un héritage de sens comme un dépôt de choses mortes, d’instructions à appliquer ou de dogmes à réciter. Dans la pratique quotidienne de la réception et de la transmission culturelle, la conservation, l’appréciation et le développement supposent une recherche personnelle, une plongée pleine de risques dans les profondeurs de l’héritage. Parce que les chaînes de transmissions sont vivantes, il nous est fait obligation d’agrandir et de faire évoluer, sous l’effet de nouvelles questions, le monde de significations qui nous a été transmis.
Les problèmes cruciaux traités par les traditions culturelles doivent être repensés par chaque génération, placée devant la responsabilité de re-générer de manière créative le monde symbolique qu’elle transmettra aux générations suivantes. Plus précisément, une génération se trouve confrontée à une question essentielle, une méta-question, si l’on peut dire : « Quel problème essentiel nous est posé? ». Autrement dit : en quel point devons-nous repenser nos traditions de la manière la plus novatrice et la plus radicale? Ou encore : de quoi sommes-nous le plus responsables ?
Aujourd’hui, les écosystèmes symboliques que sont les cultures sont emportés dans un mouvement de convergence et d’interdépendance croissante. Le nouveau médium de communication interactive planétaire questionne les règles antérieures de la vie symbolique. Le mouvement de mondialisation et d’informatisation nous demande, nolens volens, de trouver un sens à une éventuelle unité culturelle de l’humanité. Il nous invite à une manière inconnue de faire société à l’échelle d’une planète interconnectée. Regardons les choses en face : l’avenir de la vie symbolique passe par une mémoire universelle qui devient notre ressource culturelle commune.
Je ne parle pas du cyberespace comme d’un instrument pour transmettre nos traditions telles quelles. Je parle d’une sphère mondiale unifiée de la culture humaine qui surgit comme problème. Parviendrons-nous à négocier quelqu’équilibre dynamique à un nouveau degré de complexité, à une plus grande hauteur, comme l’ont déjà fait nos prédécesseurs à plusieurs reprises lors de grandes mutations culturelles? Aurons-nous le courage de viser la fécondité maximale de notre patrimoine commun? Serons-nous capables de projeter une mémoire numérique universelle qui soit digne de la grande civilisation pluraliste unie par sa mémoire que nous pourrions contribuer à créer?
Repenser l’archive
Afin de relever ce défi, les institutions de la mémoire doivent prendre la juste mesure de leurs nouvelles possibilités. C’est toute une nouvelle pensée de l’archive qu’il nous faut convoquer pour intégrer la levée de très anciennes contraintes techniques. Une fois l’information numérisée et indexée, il est devenu possible de la multiplier et de la distribuer indéfiniment pour un coût faible à toutes les extrémités du réseau. Dès lors que nous comprenons la nature de l’information numérique, il devient clair qu’elle n’implique ni l’unicité de localisation, ni la fixité de l’apparence. Elle peut être partout et se manifester de manière interactive selon une infinité de manières. Elle échappe quasiment à toutes les limites imposées par l’espace physique.
Cela signifie que nous pouvons rendre disponible de manière cohérente dans le cyberespace la quasi-totalité des données numériques conservées et exposées par tous les noeuds du réseau mondial des musées et des bibliothèques. Mais cette première ouverture ne constitue que la partie physique et institutionnelle de la redondance permise par le cyberespace. La redondance sémantique est plus radicale. En effet, parallèlement à la levée des contraintes techniques, le desserrement de codes symboliques rigides et les progrès d’un regard anthropologique instruit de la diversité culturelle ont estompé les distinctions qui organisaient naguère les structures de l’archive. Il n’existe plus de séparation absolue entre « ordinaire » et « digne de mémoire », entre artiste et public, entre visiteur et commissaire d’exposition, entre critique et public. Qu’une communauté virtuelle se saisisse d’un thème, d’une idée, d’un patrimoine quelconque… et des paquets d’information accèdent à la dignité de mémorable. Tous les témoignages humains sont interconnectés au sein d’une conversation mondiale proliférante. Les documents sont reliés par un grand hypertexte dynamique qui reflète nos mouvements d’écriture, nos liens et nos navigations.
Résumons quelques-unes des plus radicales contestations de l’archive traditionnelle qui aient été émises au XXe siècle.
- Premièrement : toute activité humaine peut être objet d’histoire et d’archéologie.
- Deuxièmement: une forme d’expression culturelle est légitime dès qu’elle trouve une communauté pour en porter la mémoire.
- Troisièmement : le nouvel espace de projection de l’artiste est le musée.
La future mémoire numérique universelle intègre sans peine ces remises en question. Puisque sa reproduction ne coûte presque rien, nous pouvons multiplier l’information numérique par toutes les manières de s’en servir et d’y accéder. Il devient désormais envisageable de proposer sur la mémoire universelle autant de points de vues qu’il existe de communautés humaines. C’est pourquoi je propose de concevoir la future architecture de l’information sur la base d’une nouvelle « perspective sémantique ». Perspective, en effet, puisque la mémoire numérique ici projetée tend au-dessus du cyberespace un miroir sémantique, un monde virtuel explorable dont la fonction sera de renvoyer aux visiteurs l’image indéfiniment multipliée de leur création collective.
Les musées et bibliothèques peuvent se saisir des techniques disponibles pour édifier une architecture de l’information qui soit digne de la mémoire numérique universelle. Nous devons viser une architecture d’images animées, souple, transparente, distribuée et ouverte au travail collaboratif. Selon ce programme de travail, l’espace d’exposition de la mémoire numérique universelle devra organiser une mise en image animée tridimensionnelle du mémorable humain dans laquelle toutes les communautés virtuelles de visiteurs, d’auteurs et d’utilisateurs pourront se retrouver et collaborer. Nous pouvons à cette fin utiliser les nouvelles possibilités de projection automatique de mondes virtuels tridimensionnels partageables grâce aux progrès de la bande passante et des logiciels de synthèse d’image. Ces opportunités techniques sont déjà exploitées par une partie de la communauté scientifique et par les jeux en ligne qui se déroulent dans des mondes virtuels multiparticipants.
Une nouvelle perspective
Le sens de cette mutation du regard sur le sens peut, je crois, s’éclairer d’une comparaison avec la mutation du regard sur le sensible qui s’est effectuée en Europe autour du XVIe siècle. Comme la perspective inventée à la Renaissance, la perspective sémantique implique une révolution dans la manière de voir. On peut définir la perspective comme le construit culturel selon lequel l’espace se compose de points de vue différents et symétriques. Suivant cette définition structurale, l’invention de la perspective ne s’est pas faite qu’en peinture. Elle a progressé dans les rapports d’égalité entre citoyens, dans les formes abstraites de la géométrie, comme dans les relations physiques entre masses décrites par la science moderne. Grâce à la mise en cause de nos ethnocentrismes par l’anthropologie et les sciences humaines, nous approchons d’une telle perspective dans les disciplines du sens. Mais il manque aux études du phénomène humain une visualisation de ses objets dans un espace tridimensionnel infini qui en donnerait une perspective complète. C’est pourquoi je propose pour structurer la mémoire numérique universelle un espace virtuel tridimensionnel potentiellement infini dans lequel chaque sujet-objet se comporte comme un point de vue agissant sur la structure même de l’espace d’exposition. Le point de vue de chaque communauté unie autour d’un patrimoine documentaire prendra place parmi la multitude auto-organisée des points de vue possibles. En faisant de l’espace sémantique un espace perspectif, les institutions de la mémoire produiraient donc pour chaque visiteur une représentation virtuelle du point de vue des autres qui ne pourrait se dissocier de la découverte de son propre point de vue.
Afin de réaliser ce programme, nous pouvons nous appuyer sur le développement en cours du Web Sémantique. Sur un plan strictement technique, nous savons que le Web sémantique qui se prépare aujourd’hui augmentera l’utilité des informations numériques en fournissant des balises aux agents logiciels qui vont parcourir le réseau, ce qui leur permettra de tenir compte du sens des documents et des transactions dans l’accomplissement de leurs tâches. Grâce au Web Sémantique, les données de la mémoire numérique universelle pourront donc être adressées et auto-organisées par leur sens et leur usage pratique (si ces deux notions ont des extensions différentes, ce dont – avec Pierce et Wittgenstein - je doute). Le Web sémantique, tel qu’il est conçu aujourd’hui, est organisé par une multitude d’ontologies. Cela est parfaitement normal, puisqu’il doit toujours exister un grand nombre de manières différentes d’interpréter le monde pour faire vivre une intelligence collective riche et féconde. Pourtant, si nous voulons que la mémoire numérique universelle adopte un système d’adressage par le sens, nous devons pouvoir traduire ces multiples ontologies dans une architecture sémantique de la mémoire qui soit cohérente.
L’adoption d’un langage commun apte à signaler toutes les perspectives possibles sur le sens conditionne la fondation d’une mémoire numérique universelle. Ce n’est qu’à cette condition qu’une mémoire numérique commune pourra coordonner et rendre intelligibles les relations entre zones sémantiques structurées par des ontologies locales distinctes. Le langage d’architecture de l’information que je propose ici répond à cette contrainte de mise en scène des rapports parce que, comme on le verra, sa structure reflète un système de relations symétriques entre points de vue ontologiques différents. Comme il répond aux principes d’une géométrie des points de vue réciproques, ce langage des idées est capable
de satisfaire aux conditions de symétrie anthropologique que requiert la mémoire numérique universelle. Mais d’abord, qu’est-ce qu’une idée?
Le langage des idées
L’espèce humaine a ouvert un nouvel espace, un espace abstrait, à l’évolution du vivant. Le langage articulé a ouvert à l’humanité la possibilité de poser des questions, de raconter des histoires et de dialoguer. Il a permis le surgissement d’entités inconnues des sociétés animales : les nombres, les dieux, les lois, les œuvres d’art, les calendriers, l’aventure technique et l’univers entier de la culture. Je désigne ici sous le nom d’idées ces formes complexes qui n’apparaissent, ne se reproduisent et n’évoluent que dans le monde de la culture, dans l’espace de signification ouvert par le langage. Le surgissement de l’espace sémantique où vivent les idées a permis aux communautés humaines un saut d’intelligence collective par rapport aux ruches, aux troupeaux et aux meutes parce qu’il crée un lien de coopération compétitive plus fort, plus souple, plus évolutif que celui qui unit les insectes des fourmilières ou les singes des hardes de babouins. La vie des idées distingue l’humanité. Oui, nous sommes des sociétés d’organismes animaux, fruits de l’évolution biologique. Mais l’humanité est également le seul environnement d’où la vie symbolique tire son existence. Le langage marque le seuil à partir duquel se constituent cette deuxième nature formée d’écosystèmes d’idées - des sortes d’hypertextes spirituels - vivant en symbiose avec les communautés de primates parlants que nous formons. Ces écosystèmes d’idées se complexifient, dépérissent, se diversifient et se mélangent, entraînant les sociétés qui les nourrissent sur un chemin partiellement indéterminé d’évolution culturelle. Teilhard de Chardin a baptisé « Noosphère » l’écosystème mondial de toutes les idées que la mondialisation et le développement des moyens de communication qui culmine dans le cyberespace commence à nous faire toucher du doigt.
Or je suggérais plus haut que nous pouvons aujourd’hui envisager la possibilité technique de visualiser ces écosystèmes d’idées dans un miroir sémantique : une simulation tridimensionnelle animée – complexe, certes, mais organisée et cohérente. Fruit de la convergence des musées et des bibliothèques en ligne, la mémoire numérique universelle peut multiplier l’expression culturelle pour tous les publics et dans toutes les directions de l’espace du sens en mettant en scène le monde des idées de manière cinématographique et interactive.
Quel genre d’idées trouvera-t-on dans le monde virtuel qui figure la multiplicité entrelacée des mémoires ? Ce ne seront pas exactement les idées de Platon. Le fondateur de la philosophie occidentale les décrivait fixes, éternelles et invisibles aux sens. Les idées de notre mémoire numérique, en revanche, sont des sujets-objets virtuels tridimensionnels explorables par la vue, le toucher et l’ouïe, qui évoluent au sein d’un écosystème où elles vivent en interdépendance.
Digitong
Avant de nous lancer dans l’exploration de ce monde virtuel, quelques mots d’abord sur le choix du nom de notre système de cinématographie de l’information. Digitong dénote une langue digitale, un langage visuel d’indexation sémantique de l’information qui ne peut être « parlé » que par l’intermédiaire du réseau des ordinateurs. La médiation technique des ordinateurs en réseau permet aux communautés entrelacées qui « parlent Digitong » de projeter un monde virtuel tridimensionnel figurant leurs rapports de sens.
Idées
Digitong compute le mouvement des idées en trois dimensions dans un espace virtuel infini et cohérent où les proximités spatiales reflètent des proximités sémantiques. L’idée est ici définie formellement comme l’union indissoluble de trois dimensions interdépendantes du même sujet-objet :
- 1) une communauté virtuelle (l’intelligence de l’idée),
- 2) un traitement de données numériques (le processus cognitif de l’idée)
- 3) une constellation d’images symboliques dans la mémoire numérique (la conscience, ou autoreprésentation de l’idée).
Mèmes
Digitong permet de projeter un monde virtuel dans lequel les idées absorbent, transforment et émettent des capsules d’informations multimédia, éventuellement préparées par les services en ligne des musées et bibliothèques. Ces paquets d’information sont appelés des « mèmes ». Le terme a été forgé par Richard Dawkins sur le modèle du « gène », afin de désigner l’entité autoreproductrice qui circule entre les esprits humains. Je crois que Dawkins était sur la bonne voie en conceptualisant la sphère culturelle comme une écologie, et c’est pourquoi je reprends son terme. Mais il n’a décrit avec le mème qu’une moitié de l’écologie cognitive humaine. Pour rendre compte de la profondeur et de la complexité de la nature sémantique de l’information, on ne peut se contenter d’un équivalent des gènes, il faut aussi se doter d’un équivalent (virtuel) des organismes. Dans la mémoire numérique universelle structurée par Digitong, les idées sont précisément ces organismes virtuels qui absorbent, traitent et diffusent les mèmes. Les idées donnent une consistance symbolique aux communautés humaines unies par le langage, une consistance que la seule prise en compte des mèmes ne peut fournir.
Syntaxe et sémantique
La syntaxe de Digitong remplit essentiellement une fonction cinématographique. Elle permet la représentation animée en 3 D d’une mémoire numérique dans laquelle des idées échangent et transforment des mèmes. Cette syntaxe est intimement liée à la sémantique, qui offre un système de coordonnées graphiques permettant la projection d’un espace virtuel potentiellement infini - mais précisément adressable - dans lequel transitent les idées et les mèmes. Les distances géométriques dans l’espace engendré par cette langue représentent des distances sémantiques. Cette correspondance entre espaces sémantiques et géométriques repose sur les deux piliers de l’architecture informationnelle de Digitong: une idéographie et une algorithmique.
Idéographie
Le rôle des idéogrammes de Digitong n’est pas de traduire exactement le contenu des documents et des transactions numériques mais seulement de les indexer ou de les adresser dans l’espace sémantique. On peut les imaginer comme des sortes de « codes postaux » de la mémoire universelle.
Les idéogrammes de Digitong sont indépendants des langues. Ils sont construits selon une méthode de division symétrique des types d’actes qui structurent l’espace sémantique humain. C’est la symétrie anthropologique qui inspire cette idéographie qui en fait un instrument adéquat de structuration de la mémoire universelle. J’appelle cette symétrie la perspective virtuelle parce qu’elle traite - précisément - les directions de sens de manière symétrique.
Les idéogrammes de Digitong ne représentent pas des concepts rigides qui se comporteraient comme des « classes » ou des ensembles emboîtés hiérarchiquement, séparant des « dedans » de « dehors ». Leur éventail présente la palette des qualités d’actes qui sont en état d’enveloppement réciproque et fractal dans les idées. Chaque idéogramme est accompagné d’un nombre indiquant le « volume sémantique » affecté à la qualité d’acte qu’il représente. Comme les idéogrammes signalent des sortes de couleurs ou de fréquences sémantiques, leurs proportions et leurs combinaisons peuvent être multipliés indéfiniment.
Tous les mèmes qui sont conservés en mémoire, transformés et échangés par les idées sont étiquetés par des codes sémantiques. Ces codes se composent invariablement d’une suite ordonnée d’idéogrammes affectés de volumes. Les idées peuvent identifier et traiter les mèmes grâce aux codes qui décrivent leur teneur sémantique. Les idées, à leur tour, sont repérées par des codes sémantiques qui expriment leur activité et leur mémoire.
Les idéogrammes représentent des opérateurs actifs du monde virtuel de la mémoire :
- émetteurs qui permettent aux mèmes de se signaler aux idées auxquelles ils s’adressent ;
- antennes qui permettent aux idées de capter et d’émettre des mèmes ;
- commutateurs sémantiques qui transforment l’information reçue par les idées en information transmise ;
- instruments de navigation dans l’espace sémantique pour les visiteurs.
Algorithmique
Puisque les idées sont vivantes, leurs positions changent au gré de leurs navigations sémantiques et ces changements restructurent l’espace autour d’elles. L’espace virtuel en trois dimensions qui exprime les distances sémantiques est périodiquement recalculé à partir des codes des idées. Les algorithmes de Digitong construisent l’espace-mémoire universel selon une sorte de négociation collective permanente entre les idées sur leurs distances respectives. Le principe de ces algorithmes, relativement simple, est exposé dans le document principal.
En plus de calculer une position universelle pour toutes les idées, les algorithmes de Digitong projettent l’espace relatif de chaque idée, son « champ de vision » ou univers propre. Il s’agit de l’environnement écologique constitué des idées complémentaires avec qui l’idée de référence échange des mèmes.
Enfin, ces algorithmes disposent les mèmes (en fonction de leur teneur sémantique) à l’intérieur des idées.
Calcul sémantique analogique
Les idées projetées en 3 D par Digitong se comportent comme des processeurs analogiques des informations encapsulées par les mèmes. Elles sont munies, on l’a dit, de commutateurs sémantiques qui effectuent la transformation des mèmes reçus en mèmes émis. Le tableau des volumes sémantiques de ses commutateurs à un moment donné reflète la position instantanée d’une idée dans l’espace de toutes les commutations sémantiques possibles. On notera que, comme cet espace à une infinité de dimensions est irreprésentable, tout l’intérêt des algorithmes de Digitong est d’en fournir une projection navigable en trois dimensions.
Moments, arches
La perspective cinématographique de Digitong décompose le mouvement des idées en « images fixes » qui sont appelés des moments. Un moment du traitement sémantique analogique accompli par les idées peut être analysé en (1) réception d’information, (2) transformation de l’information reçue et (3) émission d’information. Chaque moment projette une image distincte dans l’espace à trois dimensions. Les mèmes sont rangés dans les deux arches d’informations que portent les idées à chaque moment de leur trajet. Une arche expose les mèmes reçus et une autre les mèmes émis. Peut-on concevoir, en temps de déluge informationnel, une architecture de l’archive sans arche?
Sèmes
La transformation sémantique effectué par le moment d’une idée s’appelle un sème. Le sème représente l’acte d’un moment sous la forme du « programme » analogique suivi par l’idée lorsqu’elle transforme les mèmes reçus en mèmes émis. A chaque moment, le sème indique la réfraction particulière d’un flux d’information opérée par une idée. Le sème lui-même n’est que la trace instantanée d’une sémiose : la navigation sémantique d’une idée dans un écosystème d’idées. Moment après moment, la succession de ses actes signifiants contribue à orienter la navigation sémantique d’une idée.
Digitong fait coïncider le sens et l’acte. Ce langage traite le sens comme une perspective de navigation dans un espace sémantique infini dont aucune direction n’est privilégiée. Les penseurs lucides de nombreuses traditions ont souligné la nature différentielle et relative du sens, sur lequel il est beaucoup plus difficile de s’accorder que sur les observables ou les calculs logico-mathématiques. Conformément à cette ligne de pensée différentialiste, Digitong identifie l’unité de sémiose à une différence instantanée entre les visages de deux configurations idéographiques.
Information
La succession des moments d’une idée projette la navigation d’une communauté dans l’espace sémantique. La cinématographie de Digitong permet de visiter les trajets sémantiques des idées qui produisent, échangent et consomment l’information. Elle permet également de repérer et de mettre en contexte l’information elle-même. En effet, les capsules multimédias que sont les mèmes se distribuent de manière redondante au sein des arches d’informations portées par les idées et les mèmes se disposent dans les arches de manière contextuelle, en fonction de leurs connexions sémantiques.
L’information représente tout ce qui peut avoir sens ou valeur pour des êtres humains : ressources matérielles et techniques, rôles sociaux, institutions, idéaux, formes d’organisation, compétences, connaissances, messages, images, musiques et symboles de toutes sortes. Les communautés virtuelles échangent et transforment l’information dans le réseau de la mémoire numérique universelle. Le mouvement de l’information relie et sépare : sa distribution fluctuante structure l’espace sémantique. Les idées présentent ensemble une multitude de moments d’intelligence singuliers et interdépendants, autant de visages que le miroir de l’intelligence collective reflète fractalement dans toutes les directions du sens.
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Dans le document auquel ce texte introduit, je traite de la possibilité logique, de la calculabilité informatique, de la faisabilité technique et de la pertinence anthropologique d’une mémoire numérique universelle structurée par Digitong.
La première partie est consacrée aux principes de la perspective virtuelle et aux neuf premiers idéogrammes qui définissent les points cardinaux de l’espace sémantique.
La seconde partie expose la cinématographie des idées, leur décomposition en moments, la décomposition de ces moments en arches contenant des mèmes, etc. On y trouvera également le principe des algorithmes qui permettent de recalculer périodiquement l’espace sémantique en fonction de l’évolution et des positions réciproques des idées.
La troisième partie explique les fondements de la navigation des idées et des visiteurs dans l’espace sémantique.
Les six parties suivantes exposent systématiquement l’idéographie. On verra que la structure symétrique et le mode de construction principalement combinatoire des 549 idéogrammes de Digitong sont au cœur de sa puissance expressive.
L’édition du document présentant Digitong a bénéficié de l’aide précieuse de Darcia Labrosse, qui a joué le role d’éditrice graphique, de correctrice et de conseillère litteraire pour la langue anglaise.
La bibliographie qui suit n’a pas pour ambition de recenser la totalité des traditions philosophiques et culturelles qui ont joué un rôle dans l’élaboration de Digitong. Elle se contente de signaler les domaines de recherche pertinents et les sources d’inspiration contemporaines les plus marquantes.
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Culture
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Knowledge management
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Medias
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Networked society and social capital
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Sign and Language
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Visualization & mapping
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Appendix 2: Selected Bibliography
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Appendix 3: CHIN Research on VMC
Martine Bélanger, Martin Brooks, Pierre Chalifour, Kati Geber, Bobby Ho and John Spence. Virtual Classroom - Virtual Museum of Canada. Journey of Captain Bernier Project. Draft.
Description of a learning based collaborative project between CHIN, the NRC, Musée Maritime du Québec and several schools.
Decima Research. The Virtual Museum of Canada Usability Evaluation for the Canadian Heritage Information Network. Summary Report. April 2002.
Report on research conducted by Decima to determine how CHIN's target audience uses the VMC, and whether the structural, visual and content aspects of the VMC are successful.
Renelle Chalifoux and Sylvia McLaughlin. Virtual Museum of Canada Online Marketing Survey of November 2002. February 2003.
A summary and interpretation of data collected during the VMC online survey during its implementation period of November 8th - November 29th, 2002.
Suhas Deshpande. VMC Report Card. January 2004.
An evaluative, statistical analysis of the VMC using web log data collected during its first three years of existence.
Silvia Filippini. Personalization through IT in museums: examples and recommendations for the Virtual Museum of Canada.
An analysis and detailed description of the techniques available to create virtual environments that are increasingly adapted towards the different needs, interests and expectations of heterogeneous users.
Kim Gauvin. CHIN Virtual Exhibition History. December 2003.
An historical overview of CHIN's evolving role as a partner and creator of Virtual Exhibits. This document includes a very useful typology for online content.
Kim Gauvin, Kati Geber and Corey Timpson. Use of the Engagement Factor in the Analysis of Visitor Engagement in the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC). October 14, 2003.
A description and analysis of the engagement factor, which is a metric developed at CHIN to measure the quality of a user's visit to the VMC.
Pierre Levy. Pour une Mémoire numérique universelle. 2004.
A discussion of digitong, which the author describes as "a universal information architecture language designed to support the converging knowledge management gathered by on-line museums, on-line libraries, e-governments, and all kind of other on-line organizations who need to present optimal memory displays to their public".
Rick Nadeau. Awareness of the VMC: A Decima Research Report for the Canadian Heritage Information Network. 2003.
Report in the form of a powerpoint presentation on the recognition of the VMC by Canadians.
Barbara Lang Rottenberg. Virtual Museum of Canada Feature Analysis. December 2003.
An analysis of how web sites other than the VMC use the featuring function.
VMC Feedback Messages: An Analysis
Guidelines on analyzing feedback messages while taking into account privacy issues.
VMC Rethinking Brainstorming Session with the Investment Program Editorial Board. November 24, 2003.
The VMC Investment Program Editorial Board was invited to meet with the VMC Rethinking Team (list of participants in Appendix A) on November 24th, 2003, in Ottawa, to brainstorm on five questions (Appendix B) that were emailed to participants a few days before.
VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session - Users. January 21, 2004.
The objective of this brainstorming session was to solicit views on the topic of users as it applies to the next generation of the Virtual Museum of Canada. The term “user” was generally defined as anyone who uses/interacts with a computer, and more specifically, for our purposes, a Web user visiting the VMC.
VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session - Personalization. November 28, 2003.
The objective of this brainstorming session was to solicit views on the topic of personalization from CHIN Staff (see list of participants in Appendix B) as it applies to the next generation of the Virtual Museum of Canada. “Personalization” was defined in broad terms for audience, so as not to limit the discussion.
VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session - Innovation. October 23, 2003.
The objective of this brainstorming session was to solicit views on the topic of innovation from CHIN Staff (see list of participants in Appendix C) as it applies to the next generation of the Virtual Museum of Canada. The term innovation was not explicitly defined for the audience, so as not to limit the discussion, nor indeed the concept of innovation itself.
VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session - Content. October 8, 2003.
The objective of this brainstorming session was to solicit views from CHIN staff on the topic of VMC content with an eye towards the next generation. Given the broad scope of “content” as a brainstorming topic, a one-page document (see Appendix A) was sent to CHIN staff to focus the topic, while not limiting the discussion.
VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session - Business Models. February, 2004.
The objective of this brainstorming session was to solicit views from CHIN staff on business models. Issues such as the compatibility of business practices and museum practices were explored. Other issues that were discussed were the experience economy and sustainability.
Appendix 4: CHIN Virtual Exhibition History
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), a network of and for Canadian museums, produced its first collaborative online exhibition in 1995. CHIN had already been working with the museum community for 23 years developing databases of heritage content (the national inventories, now called Artefacts Canada, being the basis for CHIN’s existence). However, until the production of this first virtual exhibition, entitled Christmas Traditions in France and in Canada, CHIN had not ventured into the realm of interpreted heritage content nor that of content for the general public. All previous CHIN produced resources had been developed in conjunction with heritage professionals, for heritage professionals. The decision to work with the Ministry of culture in France, along with several Canadian and French museums was the point of departure from CHIN’s traditional modus vivendi.[117] This first online exhibition, in fact, foreshadows the creation of the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC), which is the public face of the network’s products and services.
From CHIN’s perspective, the end product was almost secondary to the loftier goals of strengthening the network, developing relations among museums both within and outside of Canada, and building capacity with respect to digital content within the participating Canadian museums.[118] Given this, in addition to the complexity of working collaboratively with several museums in two countries, it is no wonder that the Christmas virtual exhibition follows the format of a physical exhibition and did not aim to push the boundaries of the medium.
At its inception, it was seen as a project, with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Christmas Traditions in France and in Canada was conceived to be a “one-off”, despite the fact that it is now seen as the first in a long and successful (on a variety of levels) series of CHIN produced, collaborative on-line exhibitions. In keeping with its conceptualization as a project with a clearly defined end date, once launched, this online exhibition, like all collaborative CHIN productions since, was never revisited or revised by its creators. Like much online museum content at that time, the Christmas production was seen as a published book, the flexibility of the online medium was completely overlooked, and, until this year, continued to be in CHIN productions.[119]
This simple, linear online exhibition composed of static HTML pages containing text and images became the inspiration, and, in the early years, the model for future CHIN produced exhibitions. CHIN’s goals remained the same for subsequent exhibitions, which is not surprising, given that all previously developed CHIN products had focused on the benefits derived by participating museums and, less-so on other stakeholders (including the end-user).
Despite this (or possibly because of it), the Christmas Traditions in France and in Canada virtual exhibition proved to be enormously popular[120] and engaging, as evidence by quantitative data (in the form of Web statistics) and by qualitative data (as evidenced by e-mailed feedback). Its popularity continues to grow, eight years later, with almost 90,000 visits in December 1998, and an increase of almost 45% in December 2002 with visits reaching over 129,000.
It was assumed that following the model of informative text with supporting images packaged in a simple, though appealing, graphic design would recreate the interest and enthusiasm that the Christmas production generated among visitors. This formula was not a guarantee for success, however, as the resulting productions included several victories, such as Butterflies North and South, launched in 1999 (357,861 visits), and Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art, launched in 2001 (371,131 visits), and a few that were less so, Meiji: Tradition in Transition, launched in 1999 (37,733 visits), and Athena’s Heirs: Exploring Four Centuries of Canadian Science and Medicine and Science, launched in 2001(21,417 visits).[121]
There are obviously a multitude of reasons for the success or failure of these virtual exhibitions, including subject interest, technology used, and marketing, but it is worth noting that it was not until after the creation of the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) in 2001 that the focus of the CHIN produced virtual exhibitions began to shift to more clearly on the user experience. This was in part due to the addition of a marketing team to CHIN staff and a general trend in Web design, and within the museum community, towards user-centred design.
With the creation of the VMC came the development of the VMC Investment program. The proposal form for this program clearly demonstrates the melding of CHIN’s mandate to build capacity within the museum community, but with a new emphasis on developing productions for a specified target audience, as evidence by the Program criteria.[122]
As well, with the Program came the acknowledgement that not all online productions were virtual exhibition. To assist museums in the identification of their production type, a typology for online content was developed. It is as follows:
Collections Management Interface - A production that provides a window on the collections management system of the institution.
Game – An Interactive activity, or a grouping of activities, that requires users to use skills and/or knowledge to proceed through to the conclusion.
Resource – A production that contains informative and/or educational content that is not organized into a narrative, but rather provides content on various aspects of a topic.
Virtual Exhibition – An online production that enables the display and interpretation of content. Various media are generally used towards the communication objectives of the virtual exhibition.
Virtual Museum – A production that will include several stand-along virtual exhibitions.
Virtual Tour – A production that provides a tour of a physical space/site, such as an historical site or a physical exhibition.
Exchange – A production wherein the main focus is facilitating the exchange of information, and sharing of stories by and among users.
An additional program was created by CHIN more recently in an effort, again, to encourage the development of skills related to digital content, but also to assist community museums to connect with their audiences, namely their local communities. This Program, Community Memories, was designed with small (two FTE or fewer) museums in mind.
These two programs clearly illustrates CHIN’s move towards, and understanding of, the needs of the end-user in the development of online content. Interestingly enough, the CHIN online productions, while incorporating audience evaluations and usability testing more thoroughly in their development, are now more clearly focused on researching and testing various technologies and theories, with the objective of providing results that the museum community can exploit in the development of their own online content.
CHIN has come full circle with virtual exhibitions, and now embraces its role, with respect to interpreted content, as that of facilitator. By way of the various VMC programs or as a result of the research that stems from CHIN collaborative productions, assistance is provided to the museum community to enable them to reach and to connect with the public.
The virtual exhibitions are an important component of the VMC, representing approximately 75% of visits to the site, and being the source for the generation of the bulk of the feedback messages received. Clearly users have a need for and an interest in this type of online content, and together with the museum community, CHIN, via the VMC, will be able to provide better access to an increasingly diverse collection of interpreted heritage content.
Pure CHIN VE History/Facts
The seed of the first CHIN produced, collaborative virtual exhibition was the result of a partnership between CHIN and the regional office of the Department of Canadian Heritage in Montréal. The resources and contacts of the two were pooled together, funding through the Canada-France Accord was targeted, and museums in Canada and in France were invited to participate in this new initiative.
While the government representatives were necessary to pull together the resources, it was due to the close collaboration among museum representatives that this well researched online exhibition, which put aspects of the Christmas traditions of two countries into context. CHIN, of course, did not have the expertise for the creation of interpretive content, but, through its experience building a network, had acted as a facilitator for the museum community with respect to making their collections records widely accessible. For this reason, CHIN was able to facilitate the online distribution of the stories the museums wanted to tell.
Despite the many challenges of this first collaborative project, the summative evaluation revealed that it yielded many benefits. Among these, from the Canadian perspective, were the forming of bonds between participating museums and the development of technology skills for those involved.
Christmas Traditions in France and in Canada was followed by In the Countries of the Francophonie[123], another international collaboration that CHIN produced with funding from another source, the Agence de la Francophonie. It was during the development of this second virtual exhibition that talk of a “virtual museum” (though a “virtual museum of the Francophonie”) began in earnest. Unfortunately, funding for online Francophonie projects seemed to dry-up, and for this reason only one other virtual exhibition with Francophonie-based museums has been created since that time.[124]
Despite the fact that the first collaborative virtual exhibition was followed by a second, it was not until 1997 that the production of collaborative virtual exhibitions became a CHIN program. The catalyst for this was internship funding obtained from Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) as a result of a partnership with CHIN’s colleagues in the Department working on Young Canada Works.[125]
While this made the projects more difficult, it also guaranteed that those involved were committed to seeing it through to fruition. While few were paid, generally all benefited from their involvement. At minimum, the benefit was providing unlimited access to objects from their collections in both languages.[126] However, most had the added benefit of acquiring new skills and knowledge about the creation of online content, of developing new contacts within the museum community (within Canada and sometimes abroad) and working with one or more youth, through the internships, which many felt brought new life into their institution, along with new ways of doing things.
Several projects had the advantage, and challenge, of receiving supplementary funding from other sources. This additional funding also meant additional requirements, such as those developed for the world expos[127] and for governmental relations.[128]
Together, CHIN and the participating museums, found ways to address these new challenges, but it was not until the creation of the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC), that the resources to easily and efficiently achieve these goals became available.
Appendix 5: Glossary
artificial intelligence (AI): A common name for the set of different techniques that aim at teaching computers how to think. Here ‘thinking’ refers to the human way of thinking.
aware: refers to the fact that the interaction between the human and the system is informed by context. The extent to which the awareness is “inferred” is a matter of some significant research and can be as simple as inferring the nature of the task the user is engaged in and taking action based on that.
born-digital adjective. Of or relating to a document that was created and exists only in a digital format.
cyberinfrastructure: Man contemporary projects require effective federation of both distributed resources (data and facilities) and distributed, multidisciplinary expertise, and that cyberinfrastructure is a key to making this possible. There is no standard term for such environments enabled by cyberinfrastructure; some of the names in use are collaboratory, co-laboratory, grid community/network, virtual science community, and e-science community.
cybernetics: Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and social philosopher, coined the word cybernetics from the Greek word meaning steersman. He defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Cybernetics does not treat objects per se but ways of behaving.
cyberspace: A term used by author William Gibson to describe a networked virtual reality.
digital library:
distributed: refers to the interaction that takes place between components to carry out some task. Thus, while ubiquity refers to the availability of access, distribution refers to the internal processing. A distributed system carries out the functions needed by the users without regard to whose the actual resources or processes take place. One might suggest that distribution is the internal view and ubiquity is the external view.
embedded: refers to the movement of computational elements into everyday appliances. Like Anti-lock Braking Systems, the future will see “smart” doors, thermostats, refrigerators, etc. Like ABS, many of these systems will be important single function systems. Others will share information with other subsystems. At what point we can take user aware displays and input devices and conclude that the aggregate of devices at a location provides for a “smart room” is not clear. This suggests that there is a close relationship between being aware and being embedded. At the same time, we see that each brings a separate research focus.
hypertext; hypermedia: Hypertext is the antecedent of hypermedia, but both terms refer to the non-sequential associative linking of text, information, media elements, and spatial and temporal boundaries.
immersion - An immersive experience which involves entering a multi-sensory representation of a three-dimensional space. Also an exploration of the evolution of virtual reality and 3D virtual space, .i.e. multimedia as an immersive experience that engages all the senses.
interaction – 1. communication between or joint activity involving two or more people 2. the combined action of two or more entities that affect one another and work together. [Atkins]
network: In its non-technical sense, networks are comprised of how people relate within and across groups and communities. The strength of the notion of virtual networks is that it provides a simple way of moving beyond a focus on individuals and individual encounters, towards one which shows how common goals /partnerships/ideas can link people and services or resources by a streamlined and accessible means. In the museum community, networks function for users and organizations in diverse ways and through diverse activities: for example, information seeking for audiences, and in providing professional support for museum practitioners.
semantic web: The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form. [Berners-Lee]
transparency: consistency in an interface (physical or virtual) that hides the complexities and implementation specific details of a system or space.
ubiquitous: refers to the accessibility of the computing resources. They follow the user from place to place and thus the location of the user is not a constraint.
user profile: A user profile is a means of categorizing and defining a user (or potential user) of a digital resource, using one or more different attributes to do so. The term “user profile” is frequently used to describe the process by which individuals’ access and use of specific applications is configured, managed and monitored, particularly in technical terms. [Grant]
virtual reality (VR): an artificial environment that is created by the means of 3-D computer graphics, spatial audio and visual applications. Often termed 'worlds', VR represents real-world or conceptual environments that can be navigated through, interacted with and updated in real-time, often with the use of peripheral and/or sensory devices.
Appendix 6: Contributors and Bios
Howard Besser
Howard Besser is a Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, where he is Director of a new Masters Degree program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. Previously he was a Professor of Education & Information Studies at UCLA, where he taught and did research on multimedia, image databases, digital libraries, metadata standards, digital longevity, web design, information literacy, distance learning, intellectual property, and the social and cultural impact of new information technologies. He has also been in charge of information technology for both the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Berkeley
Art Museum.
Since 1985 Dr. Besser has been involved in numerous groundbreaking projects involving digitization of cultural heritage materials. He developed the first networked-based digital image distribution project (1985), and spearheaded and analyzed the first multi-institution project to test aggregation, metadata, distribution, and interface of a large set of digital images of art objects (1994-98). He is the author of several dozen articles and book chapters, and has served on 2 joint EU/US committees on metadata for digited cultural heritage collections. He consults widely with libraries, museums, and archives over a wide range of issues.
Ann Borda
Ann Borda works in informatics and new media strategy, particularly specializing in facilitating digital content delivery and e-learning solutions. Currently she is based in London, England, where she holds the position of Head of Multimedia Collections at the Science Museum.
Among the projects in which Ann has been involved are a combined 2 million dollar web infrastructure to bring cultural collections on line across several national heritage organizations in the UK and , an e-learning collaboration led by Columbia University. She is a frequent conference speaker for digital media topics, presenting papers at ICHIM and
Open Archives Forum. Educated at the University of British Columbia, London
Business School and University of London (PhD), Ann has published in the areas of media and collaboration technologies, metadata applications and content delivery. She also sits as the Chair of the CIDOC Multimedia Group; is a Board Member of the Electronic Specialist Publishing Group (British
Computer Society) and is assistant editor of the journal MultiMedia and Information Technology.
Her current endeavours are focused on intelligent retrieval & usability, e-learning models and content syndication in areas ranging from next-generation immersion to new media convergence.
Steve Dietz
Dietz is a freelance curator. He is Curatorial Fellow in Residence at the Banff Center for the Arts and will direct the International ISEA Symposium and Festival of Electronic Arts in San Jose in 2006. He is teaching at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis College of Art + Design. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site with the McKnight Foundation.
Dietz has organized and curated new media exhibitions, including Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net (1998); Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age (1999); Digital Documentary: The Need to Know and the Urge to Show (1999); Cybermuseology for the Museo de Monterrey (1999); Art Entertainment Network (2000); Outsourcing Control? The Audience As Artist for the Open Source Lounge" at Medi@terra (2000); Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001-02); a nationally traveling exhibition; Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), with Jenny Marketou, at the New Museum, New York City; Translocations (2003), part of "How Latitudes Become Forms" at the Walker Art Center; State of the Art: Maps, Games, Stories, and Algorithms from Minnesota at the Carleton Art Gallery (2003); and Database Imaginary (2004), with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Center for the Arts.
He speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Salmagundi, Afterimage, Art in America, Museum News, BlackFlash, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent; in exhibition catalogs for Walker Art Center, Centro Parago, Site Santa Fe, San Francisco Art Institute, and aceart; and in publications from MIT Press, University of California Press, and Princeton University Press (forthcoming).
Prior to the Walker Art Center, Dietz was founding Chief of Publications and New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and editor of the scholarly journal, American Art.
Kati Geber
As manager of Web Applications Interface Design at the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), Geber led the design of the award-winning Virtual Museum of Canada[129] as well as other acclaimed sites[130]. She specializes in information architecture, access, usability and evaluation.
In addition to presenting at conferences and writing[131] about Web Applications Design, Kati conducts research on the ways on-line cultural and heritage information spaces shape and affect learning, communication, participation and engagement of audiences in a multilingual, distributed information environment. She explores interoperability, integration and aggregation of content in cultural sectors.
Kati has worked in almost every aspects of informatics: from systems analysis, design and programming, to content management and high-level strategy; from project management to collaborative international initiatives, in both educational and cultural domains.
The focus of her work has been creativity and culture, imagination and understanding, of crucial importance in a communication-based world, adapting to change.
Recent projects:
Managing interface and applications design and user-centered activities at the Canadian Heritage Information Network; design of Community Memories online and offline applications; “My Personal Museum” evaluation and concept redesign; coordination of the broadband project The Virtual Museum of Canada in the Virtual classroom.
Research and road mapping for the Virtual Museum of Canada; research papers on “Feedback Analysis“ The Engagement Factor” and “Quality of Online Products” and “Personalization”; coordination of a collaborative international research project on “Virtual Museums: The Next Generation”.
Event Organizing: “Beyond Productivity: Culture and Heritage Resources in the Digital Age,” Calgary Feb. 2004[132]; Cultural Content Forum in Banff, Feb. 2004[133].
Pierre Levy
Pierre Lévy is a philosopher who devoted his professional life to the understanding of the cultural and cognitive impacts of the digital technologies, to promote their best social uses and to understand the phenomenon of human collective intelligence. He has written a dozen of
books on this subject that have been translated in more than 12 languages
and are studied in many universities all over the world. He currently holds
a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence at the University of
Ottawa (Canada).
• Born in 1956, in Tunisia
• Master degree in history of science (Paris, France, Sorbonne, 1980).
• PhD in sociology (Paris, EHESS, 1983).
• Researcher at the CREA (École polytechnique, Paris, France) about history of cybernetics, artificial intelligence and artificial life, 1983-1986.
• Visiting professor at the University of Quebec in Montréal (Canada), communication department, 1987-1989. Teaching the use of computers in communication.
• Professor in educational sciences at the University of Paris-Nanterre (France), 1990-1992. Teaching educational technologies.
• PhD in information and communication sciences (Grenoble, France, 1991).
• Co-founder and researcher at the Neurope Lab (Geneva, Switzerland).
• Researches on the economy and technology of the «knowledge age», 1991-1995.
• Member of a think-tank for a special project concerning open and distance learning commanded by the french prime minister Edith Cresson (1992-1994).
• Co-inventor of the «knowledge tree», a software system for the mapping, assessement and exchange of knowledge in communities.
• Full Professor at the «hypermedia» department of the University of Paris-St Denis (France) from 1993 to 1998.
• Member of the editorial board of the «revue virtuelle» of the Pompidou
• Center (Paris, France) from 1995 to 1997.
• Author of a report on cyberculture for the Council of Europe (1996)
• Author of a report on cyberdemocracy and european governance for the European Commission (2000)
• "Cyberculture and social communication" Professor at the University of Quebec, Canada (Dept of social communication, UQTR), from 1998 to 2001
• Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence and professor at the University of Ottawa since 2001
• Associate professor at the International School of New Media, Germany, since 2003
The Virtual Museum of Canada Rethinking Group
The Virtual Museum of Canada Rethinking Group was formed to elicit ideas for the next generation of the VMC. Members of this multi-disciplinary group organized and facilitated a series of brainstorming sessions with the
VMC editorial board and CHIN staff on a series of key topics. The results of the brainstorming sessions were included in this research paper.
The Rethinking Group was lead by Jean-Marc Blais, Acting Director General of CHIN. The project leader for the group was Marie Hélène Myre. Other members of the rethinking group were Kim Gauvin, Kati Geber, Jason Kiss and
Suhas Deshpande.
-----------------------
[1] Clifford Lynch. “Reflections Towards the Development of a ‘Post-DL’ Research Agenda.” Wave of the Future: NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop. June 15-17, 2003. . Accessed October 25, 2003.
[2] . Accessed October 27, 2003.
[3] See an annotated bibliography in Appendix 3
[4] In the US, this has led to a great increase in corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, and in a continued reliance on wealthy patron assistance for acquisitions.
[5] Rina Elster Pantalony’s paper, “A Marriage of Convenience: Museums and the Practice of Business Doctrine in the Development of Sustainable Business Models” is particularly insightful and useful regarding the tradeoffs that museums are facing and the necessary planning steps. See
[6] Besser, Howard (1997). The Transformation of the Museum and the way it’s Perceived, in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The Wired Museum, Washington: American Association of Museums, pages 153-169.
[7] Alain Minc and Simon Nora. The Computerization of Society. Boston: MIT Press, 1970.
[8] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Secretariat. “E-Commerce and Development Report 2003.” United Nations, 2003.
[9] Diagram and caption from Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002, p. 71.
[10] “Digital Resources for Cultural Heritage: Current Status and Future Needs, A Strategic Assessment Workshop.” August 25-26, 2003, Washington, DC, Supported by The Institute of Museum and Library Services, Final Report prepared by Angela Spinazze.
[11] Spinazze op cit. More information is available at , a collection of the National Science Digital Library, funded by the National Science Foundation.
[12] Gennari, J., Harrington, M., Hughes, S., Manojlovich, M. and Spring, M. (2003) “Preparatory Observations Ubiquitous Knowledge Environments: The Cyberinfrastructure Information Ether.” Wave of the Future: NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop. June 15-17. . Accessed February 17, 2004.
[13] See . Accessed 1.19.04.
[14] FCC Strategic Goals: Broadband. . Accessed December 4, 2003.
[15] John B. Horrigan and Lee Rainie, “The Broadband Difference: How online Americans’ behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. . Accessed February 17, 2004.
[16] “Number of global broadband subscribers grows 72% in 2002.” International Telecommunications Union. . Accessed December 4, 2003.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Spinazze, op cit.
[19] For more about the information marketplace see Michael Dertouzos. What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
[20] See Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “Designing Calm Technology,” . Accessed December 24, 2003 and “Rich Gold: 1950- 2003. Research from Goldographic Laboratories from All Over the World,” . Accessed December 24, 2003.
[21] See . Accessed December 24, 2003.
[22] See . Accessed December 24, 2003.
[23] Varian, Hal et al. (2003). How Much Information? 2003: Executive summary
Accessed February 17, 2004.
[24] Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths, New York: Penguin, 1970. See . Accessed March 17, 2004.
[25] See Pierre Levy
[26] See . Accessed December 15, 2003.
[27]
[28] See . Accessed December 4, 2003.
[29] See . Accessed December 24, 2003.
[30] See and ,
[31] Pantalony, op cit.
[32] See . Accessed January 19, 2004.
[33] Warren Sack, Conversation Map. . Accessed Feb. 9, 2004.
[34] Warren Sack, “Discourse Architecture and Very Large-Scale Conversations,” in The Digital Order, Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, editors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming.
[35] “Born Digital: Children of the Revolution.” A Wired Special Report. September 2002. . Accessed December 24, 2003.
[36] See “Video Game Culture: Leisure and Play Preferences of B.C. Teens”
A report from the Media Analysis Laboratory Simon Fraser University, Burnaby B.C. October 1998 at .
[37] For more information see “Economic Impacts of the Demand for Playing Interactive Entertainment Software,” Interactive Digital Software Association, 2001. and “The Relevance of Video Games and Gaming Consoles to the Higher and Further Education Learning Experience,” JISC, March 12, 2003.
[38] Janet H. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
[39] James Johnson, “The Virtual Endeavor Experiment: A Networked VR Application,” in David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (Eds.), Museum Interactive Multimedia 1997: Cultural Heritage Systems Design and Interfaces, Selected Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, (ICHIM 97). Le Louvre, Paris, France, September 1-5, 1997.
[40] For comparison, in 2003 fully 25% of the Walker Art Center’s over 3 million online visitors are from outside the United States.
[41] In an online survey of VMC users, almost 25% responded to the French-lanuguage version of the survey.
[42] Besser, Howard (1987). “Digital Images for Museums”, Museum Studies Journal 3 (1), Fall/Winter, pages 74-81; and Besser, Howard (1987). “The Changing Museum,” in Ching-chih Chen (ed), Information: The Transformation of Society (Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science), Medford, NJ: Learned Information, Inc, pages 14-19.
[43] Pierre Lévy. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Plenum Trade: New York and London, 1998,16.
[44] Benjamin Woolley. Virtual Worlds. London: Penguin, 1993, 235.
[45]
[46] Variable Media Initiative. See . Accessed March 17, 2004.
[47] Amy Friedlander. “Background Summary of Results from Interviews and Essays.” http:// repor/ interviews_summary.pdf. Accessed December 17, 2003.
[48] Article 2 – Definitions from ICOM Statutes, amended by the 20th General Assembly of ICOM, Barcelona, Spain, 6 July 2001)
[49] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
[50] Virtual exhibitions are also known as virtual exhibits, online exhibitions and Web exhibitions. All refer to the same type of production.
[51] Among those that were based on physical exhibitions, the best known is Anno Domini: Jesus Through the Centuries. The physical exhibition was created by the Provincial Museum of Alberta in collaboration with other Canadian and international museums.
[52] A Google search for virtual exhibits, and its synonyms, which provides over 5,5 million results.
[53] See Matthew Nickerson, and John Vergo, Clare-Marie Karat, John Karat, Claudio Pinhanez, Renee Arora, Thomas Cofino, Doug Riecken, and Mark Podlaseck, 2001. "Less Clicking, More Watching: Results from the User-Centered Design of a Multi-Institutional Web Site for Art and Culture," Papers from Museums and the Web 2002, Seattle, Wash., at and Victoria Kravchyna and S.K. Hastings, 2002. "Informational Value of Museum Web Sites," First Monday, volume 7, number 2 (February), at
[54] See Appendix 3, “History of Virtual Exhibits at CHIN.”
[55] Lyn Elliot Sherwood, 1998. "Discovering Buffalo Robes: A Case for Cross-Domain Information Strategies," Computers and the Humanities, volume 32, pp. 57-64.
[56]
[57] Jean-Marc Blais, To be published at
[58] For a more in depth explanation and theoretical background see “Einstein Meets Magritte”
[59] Spinazze op cit.
[60] “Beyond Productivity: Culture and Heritage Resources in the Digital Age,” a symposium sponsored by the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Culture Online Program, and the eCulture Directorate. Calgary, February 26, 2004. See
[61] Karen Neimanis, Kati Geber, From "Come and Get It" to "Seek and You Shall Find": Transition from a Central Resource to an Information Meta-Centre, Museums and the Web 1998,
[62] Sarah Kenderdine, Inside the meta-center: a wonder cabinet,
[63] Kevin Sumption, Meta-centers: do they work and what might the future hold ñ A case study of Australian Museums On-line, Museums and the Web, 2000, : Beyond museum walls" -- A critical analysis of emerging approaches to museum web-based education, Museum and the Web, 2001, ;
[64] Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) Investment Program
[65] ;
[66] Mary Catherine Bateson, “Listening to Change,”
[67] Unpublished research by John Falk presented at the “Beyond Productivity” symposium indicates that demographics are, in fact, a poor predictor of learning for online audiences.
[68] Lyn Elliott Sherwood, See Appendix 3: The Engagement Factor.
[69] Clay Shirky, “Social Software and the Next Big Phase of the Internet,”
[70] Tomislav Sola, In A Museum is a Museum is a Museum...Or Is It?: Exploring Museology and the Web, Lynne Teather, Ph.D. , Museums and the Web, 1998,
[71] ;
[72] Régis Debray: Communiquer moins, transmettre plus.
[73] Ben Schneiderman, Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, MIT Press, 2002
[74] Spinazze op cit.
[75] (Trials end 2004). See:
[76] See
[77] See . The notion of a smart community is already being implemented in Canada in the effort to bring cultural heritage and information technology together ().
[78] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
[79] See Spinazze, op cit.
[80] "The Virtual Museum of Canada" Usability Evaluation (March 25, 2002); Recherche et analyse statistique du comportement de visite sur le site portail du Musée virtuel du Canada, Orange Kiwi (Musée Média), Katy Tari, muséologue, Andrée Blais, muséoloque, Benoit Dubuc, analyste, Patrick Turmel, développeur Web, Dominique Arpin, développeur Web, 28 Mars 2003; VMC Monthly Statistics
[81] Borgman, Christine L. (2003) “Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation.” Wave of the Future: NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop. June 15-17, 2003. . Accessed February 17, 2003.
[82] Kody Janney & Jane Sledge, User Access Needs for Project CHIO, Draft, June 28, 1995
[83] See for example, .
[84] Barbara Lang Rottenberg, Virtual Museum of Canada Features Analysis, December 2003.
[85] These issues were also evident during a recent brainstorming session conducted at CHIN on personalization. The session revealed some fundamental questions related to current personalization practices especially concerning anticipation of user behavior, user choices and privacy issues. See Appendix 3.
[86] Clifford, Lynch, Reflections Towards the Development of a “Post-DL” Research Agenda.
[87] Borgman op cit.
[88] For details see Appendix 3: Personalization which provides a detailed description of the techniques available as well as an overview of the main advantages and inconveniences related to each approach. In the Annex, a number of web sites are considered as case studies, both produced by cultural institutions, museums in particular, and in other fields such as e-commerce or Internet-based information services, which use these techniques in ways that could be beneficial also for the cultural sector. Other possible applications such as audio guides or interactive devices are also taken into consideration, especially with respect to how this could help in the personalization of museums’ web sites).
[89] Design concept created by ematerial studios, under the coordination of Luigi Ferrara, based on research conducted by CHIN on personal museums.
[90] Borgman op cit.
[91] Manovich, op cit.
[92] Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,”
[93] See Aspen Moviemap, . Accessed March 17, 2004.
[94] Ironically, this project is unplayable today. Its record resides only in some digital archives and the human memories – pointing yet again, to the importance of digital archiving issues.
[95] See Appendix 3: VMC Rethinking Group Internal Brainstorming Session – Content, October 8, 2003.
[96] Cliffolilli, Andrea. “Phantom Authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia.” First Monday. Volume 8, number 12 (December 2003). . Accessed December 5, 2003.
[97] Carl Lagoze. “NSF Digital Library Position Paper.” Wave of the Future: NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop. June 15-17, 2003. . Accessed October 25, 2003.
[98] Roger Williams, “Notes Toward a Moderation Economy,” Kuro5him, Oct 28th, 2003 at 10:42:43 PM EST
. Accessed Dec. 5, 20003.
[99] Spinazzi, op cit.
[100] . Accessed March 17, 2004.
[101] In Spinazze, op cit.
[102] Besser, Howard (1997). The Transformation of the Museum and the way it’s Perceived, in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The Wired Museum, Washington: American Association of Museums, pages 153-169.
[103] In Spinazze, op cit.
[104] Besser, Howard (2002). “The Next Stage: Moving from Isolated Digital Collections to Interoperable Digital Libraries”, First Monday 7:6, June ()
[105] For example, encoding in standardized file formats like TIFF acts as a hedge against proprietary file formats that may no longer be accessible a decade from now, and developing internal application modules that communicate with each other over standard protocols ensures that in future years, VMC can replace these modules with those from another vendor.
[106] Borgman op cit.
[107] “E-Commerce and Development Report 2003,” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Accessed March 17, 2004.
[108] “Beyond Digital Libraries: The Organizational Design of a New Cyberinfrastructure.”
[109] See Appendix 3: “VMC Rethinking Brainstorming Session with the Investment Program Editorial Board,” November 24, 2003.
[110]
[111] htpp://scran.ac.uk
[112]
[113] Rina Pantalony, op cit.
[114] Recently British Library instituted secure electronic delivery to users’ desktops. See . Accessed December 4, 2003.
[115] VMC brainstorming session, February 5, 2004. “CHIN is interested in building capacity in museums to be able to share content through cross-media – as equal partners with big players. For this purpose, the development of a business model is important for CHIN/VMC and museums.”
[116] VMC brainstorming session, February 5, 2004.
[117] Christmas Tradition in France and in Canada (1995) involved the participation of The Provincial Museum of Alberta (Edmonton), the Musée de la civilisation (Québec), and the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires (Paris).
[118] Lorraine Normore in her article “Studying Special collections and the Web: an analysis of practice” identifies several potential benefits related to the production of virtual exhibition, including showing “both parent institutions and potential donors the important content the collection has to offer as well as raising its visibility, within the organization and to the world at large.” CHIN certainly saw the potential for raising the profile of participating museums, and of their collections, and these may have been motivators for the participating museums.
[119] In all fairness, because CHIN collaborative virtual exhibitions involve multiple partners, the sites are developed by consensus. For this reason, making changes to the finished products would be a complicated, labour intensive task, and is the main reason that these productions have remained unchanged post-launch.
[120] Not surprisingly, this was particularly true from October through to December of each year.
[121] Success and failure in this context relates purely to site visitation and perceived engagement of visitors (based on quantitative and qualitative information). All statistics provided are for the same twelve month period.
[122] These include identifying the target audience, indicating measures to conduct audience evaluations during development and exploiting the medium towards the stated communications objectives.
[123] In the Countries of the Francophonie (1997) included the participation of museums in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Vietnam and Canada (Québec and British Columbia) and was the first to involve a school in the creation of content for the site.
[124] Staying in Tune (1999) involving museums and schools in Benin, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Romania and Tunisia.
[125] For more information about this youth employment program, please visit: .
[126] All virtual exhibition produced by CHIN are available in at least English and French, while several are available in additional languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.
[127] Haida Spirits of the Sea, Our World – Our Way of Life and Germany-Canada Migration were developed for Expos held in Lisbon and Hannover.
[128] Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art was a trilateral government project.
[129] virtualmuseum.ca;
[130] chin.gc.ca; , etc.
[131] Selections: Enabling Access to a Collective Knowledge Environment, September 1998, MCN, Santa Monica; Artefacts Canada - Documenting and Communicating Cultural and Natural Diversity, CIDOC Annual Meeting, 1998, Melbourne, Australia; Documenting and Communicating Cultural and Natural Diversity, ICOM News, Special Issue, 1998; The Challenges of Building a Gateway, ICHIM, November, Washington, 1999; Self-describing Resources, MCN, Las Vegas, September 2000; A Methodology for Collaborative Applications Design and Evaluation or Designing Virtual Organizations, MCN, Cincinnati, October 2001; The CHIN Experience: Interoperability, The New review of Information Networking, Vol. 7, 2001, 77-92. Spaces, Distances and Closeness on the Web, University of York, Toronto, (Jan. 2003); Design, Intention and Engagement, Computer Human Interaction Chapter, Ottawa, Feb. 2003, with Corey Timpson; Understanding our Audiences, Digital Cultural Content Forum Meeting Pistoia, Italy, Mar. 2003, with Jean-Marc Blais; The Virtual Museum of Canada: Architecture and Design, American Society of Information Science and Technology (Mar. 2003); Community Memories - a design for diversity and connectivity, CHIN-IMLS meeting, Washington, July. 2003; Virtual Museum versus Digital Library – Joint WMA and BCMA, Reno, Oct. 2003; Audiences and Engagement, Museum Computer Network, Las Vegas, Nov. 2003.
[132]
[133]
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