Museums, universities, archives, and libraries are all slowly waking up to the need to “have some sort of presence online,” to engage with the public on the internet, at least in the abstract.
Social media is key to such efforts for two reasons: one, it’s something most people understand to be important. Even the most tech-backward administrator would have to admit that there can be no down side to your institution having more fans on Facebook.
But it’s also key to creating and maintaining a significant community of users, which is essential to the success of any new media project. Whether they’re contributing crowdsourced data, downloading your app, or simply hits on your new online exhibit or finding aid, you need users to be successful in a new media project.
Unfortunately, the way we have run these institutions for centuries is not conducive to using these social media to their fullest. We know that the most successful users are fast-paced, engaged and engaging, transparent, fun, and produce a rich flow of content on a regular basis.
Not only does this does not sound like most museums’ or libraries’ online presence, but these things are often made far more difficult by the very structure of these institutions. The silos of departmentalism can slow down or even stop this flow of information. One example that comes to mind how uncommon it apparently is for museum curators to have access to the CMS for online exhibits.
But new media projects are good PR, they engage more people, they’re sexy to the press, and they can create new revenue streams. All of this, I would argue, can be leveraged. If success in new media requires the sort of openness and radical trust that departmental silos inhibit, is that an opportunity to try to rethink the whole nature of how we organize our museums, libraries, etc?
I don’t really know the answer to these questions, and I don’t even know if it’s necessarily a good idea, to be honest. But in my limited experience, I do feel like there’s an opportunity there. What I’d like to propose is a session where people discuss the pros and cons of such a radical proposal, and maybe even do a little strategizing.
- Can we reprogram the backend of cultural institutions to make them more engaging?
- Are there workarounds that can create an environment where interdepartmental communication and cooperation happens at the speed of modern communication?
- Are new media projects important enough to the powers that be that they represent a significant opportunity to get people to rethink these structures?
- What would a cultural institution without departments look like? What kind of structure could hybridize departments or provide strong incentive to work more closely?
4 comments
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Trevor Owens
June 1, 2011 at 9:52 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I think the “hacking” part of your title is the most important element here.
imho the is how to leverage the networks we are creating to make cool things happen in our own local contexts. That means saying look the Chronicle of higher edu says this is good, when you are really talking about someone from @profhacker or similarly leveraging someone you know at an institution with a fancy name to get the thing you want to do done, or into the process of being done.
I think part of this is being able to talk about things we love, things that are public services, things that we want to do to change the world as *cringe* business cases.
We can talk about what a cultural institution would look like without departments. Or, we could well talk about what it would mean if we all just started acting like our cultural institutions had no departments.
Amanda French
June 1, 2011 at 11:15 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
At the risk of being contrarian, is this really necessary? Don’t lots of big cultural heritage instiutions already recognize the need to have a social media presence? Granted, I don’t think that the small ones do, necessarily, and at both ends I don’t know that they’re radically transparent enough. I still tell people to go read the freaking Cluetrain manifesto already: it applies to social media.
And I don’t think departments will ever go away. It might be, as Trevor says, more about acting as if there are no departments.
cybernetickinkwell.com
June 2, 2011 at 10:26 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Amanda, I’d say that big cultural heritage institutions DO already recognize the need to have a social media presence–that fight, if you will, is won. But where they fall down is in building systems to sustain a quality social media presence. Some colleagues from the Getty and the Smithsonian and I presented on just this topic at Museums & the Web this year. The question for me is: how do you get participation from across the institution so that social media is as robust as possible?
It’s not enough for the marketing team to do all the Facebook and Twitter updates. In my opinion and experience, museumgoers want to engage with content and content producers, but it can be hard to get those content producers to participate in online communities and related efforts. I think we’ll see a shift as younger curators, museum educators, etc., come up–but until then, what can the institution itself (or a group of committed people within it) do to make robust social media a reality?
I’m all for talking more about strategery in that regard.
Tad Suiter
June 2, 2011 at 1:22 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
This is something I went into greater depth on in an earlier draft of this piece, but yes– most large museums and institutions know they need to “have a social media presence.” Does that mean that they do so effectively? I would argue that they often don’t.
As I mentioned in the blog post I linked to in the above post, I went to an SI round table on interdepartmental cooperation and new media. When a straw poll was taken of the room– and keep in mind that these are the people interested enough in interdepartmental cooperation and new media projects to attend a session on it– almost none said that they allowed their curators– their primary content creators– access to the CMS’s for online exhibits.
Is it any wonder that curators, more than most other groups, seem to fear crowdsourcing and folksonomy and other techniques that harness the wisdom of their user/visitors?
People know they need to have a social media and online presence. They know they want to have mobile apps. But many of the people whose hands are really at the rudders in cultural institutions– the senior administrators and the like, often only understand that they need to do so because it’s “the new thing.” Or because it represents new potential revenue streams.
I’m not trying to issue a manifesto against departments. But I do wonder, seeing as departmental siloing is a problem that many people have discussed with me at many institutions, if we might not want to gauge whether or not this commitment to new media is lip service or real… and see if we might use that as an opportunity to hack the org chart a bit.
What if junior staff were required to be interdepartmental, sharing time between, say, education and web content development? Or curation and collections management?
That’s a more radical thought, but yes– we need to find ways to keep departmental siloing from getting in the way of our institutions’ missions, and their ability to communicate with the outside world.