Museum Informatics

People, Information, and Technology in Museums

Paul F. Marty, Katherine Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780824725815
• eBook ISBN: 9781135572051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Museum Informatics explores the sociotechnical issues that arise when people, information, and technology interact in museums. It is designed specifically to address the many challenges faced by museums, museum professionals, and museum visitors in the information society. It examines not only applications of new technologies in museums, but how advances in information science and technology have changed the very nature of museums, both what it is to work in one, and what it is to visit one.

To explore these issues, Museum Informatics offers a selection of contributed chapters, written by leading museum researchers and practitioners, each covering significant themes or concepts fundamental to the study of museum informatics and providing practical examples and detailed case studies useful for museum researchers and professionals. In this way, Museum Informatics offers a fresh perspective on the sociotechnical interactions that occur between people, information, and technology in museums, presented in a format accessible to multiple audiences, including researchers, students, museum professionals, and museum visitors.

Section 1

Introductions

1 An Introduction to Museum Informatics

Paul F. Marty

Florida State University

Museum informatics is the study of the sociotechnical interactions that take place at the intersection of people, information, and technology in museums. Researchers and professionals interested in museum informatics have spent years exploring the impact of information science and technology on the people who use museum information resources (Marty, Rayward, & Twidale, 2003). As these users become more information-savvy, and their information needs and behaviors become more complex, both museum professionals and museum visitors have had to adapt to the new role of museums in the information society.

As an example of the sociotechnical interactions that comprise the study of museum informatics, consider the following episode which took place as a university museum of world cultures moved its collections from old to new facilities (Marty, 2000b; cf. Marty, 2002). From 1998 to 2002, staff members at the University of Illinois’ Spurlock Museum inventoried, packed, and moved 45,000 artifacts, while simultaneously working with architects and exhibit designers to develop and install all new exhibits and storage facilities. During this process, they stumbled across a wide variety of information management problems, most of which had lain hidden for decades in the museum’s records, ledgers, and files.

One problem had been created in 1971, when two similar-looking, yet not identical, African figures were accessioned into the museum’s collections, and mistakenly assigned the same accession number. For nearly thirty years these figures remained in storage, and were only removed when needed by a student, scholar, or other individual. According to the museum’s records, only one figure existed, and whenever this “figure” was removed from storage, it was a gamble as to which figure would actually be found and removed. As the museum’s records migrated from ledger files, to card files, to electronic databases over the years, the inconsistency of two artifacts sharing one record was neither detected nor corrected.

During this time, however, the various paper and electronic records for this “figure” began to accumulate certain oddities: official descriptions included minor yet striking contradictions; official photographs did not quite match corresponding textual descriptions; and so on. While occasionally remarked upon by visiting researchers, this problem remained unsolved until the year 2000, when “the figure” was packed into two separate boxes in preparation for the move. When the “second” figure was packed and its location entered into the museum’s information systems, an error immediately registered, informing the registrar that this artifact was “already packed” in a different box. Opening both boxes, the registrar discovered that this “single artifact” was actually two slightly different objects, and that corrections had to be made in the museum’s ledgers, files, and database systems.

For nearly thirty years, the museum’s social systems (those that facilitated interactions between museum staff, students, and scholars) conspired with the museum’s technical systems (those paper and electronic records and databases that monitored objects, information, and their use) to keep this problem (and many similar ones) hidden. By the end of the 20th century, however, these same sociotechnical interactions were taking place within a new information environment specially attuned to the unique needs of the museum, where such difficulties were less likely to remain hidden, and more likely to become a visible part of the museum’s information infrastructure (Marty, 1999). This transition, along with the advances in information science and technology that made it possible, lies at the heart of museum informatics.

As this story illustrates, museums are in the midst of an information revolution, and museum professionals must work with a variety of different information resources, from the museum’s collections themselves, to information about those objects, to information about the contexts in which those objects are displayed, studied, or interpreted (Knell, 2003). The past few decades have seen an important shift from the idea of museums as repositories of objects to museums as repositories of knowledge (Cannon-Brookes, 1992; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; cf. White, 2004). The museum has truly become an information utility, where the need to provide access to information about objects, in addition to the objects themselves, is well known (Fahy, 1995; MacDonald, 1991; Washburn, 1984).

Museum professionals, naturally, have a lengthy history of working with information resources, tools, and technologies, and information management skills have always been important for museum professionals (Lord & Lord, 1997; Orna & Pettitt, 1998; Zorich, 1999). The traditional careers of museum librarian or registrar provide exemplars of museum positions that require extensive experience with information resources, and the information management skills these individuals bring to the museum are well-documented (American Association of Museums, 1994; Burkaw, 1997; Case, 1995; Danilov, 1994; Glaser & Zenetou, 1996; Koot, 2001; Reed & Sledge, 1998; Schwarzer, 2001a). Yet the challenges of museum informatics are not the same as those posed by museum librarianship or museum registration. While there is considerable overlap between these disciplines, museum informatics represents a unique field of study with its own, substantially different, required educational background and career path (Marty, 2005).

Museum informatics is an extremely interdisciplinary field of study. To meet the challenges of the museum’s changing role in the information society, researchers studying museum informatics have drawn upon theories and techniques from dozens of related fields, including digital libraries, human–computer interaction, social network analysis, cognitive science, museum studies, library and information science, etc. While much early work in this area was primarily focused on questions of how information technologies should be used in museums, a number of researchers and professionals are now emphasizing the need for an underlying body of theory and methods for studying museum informatics as well as related areas such as museums and new media or digital cultural heritage (Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007; Parry, 2005).

To explore new theoretical perspectives and to develop new methodologies, researchers and professionals from around the world have joined together to form an evolving community of practice. This community is dedicated to providing guidance to museums and other cultural heritage institutions as they ask and answer important questions about museum informatics and its significance for museums. While the history of this community dates at least back to the 1960s (Ellin, 1969; Vance, 1975), the number of individuals involved with museum informatics has increased dramatically in the past decade. A widespread interest in museum informatics can now be found in a variety of arenas, and thousands of people worldwide now participate in discussions, projects, and research initiatives related to museum informatics.

Each year, an ever-increasing number of museum professionals and researchers join professional organizations and attend conferences dedicated to exploring museum informatics, including the meetings of such organizations as the Museum Computer Network, the Museum Documentation Association, the International Council of Museum’s International Committee for Documentation, the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting, Museums and the Web, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ WebWise Conference. In addition, past organizations such as the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) maintain archival websites of important documents for individuals interested in museum informatics issues.

A growing number of academic and professional journals publish papers about museum informatics, including past journals such as Archives and Museum Informatics, and current journals such as Spectra, a publication of the Museum Computer Network. The Journal of the American Society for Information Science published a special issue on museum informatics and the Web in 2000; Curator published a special issue on technology and museums in 2002; and the Journal of Digital Libraries published a special issue on digital museums in 2004. In addition, there are a number of books covering related topics, including Thomas and Mintz (1998), The Virtual and Real: Media in the Museum, Keene (1998), Digital Collections: Museums in the Information Age, Orna and Pettitt (1998), Information Management in Museums, Jones-Garmil (1997), The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, and Cameron and Kenderdine (2007), Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage.

The researchers and professionals who attend these conferences, belong to these organizations, and publish in these journals and books, are interested in a wide variety of topics, such as integrated information management systems (Blackaby, 1997), virtual museums (Schweibenz, 1998), open source data standards (Perkins, 2001), and copyright and intellectual property (Zorich, 2000). They have explored methods of documenting and describing museum artifacts and have developed data standards that allow museum professionals to share information about museum collections between different institutions (Bearman, 1994; Gladney et al., 1998; Moen, 1998). They have studied the use of interactive, multimedia exhibits in museum galleries, the potential of online, virtual museums to expand the educational reach of the museum, and the impact of educational outreach programs designed to bring museum information resources into the classroom over the Internet (Economou, 1998; Frost, 2001; Rayward & Twidale, 2000; Teather & Wilhelm, 1999). They have studied the information needs of museum visitors and explored different methods for determining whether museum websites meet the needs of their users (Chadwick & Boverie, 1999; Cunliffe, Kritou, and Tudhope, 2001; Dyson & Moran, 2000; Kravchyna & Hastings, 2002; Thomas & Carey, 2005).

While a complete summary of museum informatics research topics is beyond the scope of this essay, even a short list of some recent projects can indicate the range of research conducted in this area and the breadth of individuals conducting this research. University researchers have studied how the ability to help museum visitors conceptualize information resources transformed the way museum professionals build relationships with their users (Cameron, 2003), and explored different methods of targeting individual user needs through personalization and pervasive computing technologies inside and outside the museum (Bowen and Filipinni-Fantoni, 2004). Museum professionals have looked at how different metadata schemas help or hinder users seeking collections data from museums (Coburn & Baca, 2004), and examined the changing expectations for online museums engaged in outreach to many different audiences (Hamma, 2004a). Researchers from IBM have studied digital imaging at the Vatican Museums (Mintzer et al., 1996), invisible watermarking at the Hermitage Museum (Mintzer et al., 2001), and pervasive computing in Egyptian national museums (Tolva, 2005). Researchers from Xerox PARC have developed new electronic guidebooks and shared listening devices for museum visitors, examining the impact of such technologies on the museum visit (Aoki & Woodruff, 2000; Woodruff et al., 2002).

Recently, there has been a growing trend to focus more on how new technologies affect the social relationships that occur inside and outside of the museum. In particular, there has been an increased focus on the information needs, seeking, and behavior of the typical users of museum information resources, both in the museum (Booth, 1998; Evans & Sterry, 1999; Galani & Chalmers, 2002; Schwarzer, 2001b) and online (Goldman & Schaller, 2004; Ockuly, 2003; Sarraf, 1999). By understanding the information needs of museum visitors, museum professionals can better serve their clientele from a variety of perspectives (Müller, 2002; Zorich, 1997). By evaluating the steps they are taking to meet these needs, museum professionals can help ensure a positive relationship between museums and museum visitors (Gillard & Cranny-Francis, 2002; Harms & Schweibenz, 2001; Hertzum, 1998; Streten, 2000).

These and other excellent research initiatives have not only dramatically increased our knowledge of museum informatics, but have also highlighted the need for an increased focus on museum informatics research in general. This need comes at a time when museums are in a state of constant upheaval with respect to their use of information technologies and the development of their sociotechnical activities. Traditional methods of information organization and access in the museum have given way to newer, more modern systems for information storage and retrieval (Doty, 1990). Accession cards and ledger files, once the primary media for storing information about museum artifacts, have been replaced by electronic databases and online public access catalogs, offering museum professionals the potential to gather more detailed information about their collections, and museum visitors greater access to the information they desire (Buck & Gilmore, 1998). Information about the objects, topics, and cultures found in the museum is now as important as the museum’s collections themselves (Pearce, 1986).

These changes have not only influenced the way people think about museums; they have had a profound impact on the sociotechnical interactions that take place in museums. Museum professionals, including registrars, curators, and conservators, go to work armed with new tools for managing their unique information resources. Museum visitors, whether they are visiting the museum in person or over the Internet, have new methods of learning more about the museum and its collections. Museum users of all types, from scholars to students, have new ways of accessing and manipulating the museum’s information resources. As a result, museum researchers and professionals have developed new conceptions of why museums exist and new expectations of what museums should offer. Today, it is virtually impossible to discuss museum technologies without touching in some way on how these technologies will affect all users of museum information resources, in-house and online.

When viewed from this perspective, it can be argued that the purpose of studying museum informatics is to examine the issues museum professionals and visitors face as they take advantage of advances in information science and technology while realizing that these issues exist within complex and interlocking organizational and social contexts affecting the nature of museums in general and the expectations of museum professionals and visitors in particular. The relationship between museums, museum professionals, and museum visitors is constantly evolving in response to the changing demands and problems of information organization, access, management, and use in museums. If museums are to remain relevant in the information society, museum professionals and researchers will need to embrace the growing role of museum informatics ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Charts
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Section 1: Introductions
• Section 2: Information Resources in Museums
• Section 3: Information Management in Museums
• Section 4: Information Interactions in Museums
• Section 5: Information Behavior in Museums
• Section 6: Information Collaborations in Museums
• Section 7: Conclusions
• References
• Contributors
• Index