The "museum building" has the look of an old Hitchcock house, or the house of the Addams family. Apart from the settings, the functions and usefulness of this app makes it worth a try.

Using apps to connect kids with museums is something I believe we will see much more of in the years to come. Either as a way to teach and discover topics related to school, or just as a way to build relationships – with parents who appreciate great apps for their children, or with kids who start discovering the museum.

One app I tried recently is NOT a museum app, despite its name: Buildo Museum, by the Swedish app company Jajdo. But it has features which are interesting from a museum perspective.

Jajdo has created a series of apps, very playful ones for the youngest. It’s like a sticker book, where you can grab different items (people, buildings, vehicles, tools etc.) and move them into a setting. There are usually three different settings, all connected to the main theme of the app.

The child can easily create settings with a wide variety of stickers that can be moved around, rotated and changed in size.

In Buildo Museum there is a museum building with three different floors available, the attic, the exhibition hall and the basement. The creators of the app have added a spooky feeling and there are ofcourse skeletons, spiders, cobwebs, ghosts, bats and the odd thief hanging around the museum. The ”stickers” can be easily moved around, the size can be altered and they can be rotated. They make noise when moved around and some have moving parts (eyes that move in a painted portrait etc.).

There are a few ”museum items” like paintings and statues as well, but apart from that, it’s very lightly connected to the museum world. From a museum perspective it’s more of a remix/fantasy world than a real museum experience. But again, it’s not a museum app in the sense of being produced by a museum.

The strong features of this app is that it’s well produced, great graphic design and illustrations, quality sound and it’s fun for kids. It’s easy to be creative, make unique settings and create stories. The stories can be saved for the next time or just reset to start over.

There are clear instructions in the "Mum and dad zone" in the app.

Shortly, it’s an app that appears to be very simple but actually delivers everything it sets out to deliver. And the concept of the app, as I mentioned earlier, is being used in a series of apps by Jajdo which gives a sense of recognition. The user knows what to expect.

For a museum it’s interesting to see how museum objects can be turned into something playful for kids, and at the same time be a part of a lerning experience. For example recognize well known works of art, interact with a museum environment in a playful way.

I think it would be interesting to see this concept taken a few steps further, displaying an actual existing museum, connecting the content with the real museum experience and adding a few learning experiences relating to the real museum objects.

So far creating apps is quite expensive, hopefully in the years to come we’ll see more of museum apps that can be useful to children in different ways and extending the museum to a mobile experience. Buildo Museum is a great example of how this could be done.

Get the app: http://itunes.apple.com/app/buildo-museum-sticker-book/id488521193?ls=1&mt=8

It’s available for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. It’s free until February 6.

”As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.”

A great initiative, very simple user interface, and definately something worthwhile cheking out for museums, I believe. And check out theis QR-code, it’s an article about Sweden in Swedish. Do you get it in your language?

Read full story >>

A series of unfortunate events. Photo by: Michael Wolf.

In March I gave a presentation at the Photo festival Fotografi i fokus at Malmö Museer, giving my view on photography, curation and the role of the museum.

A growing movement within photography today is, unsurprisingly, remixing. Professional photographers use images online to create new works of art. How does this affect our roles as museum curators and archivists? When the professional photographers challenge the way we look at photography does it matter to us?

Earlier this year two photographers caught my attention for remixing other’s photographs:

Honorable mention at World Press Photo Awards

For the first time a photographer, Michal Wolf, recieved an honorable mention in the World Press Photo Awards for taking pictures of someone else’s photos. ”Someone else” in this case is Google Street view.The honorable mention caused vivid discussions: Is this photojournalism?

This is a great example of the photographer’s new role, he moves beyond being just a creator, but rather a co-creator and a curator.

http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/intro/index.html

http://www.dvafoto.com/2011/02/some-thoughts-on-google-street-view-and-world-press-photo/

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2025845/world-press-photo-google-street-view-photojournalism

Photo opportunities

Swiss photographer Corinne Vionnet creates new works of art by collecting and remixing the most typical tourist images online.

The photographer searches the internet for tourist images. Apparently people constantly take pictures of famous monuments and buildings from the same angle (very interesting in itself), the way they’ve seen it depicted. The tourist images are being added one to another into new unique images.

Her work was recently shown at Arles Photo Festival.

http://www.corinnevionnet.com/site/entry.php?o=1

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8607995/Looks-familiar-Corinne-Vionnet-at-Arles-photography-festival.html

This next example is not of professional photographers remixing but of the audience’s remixing taken one step further:

The stolen scream

A self portrait by photographer Noam Galai uploaded to Flickr in 2006 has grown into an icon photograph, similar to the one of Che Guevara.

”About two years after publishing photos of myself screaming on Flickr, I discovered that my face was ‘for sale’ in several stores around the world, as well as on the Web and spotted it in places like Spain, Iran, Mexico, England and many other places.”

In this case there are the audiences online that remix and reuse the work of art of a professional photographer. This is in itself nothing new, but the fact that the photo has become an icon, used in the same way as the Che Guevara portrait is very interesting.

http://screameverywhere.com/

http://screameverywhere.com/wordpress/

http://vimeo.com/20718237

And more…

An article in French: http://www.telerama.fr/scenes/oui-on-peut-etre-photographe-avec-les-photos-des-autres,70936.php

So, what’s this got to do with me?

As a museum employee, and having worked with photographic collections in different ways the last 15 years, I am very interested in how this change in photography’s role will affect the way we collect and disseminate photography. When the photographers themselves ask new questions about photography, why shouldn’t we?

What about copyright? Is my photo of the Eifel Tower in Paris now a part of Corinne Vionnet’s work of art? And what about Google Street View, who is the photographer, really?

What about uniqueness: When the artist is a co-creator rather than the unique originator, do we need to document the creation of the photograph in a different way when collecting?

Will our willingness to provide our photographic collections online, open and free, increase (be more accepted) when remixing is no longer something young (read: cheeky)  internet savvy kids do, but is accepted and practiced among professionals (photographers and others)?

I am all excited about the changes in photography brought on by digitization, internet and social media, and I do hope we’ll see more discussions about the role of photography within museums in the years to come.

Reading tips:

Look for publications from professor Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK) and professor Joan M. Schwartz (Queens University, Kingston, CA) among others for excellent texts on photography, curation and collecting.

Why Google+ attracts early adopters

I am one of the early adopters that have entered into Google+ to find out more about this new service, along with 10 000 000 others apparently. It’s grown tremendously fast from launch, but even though the users are the size of a nation (like Sweden) we still have left most people on Facebook behind. The people trying out Google+ are mostly people who are into using Twitter and interested in social media and innovation. And that last reason is why I enjoy discovering Google+. It’s brand new, it’s got potential to grow and it seems a lot more useful than Google Wave that was launched a couple of years ago.

So, what about Google+ ?

Describing Google+ is not that easy because we haven’t really discovered the full use of the service (mainly because it’s still in Beta-version). Some have described it as a competitor to Facebook. Indeed it looks a lot like Facebook with a status wall, with “friends” and the possibility of sharing photos, links, videos etc.

Some have described it as a mix of Facebook and Twitter, the microblog service. Google+ is more open than Facebook, and will I believe be regarded as a more transparent option where people you don’t know will be able to take part of your updates.

So the core use of Google+ today is the possibility to connect with people sharing the same interests, people you find interesting, get a flow of news updates and take part in conversations.

However, what seems to confuse users is the possibility of categorizing people into circles (groups of people that make up a network). The point of circles is to filter your communication and be able to talk to one group of people at a time. And how do you define these groups? On Twitter all followers, and people you follow, are in the same group or category. No difference. On Google+ you suddenly have the opportunity to classify people (and the purpose is not to tag people savvy or less savvy, interesting or less interesting, tall or short, etc. though that could be interesting!).

The people you add to your Google+ won’t see which circle you put them in. You can also get all updates from all circles in one flow of updates on your start page, and you are able as an option, to filter the start page and only get updates from one circle at a time.

How do I use circles?

As of today I place all people in one circle. What’s the point of circles then you may ask. First of all I want to have this wonderful mix of people that Twitter allows, the diversity that is so enriching.

Secondly, I see circles as a way of communicating with people around certain topics or interests. It’s the possibility of niched networks. I am well aware of that niched networks need fuel to thrive, and that could be a project or an event for example, and I see great possibilities to work on projects in Google+ together with the use of Google Docs, Calendar etc (what about schools? In classrooms? Educational purposes?).

I intend to evaluate the use of Google+ (instead of for eample Basecamp or Huddle) a couple of months down the road, when trying it out for a project. Already a great advantage is that since I am a daily user of Google (Gmail, Analytics etc.) it’s excellent to be able to collaborate through Google+: I don’t have to log into yet another service, I have Google docs, calendar, Gmail etc. within reach, and it’s free!

I just spotted a question on Google+ by Jim Richardson: Will Google+ keep you logging in? Well I intend to share and take part in conversations, and as long as others do, it will be a place where ideas will thrive and knowledge will be shared. This will keep me logged in. And if that open discussion doesn’t take off in Google+, I will most likely use it as all other Google apps and services (which is quite a lot).

* At this point Google+ requires an invite but will, it seems, soon be open everyone.

Find me on Google+

The seminar was covering issues and possibilities when collecting, preserving and disseminating photography that is digitally born or digitised, along with the challenges for cultural heritage institutions in the digital era.

Paula Bray gave two presentations, the ”Photography Collections in the Digital Environment, and ”Getting Social With Photographic Collections.”

Most cultural heritage institutions have photographic collections. Paula Bray showed how these can be instrumental when facing the necessary changes institutions are presently confronted to. Photographic collections can be used in building relationships with audiences, in moving the museum forward in social media, in getting social and allowing the audiences to contribute to and improve collection metadata. The online audiences most often express great interest in the photographic collections. Connections are made and conversations are started through them.

Paula Bray also reminded us that photographic collections management and dissemination requires strategies, that often can be challenging in the digital environment.

Interaction through and with photography collections does impact activities in cultural heritage institutions, on a general level. Lessons learned from using photography collections, are paving the way for new decisions and choices and most of all, photographs are precious tools for engagement and participation.

People from the Powerhouse Museum are already a great inspiration to museums all over the world, as they are constantly moving ahead in understanding and implementing digital, social and emerging technologies. Photography has come to play a an important role in the museum’s quest to be relevant to its audiences.

My experience is that photographic collections over the years have struggled to make their voices heard in museums, libraries and archives. But through Paula Bray’s testimony and my own observations, i now sense we are at the start of a new era for photography. We need to take this unique opportunity to position photographic collections as central in shaping the meaningful interactions with audiences, activities that help cultural heritage institutions being relevant and to fulfil their purpose.

Paula Bray’s presentations on Slideshare

• Photography Collections in the Digital Environment
• Getting Social With Photography Collections

Opening Plenary at MW2011, by Kristen Purcell, Pew Research Center

While attending the conference Museums and the Web, in Philadelphia, I try to take some time to reflect on the presentations.

My impressions are so far that I enjoy the conference just as much as previous years, and that it has taken us participants again one step further in the development of museums and the web.

I truly appriciated the Opening Plenary by Kristen Purcell, from the Pew Research Center in Washington DC. The title was Grounding Internet Information Trends, and was based on research in the project Pew Internet.

Kristen Purcell presented a few groundbreaking changes in the evolution of internet:

• access to broadband
• development of mobile devices
• wireless internet
• the evolution of social networking

Kristen Purcell also sees a growing use of geo-location services even if there are still only 17% of all adult internet users in the US who claim they use such services.

Another big step is the evolution of apps for mobile devices, according to the Pew Reaserach Center study. They are especially useful when they bypass search, answer questions, solve problems and help accomplish tasks. However, as Kristen Purcell pointed out, it’s difficult to ask these questions in the research study, since many people don’t even know if they own a smart phone or if it has apps installed.

Not knowing what an app is, or not having access to internet, is a sign of The digital divide, a topic that was constantly recurring in the Opening Plenary. At the same time information today is – as Kristen Purcell put it – portable, participatory and personalized. Both of these aspects of the internet and the way people recieve information, affect the way museums need to adress their audiences.

Kristen Purcell finished the Opening Plenary by giving some very good (and to some extent challenging) advice on how to keep up with the evolving internet and the changing demands of the audiences:

1. Be a filter, a trusted expert (very much needed in the age of abundant information)
2. Be a curator, a one-stop-shop and an aggregator
3. Be a node in a network (your audience have audiences)
4. Be a community builder, create new networks, share and respond
5. Be a lifesaver, provide timely information
6. Provide tour guides, use geo-location services to connect your content with real world locations

Perhaps the most challenging, as I see it, would be the one-stop-shop approach. I believe this will set museums off in a new direction. The audience expectations are already constantly changing, but this will demand for more creative and innovative strategies by museums. Being a one-stop-shop is also connected to being a lifesaver, that is – as I see it – being relevant to the audience to a much greater extent than we are today.

The advice for museums presented by Kristen Purcell is one of the things I will bring back home from MW2011. I am also looking forward to see how other will respond to the challenges in the year to come.

In Sweden there is a whole campaign, Digidel 2013, run by the Swedish adult education in its broadest sense, that is, libraries, learning centers, adult education, adult education colleges. The campaign was launched December 3, 2010 with ”The appeal of digital inclusion”. The campaign aims to decrease the digital gap by half a million persons by 2013. The goal is for these people ”to start using the internet”.

So what is digital inclusion. The fact is that 1.5 million Swedes are excluded from the internet, mainly because they don’t have access to the internet in their homes. The term for these people is ”non-users” according to www.digidel.se.

Starting to think of the correct term for the people who actually have access to internet in their homes, but chose to not take part of the communities and conversations going on, I dropped a question on Twitter: What do you call the opposite of ”early adopters”? The English term is apparantly ”laggards”.

Laggards is a term quite impossible to translate to Swedish. It’s in any case rather negative. I find it excluding in itself (in it’s Swedish translation) even though it might be a common term in English.

In general I got quite excluding answers. I sense quite some frustration among my early adopter-Twitterfriends about these ”laggards”.

Communications consultant Brit Stakston at JMW Communications has with great persistance recently emphasized  the need to take into account the people with ”analogue values”, who are unaccustomed to life online and how to use the internet. And this is what I am after. Maybe I won’t find a final term to use, but this is close enough.

And why does it matter? Well, trying to mediate cultural heritage online it’s ofcourse vital to know who is online and who is not, and to learn what ”being online” actually means. This is surely an interesting topic in itself.

Conclusion

The consumers of cultural heritage could perhaps, very roughly, be described as follows:

1. Non-users (15 % in Sweden)
2. People with internet access, analogue values, unaccustomed to live on the internet
3. Early adopters (how many?)

I am still exploring the terms and the ”classification” and will surely return with new insights further on this year.

Read more

• Wikipedia on E-inclusion
• News on Digital Inclusion from Swedish Institute of Assistive Technology – SIAT

Last night the Swedish version of the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 was broadcasted live on TV. It was the first out of four saturdays when the Swedish people will pick a Swedish representative for the big European event in Düsseldorf in May.

The ESC is a huge event that has been going on for decades, and it’s become more and more popular the last ten years. And now with the effect of social media, the hype just seems to explode. For a couple of years, there’s been a growing community of Swedish Twitterers/Tweeps that you could call early adopters and especially interested in social media and communication. Last year the Swedish version of the ESC was followed by a lot of these people and an extensive conversation, small talk I would say, was taking part on Twitter.

This year the small talk within a fairly limited community has grown into something much larger. The hashtag #mel2011 even raised into the top trending list world wide for a couple of hours. A Twingly liveboard channel was set up to display the Twitter stats for the hashtag, and the tweets just kept coming faster and faster, it wasn’t even possible to follow the flow.

In the end, after about two hours or so, the spam tweets started to show up. This is the risk of all trending topics, as we experienced with the #askacurator initiative in September 2010. How this will effect the next competitions within #mel2011, we’ll find out in the next couple of weeks.

In any case, the nicely designed Twingly Liveboard gave interesting statistics, and the speed of the twitterfall was astonishing. This makes me wonder how many people are actually using Twitter in Sweden? And how will communication through social media, and services like Twitter, evolve in the next couple of years?

The best use of Twitter last night goes to (my own awards): @wikimediase who happily threw themselves into the Twitter conversation giving links and personalized comments to each of the competing artists. Well done!

Invited were a couple of guests with various backgrounds: A writer, a poet, a politician, a journalist, a political scientist, a web entrepreneur and myself from the cultural heritage sector.

All, except me, are frequent participants in public debates and arenas. The panel thus attracted an audience that was exceptionally large and trendy for a Wikipedia event. This event was also coorganized with a PR and communication agency Skugge & Co which was a great success for Wikipedia Sweden, who has had some difficulties reaching out to a larger crowd with their events.

At least half an hour late we started the panel discussion led by Axel Pettersson, press contact at Wikipedia Sweden. He had prepared a few questions to get the discussion going and then the panel contributed with a few questions, anecdotes and opinions.

The Wikipedia representatives were few, and worked hard all evening keeping the event going. They did an excellent job, but there was some critique from the audience. First of all it was percieved to some extent as not a very coherent discussion. From my point of view we covered a broad aspect of Wikipedia, but needed perhaps to stop and put focus on certain issues. Also there were no questions from the audience, mainly because they weren’t really invited into the discussion.

This strikes me as one of the weaker points of Wikipedia, there is a large crowd of just ”users” of Wikipedia. It’s just there when you perform a search on Google. There is a need to market (I am not sure if it’s the right word to use) Wikipedia as a crowdsourced organization and service, where you’re never just a user, but a contributer in one way or the other.

Then we have the interesting meeting between Wikipedia and the trendy and very demanding audience, who attend the top social media and communication events and expect nothing but perfection (technichque, content etc.). They want to be entertained by the best. To succeed and prosper, Wikipedia Sweden will need to not only get the attention of this crowd but also an active commitment (this is a lesson I bring back to the cultural heritage sector as well). Also, I believe larger Wikipedia events would benefit from a more focused programme adressing current issues of interest for segmented audiences.

I truly enjoyed last night and I believe Wikipedia Sweden all in all did a great job. Important questions were brought up, and a few things were brought to my attention:

• The young politicians are very interested in solving copyright issues, but they are also concerned and a bit frustrated that these issues aren’t taken seriously by the government, i.e. they feel there’s a lack of understanding of the real problems and how important this new culture online is to the younger generation
• A recurring issue is the poor user interface of Wikipedia (both for users and for contributers), this seems however be taken seriously by the Wikipedia foundation who are now giving scholarships and employing Wikipedians around the world to find solutions
• For the cultural heritage sector it’s important to look outside the sector for input around collaboration with Wikipedia (in the sense of contributing to digital inclusion, making a difference in society and finding new ways of mediating cultural heritage online)

Today, Wikipedia Sweden are having a meeting at Nordiska museet. They are also making time for a meeting around the collaboration between Nordiska museet and Wikipedia Sweden, which I am particularly looking foward to. Yesterday’s panel discussion was a great occasion for reflection and networking and this weekend the celebrations of Wikipedia 10 years continue.