MCN 2024

Artificial Intelligence has rapidly emerged as a transformative force in the museum community. As museum professionals, understanding the basics of AI and its implications to our industry is crucial. This presentation provides an overview of AI and delves into the various opportunities, challenges, and serious concerns that we must face together.

AI can offer the museum community tools from enhancing the visitor experience to improving how we do our business. AI-driven efforts can revolutionize how we do our work and foster innovation. However, AI in museums raises ethical concerns, especially regarding visitor data privacy and information biases. Equally important, over-reliance on AI might diminish the human touch, risking the loss of authentic, trusted connections museums aim to foster. There are real concerns about AI as it can distort, misrepresent, or oversimplify complex historical and cultural narratives. If not properly trained or contextualized, AI will perpetuate biases or misunderstandings. As museum professionals, it's our responsibility to approach AI with a balanced perspective, harnessing its potential while being mindful of its implications. Collaboration, continuous learning, and open dialogue will be key as we navigate this intersection of technology, innovation, and culture.

In this 15-minute presentation, Katy Long and Gabrielle Santas will offer a real-world case study of how a small "start-up" museum has been able to leverage new digital technologies to start building out meaningful experiential and immersive content via a free-to-download app (designed by Spellerberg and Associates) that allows visitors to access 5 audio-first walking tours across San Francisco and Los Angeles. They will discuss the challenges encountered in building the CalMigration app and the Migrant Footsteps tours, and consider how this type of digital-first museum offers new opportunities to connect with different less traditional museum audiences, as well as the potential for Augmented Reality to help create on-site exhibits. They will also talk briefly about their expansion into 360 video as a means to connect with remote users.

What if our museum workflows encouraged us to be caring, compassionate, intentional people? What would our emails, file folders, purchase orders, scopes-of-work, and contracts look like? Let’s start by looking at speculative examples created by the workshop hosts. These tangible objects that participants can hold and feel, read and look like they were transported from the future. Once we discuss what those design fictions imply about the future museum workplace, we’ll imagine our own present-day museums with digital workflows that operate in service of not only our institutional goals, but also our staff well-being along the way.

This session will invite participants to envision a near(ish)-future scenario in which museum workers have a sense of well-being at their jobs: they feel valued, cared for, and part of a collective, cooperative team of colleagues. We’ll walk participants through some exercises designed to stimulate creative thinking about how digital tools might be helping those museum workers maintain that well-being. Then we’ll return to the present and think about what we might do today to begin building those systems for tomorrow.

Our goal with this session is to encourage people to think optimistically and creatively about how digital platforms might be of benefit to make work a place of psychological safety and community. Working in nonprofits that are (at least nominally) focused on visitors’ experiences, many museum workers feel encouraged to put their own needs aside to ensure visitors are centered. We propose to help reorient participants at this session to approach their work centering their own well-being to pave a more sustainable path toward meaningful visitor experiences, as well.

A website redesign is never just a fresh coat of paint: a new digital home on the web provides opportunities for institutions to reintroduce themselves from the ground up. This session encompasses a series of lightning talks that explore website redesign projects across a range of American institutions and content areas. Including projects at all stages of development, the panel explores each institution’s goals for shifting their brand, expanding their audience, or solving existing problems for their users.

For Glenstone, a website redesign provides an opportunity to reintroduce the institution after the completion of a large-scale renovation. The collection will be digitized and a new content strategy will be employed to humanize the sometimes-intimidating vibes that contemporary art institutions can have.

The Smithsonian Transcription Center, undergoing the first website redesign in its decade+ history, is seeking to adjust to pandemic-initiated changes in the digital volunteering landscape, respond to the needs of a growing and diversifying volunteer community, and rebrand to reflect their status as a premier digital offering of the Smithsonian Institution.

After 10+ years of working with a custom CMS and a third party developer, the Bullock Museum is in the process of migrating and redesigning their website in an open source platform. Originally funded with very different content goals in mind, they are redesigning their website through the lens of a new mission, content strategy & sustainability plan, and a realistic look at what they can upkeep and scale long term.

When the web site for the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum launched in 2023, its goals were simple: capture emails and sell tickets. Since then, it has accumulated content: press coverage, a virtual museum, a special events calendar, and more. As the Museum approaches the start of its second year, the web site needs to offer a more seamless way for visitors to explore the Museum and a more developed “voice” that expresses its character.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History was prompted by a need to replatform an aging Drupal website, and undertook a two-year project to revisit aspects of the site which reflected 20 years of piecemeal web development. The museum re-evaluated the site’s architecture, design, and features and improved communication of the museum’s newly-articulated mission and values, along with strategic content and branding updates.

The Huntington is currently undergoing an iterative process to reskin and develop a series of priority new features and integrations to update its flagship website, huntington.org. This exciting project follows on the heels of The Huntington’s adoption of a new five-year strategic plan and updated mission statement, along with a comprehensive brand and brand strategy project, resulting in recommendations related to voice and tone, messaging guidelines, a style guide, graphic design, and overall look and feel.

Innovation fuels progress. This session explores the “magic sauce” behind successful museum tech projects. We’ll dissect some GLAM tech success stories, look at what drives innovation: user needs, emerging technologies, fails, and a sprinkle of creative disruption.

We’ll also see how a culture that embraces calculated risks, manages frustration, and celebrates the rewards of pushing boundaries helps innovation, exploring ideas for staying ahead of the curve by identifying the next cutting-edge advancements (surviving the current ones!) and fostering a psychologically safe environment where groundbreaking ideas can take off.

Every museum has a digital strategy, whether it is formalized or ad-hoc. The challenge is to make that strategy useful and meaningful. This session presents three case studies that showcase approaches to making digital strategy operational and useful as museums look for new digital initiatives and innovation. The Spencer Museum of Art focused on the creation of a digital plan that operationalizes well thought-out institutional goals, and incorporated museum- and campus-wide input, and sought guidance from digital leaders across the museum sector. The Arizona State University Art Museum started from a broad assessment of where they were, and what peer institutions had done, in order to plan how to proceed. The Yale University Art Gallery approached planning after completing a major digital project, reflecting on what the project’s twists and turns said about the organization as a whole, and exploring how they might better plan for digital initiatives in the future. At Yale, digital strategy is an ongoing activity, managed by a cross-departmental team. In each case, digital planning is operational. It is focused on doing: where to start, what to do next, and how to measure and learn from doing. As such, digital planning bridges the visionary strategy with the nuts-and-bolts and day-to-day.

This talk will give an overview of the creation of the Judy Chicago Research Portal, a cross-institutional collaboration to provide access to the archives of a prominent feminist artist on one website. Judy Chicago is a ground-breaking feminist artist who has been active as an artist and an arts educator since the 1960s. Her archives are held at four different institutions: two large university libraries and two museums in different parts of the country. These organizations formed a collaborative to create an online portal, hosted by one of the large university libraries, where selections from each of their distinct collections are accessible to researchers, scholars, curators, educators, and students through an easy-to-use interface. A fifth institution, a private foundation, which holds a complete collection of Chicago’s prints, also contributed records. The project represents a model for collaboration, iterative development, and improving access and discoverability for both feminist art archives and for collections at smaller institutions.

The partner organizations were united in ensuring that the unique history of feminist art and the artist’s significant contributions to this unique field were not lost in the archives. Through the portal’s inviting and welcoming interface, primary documents—artworks, photographs, manuscripts, and correspondence—from the artist’s 60-year career are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Rather than being sequestered in multiple archives, The artists’ papers and artworks are easily available to inspire and educate new generations of students, artists, curators, and researchers. This includes collaborative curricula from her Feminist Art Program. By providing free and widely available access to educational materials on feminist art, our poster supports The Global Campaign for Education’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (inclusive & equitable education) and Goal 5 (gender equity, empowering women and girls).

We have developed infrastructure to support a network, that includes implementing a Drupal portal, setting up static and dynamic data exchange, and designing search and discovery tools that can effectively navigate aggregated content. This work was challenging, and we are ready to discuss how we scaled the infrastructure to accommodate the growing volume of digital assets and the evolving needs of the user community.

In addition, the presentation will cover the various aspects of building a comprehensive network in collaboration with others. This includes negotiating shared objectives, coordinating digitization efforts, and establishing process flows to manage and expand the network over time. The Judy Chicago Research Portal will serve as a practical example of this process, highlighting the importance of clear communication, mutual respect for each partner's unique contributions, and a shared commitment to the project's overarching goals.