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.

What is Digital Content? How do we create policy and strategy for digital without common definitions and a shared framework for managing digital content? How do we prioritize and resource digital content to support our institution’s mission and strategic goals?

To help answer those questions, cross-departmental teams at the Smithsonian set out to research and inventory digital content types, connected systems, and workflows. The project differentiates between digital content and digital assets, emphasizing that not all digital content holds long-term institutional value. Digital assets are specifically identified for their ongoing usefulness and significance to the SI. The project involved extensive stakeholder engagement, including interviews and surveys with 102 staff members across 32 units, covering diverse roles such as collections, conservation, research, content production, and data analysis.

The gap analysis section addresses the challenges in harmonizing collections data, managing born-digital collections, and ensuring effective digital stewardship. Recommendations include developing systems for aggregate collections data, providing sustained funding for essential digital systems, and creating tools and training for content transfer and management.

This session will highlight how we went about researching and communicating findings, as well as prompt attendees to consider the types of content they engage with in their day-to-day work, ensuring that valuable digital assets are effectively preserved, accessed, and utilized across one’s organization.

30min: presentation
Background on the project, process, and findings.
Links of resources, final report, and supplemental materials will be made available to attendees.
15min: group exercise and Q+A
We will invite users to contribute questions and add their own digital content types via QR code form to display real-time submissions.
We may also invite guests into our Systems Diagram Miro board.

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.

The concept of accessibility is simple in theory. You just need to ensure that people with disabilities can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as people without disabilities. It’s much more complicated in practice, as we’re learning at the Getty.

Automated accessibility reports and checklists can get your application to a minimum standard, but they don’t always capture the complex user interactions and the organizational structure of a website. For instance, using IIIF, our users can zoom in to admire the strokes of a brush on a canvas. But how can we make those dynamic HTML canvases accessible and navigable for users who may not be able to see our image viewer? Well-structured HTML provides our users the ability to navigate a site without the use of a mouse. But how do we develop well-structured HTML when we’re stitching it together from multiple sources? How do we resolve conflicting structures in our applications from external libraries and our shared component system? And how do we maintain structure over time when we’re constantly making changes to our codebases across teams?

By reflecting on our successes and challenges in meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provided by W3C this session will outline how cultural heritage organizations can better provide online services to people with disabilities.

Our session topics will include:

1. Maintaining document hierarchy and preventing accessibility regressions when composing pages with components and complex data structures
2. Defining best-practices for improving the accessibility of complex user interactions
3. Promoting awareness of web accessibility concerns across teams

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.

In 2017 Greg Albers and Kathryn Cody sent out a survey and held "An Ideal #musetech syllabus" a highly participatory session at MCN 2017 where participants built what they thought were the core needs for students studying #musetech. Seven years later, and the landscape of what is needed may have changed, certainly much has changed in the #musetech landscape since 2017. The team (Max Evjen, Suse Anderson) intends to replicate the participatory experience (survey sent to the #musetech community, and participatory MCN session) that led to to this output, so we can draw upon the current trends that the #musetech community sees that emerging professionals, as well as fellow staff, should know about digital in museums.

Technology teams are as diligent as they are curious. They manage tech stacks that reach across audiences and departments to service ticketing, websites, online stores and more. At the same time, they’re keen to learn from how other organizations manage these systems. Often these conversations unfold under the guise of vendor or platform assessments or in back channels as we all just want to know: “how’d they build that?”

“Show Off Your Stack” is a 45-minute session that will connect technology users, admins, and decision-makers around this central question. We’ll look closely at the tech stacks powering the MIT Museum, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and SFO Museum. We’ll discuss key issues related to building, configuring, and maintaining these systems including:

• Integrations: When and how do we connect APIs, message queues, data hubs, and other streams of information?
• Re-platforming: How do organizations evaluate the efficacy of existing platforms and what happens when we make the call to replace them?
• Value: What are the central/foundational systems in a stack? How do they inform an organization’s overall approach to digital strategy?
• Data Governance: How should we handle and govern data to ensure security, compliance, and integrity across the organization?
• Tools: How do we develop and adopt focused tools (as opposed to one-size-fits-all solutions that meet the specific needs of our organizations?

The session will end with a call to action for documentation. In 2020, David Nunez started the Museum Online Expression Research spreadsheet.

This is a wonderfully through and incredibly useful crowdsourced resource that consolidates information on tech stacks for organizations across the world. Our group will work through the summer and early fall to review and standardize the data and update fields. We’ll share those updates with attendees and invite them to contribute to the document.

Tech stack maintenance may not be the flashiest or the trendiest work, but it is essential. Our panelists and case studies we’ll talk candidly through the intricacies of this work. And together, we’ll create a resource to empower organizations to make informed decisions, foster innovation, and enhance the visitor experience.

Exploring AI and machine learning in art museums often feels like an exercise in separating hype, achievable near-term value, and potential long-term game-changers. In this presentation, the National Gallery of Art will share how that pursuit is playing out after 18 months of pilots with cross-functional teams in two priority use cases, with lessons learned to date and plans for the way ahead. First: after initial work to scan, run optical character recognition (OCR), and analyze exhibition response wall cards and visitor comments, the team found that an AI-powered chatbot built within the network helped quickly find insights among thousands of comments, unlocking new value from qualitative data. Second: as a part of ongoing transformation in exhibition planning and operations, machine learning helped mine a decade of data to predict attendance curves and gauge what drives audience engagement. The data science team will present data visualizations, predictive modeling techniques, and methods for natural language processing and chatbot development, while members of visitor experience and evaluation will share findings, time savings, and future plans from these two initiatives. Recognizing that the value of analytics projects is measured by the decisions and outcomes they inform, the session will address how the results are used and future plans for plugging into business processes, with relevance to any museum and an invitation to participate in ongoing analysis, benchmarking, and collaborative data culture across museums.

Imagine museum interactives that combine the durability and flexibility of digital with the satisfaction and tactile learning of physical objects. Today’s museums have learned to rely on the ease and content flexibility that digital platforms offer but interactive screens have become ubiquitous and an analog dial telephone is suddenly strange and intriguing. How could we ever go back to the traditional diorama? This session will explore “phygital”: what happens when we combine digital and physical interfaces for museum engagement. Phygital includes AI overlays but it also includes alt controllers where visitors can use physical objects to control digital environments. You’ll hear from designers and creators using digital/physical interfaces to wash digital boats, play the digital drums and redirect digital water. Join us as we explore the possibilities of combining digital and physical into engaging interactive experiences.

The Kansas City Museum aims to be the “Home of the Whole Story.” But what does that mean when you design interactive media experiences? Since 2022, KCM and G&A have been working together to meet this challenge.

KCM engaged G&A to design a suite of experiences specifically aimed at youth: one welcomes them to discover the lesser told stories of the former mansion throughout time; another shifts their perspective on Kansas City’s development to see it through the lens of those who inhabited it; a third takes students on first-person narrated journeys through generations of marginalized groups and neighborhoods to understand how Kansas City has been shaped both by structural forces and the communities who live there.

The process of developing these pieces has been beautifully humbling and non-linear. We have had extensive conversations with representatives of communities that have experienced historical harm and exclusion–and those conversations have upended our assumptions about our design goals. We have conducted onsite user testing with our target audience–which has compelled us to think about their needs in new ways. And we are doing deep research to inform the pixels that create the collective visuals to ensure they properly convey the perspectives we are trying to represent. We have asked ourselves questions like: How do you design a map when the very understanding of a map differs by group? How can a virtual tour make a Gilded-era mansion feel more welcoming? How do you create a composite character to stand in for a group’s diverse experiences while remaining authentic?

This session will focus on three areas:
Why the Kansas City Museum has made a commitment to using restorative practices and it embeds the methodology in its everyday operations, exhibits and programs
How G&A approaches restorative design through all of its capabilities - content, visual design, user experience and creative technology
The critical role of user testing

We will also invite the audience to provide feedback on our work.