MCN 2024

This is a joint session by the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Perez Art Museum Miami, two medium-sized art museums that have broadly increased capacity to collect and utilize data over the past three years. Our session will showcase digital capabilities to translate strategic goals into measurable and actionable metrics supported by integrated data workflows. Both institutions will share data methodology that supports internal accountability and continuous improvement, bolsters board and grantor confidence, and strengthens support of diverse artistic practices and relationships with members.

In 2021, NCMA created a Museum Evaluation position which has led to drastic increases in internal buy-in of data practices. Data is now collected across departments to produce quarterly and annual reports, and nearly all departments are beginning to think about how data can be leveraged to shape their projects. NCMA’s Evaluator, Melissa Dean, will highlight the work of several staff members in the larger context of interdepartmental collaboration. NCMA staff Kevin Kane and Heiker Medina will highlight data contributions toward collecting goals, marketing performance, utilization of our CRM system (Tessitura), as well as in-gallery and remote educational technology platforms.

The Digital Engagement department at PAMM is a relatively new venture funded specifically to empower a digital initiative that benefits the museum and its community. PAMM’s digital engagement group originally comprised three members, a department head, web developer, and data analyst, Patrick Fox. Patrick will share his work of finding and aggregating all of the data sources in a system that brings unique departmental data to each group for KPI monitoring. PAMM will also showcase their efforts to understand and increase collection artist presence on Wikipedia and a custom membership application for seamless check-in to museum events.

Above all, we are excited to share how building data workflows by combining existing computational knowledge and tools are encouraging formal digital strategies to informally emerge. This is an exploratory showcase of our works-in-progress collaboratively experimenting while learning from each other’s challenges. We hope that sharing our journeys from previously nonexistent or siloed roles to realized responsibilities in data reporting will inspire new projects and roles at your institution as it has ours.

The New Mexico State Land Office leases and manages New Mexico state trust lands. Much of that land has been leased for extractive practices such as oil and gas drilling. During her tenure, Commissioner Stephanie Garcia-Richards works closely with Indigenous communities to return stolen land to displaced tribes. In 2022, just over 2,000 acres were returned to the Fort Sill Apache Tribe. The tribe had been separated from their ancestral land since the US Government captured their forebears and put them in military-run internment camps in Oklahoma. The exchange was completed last fall and the land is now under the management of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe.

Every fall semester, NMHU’s Media Arts Seminar class collaborates with a cultural or community-based organization to develop an exhibit. In the fall of 2023, Professor Lauren Addario’s students Destiny Zukevich, Emily Clark, and Marlene Bad Warrior, worked with Ethan Ortega, Assistant Commissioner of Cultural Resources, and archeologists Carlyn Stewart, Anne Curry, and Adesbah Foguth at the New Mexico State Land Office (NMSLO). The resulting exhibit highlights the recent accomplishments of the New Mexico State Land Office’s Land Back initiatives.

The exhibition includes a video with perspectives from Indigenous youth talking about what land back means to them, a screen-based mapping component that draws attention to how tribal lands in the southwest are impacted by climate change, two graphic panels, and bookmarks that feature endangered animals and insects in southern New Mexico.

New Mexico Highlands University’s Media Arts & Technology Department has partnered with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs since 2005. The program cultivates a homegrown pool of multimedia specialists working with cultural content and committed to serving their communities.

Museums are increasingly eager to leverage powerful software that promises to deliver valuable insights into growing audiences. However, implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in organizations with limited budgets, uneven tech literacy, and varying definitions of audiences are guaranteed to be challenging. While CRMs can enhance visitor engagement, streamline operations, and boost institutional support, their configuration and implementation is fraught with difficulties, potentially leading to costly upgrades and reinforcing siloed data practices.

This panel will offer a candid exploration of CRM deployments drawing on the diverse experiences of three organizations and insights from three key departments: Development, Marketing, and Technology. Through these multidisciplinary perspectives, attendees considering the adoption or migration of CRM systems like Tessitura or Salesforce will gain a holistic understanding of the best practices and common pitfalls associated with platform implementation in cultural institutions.

Development departments across the museums collectively emphasize the importance of a CRM in enhancing donor relations and fundraising efficiency. Best practices include conducting thorough needs assessments, involving end-users in the selection process, and investing in comprehensive staff training. Common pitfalls are the underestimation of data migration complexities and resistance to change from staff who prefer legacy systems.

From the marketing perspective, leveraging CRM for targeted campaigns and visitor insights is essential. Best practices involve integrating CRM with social media and other digital marketing tools, continuously updating visitor data, and utilizing analytics for advanced segmentation and campaign adjustments. Pitfalls include data silos resulting from poor integration and the challenges of keeping up with constantly evolving digital marketing trends.

Finally, technology departments underline the significance of choosing a scalable and flexible CRM platform that can grow with the institution’s needs. They will advocate for rigorous testing phases, robust data security protocols, and continuous system upgrades. Key pitfalls include failing to inform critical stakeholders of how key decisions may affect long-term functionality, inadequate initial customization, lack of user-friendly interfaces leading to low adoption rates, and insufficient IT support post-implementation.

This panel will equip museum professionals with actionable insights and strategies to navigate the complexities of CRM implementation, ultimately enhancing their institution’s ability to foster deeper connections with their audiences and supporters.

With support from Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Internet Archive is expanding ARCH - a web-based computational research platform so that it can streamline gallery, library, archive, and museum ability to support a wide range of users interested in working with museums collections at scale. Museum specific collection functionality includes but is not limited to AI and ML driven methods that enable to speech to text, artwork color analysis, and transcription of text found in photographs. The Internet Archive's development efforts on ARCH are directly informed by partners at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Williams College Museum of Art. In this presentation representatives from the project will provide an update on the ARCH development roadmap, new functionality such as its ability to help users easily leverage AI and machine learning with museum collections, as well as a call for broader museum participation in ARCH development and use.

This session will present a case study of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “tentpole weeks”, or specialized week-long cross-platform engagement campaigns: Shrimp Week & Sea Otter Awareness Week. From digital platforms across the web including social, SMS, and email, we want to make people stop scrolling for long enough to laugh, take a breath, and be awed by the ocean and its animals. We also want to provide incentive and opportunity for people to build affinity, deepen their relationship, and ultimately take action for the ocean.
In the past, we have participated in many more tentpole weeks such as shark week and cephalopod week. Overtime, we found our participation with all of these were very overwhelming as well as caused a drop off in engagement on our social channels. After we scaled back, we discovered a more focused approach yielded better engagement on our social channels and return on investment. In this session, we’ll describe what these tentpole weeks are and why they work, why sea otters and why shrimp. We’ll share general metrics and insights along with a video and a short presentation. We intend to include the audience in an interactive warm up with the infamous Shelly Skelly.

Museum collections are many things, but primarily they function as repositories of information, where data-intensive work has been conducted for decades. Like other knowledge infrastructures, the information in these collections is built on installed bases and requires highly skilled technicians to maintain these long-lasting digital systems. However, in representations of this computing work, women's voices and perspectives are under-appreciated, even though they have significant labor contributions in this area. This presentation will share early results from my dissertation, where I ask 1) What are the experiences of women doing computing work in museum collections? and 2) To what extent have they enacted non-normative/ transformative data practices in their work?

I answer these questions through semi-structured interviews with women practitioners engaged in museum computing. This presentation will share early results of transformative data work currently happening in collections led by women practitioners. The transformative paradigm is a framework that “addresses power issues, social justice, and cultural complexity throughout the research process” (Mertens 2007). I will share the results of the ways that practitioners are transforming collection data in ways that similarly center social justice and challenge oppressive powers. Part of understanding women’s contributions to museum computing is to further unpack their resistance to the harmful legacies of museum collections and their data. It is apparent that many practitioners working in museums have goals for their data to be inclusive, and to repair past harms of institutions, yet these practices vary based on institutional history, number of staff, and available funding. This presentation will share empirical evidence of work currently happening, adding to a more robust definition of what ‘museum computing’ can and should entail.

This research aligns with many conversations in critical data studies, urging for a more intersectional approach to data creation, maintenance, use, and reuse that is less oppressive to all (Benjamin 2019; Cifor et al 2019; D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). A further goal of this presentation is to deepen conversations between museum practitioners and work in big data studies, and more importantly, begin a conversation about what other data-intensive environments can learn from museum computing.