MCN 2024

Office spaces make for great recording studios. And expert voice talent is closer than you think.

For decades, audio guides have remained a staple of the museum visit. Though technologies have evolved, the core experience remains the same: Today's visitors continue to arrive at cultural institutions with an expectation of having access to expert audio commentary from curators, artists, historians, community members, and any array of voices providing a complementary perspective to the environment surrounding them.

Great audio content can be produced inexpensively and with tools that are readily available. This session will provide insights into the technical and creative aspects of creating compelling audio content using readily and easily available resources.

Presented by Bloomberg Connects, a community partner for this year's conference.

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 Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has a digital-first mandate and a commitment to community co-creation. Join us for a session exploring why community-focused programs should be at the center of exploring women’s visibility (or the lack thereof). By presenting case studies and provocations, the session will share how evolving digital expectations can foster community participation while offering insight and inspiration for your digital storytelling and audience engagement efforts.

In March 2024, the museum unveiled multiple initiatives that engage audiences in different ways – "Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women’s History into Focus," a compelling story-driven digital experience and “Community Story Explorer,” an interactive browsing experience showcasing stories contributed by the community. While each initiative offers its own format, their roots are interconnected, originating from an underlying strategy meant to invite diverse audiences to engage and participate across mindsets, interests, and locations.
Featuring speakers from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, the Smithsonian Office of Digital Transformation, and digital agency Forum One, this interactive panel will illustrate important connections between organizational goals, strategic planning, and program design, offering valuable insights into developing a coherent approach for community building and engagement.

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.

This session will introduce brand new preservation guidance for new media art/digital media art/time-based media art/variable media art and facilitate exercises from “Maintenance Culture: Sustaining Access to Digital Creative Works,” a Myriad project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Maintenance Culture aims to provide practical, realistic guidelines to support small to mid-sized art museums, history museums, museums at academic institutions, and other cultural heritage institutions who steward complex, born-digital, creative works.

The session will introduce participants to the structure and content of the Maintenance Culture guidelines, including describing some specific examples to illustrate the types of works this project addresses (digital design, time-based media art, augmented reality, and net art) and their common preservation challenges. Facilitators will provide structure for the small group work within the session, with the goal of connecting participants to each other and encouraging the growth of communities of practice around preserving digital creative works.

Presenter will facilitate exercises from the Maintenance Culture workbook (to be published July 2024), including:
• Identifying institutional strengths that support maintaining long-term access to born-digital, creative works
• Naming challenges to collecting and preserving complex, born-digital creative works and connecting with others experiencing similar challenges
• Taking steps towards drafting workflows for collecting and maintaining complex, born-digital works

For the first time The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens is able to present its rich and varied collections in a single unified interface. We will discuss how over a 5 month period we were able to iterate our way to a high-fidelity collections prototype laying the groundwork for a production-ready online collection. This singular view on our holdings affords our audience a window into the various disciplines within our organisation and helps forward our transition to a more coherent, less siloed public presentation.

The CDC reports that approximately 7M Americans suffer from blindness or vision loss. The Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University estimates that 20M people—8% of the American population—have some form of vision impairment that glasses, contacts, or surgeries cannot correct. Many museums, including those featured in this panel, have little, if any, of their digital collection augmented by visual descriptions, or alternative text (alt text) for this large population.

As a group of US-based art museums, we’ve been exploring the very real future of using multimodal AI to begin to bridge this gap: using AI “vision” to describe, tag, and provide image descriptions for artwork. After an initial convening in November 2023, we’ve developed a collaborative, inter-museum working group to explore this idea along with the technical, practical, ethical, and conceptual challenges inherent in this arena. This group includes the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, the Harvard Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, and other partners.

This multi-presenter session will focus on our initial findings, insights, and the next steps we hope to explore. Specifically, the talk will roughly be divided into the “why”, the “how”, and the “what now.” The “how” section is our core and will feature comparisons of results across different models, insights into prompt engineering, strategies for systems architecture, and explorations around evaluation and human feedback. The “what now” section will introduce where we intend to keep exploring, with each presenting museum sharing current and upcoming efforts. Finally, we will invite attendees to join us elsewhere at the conference (location TBC!) to explore individual use cases and, when possible, dig into working examples.