MCN 2024

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

One of the challenges that digital technologies have made manifest in cultural heritage organizations is that there is more stuff than most staff have the time, attention or ability to devote to. In the past, before networked computers and compendiums of information like Wikipedia (or Amazon) changed people's expectations of what can and should be taken for granted, the cultural heritage sector dealt with this problem by hiding it in a flurry of words and never letting anyone see all the things stacked on shelves in the backroom. But people's expectations have changed and coupled with the calls for open access around our collections suddenly all that stuff, much of it uncataloged and unresearched, is seeing the light of day without much context. This session will discuss the organization and technical challenges that these new realities present emphasizing the questions surrounding the use of generative and artificial intelligence systems to address the cultural heritage sector's perennial "content deficit" and what many of the concerns about their use say about the sector itself.

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.

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 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