Filters
East Lothian and Social Networking sites
Why is this case study relevant?
East Lothian Council’s Museums Service has been an early adopter (and occasional pioneer) of digital trends in the museums sector. This case study is an innovative example of how social networking sites can be used to engage and interact with new audiences and as such, provides a positive example of a beneficial relationship between museums and ‘Web 2.0’ technology.
What were the aims of the project?
• Make East Lothian museums content more accessible
• Allow online users to interact with images and video
• Enhance content with user-contributed tagging
What happened?
Since summer 2007 East Lothian Museums Service has been using social networking sites as part of the service that it offers. These include Bebo, YouTube and Flickr. The Museums Service, like many others around Scotland, undertook a large digitisation program at the turn of the millennium, photographing and scanning a number of its 2-d and 3-d artefacts. These digital images were then uploaded to sites including Scran http://www.scran.ac.uk .
Since the Museums Service retained the copyright in these images, it has been free to repurpose them elsewhere, and accordingly we have made images freely available to download through our own website http://www.eastlothianmuseums.org . We have also uploaded a number of images to the picture hosting site Flickr http://www.flickr.com, under a Creative Commons licence allowing limited reproduction rights. To direct users who visit www.eastlothianmuseums.org to our Flickr content, a small piece of code on our site pulls four random images from our Flickr photostream into our own home page.
In addition to information about each artefact, we added a number of keyword ‘tags’ to each image so that, in theory, other Flickr users should be able to find the image. Like many similar sites, Flickr also allows other users to comment on your uploaded images, and to ‘tag’ them with their choice of keywords. The thinking behind this latter option is that users will be more easily able to find your content if they are able to choose how it is annotated and indexed rather than having to intuit the uploader’s choice of vocabulary. For example, if a Museum Service uploaded a picture of a World War II Air Raid Precautions pamphlet to Flickr, and tagged it as a ‘pamphlet’, the picture will not appear in the search results of any user who instead types ‘booklet’ into the search engine. Having other users able to add tags of their choosing, therefore, helps to build a consensus of nomenclature. This organic, user-generated process has been called ‘folksonomy’, as opposed to a top-down, ‘expert’-led taxonomy.
As a result of uploading images to Flickr, we have received a number of comments from other users. For the most part these are simply affirmations (such as ‘cool picture’ or ‘nice medals’). Occasionally however, users are able to add to the information we have about an artefact; the best example is a user who was able to give us specific information about a bandsman’s uniform. Users are also able to request reproduction rights for an image, or add an image to their own photostream; one user, for example, asked if she could include some of our wedding dress images in a photostream of her own devoted to dresses.
At a glance, we can see how many people have looked at each image and which ones have been ‘favourited’. While demographic data about users is difficult to come by, it’s likely that few of them are based in Scotland, let alone East Lothian. And so, we have reached a new audience that otherwise wouldn’t have seen our collection. See our uploaded images at http://flickr.com/photos/eastlothian/ .
Similarly, we have begun uploading video materials to YouTube http://www.youtube.com . For the most part, this is all new content (as opposed to our Flickr content which is mostly repurposed existing material). We often shoot video footage at special events or exhibitions, or conduct interviews with interesting local people, and then edit this using software such as Apple’s Final Cut Express. The footage is then uploaded to YouTube so that other users can view it. As well as enabling wider access to the footage than if we hosted it ourselves at www.eastlothianmuseums.org, uploading material to YouTube’s servers obviates any bandwidth problems.
Thus far, our short films have been viewed by quite a few viewers, with footage of our No.6 Engine at Prestongrange Museum proving the most popular, at over 1,900 views. Of course, as with our Flickr photostream, most of these views will not have been made by users wishing to find out about the activities of our Museums Service. Instead, they will have been made, for example, by steam railway enthusiasts, some of whom might be tempted to follow the links to our own museum website. Whether they do or not, we have again tapped into a new audience base, few of whom would otherwise have had any contact with East Lothian Museums Service. See our YouTube films at http://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalMages.
While other museums have leveraged the power of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, we were the first to do so on Bebo (http://www.bebo.com). We felt that Bebo was a particularly apposite site on which to establish a presence, as it has a large usage among teenagers and is popular across Scotland. Thus far, we have done little more than set out our stall on the site, and attract the occasional ‘friend’, but we hope to build on this small beginning in the coming months.
What was learned?
One of the reasons that we have not been able to do more on Bebo, and one which will affect many local authority museums, is the issue of web filters. Our council’s IT department takes a very conservative line over what its employees should and should not be able to view on the web. To this end, it uses generic web filters to prevent employees from accessing certain sites. Unfortunately, these filters deem most social networking sites off limits, and not suitable for use during work-time. At various times both YouTube and Flickr have been unavailable on council-maintained computers (though happily, at the time of writing, they seem to have reversed this policy). Bebo, however, is not accessible from computers on the council’s network.
Despite these problems, social networking sites have been extremely useful to our Museums Service. There are many advantages to utilising them, and few disadvantages. The main one, as outlined above, is the ability to reach users who would not otherwise visit your own museum or its associated website, whether for geographical, intellectual or financial reasons. As with other digital resources, too, the use of social networking sites allows museums to squeeze a lot of mileage out of miniscule budgets, as the costs involved are minimal. Our YouTube and Flickr accounts for example, cost us nothing, while the hardware that is used to create content for these sites has already been purchased and paid for out of other budgets. While you can get a free Flickr account which allows limited uploads, we opted to pay $24.95 per year for an account which allows us to post 2GB of material per month should we so choose. While some may view such free and unfettered access to our artefacts as cheapening or downgrading the museum experience, we prefer to think of our experiments as increasing access to East Lothian’s cultural heritage.
What is the wider relevance?
As the internet becomes more sophisticated there is an expectation for museums and galleries to not only offer information about their collections but also to allow visitors to interact with museum content. While there is much hesitation on the part of the sector to participate in this type of Web 2.0 activity, this example shows the potential benefits of using social networking sites as a new route into collections and a valuable way of engaging with visitors and reaching new audiences.
How was this project promoted?
Our Flickr site is now being promoted in schools, as photographs of class museums are uploaded for pupils, teachers and the general public to comment upon. The sites are also promoted through our general East Lothian Museums Website, our Museums Blog and at conferences and talks.
What type of evaluation was done?
At present, our statistics are monitored on a monthly basis. However, more in-depth evaluation is required to discover exactly what visitors gain from our social networking sites. This evaluation is due to be set up in 2009.
Associated Images
Category
ICT/Digital
Project Start
1st Aug 2006
Project End
1st Nov 2008
Published
25th Nov 2008
Who Led?
East Lothian Council
Who else took part?
Digital Resource Development Team