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Museums and the Web Conference, Vancouver 2005: A Review - 1 June 2005
by Eleanor Lisney
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Christina Li)
It is now almost obligatory for a museum to have some kind of web presence. Visitors check for opening times, events, exhibitions and facilities before or after a visit and use the website. Museum websites also provide resources on their exhibits and at times, websites have been specially created to accompany an exhibit. Some museums exist only online. Archives & Museum Informatics organizes a series of national and international conferences to facilitate the sharing of information between museums, archives and other cultural heritage institutions. This year, their Museums and the Web conference was held in Vancouver, Canada. I was present at this conference to participate in a forum, Gender Issues and Museum Websites and to help at a workshop, Making Museum Websites Accessible.
The Museums and the Web conference addresses the social, design, technological, economic, organizational and cultural issues of culture and heritage on-line. The people who attend this conference are webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, and archives. Along with the presentations, workshops, forums and exhibits they have interactive sessions such as a Crit room and a Usability Lab.
For web designers, the Crit room is more than informative, the participants are introduced to a website and then they are invited to critique it. Considering that the audience is made up of an international selection of web professionals, this is a wonderful opportunity to get their feedback on your website. In one way, its wonderful to showcase and in another, it is unnerving to expose your design to be critiqued so publicly. In the similar way, the Usability Lab provides an opportunity for conference participants to observe user testing of museum Web sites in action; volunteer to participate as a user test subject and discover some of the problems users have on unknown sites. Volunteer user testers were selected at random. The volunteer user temporarily leaves the room while the owner of the site describes what they consider a typical scenario of use—something the average visitor to the site would be trying to do. These scenarios were then converted into tasks, which together with some randomly selected standard tasks, were given to the user to perform during the test. The site was projected on a big screen for the audience to follow the user’s experience. The user was then brought back into the room and what seems like a simple, low-cost, high-speed user test is conducted. Michael Twidale (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Paul Marty (Assistant Professor Florida State University) demonstrated a variety of testing techniques throughout the day and they emphasized the thinking aloud method so that the audience can easily follow the test subject’s thoughts. It is a good way of introducing people to the principles of user testing and the purpose of doing it. After the conclusion of each test, the user, site owner, test administrators and audience discussed what was learned before going on to the next site. The Usability Lab is set up so that conference attendees can drift in and out and can participate as time permits. I find both the Crit room and the Usability Lab very enriching experiences. Apart from learning from the practice itself, the interactions and responses of the audience and participants impart an extra dimension to the exercise, different from one in a normal Usability Lab which is video taped.
This conference is also a showcase for some of the cutting edge technologies available. I was at an interaction workshop conducted by Slavko Milekic (University of the Arts, USA)’s “Attentive Interfaces For Museum/Gallery Content.” He presented an overview of unorthodox ways of interacting with museum content, both on-site and on-line. The interaction mechanisms included those based on detecting a visitor’s presence, intention, gestures or gaze direction. He demonstrated an interactive Chinese scroll (The Literary Gathering at a Yangzhou Garden, landscape by Fang Shishu (1692 – 1751), a digital copy of a huge scroll where it would normally not possible to look at close range. In another, he used an eye-tracking device to interact with an interface. In another session, there was a Dutch, ZaPPWeRK’s, presentation of “Culture around the Corner”. Information about the nearest cultural event, museum or monument is made available on a mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or laptop. The service works via text messaging or, technically more advanced, the mobile portal Vodafone life where “Streetguide” indicates the exact location of the nearest building of interest. The website can be consulted via PDA and laptop. Whatever instrument is used the system retrieves the position automatically and matches the location with the location of the required place of interest. ZaPPWeRK started this project to investigate the technical boundaries and to address the usability issues. In the demonstrations, one promising innovative device is Peter Seitel (Smithsonian Institution, USA)’s “Synchrotext: A Tool for Curating and Publishing Media Content” Synchrotext is an annotated-media producer/player that synchronizes digital audio and video with scrolling transcriptions, translations and multimedia commentaries in ways that educate and entertain. It provides an automated platform to promote in-depth understanding of English and foreign language performances, storytelling, oral epics, theatrical plays, popular songs, political speeches, films, and scholarly lectures. This might be an answer to making such audio- visual material such as streaming videos accessible.
A regular event is the “Best of the Web” where Museum Web sites from around the world were nominated in a variety of categories and are judged by an independent panel of judges. The best innovative or experimental application for a website was won by Eternal Egypt. According to the judges, it has a very well thought out design that provides a net in which to explore Egypt. The best E-Services Site is Seminars on Science the Best Overall Museum Web Site was won by London’s Science Museum’s Making the Modern World Online – Stories about the lives we’ve made. According to the judges it is a “robust demonstration of how museum artifacts can be offered online to engage audiences in an innovative learning experience.”
This conference is a yearly event and next year, it is scheduled to be at Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Eleanor Lisney is part of the uiGarden editorial team. She holds a Master of Science in Information Studies. Her main interest is in accessibility and usability. Eleanor worked for the University of Massachusetts before her return to live in France.
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