Hi Mike
Hope you’re doing good. This caught my eye this morning. In terms of archives, we find that whenever we’ve done surveys or user feedback workshops etc. over quite a number of years now, researcher's loud and clear top request is always for completeness of collections and they’ll accept data quality compromises to get the completeness. They’re generally not interested in curated and manicured content. Archives research may be a very different scenario to the museums world, but figured this may be useful to know.
Ade
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Adrian Stevenson
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> On 25 Feb 2019, at 8:59 am, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> I’m writing a blog post about collections online and wanted to poke the hive mind, see what thoughts there are out there.
>
> Background is that we’re constantly (like any museumy web people) being asked to put collections online - and have (as you may know) done things like CultureObject [https://cultureobject.co.uk/] in order to facilitate this.
>
> Those who know me will also know that the big thing for me personally is narrative and stories around those collections. Through things like Bristol exhibitions online (where the team can upload mini-subsets of collections records and then knit together rich narrative threads using maps / timelines / nice looking galleries etc) we are hopefully making ways in which collections items become more a core part of sites than a stand-alone thing which lacks narrative context.
>
> What I’m interested in is why museums continue to push to get their *entire* collection online.
>
> If a client came to us and said they’d got some content to get online but that..
>
> - ...there are around X pages (where X = 10’s or 100’s of thousands)
> - …a high percentage of these don’t have up to date content (or at least have missing bits of content, typos, grammatical errors, factual mistakes)
> - …many don’t have any images
> - …there is little idea of who the audience is (and this audience is probably niche / not really core to a “visit us” mission anyway)
> - …there aren’t any stats on previous use to justify future development
>
> …I would be pushing back pretty hard to get that client to justify why they want to go through the effort of this work.
>
> My [with definite Devil’s Advocate edge to it!] question to the list is this: why do collections get a special place at the table? Granted, they’re what makes museums special and unique, and I understand that some museums have a “get X% of your collection online” mandate, but why?
>
> The starting position I take is: get 100 or 1000 (or 10!) objects online with really superb content / images / background and you’ll see much higher engagement than putting 100k poorly represented ones up there. In an age where attention deficit is the biggest issue we face, we should be focusing on quality and not quantity.
>
> Obviously the holy grail is “all the things at high quality” but 95% of museums don’t have the luxury - so I’m rather less interested in those lucky enough to have both quality and quantity but rather those who are having to choose how to approach this.
>
> Be interested to hear your thoughts.
>
> Thanks all,
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
>
> _____________
>
> Mike Ellis
>
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