“How best to leverage the Web?”
At the Museums and the Web conference this year the ImageSpan team learned how important it is for museums to establish a larger presence online and that they view the Web as a potential treasure trove of opportunities.
The big question, “How best to leverage the Web?”
For many long-time museum professionals, releasing content to the “wild” is a scary and daunting prospect in the first place. And while the majority of the museum community understands the educational and cultural benefits of making their content available online, many are still struggling with how best to leverage their digital assets to attract and reach new global markets online.
Some simply want to make content available online for browsing by art lovers, or for educational purposes. For others, the Web is a new frontier where people are actually willing to pay for museum content for use in new media, publishing, corporate messaging or out-of- home advertising.
For example, the Missouri History Museum demonstrated at Museums and the Web how ImageSpan’s LicenseStream helped it extend its reach online so that anyone, anywhere in the world can quickly find images from its extensive collection of historic prints, photos and other digital assets – The Missouri History Museum showed conference attendees how it quickly began to uncover new markets and license hundreds of images through online image store powered by LicenseStream. http://mohistory.licensestream.com/licensestream/portal/index.aspx.
Still, we often heard: “I know that we are sitting on a gold mine, but it’s just such a huge undertaking.”
While recognizing the value in their content, many museums do not believe they can begin licensing it until they have a content management system in place and have everything digitized, tagged and key worded. However, the Missouri History Museum’s experience with LicenseStream demonstrated that this is not the case. The Missouri History Museum decided to start by placing only a small portion of these images in its image store.
While their digitized collection grows and they add more of this content to their Web-based store, they are learning about how best to navigate this new frontier. Already, Missouri History Museum staffers are thrilled to see an interest from outside the museum community and are learning how to create awareness, drive traffic, learn buying patterns, identify and move forward into new markets.
By the time the Museum’s complete collection is in its online image store, its staff will know how to prioritize and determine the value of their content in specific industries. They also will know how to market their store and who their buyer is, allowing them to capitalize on the demand they’ve created.
How?
The LicenseStream platform enables you to manage, track, market and monetize digital content. It provides the intelligence to find your niche in the “wild”. It also helps protect your valuable archives and generate incremental revenue, which may be used to support ongoing digitization projects. Furthermore, LicenseStream can “plug in” to any existing architecture and/or CMS to generate revenues that will help any museum justify the larger content management initiatives.
As museums explore new opportunities via the Web and mobile technologies, it will be exciting to see how they leverage their assets online and optimize the use of technologies to engage audiences and advance their missions.