museumsandtheweb.com - Museum Websites

National Park Service Museum Collections website

mfreem12 — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:33:01 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

online collections

Keywords:

website rebuild

Keywords:

Museum Websites

Keywords:

National Park Service

Abstract:

A collaborative effort, between the Museum Management Program of the National Park Service and the University of Tennessee (UTK), has lead to a completely redesigned website for the National Park Service (NPS) museum collections.

The previous site had a dated design and statistics showed that most visitors failed to get past the home page. In addition, only a small number of parks contributed data to the site. The huge variety of data in the parks' collections, the low incidence of images, and the fact that objects had been cataloged to different standards in different systems over many decades, all presented challenges to the new design.

Starting in 2010, a small team at UTK has worked with parks to increase the number of records, images, and other media in the database. A review of user feedback and statistics, NPS needs and practices, other museum collections websites, and target audience needs led to the new design.

The new site enables easier visitor access the collections. Although visitors can perform simple or advanced searches by keyword, park name, object name, people, places, and date, the intent was to make the site more exploratory, without over-reliance on the search box.

A database, including summary collection information, was added for all parks, whether or not they had submitted object records. This database provides a basic discovery tool for all the total park collections, and also a top level contextual hierarchy of information. A second level of context was provided by a new "collections highlights" tool. This allows parks to create and describe significant parts of their collections. These highlights provide both easy access to the site and thematic context for the selected objects. Also collection, park and object "highlights of the week" give easy access to the site from the home page.

The site backend was built around ICMS, the NPS collections management system. It went live at the end of 2011.

Type:

Demonstration - show your project

MW2012 Demonstrations I

Site:

http://museum.nps.gov

Authors:

Mark Freeman

Too much stuff! Content strategy for museum websites

KateC — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 05:22:02 +0000

MW2012

Keywords:

content strategy

Keywords:

Website architecture

Keywords:

evaluation, user analysis, engagement, on-line audience, user behaviour, metrics, statistics

Keywords:

Museum Websites

Keywords:

museum victoria

Abstract:

Web publishing systems and distributed authorship can lead to almost endless publishing: easily, quickly, and by lots of people. That’s great, but we rapidly have TOO MUCH STUFF. As a result, quality suffers, maintenance is hard and users struggle to find the content they’re looking for.

So who should be overseeing the development of museum online content? Who can spot the gaps and overlaps? Who is making sure the effort we assign to our websites is pointed in the right direction? The Content Strategist can.

In this one hour workshop, we will present an approach for content strategy for museum websites, including:

* Dealing with the old stuff – whether to delete, update or migrate existing content
* Making great new stuff – working out what stuff to make, how to ensure it’s great, how to structure it and how to plan its life cycle from the outset
* Keeping your users happy – how to understand what your user wants and needs, and how to ensure the internal demands of the organisation don’t commandeer the content

We will draw on real-life examples from the Museum Victoria website (museumvictoria.com.au), a behemoth of 65,000+ pages. The site was redeveloped in 2007 and now demands a rethink.

Who should attend?

This workshop is for those who are struggling to keep up with an ever-growing online presence. It will also be useful for those who are planning a redevelopment, or maybe just getting started with a new website for their organisation, whether large or small.

Type:

Professional Forum - discuss an issue

Professional Forum on Content strategy for museum websites

Site:

http://museumvictoria.com.au

Authors:

Kate Chmiel

Online Presence and the Act of Not Just Being There. The Use of Social Media by Danish Museums

nholdgaard — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:14:00 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

The Use of Social Media in the Danish Museum Landscape

Keywords:

social media

Keywords:

Facebook

Keywords:

Museum Websites

Keywords:

Denmark

Keywords:

online presence

Keywords:

survey

Abstract:

Through the last decades, a large amount of different initiatives have been set to explore, innovate and develop the presence of museums online both in an international context and in a Danish setting.

The aim of this paper is to examine how the Danish museums understand and approach online communication with a focus on the use of social media. So far, the empirical based knowledge of how museums' actually act online in terms of social media is very scarce. This study will provide new insights into the field of digital museum communication and point to challenges of the present museum website categories by and ask if we need new categories to describe the museums online presence and communication.

The paper will take its point of departure in an outline of the Danish online museum landscape through an analysis of the museums' online content. This includes the presentation of the results of a content analysis of all the 123 state-owned and state-subsidized museums' websites and a study of the museums' use of social media. The content analysis focuses on the use of images, videos and sound effects or podcasts on the museum websites. The scope is to analyze how the Danish museums present themselves online and to discuss whether or not German media researcher Werner Schweibenz' four museum website categories (brochure, object, learning, and virtual museum) cover the reality of today's online museum communication.

The main part of the paper will, with Facebook as an example, examine the museums' presence on and use of social media platforms, examining different cases of Danish museums' interaction and communication on Facebook. According to Facebook's own statistics, Denmark is one of countries with the highest percentage of users per capita and every second Danish Internet user has a Facebook profile. Hence, the outreach potentials for the Danish museums are presumably high. The initial results of the investigation of the museums' social media use show, that half of all the Danish museums are present on Facebook, typically with a 'like' page, but a marginal number of museums also have a profile or a group. The paper will also use data from interviews with museum professionals and Facebook users and a content analysis of selected museums' Facebook ‘like' pages, profiles, and groups. The final paper will analyze how Facebook as a social network site with its specific design and interface and possibilities of interacting create both great potentials and barriers for when the museums interact and communicate online.

In addition to the above mentioned survey of Danish museums online, this paper will draw on data from my Ph.D. project on Online Museum Communication from a User Perspective and on new and unique data from a national survey of the Danish Museums' Web Users (2010) by The Heritage Agency of Denmark.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Social Media and Beyond

Authors:

Nanna Holdgaard