Our next on-line AMQ session will take place on Friday 10th May and will be lead by Web Manager at Manchester City Galleries.
The session will look at online initiatives and using the web to enhance museum and gallery work so if you have any questions you would like answering simply reply to this post and Martin will get back to you on the 12th April between 14:00 – 16:00.
If you have any issues posting questions, just email David Craven – david.craven@manchester.ac.uk
If you have ideas for future sessions, suggestions on how we can improve this feature, or want to volunteer to run a Q&A, just let us know.
Museum Development North West 
Hi I’m Martin Grimes, Web Manager at Manchester Art Gallery. I’ve been in post for 6 years and during that time have seen significant changes in the way museums and galleries operate online. In common with many institutions, we’ve moved from having just a website to having a diverse online footprint including YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Tumblr and WordPress blogs, Soundcloud, Twitter and Facebook channels. That’s a lot of online real estate to look after and a lot of potential conversations to engage in.
Much of this activity is about behind the scenes insight, our curators and other staff writing or posting photographs and video of the work they do with our collections, with the exhibition programme or the events they run or even about the bee hives on the gallery roof!
Our collections are at the core of what we do in the gallery, and we’ve seen a continuing and increasing interest in our online collections – after What’s on and Planning your visit information, it’s the most visited part of our website. Currently at the gallery, and across the Manchester Museums and Galleries Partnership, we’re looking at how we can bring our dispersed online activity – curators blogs, video collections, and social media – back to the core and increase the focus on our collections – making them easier to to search and more engaging and useful for a wide range of audiences, many of whom now visit our site via mobile devices.
From Rebecca Mileham:
Hi Martin, I am a text-writing consultant and trainer with TextWorkshop. We often encourage colleagues who attend our training to include visitors’ voices in their interpretation and labels – physical and digital. Are there any good examples you’ve seen where museums have used a website, blog, or other online method to seek visitors’ stories, experiences, knowledge and so on, to add to the richness of interpretation?
Thanks, Rebecca.
Many thanks!
Rebecca.
Hi Rebecca, thanks for your question. There’s quite a few things that come to mind, each very different in purpose and outcome, but all of which in some way include visitor response, whether on or offline.
The BBC Your Paintings tagger is a good example of a crowd sourced route to describing paintings, asking participants to use their own words to ‘say what they see.’ (http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/)The outcome of this is that the works become easier to find through everyday language based searches. Another example might be Flickr commons: http://www.flickr.com/commons where institutions from across the world have posted collection content in an arguably more public location than in their own online collections. As an example here, the comment threads for the Imperial War Museum’s Faces of the First World War series shows astonishing engagement and participation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/imperialwarmuseum/sets/72157632664735914/
And, at Manchester Art Gallery, we used a blog to document public consultation about the PreRaphaelite collection: http://www.thepreraphaeliteexperiment.org/ The consultation in this case took place in the gallery rather than online, with the blog acting as an archive of the process and the outcomes.
Hi Martin,
You gave a long list of potential web-based resources ‘YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Tumblr and WordPress blogs, Soundcloud, Twitter and Facebook ‘. If you could choose only one of these methods, which would it be and why?
thanks
Lisa, Worthing Museum and Art Gallery
Not an easy call. Each has its benefits and particularities that make it suitable for different uses. Ultimately, I’d have to opt for Twitter, though this is a bit of a cop out. The barriers to engagement through twitter are very low, it’s easy to converse, you don’t need to write too much, you can get to the nub of an idea, ideas can be shaped and shared quickly, institutions can support each other through re-tweeting and, importantly, you can link to other resources – that’s the cop out, you still need other resources to give depth and breadth.
Hi Martin. I’m interested to hear how you have used on-line resources effectively to increase access to the collection at the Art Gallery.
What is the most effective on-line method to capture the interest of children to inspire a new generation of young people to engage with cultural experiences?
How regularly should you update a twitter/ facebook account to maintain interest but not overload people with information?
Cheers,
Alex
Hi Alex, it’s not always easy to measure effectiveness beyond the bare numbers gleaned from analytics. In sheer numerical terms, the collection themes developed by Miles Lambert, Senior Curator at the Gallery of Costume constantly out perform any other area of our online collection. This is probably because the content is easy to find, theme titles are engaging and the writing is informed but very accessible. (http://www.manchestergalleries.org/our-other-venues/platt-hall-gallery-of-costume/the-collection/collection-themes/)
I don’t know if I can answer your second question easily. Many museum and gallery websites have been or less opaque to young people, often written in dry, difficult language and, in design terms, off putting, not easy to use. Though I have no evidence to support this view, I believe that sites like the recently launched Rijksmuseum point the way forward to an approach that works across audiences whether young or old, informed about art or not. With images from the collection squarely foregrounded, a supremely easy to understand navigational structure and as much depth as you could want, it’s a visual feast, it’s impossible not to want to discover more. (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en?lang=en&gclid=CKD4y-vji7cCFZQZtAod7W0AIg)
And finally, it’s perhaps more important to consider the content than the frequency of posting. Avoiding posts which are ultimately just marketing is very important, these after all are social media, not marketing channels – we all stop listening when all we hear is sell, sell, sell. Balance the communications between behind the scenes stories, collection insights, links to great content, sharing content from other institutions or asking questions as well as the necessary event and programme information.
Hi Martin,
We’ve been thinking about developing an online exhibition (seperate from our current website – so it could be maintained and created by our very capable volunteers) – a very simple small scale group of objects with short mini histories. The aim is to get more of our collection out in the public domain to different audiences. I’ve never done one before and just wondered if you had any advice about where to start or any good examples or where this has worked well?
Also – we’d like to increase our facebook and twitter followers – we comment and tweet daily covering lots of different ascpect of what we do at the museum and numbers are steadily growing – do you know of any good methods of recruiting new followers?
Many thanks
Catherine
The Novium, Chichester
Hi Catherine. I’ve just looked at your website and very much like that your collections are right there on the homepage with the Object of the month. I’m wondering what you think you’ll gain by moving to another platform, is it that your current site structure doesn’t let you focus on the images and content in the way you wish to? Moving to another website will still require you to market and promote it in the same way that you do for your main site, you may even get less visitors!
Though it’s not as current as tumblr or Pinterest for example, Flickr is a simple and very inexpensive (free even) way to foreground collection material to audiences that might not otherwise come across it – see the example from IWM above, or, from Manchester Archives: http://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/sets/ or from Manchester Art Gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/manchester_city_galleries/collections/72157619640157842/
Equally, you could use Pinterest boards to diversify where your content sits, or set up a tumblr blog and start following other appropriate blogs in a bid to extend your reach to different audiences. And, mostly, these sites are mobile friendly, which helps.
I don’t think that there’s a magic bullet to grow followers, it sounds like you’re already doing all the right things in terms of content, sharing and retweeting and you have clear links on your website – I guess you also have these on your printed literature and in the museum itself? Your Facebook content is very engaging and well balanced. We’ve found that our facebook metrics show a weighting to younger female audience and that posts about and around our family activities tend to be the most liked or commented upon. It might be worth spending some time looking at your analytics and seeing what you can learn from them.
Please feel free to get in touch again if you want to discuss any of this any further.