Museums, Social Awareness and Sustainability

Just stumbled across an excellent online exhibition on the London Transport Museum website called the Future Generator. Beginning with a video that discusses global warming and its effect on the city of London, the exhibition introduces four possible scenarios of the future. By answering up to 16 questions about your daily routines and lifestyle, the exhibition will generate a likely scenario of your future too. 

The future generator called for an awakening to the environment around us and the carbon footprint that we create by simple daily routines such as transportation and even kettle-boiling. While it is interesting in itself, it provokes a re-evaluation of our daily lives and environmental consciousness. 

I always feel that this is how a museum exhibition should be, especially for large institutions. Considering that it is a venue that invites the public to receive messages that it has to deliver, there is a social responsibility for museums to raise and discuss issues that impact the population and the world that it lives in.

Pop Quiz at the Brooklyn Museum

To complement opening of the exhibition Unearthing the Truth: Egypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture, the Brooklyn Museum presents a pop quiz for all to test their skills on identifying genuine ancient artifacts from their modern reproductions. Besides telling apart a fake from an original, very often an artifact was also modified partly over its course of history, i.e. it is an original but someone pimped it at some point. See if you can tell the difference over the nine images of Egyptian/Coptic sculptures. A hint from yours truly: materials, colours, craftsmanship tend to reflect their origins in time. 

Do you think this is an effective means to promote an exhibition? Let us know in the comment box!

Good luck and happy quizzing!

The Ars Electronica archive

Starting in 1979, Ars Electronica GmbH has organized an annual festival featuring digital media art. With close to 30 years of material in digital art and media culture, its archive presents an interesting evolution of digital technology and changes in the creative process. Besides project descriptions of displays over the past festivals, the archive also contains festival documentations and catalogues, information about winners of the Prix Ars Electronica and about the participants for the festival's various projects. What's more interesting is that the website has created an interactive navigator that helps visitors browse through the archives without the need to constantly refer to its main page. Its wealth of creative ideas and their use of technology definitely warrants a look for those who take an interest in digital art.

Update: Serena provided a link for an interactive map navigator for the Ars Electronica archive at http://residence.aec.at/didi/FLweb/ - neat stuff!

Shelfari: Speaks for Your Books

In the TEC-CH Online course of Museums and the Social Web, we are required to analyse a number of Web 2.0 sites and create a report describing the interactions, usability and potential museum applications of these websites. Shelfari was the topic of my assignment, and while thinking that it may be something useful to share, I'm re-posting my article on the blog. 

In a nutshell, Shelfari is a virtual bookshelf application that lets its user document and organise his or her reading lists and book collections. Wikipedia refers to it as a “social cataloguing website”1, where users may “rate, review, tag and discuss their books”. Its main feature is a graphic user interface (GUI) in the form of a bookcase, displaying book covers of the items that users choose to exhibit. Based in Seattle, Shelfari was first launched in 2006, and was later acquired by Amazon.com in August 2008.

The Features of Shelfari

As with many other Web 2.0 applications, it is mandatory for users to create identities for their accounts, so their contributions and participation on the website may be identified. In true bookshelf-building fashion, users may also choose the shelf material of the bookcase, in the exciting colors of mahogany, walnut, rosewood, and black cherry.

Once a bookshelf is created, users may add titles to the shelf and organise their reading lists. If a user already has certain titles in mind, one may conduct a search by title, author, ISBN or subject to find and add the book. When desired results cannot be found, users may add their titles to the catalogue. One can still construct his or her book collections even if they do not have specific titles to add to their virtual bookshelves. Users may choose to browse for books under “What’s Hot” and “Browse Subjects”. “What’s Hot” presents books that have the highest ratings, are the most reviewed or the most commented within the day, while the option of “Browse Subjects”, as the name suggests, is a more traditional approach. As the user advances to participate in the Shelfari community, for instance, reading reviews or contributing to discussions, one would realise that any book entry that one comes across may be added to his or her virtual bookshelf. For those who already own accounts or booklists on other similar websites, Shelfari presents the option to import their collections.

Book titles may be organised into three main categories, or book lists: Books that I plan to read, books that I’m reading, and books that I’ve read. By keeping book statuses current, the lists offer a great way to motivate and keep track of one’s reading progress as well as his or her interests for any future reading. The books can also be marked as a favorite, as one that the user owns, or one that is on his/her wish list. These features are useful in reflecting the user’s tastes in books, so Shelfari members with similar tastes may connect with each other, and the website may make useful recommendations for the user on potentially interesting books, authors and other Shelfari members. Further, for each book entry users may enter their read dates of a book to create a reading timeline for his or her collection, create a purchase record, and keep track of the loan status of a book. These cataloguing features under “My Copy” bring Shelfari from virtual to visceral, letting users manage their physical bookshelves at home, or elsewhere such as a library. In addition, a user can also help the Shelfari community in cataloguing its books by tagging them with relevant keywords. With the tagging mechanism, books with the same keyword are grouped together, so users may discover new titles with similar concepts by looking into a given tag.

Shelfari is not merely an organization device, with a large community of book lovers it also behaves like a giant book club. Users can reflect on their books by rating them from one to five stars, writing reviews and comments, and by contributing to an “Authors Unbound” section dedicated to information about the authors of their books, much alike a wiki. The reflection is not an individualistic one, as users can also interact amongst themselves by reading and voting on the quality of other members’ book reviews, exchange notes, recommend books or ask for recommendations, and engage in conversations that take place under discussions, comments and groups. They can also freely browse each other’s virtual bookshelves to discover other member’s preferences for books. Users can also become “friends”, regardless of whether they know each other in person or not, in order to keep track of each other’s activities on Shelfari.

Ease of Use and Areas of Improvement

The virtual bookshelf is a very user-friendly graphic user interface. Book covers are neatly lined up and clearly sorted according to their own categories, and many common functions such as rating, tagging or writing reviews can be easily accessed with one-click, directly on the virtual bookshelf. The website itself is also very usable, packing access to most Shelfari features on the user’s homepage, and any potential confusion with ambiguous icons are aptly explained with instructions upon rollover. Another interesting characteristic is its multiple points of entry for various functions on one page. For example, to add a book to the shelf, one can click on the according link located on the bookshelf, but one can also click on another link that is located directly above the bookshelf interface. While it makes the features more accessible, it may also create confusion for users, as they may wonder which link is the correct one to use or expect different destinations for the same links on the same page, but at different locations. Another side effect of such multiple points of entry is that the menu options are very much scattered across the page, directing users to search all over the page for desired functionalities.

Shelfari also has a logical presumption that its users are fully literate, thus the menu options are highly text-based. Besides the virtual bookshelf interface, book covers and user profile pictures, the entire website is consisted of texts rather than images. While it may be reasonable to argue that extra icons or graphics may overwhelm the webpages which already contain many images of book covers and profile pictures, a fully text-based menu is also boring to read and visually difficult for one function to distinguish from another. In addition, ambiguous menu items such as “Books”, “Members” and “Groups” should be more specific or explained with a rollover so users may have a better idea of what to expect before the click-through.

In Nina Simon’s terms, Shelfari is a “walled garden”. Any contributions made to the application is only viewable to other users who have also registered. While there are attempts to go beyond the wall of the Shelfari site by creating widgets so that information from one’s account may be displayed elsewhere on the web, much of the communication, updates and modifications can only be accessed on the Shelfari website.

The biggest flaw may be that it is an anglocentric application that is incompatible with books that are in languages other than English. With several attempts to search for Chinese books with varying methods of input, I have discovered that all the Chinese titles are only available in English translations, if not completely inexistent in the catalogue. Further, the Shelfari search engine is unable to recognise any input that is not consisted of Roman characters. With the current rising trend of non-English sites, multilingual compatibility would be a valuable upgrade to the website.

Applications for the Museum

Museums may join Shelfari and use it as a tool to connect with visitors or patrons, discuss ideas, and recommend books in relevant areas. By participating in discussions, adding friends with interests relevant to the institution, and starting up Shelfari groups, institutions have the opportunity to reach out to established online communities as well as individuals, informing them of the existence of the museum, sharing its knowledge and having useful exchanges of information. With the expertise available at museums, staff may create valuable book reviews on readings that are relevant to their subject areas, hence attracts users with genuine interests on those topics. By studying the bookshelves of these users, museums may gain a good idea of the interests of their target audience and hence develop relevant exhibitions and programmes. On a research level, Shelfari also enables museum staff to connect with other professionals, to exchange insights and to enlist research help.

Shelfari has many individual features that may be adopted to museum websites in order to facilitate visitor participation. For example, “Authors Unbound” may be adopted as an exhibition-related wiki, where curators and visitors may create content collaboratively. Instead of tagging books, museums can invite visitors to tag individual artifacts or exhibitions, so museum staff can learn about common perceptions of their collections while visitors have the opportunity to contribute to the understanding of the items. Discussions and comment capabilities are also obvious technologies to adopt, so visitors are given a voice to express their opinions about objects, exhibitions, and related issues. Further, the idea of creating own collections in general is highly applicable to the museum world, as visitors may gain a sense of belonging to the museum and identify their favorites within an often vast collection of museum objects.

1 "Shelfari." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 5 Jan 2009, 19:25 UTC. 1 Feb 2009 .2 Simon, Nina. "Is your museum website a walled garden?" Museum 2.0. 29 Jul 2008. 27 Jan 2009 .