By Matthew MacArthur

A web exclusive article published in September 2007.

Blogs. Wikis. Mashups. Folksonomies. Social networks. Open source, open content and user-generated content. Once buzzwords, these tools and concepts are hallmarks of today’s changing Internet landscape. We knew something important was happening when the social networking site MySpace surpassed search powerhouse Google as the most popular website. This milestone was symbolic of a shift in emphasis from the Internet as a collection of pages to the Internet as connections between people. Time magazine, in making “You” (the amateur bloggers, profilers, mashup artists and other online users-cum-contributors) Person of the Year for 2006, calls it a “revolution.”1

Those with a stake in the creation and distribution of cultural content—media conglomerates, news organizations, technology companies—are taking the revolution seriously, employing a variety of offensive and defensive strategies in an effort to ensure their survival. Museums, libraries and archives, though lacking the same urgency, also have the sense that recent events could influence relationships with, and expectations of, their audiences.

Mashup © audiosteinTM

The cultural establishment remains deeply ambivalent about what writer Steven Johnson termed “this permanent amateur hour”—unsure whether to celebrate its “power to the people authenticity” or mourn “the end of quality and professionalism.”2

Web 2.0 and Museums

Of the various tools and concepts encompassed by Web 2.0, a few stand out as having particular relevance for museums. One such tool is folksonomy, the application of user-supplied subject terms—known as “tags”—to describe everything from webpages to works of art.5 Proponents of folksonomy argue that allowing users to describe online content in terms that make sense to them, rather than relying solely on organizing principles imposed by others, will make that content more retrievable, useful and meaningful to the audience. Its most enthusiastic supporters add a countercultural flavor to the debate, as voiced by technology commentator David Weinberger: “Folksonomies stick it to The Man. . . . Even when the experts do a good job—as they usually do, because they’re experts—it is still an implicit statement that someone else’s way of thinking is better than yours.”6 Naturally, the “experts,” trained in systematic descriptive methods that have been honed and developed over centuries, have a different opinion. In their view, folksonomy opens the door to idiosyncratic, inconsistent, irrelevant or simply incorrect subject terms, undermining the usefulness of any index that is created.7 A collaborative research project, known as steve, has set out to study the potential of folksonomy for art collections in hopes that it will increase public access to works of art and improve the experience by encouraging personalization and multiple points of view.8

Using the Web to build relationships with and among users is another area in which museums have been experimenting for years. Web 2.0 tools give museums additional opportunities to build online communities, both on their own websites and on third-party sites. Many museums are experimenting with weblogs, chats, social networking and other outreach tools. Because most successful social networks emerge in an organic, collaborative process, museums have found that it takes more than just a token institutional commitment to create a lively online community.9 While a few attempts have been successful, others are either underutilized or unsustainable for a variety of reasons.

Wikis take the concept of user involvement a step further, by allowing users to actually contribute to or edit content on a website. The most famous example is Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia with nearly eight million entries as of this writing.10 Reaction to Wikipedia is mixed; some argue that its model of open and anonymous authorship, together with well-publicized instances of deliberate falsification, prevent it from being trustworthy as an authority. Even so, its breadth of material, up-to-the-minute responsiveness and sheer audacity as an enterprise continue to attract users and stimulate ongoing debate.11 Wikis like it have been used for a number of other collaborative ventures, from community portals to scholarly research.

Relationships of Trust

At the heart of any discussion about museums and Web 2.0 lies the issue of authority. According to a 2001 American Association of Museums (AAM) survey on public trust of various sources of information, “museums are the most trusted source of information, ahead of books and television news.” Respondents particularly valued museums as providers of “independent and objective information.”12 How is that trust affected if users are allowed to have a greater voice on our websites and even in our galleries? What is the proper relationship between professional experts and amateur enthusiasts? Traditionally, museum curators have been seen as “stewards of cultural heritage,” providing not only primary research about material objects, but in recent times being expected to transmit a “clear and faithful understanding” of their meaning to museum visitors.13 Some, even within museums, criticize this model as unnecessarily exclusive. According to one group of authors writing about science museums, learning is more likely when museums work with visitors to develop an approach that “has realistic overlap with the audience’s behavior, attitude and expectations.”14 To do this we must allow visitors to be active participants from the beginning of the interpretive process, not just passive recipients at the end of it.

In 1997, when AAM published the seminal Wired Museum, a debate was raging about the impact of public access to high quality digital images of collection objects. Would visitors no longer feel the need to visit museums? Would original artifacts lose their “aura”? Would the role of curators be usurped if visitors could closely examine objects and sort them in various ways?15 Today those concerns seem quaint, like the prediction that videotapes would lead to the demise of movie theaters. But museums and others are more worried than ever about how online digital content could be appropriated for questionable purposes in an era when savvy Internet users routinely mix and match images, music, videos and even databases to create everything from political spoofs to dynamic maps of UFO sightings. While some content owners recoil and sue for copyright protection, others allow or even promote the creative re-use of their content—witness how George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, has cultivated a whole new generation of fans by allowing and in some cases encouraging amateur spinoffs that have appeared online in recent years.16

Wired Museum contributor and informatics professor Howard Besser certainly hit the nail on the head when he predicted (with some regret) that the public would come to “view culture less as something to consume and more as something to interact with.”17

© Mike Franklin

The reaction of museums to the freewheeling Web 2.0 atmosphere is no different than that of most other content providers. On its face it appears to be an unprecedented opportunity to show that museums are serious about community involvement and ensure that we remain relevant to our audiences; yet the idea of deliberately diluting our intellectual content with substantive input from users—allowing their material to appear in connection with our trusted “brand”—makes us extremely uncomfortable. Law professor James Boyle, of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, has theorized about why intellectual property owners feel threatened at the prospect of user participation. According to Boyle, content owners have historically had a tendency to be blind to “the opportunities that commons-based production . . . the non-property, less control, open access side of things tends to offer,” while overvaluing tight control of ownership rights, rules and even methods of distribution. As a possible explanation he suggests that our instincts, laws and institutions were formed to protect physical property—a role still crucial to most museums. Digital assets, while similar in some ways to physical assets, have their own distinct qualities and should be offered up with a greater awareness of the balance between protection on the one hand and a lessening of control on the other.18

Leading thinkers about museums and Web 2.0 have identified institutional bias of the sort described by Boyle as the greatest obstacle to the adoption of a more user-centered approach. To combat this bias, some have seized on the notion of “radical trust,” which suggests the need for a more intimate, equal relationship between museums and constituents. The term is credited to librarian and blogger Darlene Fichter, who suggests that emergent systems—those built collaboratively by end users, without high levels of top-down structure or governance—can be successful only if established institutions trust their constituents to be not only users and customers but participants and co-creators.19 Fichter emphasizes that inherent to any emergent system is the expectation—and, to a certain extent, tolerance—of some level of abuse, with mechanisms in place to prevent or correct it. Blogger Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum, in Sydney, Australia, picked up on this point: “Most ‘systems’ of trust in Web 2.0 applications are specifically constructed to encourage and protect, through safeguards and small but not insignificant ‘barriers to participation’—what is being described as ‘trust’.”20 With the exercise of appropriate caution, it is possible to be inclusive without being reckless.

Benefits of Participatory Learning

Much could be said about the benefits of museums allowing a loyal community of supporters to extend our knowledge and help contextualize our collections. More important in terms of our educational mission is the effect that user participation can have on the audience as learners. As informal learning online is treated elsewhere in this volume, let us briefly consider a few key principles of museum learning that, in each case, can be addressed by the thoughtful application of Web 2.0 methods:

• Visitors do not typically view museums as classrooms for in-depth learning so much as smorgasbords of content with which to construct their own meaning and associations based on individual interests and background.21 Museums should not discount this mode of learning “out of fear of being unable to control the results. . . . Such action (or inaction) ignores the human realities of how meaning is constructed and how museums currently are used by the public to support personal growth and development.”22

• Museums play a crucial role in this dialogue with visitors by offering arrangements of objects, thoughtful interpretation and a unique setting for learning that work together to help visitors make meaning out of the world and understand their place in it.23

• Museums present one version of “truth,” but objects can tell many stories and hold multiple potentially valid meanings. Visitors may be well served when museums facilitate informed discussion incorporating multiple points of view.24

• “Minds-on” interactivity is even better than “hands-on” when it comes to learning. Museums should offer opportunities to solve problems, pursue inquiries and other “activities that require attention, time and engagement.”25 All museum learners would benefit from methods employed at children’s museums, where young visitors are given a high degree of autonomy and control over the learning experience, with frequent opportunities to act as facilitators.26

• Social interaction with family or group members, and even among unrelated visitors, is a crucial part of museum learning. Group learning is not only effective but economical, as group members distribute information gathering and come together to share results. Museums can serve groups of learners by designing experiences for multiple users, fostering social interaction and placing motivated novices alongside knowledgeable mentors.27

• Successful museum learning is about making connections—between the new (and young) and the old, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between experiences inside museums and life in the wider world.28