symbols, the details pop up. Presented to the 27th Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology,
Prague, August 2000
Stephen Toney
Systems Planning
2205 Gabriel Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89119 USA
toney@systemsplanning.com
http://www.systemsplanning.com
Copyright © 2000 Systems Planning
Museums, an integral part of the urban landscape, are adding websites to supplement their physical sites. The web is seen as a low-cost opportunity to further museums' goals of providing cultural, educational, and recreational resources to a much wider audience than will ever visit the museum in person. This paper outlines the issues concerned with creating a web presence for a museum and integrating it into the "cyber landscape."
Museums are one of the most visible components of a city's cultural life. Many tourists visit museums only on vacation but never visit museums at home. In other words, museums are part of the "landscape" of the tourists' destination.
But on the Internet, a museum can be part of the destination of many visitors, not just of those travelling to the city. This is one of the main forces that is driving museums of all kinds to develop their presence in the "cyber landscape," meaning the city as seen through the World Wide Web.
What is a museum? With some exceptions, it is a repository of physical objects collected for the purpose of exhibiting them for cultural, educational, or recreational purposes. Thus a museum's website, if it is to be meaningful to the mission, must derive from the museum's object collection. In other words, a museum website without pictures and information about the objects is just a brochure, and no one visits a museum to read its brochure. "Brochure" websites do have some purpose in helping visitors who plan to visit in person, but do not affect the cyber landscape.
The presentation of collections information (the museum's catalog) -- as opposed to an online brochure -- permits visitors to the city's cyber landscape to enjoy and learn from the museum without a personal visit.
Most museums are struggling with how to publish their catalogs online, providing data and images about the collection. While this has some value, especially to scholars, it is of little value to the general public. The public does not care about data by itself, or even about objects, by and large. Instead, they want to understand the significance of the objects as part of a context, such as the objects' place in history, or in the development of art. In the words of one museum philosopher*,
The question isn't "What?", it's "So what?"
("So what?" is an Americanism meaning "What is the significance of what you just told me?")
The same philosopher (op. cit.) also discussed the dreaded search field, the empty box where you are supposed to type terms you want to search on. But if you have no idea what's in the collection, or what it might mean to you, how do you know what terms will provide results that will interest you? In other words, the search box is a fine tool for scholars, but much less so for the general public.
Of course this is true not just for museums but for any website visited by the public.
Combining these two insights, what do we have? We have the need to tell stories about the objects, or even better, to let the objects tell their own stories. One of the most powerful works in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Winslow Homer's "The Cotton Pickers." The curatorial comments on this work say (in part) "two powerful and majestic women fill the canvas and dominate the composition." Doesn't this make you want to know more about this scene?
This story orientation is the current trend in museum websites, just as it is in museum exhibitions, their physical counterparts.
Just as Homer's cotton pickers dominate their landscape, the museum that tells important and interesting stories will dominate its landscape, especially in cyberspace.
Once we have stories to present, we need a way to let people know they exist. For this the search field is completely inadequate; instead we need to present website visitors with suggestions, choices, opportunities -- probably in some sort of hierarchically classified manner.
We believe it is not enough for city websites to be simply a collection of links, as so many are. Instead, cities should be providing directories to their resources that combine data about museums, libraries, art galleries, business groups, tourism offices, and other resources.
In addition, just like museums, cities should be telling their stories to the public, especially to potential visitors. This means integrating information from a variety of sources into a cohesive structure that captures the imagination. For example, the story of a city's early settlement could be made interesting through combining data and pictures from its museums, its public records office, its archives, and its local historical societies.
Our MWebtm product was developed to solve the problems discussed above. First, because MWeb integrates data from any source, it provides ways to integrate the museum collection and other data resources of its community. Because MWeb integrates resources, it can provide a cyber "landscape" for an entire city -- its museums, its libraries, its architecture and public spaces.
The next slide shows how MWeb can integrate data from any source (the data shown is fictional). Numerous databases about Prague could be combined, and a search on "Dvorak" could display the integrated results in an interesting way. As the user moves the mouse over the symbols, the details pop up.
When the details are clicked on, the contributing webpage is shown, which can be bookmarked or printed. (The illustration shows several sets of details; in reality only one at a time would show.)
MWeb, although it provides traditional searching, also provides a means for users to find information by clicking on terms arranged in a hierarchy. The same interface can be used within a museum website to find "stories" about objects, or the objects themselves.
MWeb is not intended to replace the databases used by museums and agencies. Instead, the data to be published is reformatted to improve integrated searching. The diagram below shows the relationships between MWeb and the internal databases.
Our orientation for all systems development is that the user is paramount in all design and system decisions. This results in systems with the characteristics of:
MWeb uses several techniques to improve response time, which is essential to a satisfying user experience:
For more detail on MWeb techniques, see
We have seen that museums can be part of a city's cyber landscape, just as they are of its physical landscape. This raises the question of whether there is a parallel to city planning on the web? For example, should cities try to integrate their Web presence in any way? Should they try to make sure traffic flows smoothly? Should they worry about growth potential? Should they try to approve the appearance of the websites that make up the cyber landscape?
Just as a city's cultural heritage is preserved and enhanced by urban planning, we believe that cyber urban planning can enhance the cultural heritage of the city on the Web. If this view were to become prevalent, museums would need to work with cyber planners to ensure they are in a good "location," that traffic could reach them, and that they were an ornament to the cyber landscape.