On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector's use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations. The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston. Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL's experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).

After lunch, Peter Lawther, the Senior Online Marketing Executive at the National Media Museum in Bradford, outlined the opportunities and pitfalls of publishing photographs on the Flickr Commons. In brief, the upsides were a huge increase in reach and engagement (they even got a contribution of a new set of historical photographs after a member of the public recognised the style as being the same as some old prints he found in his attic), as well as marketing potential due to the fact that their collections were covered by both the press and bloggers. The only real downside identified was that it can impact on revenue from picture library purchases, although several delegates pointed out that similar experiments have not shown a decrease in revenue as a consequence. You can see all of the National Media Museum's contributions on their Flickr pool. Then there was a great talk from Mia Ridge, Senior Web Developer at the Science Museum in which she challenged museums to think deeply about how and why they wanted to engage in dialogue with their audiences, and leveled the criticism that all too often museums ask for comments, and then just leave the room. She pointed out that in the same way a museum is no longer constrained by its physical venue, its online presence is no longer constrained by its domain name: instead discussion and opinions are spread around the net, and organisations need to have an appropriate representation there too. Finally, she mentioned an exciting project that the Science Museum is planning to launch in conjunction with a new exhibition: the Cosmos & Culture Mashup. In accordance with Rufus Pollock's Many Minds Principle, which states "The Coolest Thing To Do With Your Data Will Be Thought of By Someone Else", she plans to release the raw information about collection objects using a standard API. This would then allow visitors to create new interpretations, new visualisations and to merge the data with external sources of information. You can read more about the mashup project in her blog post. Finally, the day ended with presentations from the British Museum. Firstly Patricia Wheatley, Head of Broadcasting outlined what the BM is doing with film and broadcast, including partnerships with the BBC and other organisations, as well as custom programming such as the trailer for the Hadrian exhibition. She also mooted the idea of cross-museum collaboration to fund more in-depth programming. Then it was over to Matthew Cock, Head of Web, to discuss the need to engage with specific audiences such as disabled people. Firstly he mentioned a partnership project with Frank Barnes School in which they commissioned British Sign Language videos by children. Then he talked about how video and multimedia, often seen as the bug-bears of accessible websites, can actually be a huge advantage to certain classes of disabled user. For example, in a study in conjunction with the Rix Centre they found that for people with learning difficulties video content created focus and atmosphere, while captioning re-enforced ideas. He urged any museum that is pioneering accessible digital media to enter the Jodi Awards. All in all, it was an extremely interesting and thought-provoking day. I look forward to seeing how things develop as cultural institutions raise the bar in terms of engaging online audiences.