Off the 'Cuff

I’ve been doing walking tours of Gastown, Chinatown, and the Downtown Eastside for the last five years. There’s something almost magical about taking people outside of the confines of a museum and into the “real” world; people interact differently with buildings, streets and crowds than they do with carefully-crafted signage and objects mounted behind glass. A great deal of it has to do with the sense of place that geography can impose on us.

It’s because of this idea of a sense of place that I love the idea of geotagging museum content. What is geotagging? Basically, noting accurate location data for objects, photos and ideas: THIS is connected with HERE. It’s especially exciting when one considers the possibilities associated with the novel modes of presentation and interaction this could allow with a museum collection. (Imagine being able to roam the city with your iPhone and walk the old police beats, find photos in our collection of the area you’re in, read old police reports, etc.)

In December of 2007, I had a chance to visit the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia–I wish I’d known at the time about all the interesting things they were up to. I stumbled upon these two interesting links in one of their blogs just a few weeks ago:

The first article discusses how geotagging may serve to turn the traditional museum inside-out; instead of being central repositories of artifacts, effective use of location information gives a museum the opportunity to

• share authority and interpretation
• repatriate ’stolen’ museum objects virtually rather than physically
• engage communities in new ways far away from our museum sites
• re-contextualise objects and collection in time and place
• allow for the recombination of objects from one museum with another to restore temporal and spatial relevance to groups of objects

For a museum like ours with very location-specific material (every officer has a patrol area, every crime has a scene) I expect that this will be something we become very involved with over the next few years. This sort of initiative may be necessary for us if we are to continue to grow at the pace we have been; we are already outgrowing our space so we have two choices: add additional space, or do more outside our space. Current and up-and-coming technologies will be able to help push our collection and interpretation outside our walls over the next few years.

Imagine being able to collect and preserve, just as we do now, but also being able to expand ourselves into the streets, into the homes and even into the spaces our objects are about. I’ve long said that some museums are really bad at explaining what makes their stories so compelling; you can’t get much more compelling than when something relates back to your exact, current location.

The second article on the Powerhouse blog goes into significant detail about a project where the Powerhouse Museum recently uploaded some of their historical images to the popular photo-sharing website Flickr. In only a few months, they’ve already noticed that the public has interacted significantly with that collection, most notably in new and interesting ways, some of which are not possible with traditional modes of archival access. Those ways include:

1. Viewing
2. Favouriting (”bookmarking”)
3. Friending (”I am interested in seeing more/connect with me”)
4. Social commenting (”here I am”)
5. Tagging (”let me help”)
6. Image content tagging (”here’s something interesting”)
7. Content commenting (”let me tell you more about this”)
8. Content embedding (”I’ve stuck this on my site/blog/profile”)
9. Content remixing and connecting (”here’s my images that fit with yours”)

We’ve been working hard to digitize our own photographic collection; over 15,000 images detailing events whose scope ranges from broadly historic to singularly personal are already in digital format. Additionally, we’ve just applied for funding to digitize our object collection as well–taking high quality photographs to document our three dimensional objects as well. With all that content in ready, digital format, we’ll be ready to take the next step–to turn this museum inside-out.

Being a small museum–with a forever-tight budget–we will never be able to invest the sort of time, energy or technology that a large museum could. Running lean, though, makes it easier to respond to changing conditions. We’re nimble, we’re not afraid to try new things–and there are just so many new things to try!

Tags:   digitization · flickr · geotaggingNo Comments