One of our first completed caches

A few weeks ago, we went out with a GPS device (Global Positioning System) and a few magnetic key boxes, hiding them around the city. This marked the start of our participation in a little sport/hobby called geocaching.

What is geocaching? According to Wikipedia:

Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook. Larger containers can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is most often described as a “game of high-tech hide and seek”, sharing many aspects with orienteering, treasure-hunting, and waymarking.

Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. As of February 8, 2010, there are over 984,900 active geocaches over the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching

Museums have been involved with the geocaching movement for awhile. Popular museum blog Museums 2.0 had a great post on geocaching a year-and-a-half ago. In fact, thanks to the recent introduction GPS-enabled cell phones, this activity is suddenly becoming much more approachable for the general public and geocaching, as well as other location-based activities, are likely to explode in popularity.

A quick search suggests that most Canadian museums have caches hidden close by, whether they know it or not; some, like the nearby Port Moody Station Museum have even been gracious enough to permit them on their property.

These three caches were placed in late January

So what about the caches we hid? (Pictures are on the right; click on the image for a closer look.)

Each our caches has been placed near a historical location in the city, and each includes information about the location. Our first three spots? A strip club with a racy history, a Chinatown alley that was once a bustling center of vice and a location with a creepy past–our own building. A list of our caches is available on the Geocaching website, but you won’t get to see the coordinates unless you sign up to become a geocacher yourself. Already, in just a few weeks, our three caches have been found almost 100 times!

We chose to use magnetic key boxes because they’re easiest to hide in an urban environment, although they have two important drawbacks: they’re not waterproof, and they don’t leave much room for those who find them to leave items for trade. We’ll be re-evaluating our cache containers for the next round of hides.

The initial contents of our first caches

As with any group, we didn’t want to get involved in something without understanding the expectations of the community; Anthony Floyd (Aerodoq on geocaching.com) has provided invaluable assistance in helping us learn what’s good practice and how to be an active participant in that community. We’re also glad we found the BC Geocaching Association.

One of the most important lessons was that commercial messages are strictly not allowed. It might be tempting to explicitly market our museum through our (or others’) geocaches, but this always instead works against you. Our caches only make a brief mention of the museum, just to point out that we placed it. Instead, we see them more as an educational tool: those who already geocache get introduced to places and pieces of history in a way they enjoy, and (hopefully) those who are interested in history will learn about this project and develop their own interest in geocaching. (It really is a fun activity!)

Each of our caches contains history info about its location

Mostly, we’re just excited for the possibilities that our involvement can contribute in a significant way to building a real sense of place. Just in a few weeks of searching for geocaches ourselves, we’ve already discovered gorgeous vistas, hidden treasures and special little places we would have never found without a little encouragement. Hopefully, the caches we’re placing will help encourage people to feel a deeper connection with the past lives of the places they frequent, but rarely think about.

We look forward to “losing” our keys (or much bigger things) soon.

Want to start geocaching, yourself? Visit the Geocaching website to sign up for a free account. Also, if you live in British Columbia, be sure to check out the BC Geocaching Association; they do great work spreading the word about learning opportunities, special events and more. Their memberships are also free.

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!