Just wanted to announce that the 2011 Horizon Report>Museum Edition has gone to press (and was officially launched at MCN in Atlanta last week). Follow this link to a page where you can a) download the report, or b) watch a >4 minute video which gives a brief overview of the six technologies featured in this year’s report.

Meanwhile, as always with Horizon Reports, you can view all of the work of the advisory board leading up to the publication of the report (including lots of great resources) on the project wiki:

Thanks to Nancy Proctor and the MCN Program Team for facilitating the launch of this year’s report at MCN 2011 in Atlanta last week.

One of the really cool and exciting things about the rise of the mobile platform is that, by definition, they can be used almost anywhere. This greatly impacts the scale and scope of educational opportunities for organizations looking to get their programs (literally) into the hands of a curious public.

So imagine the opportunities for science organizations looking to encourage self-guided discovery by the public, or adding information from the field into their research databases. In the 19th and early 20th century, science was often conducted by private citizens, whose curiosity (and private funds) allowed them to go out and collect information about the natural world. They kept logs, collected specimens, and wrote papers about what they found. Later in the century, these efforts were concentrated in museums and universities, and the academic perception was that the collection of scientific data was only valid if performed by highly-trained experts.

Now, in the Information Age, access to this data is easier than ever before, and a curious public is eager to learn and contribute their findings back to various bodies of knowledge. With mobile apps, the potential for great warehouses of scientific data, collected from backyards, beaches, mountains, and public parks, is enormous. And even if the app is not designed to collect data, the immediacy of the world means a question can be asked and an answer received in short order.

Back here at BPOC, we’ve begun exploring such apps, and two of our Wounded Warrior interns, Mitchel McCullough and John Donner, and volunteer Sam Trusley, reviewed 14 different citizen science apps. Their descriptions and notes are below the cut. And if you have a favorite app or opinions about the ones listed below, please share it in the comments!

Project Noah

Product Description: Project Noah lets you document the wildlife around you. It is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere. You can post a new spotting, upload photos, tag plants and animals with location data, join missions, and earn patches. The app also contains a field guide to help you identify the wildlife you find.

Maker: Yasser Ansari, Martin Ceperley, Peter Horvath, and Bruno Kruse (with investment support from National Geographic)
Price: Free
Compatibility: Website, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Android
Region covered: Global
Topic: Wildlife

Intern Review: This application strikes me as the most complete in terms of an overall user experience. You must create an account in order to be allowed to use this application. Don’t worry it’s free. There are four sections on the home screen, “my spottings,” “my missions,” “my patches,” and “settings.” The first category is a list of all your observations and photos of wildlife and plants; you can also see all of their locations on a Google map. Like Sci.Spy, there are missions that are created by the application makers and other users for you to fulfill. Once you choose a mission, it appears under the “my missions” section in list format. My favorite feature, and the feature that I think makes this application rewarding and interactive is “my patches.” For each spotting you upload or mission you complete you receive a digital nature page, kind of like being in the boy scouts or girl scouts. I think this feature creates a really nice system of reward and will give users incentive to upload more content.

SciSpy

Product Description: SciSpy is a mobile and web-based app, created by Science Channel, which enlists science enthusiasts to participate in the creation of real science by becoming mobile field observers. Using a free iPhone app or Web-based program, you can upload your photographic observations of the natural world. They’ll be tagged and stamped with date, time and location information that scientists can use to track migrations, changes in the natural environment, seasonal trends and more.

Anyone can view the latest SciSpy field observations on an iPhone or on the Web at http://scispy.com. In order to participate in SciSpy by creating your own observations, commenting on other users’ submission, or flagging content that is inappropriate for the SciSpy community, you must create an account and log in to SciSpy.

Maker: Discovery
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
Region covered: Global
Topic: General wildlife, plants, birds, bugs

Intern Review: Sci.Spy engages the users by setting up “missions” for the user to contribute content. Whether its general wildlife, plans, urban wildlife, birds, or bugs, sci.spy has a category that any average nature enthusiast can add his/her photos and observations. The application also allows you to see popular and recent sightings by other users. It does not have a map feature.

iNaturalist

Product Description: iNaturalist helps you record your observations from the natural world and contribute them to iNaturalist.org, a social network for naturalists.

KEEP TRACK: iNaturalist lets you keep a log of the plants and animals you’ve encountered. Record the cool things you see as you hike around the countryside, then look back at the biodiversity you’ve experienced! The simple act of recording will help you remember and learn about nature.

WHAT’S THIS WEIRD BUG?!: The community can help you identify the things you see outside. Snap a picture with the app, send it to iNat, and you can get help deciding what you saw.

BUILD YOUR LIFE LIST: As you record observations, iNaturalist.org will automatically maintain a life list of all the organisms you’ve seen.

SAVE THE WORLD: Climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction threaten the biodiversity of our planet. You can help scientists, conservationists, and land managers just by recording where and when you observed living things.

Maker: iNaturalist.org
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Region covered: Global
Topic: Plants, Animals

Intern Review: This application pretty much serves as a mobile field journal, where users can jot down their own nature observations by adding a photo and a couple of quick notes. The phone or ipod triangulates the users positions and places a pin on a Google map to mark the observation location. The user does not even have to know the name of the species observed because it will be matched against iNaturalist’s database of species and other user content. This is a useful tool for helping new nature goers learn about interesting animals or plants they encounter.

BirdsEye

Product Description: If you are in search of a particular bird, BirdsEye will show you where it has been observed, and even give you directions. BirdsEye will give you a list of birds seen nearby and a map of birding hotspots for any location in North America (the contiguous 48 states, Canada, and Alaska). The application includes images and audio for the 470 most frequently observed in North America. Additional content is available for more elusive birds—for a total of 847 species.

Maker: Birds in the Hand, LLC and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Price: $19.99
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch
Region covered: Contiguous 48 states, Canada, and Alaska
Topic: Birds

LeafSnap

Product Description: Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves. Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

Maker: Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone and iPad
Region covered: New York City and Washington D.C.
Topic: Plants (trees)

Intern Review: LeafSnap has a lot of nice graphical pictures of all sorts of flora listed in alphabetical order. You just need to click the “browse” feature and a full color list shows up with leaves in alphabetical order according to their name, even including latin species names. One awesome feature is the games component of the application. This feature is a fun way for users to interact with nature. One game called “Green Sweep” gives a set time for users to try and move free-floating leaves into specific boxes with their species names on them. The other three games are matching challenges where users are given a flower, leaf, or fruit name and have to select the correct picture out of 4 different photos.

Zooniverse

Product Description: The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest and most popular citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced and maintained by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

Maker: Citizen Science Alliance
Price: Free
Compatibility: Website, iPhone, Android
Region covered: The cosmos
Topic: Varied; space is a big emphasis

Intern Review: This application is pretty much a continuous questionnaire about pictures of galaxies. It does not seem that engaging or interactive. In the description for the application, it is described as a tool where users can interactively help scientists mine through countless amounts of data. It seems to do nothing but that function.

Encyclopedia of Life

Product Description: EOL is an ambitious project to organize and make freely available via the Internet information about all forms of life on Earth. The first version of the EOL iPhone app allows you to photograph organisms, and have the geotagged photos automatically uploaded to the EOL Flickr Group. EOL will periodically scan this Flickr group for new photos to add to the appropriate pages of the Encyclopedia of Life.

Maker: Natural Guides, LLC
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, internet website
Region covered: planet earth
Topic: every species on the planet

Golden Gate Park Field Guide

Product Description: The Golden Gate Park Field Guide is the go-to mobile guide for navigating San Francisco’s thousand-acre urban oasis. The app highlights the park’s common wildlife, popular attractions, and hidden gems. It also invites users to actively engage with the park and to record and share their experiences.

Maker: Designed by Odopod and developed by SourceN for the California Academy of Sciences
Price: $2.99
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
Region covered: Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
Topic: Plants, wildlife and popular attractions

Botany Buddy

Product Description: From your home screen, get daily updates from Botany Buddy about garden news, information and valuable gardening tips. The Botany Buddy Tree and Shrub Finder is simply the most powerful botanical field guide for Trees, Shrubs, and ground cover ever built. Now with over 9,500 unique images and 2,000 unique species of trees and shrubs, anyone with an interest in botany can easily find and identify the trees and shrubs for their needs.

Maker: AVAI Ventures Inc
Price: $9.99
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Region covered: N/A
Topic: Gardening

Florafolio

Product Description: Florafolio 2 is an easy to use, interactive field guide to native plants of North Eastern North America. This edition focuses on the stunning variety of trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns, vines, and grasses that are indigenous to Eastern Canada and North Eastern United States. Florafolio is the perfect guide for anyone who wants to identify species in the wild or garden with native plants.

• Easily search for plants using Florafolio’s new search engine. In edition to searching for plants by common and Latin name you can now visually search by leaf shape, flower color, wildlife benefit, gardening use and a host of other options.
• Find out which states and provinces each plant is indigenous to though the new native distribution list.
• Easily see what plants attract birds and other wildlife.
• Browse through hundreds of ORIGINAL photos for easy identification and selection.
• Text based descriptions, care tips, growing instructions, and habitat notes are written in useful and approachable terms.

Maker: HoliMoli! Media
Price: $3.99
Compatibility:
Region Covered: North America
Topic: Plants

Nature Find

Product Description: Great nature experiences are available at thousands of places carefully selected by NatureFind with user feedback. Descriptions, interactive maps, photos and other features are included. NatureFind guides you to parks, zoos, botanical gardens, nature centers, natural history museums, trails, wildlife refuges and more. And many offer nature experiences indoors through their displays, movies, exhibits and presentations. This guide also features many of the engaging, informative and exciting events that occur at these places. These events are affordable and available for all age groups. They range from challenging hikes or kayak trips to events for little kids.

Maker: Moonshadow eCommerce, Inc / Sapello, LLC
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
Region covered: United States
Topic: traveling

Intern Review: The application appears to be broken on its “places feature.” After clicking on a specific places feature, the application will not go back to the previous search results. I have tried tapping it multiple times and it remains on the same place page. This application seems broken. The other features: Events, Map, and More appear to work though.

Audubon Field Guide Apps

Product Description: If it crawls, slithers, wiggles, flies, swims, bites, burrows, hops, it can be found in one or more of the Audubon Nature Guides. Great for birdwatching, hiking, and exploring the outdoors, guides feature high quality photographs, range maps, animal sounds and and the ability to create your own lifelists and record sightings. What are you waiting for? Start exploring your world with Audubon Mobile Field Guides. Apps displaying a (+) symbol on our website and on the iTunes Store are Universal Apps. When these apps are purchased, the download comes bundled with both the small screen and large screen versions.

Maker: National Audubon Society
Price: $19.99 for bundled apps, $14.99 for single apps on iphone/ipad, $9.99 for Android app
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android, HP Touchpad
Region covered: North America and specific regions (Florida, California, New England, Texas, Desert Southwest), African Wildlife
Topic: Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, Fish, Flowers, Trees, Amphibians, Insects

WildObs Observer

Product Description: This Wildlife Observation app makes it very easy for you to report your sightings and identify species, and your observations show up on National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Watch website. It’s one of the only apps that allows you to report sightings without having a photo and it also tags your location if you so desire.

Maker: Neukadye
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android
Region covered: North America and UK
Topic: All Wildlife

Intern Review: This application does a nice job of creating a community around nature observations with features under the “Wildlife” heading such as Community: Featured Encounters, where particularly well documented encounters posted by users are featured, and Community: Recent Encounters, where recent nature encounters by users are posted. There are also helpful tools for locating nearby species under the “species” heading. An account does have to be created to run this application.

Trailhead

Product Description: Powered by EveryTrail.com, Trailhead finds trails, hikes, bike routes and more based on your location. You can even search by activity and length. Whether you’ve selected an existing trip or started a new one, Trailhead tracks your route, distance, speed and elevation in real-time. When you’re done exploring, you can post your trip to Facebook, Twitter or EveryTrail.com.

• Search from over 300,000 trails, hikes and bike routes.
• Find trips by activity, length and location
• Track your route with a real-time interactive map via GPS
• View your distance, speed, elevation and more
• Post photos taken on your trip
• Share your trip to Facebook, Twitter and EveryTrail.com
• Find outdoor events in your area with Planet Explore

Maker: The North Face
Price: Free
Compatibility: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
Region covered: North America
Topic: Trails

So as we pursue mobile projects that showcase the great variety of attractions within the Park (80+ destinations and 50+ events each day), that objective translated into the re-use and re-purposing of content. After all we want to solve the common problems that visitors face (like getting lost!) using a low-cost approach and ship it fast.

The first app that we created was the Balboa Park iPhone app, a branded app that works on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. By featuring content fed directly from the Balboa Park website via RSS feeds (organization listings, locations data, event instances, etc.) we spend very little time maintaining the app. If it’s right on the website, it’s right on the app, and we know we’re providing visitors with up-to-date info at their fingertips. We are also launching some kiosks around the park that use the same feed.

While we had a great response to our first iPhone app, we knew we weren’t meeting all the needs of our visitors. We then wanted to focus on two objectives:

• Provide a product for the increasing audience of Android users. Over the last year, we saw the share of mobile traffic to Balboapark.org from Android devices grow to more than 29% of mobile traffic (mobile traffic is 10% of total traffic).

• Provide better navigation tools. While our first app had a detailed Google map, people were still having trouble finding the right routes to their destinations.

A few months ago we began working with the Meridian App team— the same developers that helped us launch our first iPhone app—to build a multi-platform Balboa Park guide for both iOS and Android devices. Our content would be integrated into the Meridian platform, which would have guides to other destinations such as the Portland Art Museum and had a strong emphasis on turn-by-turn navigation. By joining this common platform instead of branding our own app, we would also minimize our expenses while enjoying this advanced functionality and other features that the Meridian team would continue to add.

Plus it would be free for our visitors to download. As we learned from our first release, people may buy $4 lattes but they care about their dollars when it comes to apps.

Yesterday we released the Balboa Park guide on Meridian.

Now, if you want to find your way from the Air & Space Museum to the San Diego Zoo, or from the Prado Restaurant to the Museum of Man, you can find your way, step-by-step. Next steps will include adding location-aware audio and video content.

The Meridian app is available for free through the Android Market and the App Store.  You can start the process of building your own app here: http://www.meridianapps.com/

Since early last Spring I’ve been working as Co-PI, with Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium on the latest incarnation of the 2010 Horizon Report–the first-ever Museum Edition.  This report would not have been possible without the hard work of an enthusiastic and engaged Advisory Board (see pg. 34 of the PDF for some familiar names).  Below is the formal announcement of the report.

The report has been released under a Creative Commons license to encourage broad distribution, and I encourage you to send electronic copies to your colleagues.

The report itself is only 324K, so it should be easy to email.  It is also accessible via download from the NMC website at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report-Museum.pdf

Announcement:

The Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), the new museum-focused branch of the New Media Consortium (NMC) is pleased to announce the release of the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition!

This watershed edition of the annual Horizon Report series is the first of a new annual series that MIDEA will produce in partnership with the NMC. Each edition will consider emerging technology as they may be uniquely applied in museum settings — and the unique constraints and opportunities that each affords.

The new report identifies and describes six emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on museum education and interpretation over the next five years. Also included are the major trends driving and challenges impeding their adoption. Each highlighted technology is examined from a practitioner’s perspective, and the discussions include sections on relevance to museum education and interpretation, benchmark projects incorporating the technologies, and key readings intended to allow interested readers to learn much more.

The new museum report is the latest addition to the globally recognized Horizon Project, which for nearly a decade has document emerging technology opportunities for formal education. More than 350,000 copies of previous Horizon Reports have been downloaded from the NMC website, and the readership of the overall series is estimated at more than 600,000 worldwide, spanning some 70 countries.

The report is designed to spark discussion among museum leaders, practitioners, and staff about how cultural institutions might think about emerging technology and is intended to be both brief and informative. We hope it will be of interest, and we welcome your comments.

The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition was produced with the gracious support of the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation.

* Download the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition here: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Museum.pdf

* Learn more about the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition here: http://midea.nmc.org/2010/09/hz10mu-released/

We got a taste of what “no email” means right before we switched over when our phone vendor goofed and our phone and email access were down for a day. Since we hosted our own email server, that meant not only that people who called our office got nada, but that we had no access to email and no way of telling people that we weren’t reading the email. Not good.

Hopefully, that won’t happen again. And that’s really not why I started this ramble today.

Two interesting things emerged from this excercise.

1. All staff under the age of 40 have smartphones and wanted their work email to sync with their smartphones. (Over staff over 40 with smartphones, half said, “sync,” half said “I’m okay with relying on my computer”.) Suggests that whatever we’re doing with smartphones, we might want to do more. Worrying about webpages for computer browsers may go the way of the fax–it’ll still be used, but won’t be the significant medium. Instead,  we finally have a ubiquitous computing device that everyone seems to have, and seems to use as functional extensions of the brain and fingers.

2. The Law of Unintended Consequences. Did I mention that we have a lousy, slow internet connection? Imagine what happened when our small office now had to download/send all email via an external, hosted server. Yup. The coup de grace. Next step will be to add some actual bandwidth. Or move us all to smartphones.

“I never take audio guides.  I can’t stand them!”

I love that phrase.  I think it encapsulates everything museums have got wrong with mobile interpretation.  I’ve now heard it so often that I’ve resigned myself to producing a polite smile each time I hear it; I’m rarely able to summon the strength to follow it up with an inquiry as to the background behind such a life-changing decision.

That’s now though.  Before, I use to want to explode:

“What do you mean you can’t stand audio guides?  It’s just a piece of hardware.  You realise that the content on them is different at each museum?

Yes, I understand that it was particularly dull the way the director droned on about the uniqueness of Seurat’s painting technique on the last one, and I’m really sorry you paid extra for it, but I promise he won’t be there next time!

And be reasonable.  Did you stop going to the cinema after you watched Titanic?  No, exactly. An audio guide, like the cinema, is just a platform.  I agree that the content on these things can be disappointing, but that’s no reason to give-up on the platform itself.”

Recently though, I realised this kind of rant is pointless.  Despite the (I hope) logic of such outbursts, I’ve come to believe that it’s not the visitor’s fault that they can’t stand audio guides. They’re actually the victims in all this; the museums are the culprits.

Let me explain how I see it.  (For simplicity, I’m adopting the term audio guide to refer to all type of audio-multimedia-GPS-RFID-QR-pod-phone guides etc).

A visitor arrives at a museum and, before breaching the gallery threshold, is obliged into an early decision.  “Would you like to take the audio guide?” the museum asks.

It seems like a simple question.  But if we stop and look at this from the visitor’s perspective – a reasonable action considering audio guides are a visitor service – they’re probably asking themself:

“Well, why in the devil is there an audio guide, and why should I take it?  Especially if they want me to pay extra for it!”

It was this museum-visitor exchange that became a major museum bug-bear while traveling.  Eventually, when a museum asked whether I wanted the audio guide, I’d ask why I should want it.  When this question was not by a shrug, my part of the exchange developed something like:

•  “Interesting. It includes the Maharaja, the Maharini, the Prince, and the Princess talking about what its like to live in the Fort?  And the Queen Mother too?!  Fantastic, that sounds like fun!

•  There’s not a single label anywhere?! So, if I want to know why the Roman’s built this city in North Jordan, and why its still so well preserved, I’ll need the audio guide, right?

•  [Speaking clearly].  Are there any labels in English? iie?  But the audio guide is in English?  Wonderful.  Then I’d love one please.  Arigato gozaimashita.

•  [As someone hands it to me as I enter].  Oh, it’s integral to the experience.  Ok, thank you.”

Without such an exchange, having not yet been into the galleries, I don’t believe that I, nor any other visitor, would have the necessary information with which to make an informed decision about whether to take the audio guide.

At the Handheld Conference Online last week, when asked where they have taken a great audio tour, Alcatraz, a museum whose audio guide is integral to the experience and given without prompting to every visitor, was one of the most popular answers.  I personally found that interesting because when someone tells me they hate audio guides, I think to myself, “send them to Alcatraz!”  Its not that I’m advocating jail time for audio guide skeptics – the prison system would probably implode just at the prospect of so many new inmates.   And nor is it because the Alcatraz audio guide delivers such an engaging experience.

Moreover, I’m thinking; send them to Alcatraz, and I bet they take the audio guide.  Because, in fact, I don’t believe that these people are genuinely ‘anti-audio guides’ per say.  Moreover, after some bad experiences – and to be honest, there are enough bad audio guide experiences floating around for this to have occurred – they are quite rightly fed-up of having uninformed decisions to take the audio guide backfire on them.  So now they’ve decided it’s simple not worth the risk, nor the oft-require financial investment, and swear never to take one again.

But at Alcatraz, by distributing the audio guide to all visitors by default, the museum is ‘telling’ visitors that they need the audio guide: they aren’t leaving the visitor to guess whether they need it or not.

I don’t use this example to advocate the free and universal distribution of audio guides at all museums.  Audio guides most certainly are not a universal pre-requisite for all museum experiences.  And just distributing them free doesn’t actually provide much information to visitors as to whether they are useful.  Rather, I use this example to highlight where a museum is taking the initiative in helping the visitor decide whether or not to take the audio guide.  By contrast, if we provide no information, and simply advertise to visitors that ‘audio guides are available’, we’re actually encouraging visitors to draw on personal notions of whether they like audio guides in order to decide whether to take it or not.

And from my experience, this is what we’re doing.  I’ve illustrated this post with a selection of images of audio guide distribution desks and marketing materials, but this was barely a selection: I find these to be the norm.  Museums rarely provide much information that tells visitors why there is an audio guide, or why they might want to take it.  At my most cynical, I’d say this is sometimes because a lot of museums aren’t too certain themselves, (or because they don’t want to tell visitors that the audio guide was installed first and foremost as a risk-free opportunity to make money), but I’ll save that for another day.

It is ironic that within the museum tech. community we agree that ‘it’s not about the technology’.  Yet, with audio guides, we make visitors opt to take them or not based solely on the technology.

For years now audio guides have been advertised simply as the hardware, and in doing so, we’ve implicitly reinforced the idea that the experience these technologies deliver is similar at each site.  We can’t therefore now blame the visitor if they’ve concluded that they don’t like audio guides, whatever the site.

If someone asks if you want to go to the cinema, before you agree, you ask “what’s showing?”

Like the cinema, the audio guides itself is not, and should not be presented as, the deal clincher.  I know that ‘sexy’ technologies like multimedia tours, and IPodTouches/IPhones currently act as deal clinchers, but like an I-Max, after a couple of experiences, I’m sure the novelty will wear off.  And then what?  Find a new sexy technology in which to package the audio guide?  Or give visitors the information that will help them see beyond the technology, and so make an informed decision on whether its offering the type of experience they’ll enjoy?

Whilst the techie device stuff is absolutely fascinating and I love it, I think we need to dedicate more attention to the latter.  Its here, rather than the technology itself, that I believe we’ve the greatest ground to make up!

This post is an adaptation of a presentation I delivered at AAM conference 2009, entitled “Visitors just want to know ‘why?’” available on SlideShare at  http://tr.im/m5Gt

THE HARDWARE & WIRELESS NETWORKS
The technology for the Stedelijk audio guide was developed by the Dutch electronics company, Philips, and is probably best described as a closed-circuit short wave radio broadcasting system.  Essentially, the audio output of an analogue playback tape recorder served as the broadcast station, and transmission was via a loop aerial.  The audio would be broadcast through the aerial and picked up by listeners/visitors through a portable radio receiver with headphones, when inside the loop.

The system was actually developed for cinemas as a service to the hard-of-hearing.  (This is why the news-footage commentator opens with the quip: “This is not a meeting for the hard-of-hearing.”)  In cinemas the loop aerial would be installed around designated seats within a theatre hall.  Those visitors with hearing difficulties could request a receiver and headphones, and thus receive a personal and amplified version of the movie’s soundtrack when seated in one of the designated seats.

The Stedelijk Museum adopted an identical installation save that the loop-aerial was installed into the skirting board around the outside of the galleries.  This created a larger audio-capture zone, and so was more suited for group visits around a museum, rather than just an individual.

I think it’s interesting here to emphasise the fact that already in 1952 museums were using wireless networks for the delivery of content to visitors.  Although the difficulty of creating a network that provided coverage throughout a museum eventually led to these systems’ demise, the practice has today been resurrected, only that radio has been substituted by WIFI.  Hopefully we’re now better equipped to get over the same reception issues…

And on the hardware front, there’s mileage too in recognising that audio guides derived from a forefather of today’s Audio Induction Loop.  The past fifty years has seen a revolution in audio amplification for the hard-of-hearing: whereas in the 1950s, institutions – like the cinema – provided the hardware and installed the network, now they need only provide the network, i.e. the Audio Induction Loop.  That’s because the hard-of-hearing own their own hardware, a hearing aid, which they use everyday of their life. I think this is a fascinating ‘echo’ for museums today, as we look to move away from owning and distributing handheld guides, preferring instead for visitors to use their cell phones to receive content from a museum-provided, wireless internet network.

WHY
Discovering how the system worked was the easy part: uncovering ‘why’ the museum decided to install it was a little more difficult. (Does that sounds familiar?)  Whilst I found no single source in the Stedelijk Museum archive that answered the question, I’ve deduced the following:

The system was launched for a high-profile temporary exhibition entitled ‘Vermeer: Real or Fake’.  Its function was to provide foreign language tours to visitors.  Since the audio was broadcast silently into the galleries – all visitors with an audio guide would receive/hear the identical audio simultaneously – the foreign language ‘tours’ had to be staggered throughout the day: the technology did not allow them to be run concurrently, (I’ll get onto multi-frequency broadcasts in my next post).  The start of each tour would be announced over the public address system.  And I never found out if visitors were charged extra for taking the tour, though the news footage suggest they were not.

In terms of the visitor service this system provided, arguably, it provided few benefits over a trained docent: visitors still had to arrive at the museum at a pre-determined time to take the tour, and many visitors, like today, expressed a preference for docent over recorded lecture. As the news footage observes however, it did allow the silent peace of the galleries to be preserved. (I’m biting my tongue!)

But I would position this audio guide as about more than just its function: it was also about an ambition to re-conceive the visitor’s relationship with the museum, an ambition which continues today as we explore the potential of IPhone applications and of social networking principles within the gallery space.  In the 1950s at the Stedelijk Museum, the driving force was Willem Sandberg, director of the museum from 1945 to 1968, and internationally recognised for his contribution to many of today’s ‘modern’ museum practices.  As James Bradburne wrote in the foreword to my book:

‘Willem Sandburg, … , who pioneered the first museum audio tour, also pioneered unjustified text (flush left, with equal word spacing), which he believed challenged convention and had important social overtones.  Sandburg was among the first to recognize the importance of the visitor’s as well as the museum’s voice, and to argue that they consist of a dialogue, and not a ‘top-down’ lecture.  Along with Marshall McLuhan, Sandburg was among the first to champion the ways in which the museum had to transform itself – long before the technology was available to do so.”

Other museum practices for which Sandburg deserves credit for pioneering include non-chronological hangs and the museum cafes: for the latter, gallery space was actually reclaimed!

Sandburg’s ideas caused a stir among the museum community, and the audio guide was no different.  Its launch coincided with the ICOM international conference, held in Amsterdam that year, and it’s ‘stir’ was felt internationally, and in few places more so that at American Museum of Natural History in New York, who promptly deciding to develop a similar system.  One of Sandburg’s contemporaries (while admittedly referring to a subsequent installation of the audio guide) enthused:

“The possibilities of this device are so great that in the future short wave lectures cannot be ignored by any museum.  In the future shortwave lectures discussing individual works of art will be installed in such a way that they can be heard by any visitor, at will.”

Above all, I believe that it was the innovation and potential embodied within the audio guide that best explains why the Stedelijk Museum ‘invented’ it.  Whilst one could claim that what was achieved by the system could have been achieved through trained docents, this is too narrow a perspective.  After all, this innovation went on to spawn what was arguably the most successful museum technology of the 20th century, and one of the most exciting of the early 21st century.

I’ve posted more images of the Stedelijk Museum audio guide, together with photos of other – as yet unsorted – handheld guide installations from around the world, onto Flickr.  See http://tr.im/lFWO

Loïc.

TRANSLATION OF DUTCH FILM COMMENTARY
‘This is not a meeting for the hard-of-hearing.  Rather these people are visitors of the Amsterdam Stedelijk museum, who are being guided in a special, modern way.  Via a hearing-aid/listening-device, they are given explanations and are guided to the different artworks.  The spoken text is recorded in various different languages onto a so-called ‘tape-recorder’.

[French language audio]

The audio from the magnetic tape goes via an amplifier to a ring-wire/antenna that is located along the baseboard/skirting of the galleries. The broadcast that comes from the ring-wire, makes it possible to pick-up the spoken word through a simple hearing aid with built in reel/spool, without disturbing the peace in the museum.

The earplugs are being carefully disinfected every time after use. Every visitor now receives such a device, and follows via the ingenious system the directions and indication of an invisible guide.

[Voice of guide; "Here we are standing in front of one of the incredulous falsifications by 'van Megeren' of Vermeer. The holes in the canvas are imputed to the forceful attempts by van Megeren to give the canvas an 'old' look. And if you all look to the right, at the original drawing of van Megeren, you will also see that there is great similarity between this head and that of the Christ-figure in the so-called Vermeer. And now we move on to the next example."]

This dutch scoop in this way of guiding, has generated interest abroad.”