Tag Archives: digital

Going digital: Reading Museum and the MERL team up

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The digital world is not coming, it is already here.

In fact, it has been here for some time. Online shopping is king, Google knows where you live, almost everyone has a smartphone and the President-elect speaks primarily through Twitter.

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But being able to use smartphones, graphic software, websites, social media, apps, tablets, Windows, Macs and everything else remains a steep learning curve for many. Morevoer, digital is not simply simply technology but how we have adapted to these technologies, touching on issues such as online privacy, piracy, open data, hacking and entirely new forms of communication.

And if you think it’s hard keeping up with today’s world on a personal level, imagine how difficult it is to keep entire institutions such as museums up to date.

The job is made easier by how museums are forward-looking, aim to reflect contemporary as well as past society and are keen to adapt new technologies to encourage conversation, learning and discovery. We want to be using digital technologies in marketing, displays and education. We want to be relevant and cutting-edge.

The problem is how to get there.

The Science Museum Lates are a perfect case study of how we can engage new audiences with digital technologies.

The Science Museum Lates are a perfect case study of how we can engage new audiences with digital technologies.

Getting there is the aim of #Reading: Town and Country, a joint project between Reading Museum and the Museum of English Rural Life funded by Arts Council England. Reading is lucky to have two museums which cover such a broad swathe of history and culture: Reading Museum for the town, and the Museum of English Rural Life for the country. Together, we will make the best of most museum’s areas of expertise to better serve Reading’s communities in new, digital ways.

The overview of the project is deceptively simple: to take stock of how we use digital technologies currently and the skills of our staff; to then train staff in the digital areas with most potential; and finally to put those skills to use in shared projects between the two museums.

But this is new ground for us. We need to open the eyes of our colleagues to the potential of digital for our work through case studies from the wider sector. We need to appreciate that everyone has different needs and expectations; some simply need to know how to use Twitter, while others may be interested in how we could use 3D-printing and Virtual Reality. We need to be prepared to thoroughly review our institutional plans and strategies, and ensure they take digital opportunities and realities into account. Above all, we need to make sure that our audiences benefit.

The project will tie the MERL and Reading Museum closer together.

The project will tie the MERL and Reading Museum closer together.

We are not starting from ground zero, however. Both museums of course have websites, are on social media and have online object databases. Both museums, however, are aware that to remain relevant to our communities we need to be incorporating new technologies into what we do, to be using social media effectively and ensure our systems are keeping pace.

What this means for our visitors is a step-change in how the museum operates to take account of how the world is changing. It means exciting new ways for you to get involved and to learn new things.

What this means for staff is an exciting opportunity to learn new skills, use new technology and transform how we operate both internally and for our audiences.

You can keep up with what we do on our blog, as well as by keeping a close eye on Reading Museum’s and the MERL’s social media accounts!

Reading Museum Twitter

Reading Museum Facebook

The MERL Twitter

The MERL Facebook

@AdamKoszary

How we went viral: a good story, good luck and good friends

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Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer.

It all started with a story that, five or ten years ago, would have remained within the four walls of the museum and gone no further: our assistant curator found a dead mouse in a Victorian mouse trap.

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The trap was behind a glass case in our store; it was not baited and it was not on display. And out of the thousands of tasty objects the mouse could have chosen to call both home and dinner, it zoned in on one of the few objects designed to kill it.

As a humane trap, the mouse is meant to be found and then released. Tragically, our mouse would have died a lonely death. Since we check our collection for pests regularly, and don’t expect our traps to be achieving their original purpose, this mouse was simply unlucky to get trapped in a time-frame between check-ups.

We thought the story was interesting and posted about it on our blog and Tumblr. Fast forward five days and it has become global, viral news.

See our other blog post for more information about the trap and an update on what we’re doing with the mouse.

Interest in our Tumblr spiked, and then rapidly returned to normal levels.

And we’re not exaggerating.

Since the original blog post, we have been interviewed by the BBC and the Canadian public radio broadcaster CBC. After featuring on BuzzFeed the story of our mouse rippled throughout the internet, ending up on The Daily Mail website, ABC, The Huffington Post, I F***ing Love Science and more. We trended on Tumblr, where our post has over 3,000 notes, and have been chosen as a feature of their History Spotlight category. We made the front page of Reddit, and our imgur gallery has been viewed 374,552 times. Our blog has had 67,521 views since the original post, more than the past two years put together.

Not bad for our debut on BuzzFeed.

Not bad for our BuzzFeed debut.

We thought everything had died down by Sunday, but then news started trickling in that we were trending on Facebook across the world. And not only that, but that we were trending higher than the SuperBowl, North Korea and…Beyonce:

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Suffice to say, we've never had it so good on Facebook.

Suffice to say, we’ve never had it so good on Facebook.

So what was the viral timeline of events? It all started with our original blog post, which was also cross-posted to Tumblr, and from there:

Our mouse made the 'front page of the internet', better known as Reddit.

Our mouse made the ‘front page of the internet’, better known as Reddit.

Needless to say, there does not seem to be one recipe for going viral. What seems essential, however, is recognising when you have a good story, writing it well and having nice pictures.

From there it took getting our story in front of the right person – in this case Buzzfeed’s Hayley Campbell – and then watching the dominoes of ‘clickbait’ websites fall. We also nudged the story along, soliciting a retweet from a ‘power user’ of Twitter and Tumblr, Neil Gaiman, as well as posting updates and providing different angles on the story, such as our image gallery on Reddit.

We were lucky that we had been building our expertise and capacity in social media for some years, meaning we could hit the ground running when it became obvious the story was a hit. Our online network of museum professionals and journalists was essential to its success; without Nick Booth alerting Hayley Campbell to the story, it may not have kicked off in the first place.

However, before we publish blogs from now on, we’ll definitely be asking ourselves: ‘Would we be happy if this went viral?’ In hindsight, we were glad to have explained the ethical and practical issues involved with having a dead mouse in a museum object, as well as why and how it may have happened. Trust is very important to a museum, and if this story had gone viral without us considering the deeper issues we may have suffered immense damage to our reputation. There are many other stories about the important work we do as a Museum which we’d preferred to have gone viral, but nevertheless we hope those who saw the story have learnt a bit more about conservation, the continuing relevance of museum objects and how even the smallest of tragedies can captivate the world.

The mouse is currently being prepared by our Conservator.

The mouse is currently being prepared by our Conservator.

Museums, archives and GIFs: a fine line between fun and foolishness?

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Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives.

GIFs have seen an explosion in popularity over the past few years, taking advantage of a more browsable internet and a multitude of social media platforms. As more and more museums, galleries and libraries have been communicating with GIFs online, it’s no surprise that it has been chosen as a Culture Themes hashtag on Twitter today.

If you don’t know what the Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) is, it is essentially a type of image that can be both static or animated. They play automatically in your browser and usually loop so that they play infinitely. They’ve become very popular on sites such as Reddit and Tumblr as a means of communicating, most commonly through ‘reaction gifs’. The downside of GIFs is that there is no sound and the animations tend to be short (although people have managed to fit the entire Star Wars saga into a single GIF..). Yet, they are a breath of fresh air for what is still a surprisingly static internet.

This GIF is a simple animation of the rain on the rooftops of our Grade II-listed building. Its original purpose was to warn Reading Festival goers of the poor weather, but has been picked up by Tumblr users for its atmospheric feel.

This GIF is a simple animation of the rain on the rooftops of our Grade II-listed building. Its original purpose was to warn Reading Festival goers of the poor weather, but has been picked up by Tumblr users for its atmospheric feel.

We have adopted GIFs as a form of communication because we believe museums, libraries and galleries should be relevant. To communicate with new generations of visitors we have to speak in their language, and those who have grown up in the digital world are as comfortable communicating with emojis and GIFs as they are in simple text.

This GIF combines an attempt at humour and our own collections, which in this case is a plate from the 1796 Ichthyologie, ou, Histoire naturelle des poissons. A person saying ‘huehuehue’ is a common trope/meme of internet humour, but has little connection to the illustration.

This GIF combines an attempt at humour and our own collections, which in this case is a plate from the 1796 Ichthyologie, ou, Histoire naturelle des poissons. A person saying ‘huehuehue’ is a common trope/meme of internet humour, but has little connection to the illustration.

We know that the narratives, lives and themes bound up in our collections are supremely relevant to all: young or old, town or gown. In 2015, however, not everyone can visit our museums and collections in person, sequestered as our buildings are are on university campuses. To convince prospective audiences that we are worth their time and interest we had to go to where they live: the internet.

This GIF was part of a series celebrating the 200th birthday of Robert Hooke, the author of Micrographia. Hooke discovered cells using a microscope he designed himself, and the GIF above shows how it was used with a close-up of cells found in cork.   

This GIF was part of a series celebrating the 200th birthday of Robert Hooke, the author of Micrographia. Hooke discovered cells using a microscope he designed himself, and the GIF above shows how it was used with a close-up of cells found in cork.

This is why the University of Reading’s other museums and collections are on Tumblr, a micro-blogging site with a diverse but very often young audience that relies heavily on GIFs. We were inspired by institutions such as the Smithsonian Libraries, who bring static images to life through quirky but illuminating animation.

This GIF was a way of tracking the progress of MERL’s redevelopment, showing the removal of wagons which have been suspended above visitors’ heads for over ten years. A simple insight into our behind-the-scenes work but one we thought was more effective than a photograph.

This GIF was a way of tracking the progress of MERL’s redevelopment, showing the removal of wagons which have been suspended above visitors’ heads for over ten years. A simple insight into our behind-the-scenes work but one we thought was more effective than a photograph.

And, as you can see from the images in this blog-post, our own GIFs vary in their quality, relevance, impact and purpose. As museum professionals we are used to reviewing the point of what we do so that we can justify ourselves to our funders and to the public, and we already feel that we’re treading a fine line between frivolity and respect for the collections. There is nothing in our Mission Statement about making funny GIFs.

But can a University museum afford to ignore a model of communication used by its student body? Is it okay to use GIFs with no obvious educational value if it strengthens the image and reputation of a museum with younger audiences? And what are the ethical implications of subjecting our collections to digital manipulation? We already started this discussion after last year’s #ArchiveSelfie Day, when we photoshopped smartphones into archival photographs. After much thinking we decided that our photographs are off-limits for manipulation because they feature real people who may still be in living memory, but out-of-copyright illustrations are okay on a case-by-case basis. If you have an opinion, please let us know by commenting on this blog or tweeting @MERLReading or @UniRdg_SpecColl .