1) Right now I’m sitting in the University of Canberra attending the first ever THATcamp in Australia.

The opening discussion was a fascinating investigation of whether it is possible to do for Privacy what CreativeCommons did for copyright. That is, create a easy to understand, mix-n-match schema to explain privacy issues especially in context of archives and libraries. These could include: the period of time data is to be kept; what happens to the data when that period expires; 3rd party use/access; what kind of people have access to the data; what jurisdiction is it in; etc….

I’m looking for the rest of the rest of this unconference!

2) Museums Australia “Interesting Times: New Roles for Collections” 28 September - 2 October. Melbourne.
This is the annual big event in the Australian museum world and they’re very keen to hear about new ways that existing collections in museums can be used to reach their audience(s). No prizes for guessing what my presentation will focus on

3) Europeana “Open Culture Conference” 14-15 October. Amsterdam.
Amazingly, I’ve been invited to not only speak at this conference, but to Keynote it! Europeana is a project co-funded by the European Commission to make European culture more accessible digitally. Interestingly, Europeana doesn’t itself own any of the data being used in its services so by definition it’s a project that lives in a world of reuse culture. I’ll also be working with them to see how their project can collaborate with Wikipedia.

4) Museum Computer Network “I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In” October 27-30. Austin.
This is a major part of the US museum calendar as the headline event of the MCN. I love the range of interlinked themes for this year’s event:

• Behind the scenes and transparency in the museum
• Commons and digital collections
• Igniting the Imagination: building communities locally and globally, on-site and online
• Open Source, Open Content, Open Learning
• Democratizing Access
• User-generated and museum content: quality, trust, reputation and relevance
• Integrated communication strategies in print and online
• Bridging the Digital Divide

My presentation will be talking about my time at the British Museum and how other museums (large and small) might be able to produce their own version of the “Wikpedian in Residence”. This is highly relevant to many of the above conference themes and I would hope that many more museums will start to look at Wikipedia as a way of achieving those outcomes.

[Between MCN and GLAM-WIKI:UK I'll be undertaking a couple of other interesting projects in the US which I'll talk more about another day]

5) GLAM-WIKI:UK 26-27 November, London & GLAM-WIKI:France 3-4 December, Paris.
I’m incredibly pleased to say that the conference that I ran in Canberra one year ago has now become a series. Both the French and UK Wikimedia chapters will be running their own editions where the GLAM sector (art Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) can come together to talk with the Wikimedia community to see how we can best collaborate productively.

Moreover, I’m very happy to say that I have been contracted by Wikimedia-UK to convene the London edition which will be hosted at, you guessed it, the British Museum. There will be more information about these conferences in the near future but if you can be in London or Paris then - save the date because you won’t want to miss it

Today is my last day at the British Museum as the “Wikipedian in Residence” project draws to the end of its five-week pilot. On Monday I head off to Gdańsk Danzig Gdańsig for Wikimania 2010 to present about what I’ve learned here.

This post will highlight some interesting outcomes from my time here and also lay some ideas for how this kind of project could be run elsewhere.

Interesting outcomes from this project that you might not know about:

• Looking at the quantitative reporting, June represented the single biggest month both in terms of organically generated pageviews to British Museum articles in Wikipedia and also in terms of clickthroughs to the BM catalogue.^[1] (See more about these stats at my previous blogpost.)

• Not only did many Wikipedians write in asking for the assistance of curators at the “one on one collaboration” page, but a couple of BM departments “pitched” notable objects and asked if any Wikipedian would like to come on-site to write an article. The first result of that has been today’s creation of the article Isabella Brant (drawing). A piece by Reubens with his first wife on the front and his second wife on the back!

• At the time of writing this, there have been 901 edits and 114 footnotes added to the article Hoxne Hoard since the day I announced the “Hoxne Challenge” event. This is a ratio of one new reference for every nine edits which is a fantastically strong showing over such a number of revisions. The article is currently a Feature Article candidate.

[The "empress" pepper pot - most famous object from the Hoxne Hoard.
The article about the object itself is also a byproduct of the "Challenge" event. Photo by BabelStone, CC-zero]

• During the Hoxne Challenge we took what I believe to be the first video of Wikipedians editing in the wild. It is a timelapse of the editing process and can be viewed in .ogg format here. It is also the first use of a Creative Commons license by the British Museum.

• OpenMoko, the people behind the Wikireader (effectivley the closest thing you’ll get to a Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galazy) generously gave us five Wikireaders for this project. Not only were they used extensively during the Backstage Pass day but they are now being used as part of the schools programe at the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre.

[One of the Wikireaders in action during the "backstage pass" tour. By Mike Peel, CC-by-SA]

• There are many other things that have resulted from this month-long collaboration some of which are tangible (or at least digital) whilst many are more difficult to quantify. A lot of people, from both communities, now feel that the other is not quite so scary, not quite so exclusivist, not quite so antithetical to their way of doing things. Of course, I have no proof of this other than comments that people have made but I do hope that this month marks a turning point in the way Museums and Wikipedia (and by extension, the free-web and the GLAM sector) see each other - as potential allies rather than as potential threats.

Running this project elsewhere

The key thing that I would recommend you look at if you are interested in running a similar project in your own museum (or if you’re a Wikipedian wanting to work at your local museum) is to know the rules of engagement. You need to both be aware of what you want to achieve, what are potential conflicts-of-interest, what areas of policy overlap and what diverge.

The way I defined the scope of my time here was:

“The project is to identify ways of building a sustainable relationship between the museum and the Wikimedia community that is both mutually beneficial and in accordance with both communities’ principles.”

There are a lot of keywords in that but they’re all relevant. What they mean in practice is:

• Sustainable = it’s not “all about me” but also about what happens afterwards. It’s important that resident not attempt to “own” or control subjects just because they are related “their” museum. The project should not burn-out either community from being interested in each other into the future.

• Relationship = Building a relationship is more than just asking for a donation of multimedia content. It’s not a fire-and-forget thing, but a meeting of two communities of practice.

• Mutually beneficial = there must be direct benefit to the Museum and not just to Wikimedia otherwise the project is just a charity-case rather than something that can be pointed to by management as fulfilling part of their strategy. The trick is identifying things that are beneficial to both rather than just one or the other.

• Both communities’ principles = that is, as an officially affiliated volunteer you’re responsible to both organisations to give advice that you know will not undermine either. You might be able to convince a museum to release images (for example) but if you do this by making false promises then you’ve undermined the relationship/trust. This section is also important when dealing with Conflict of Interest issues as it means you cannot be obliged to willingly undermine one community or the other.

Addressing these points are crucial to making sure you remain in good standing with both communities which is itself crucial to making the project a success.

Nevertheless, be prepared for hostility. From both directions. There are some (though not many) in the museum sector who believe that working with Wikipedia or free-culture community will undermine the role of the professional cultural institution. Equally, there are some in the Wikipedia community who believe that working with museums will undermine the encyclopedia’s independence.

I’ve heard the phrase “but we must preserve the integrity of our collection” used in reference to museums arguing for control but equally I have heard the same phrase used by Wikipedians arguing why they should not interact with outside organisations. I’ve also been accused of having a conflict of interest, of being a paid-editor, of breaking UK tax law and taking the place of someone else more qualified to take the role. cf. Haters gonna hate.

Overall

Now that this month has passed (too quickly) I can safely say that I’ve never felt more engaged and able to contribute to both sectors than whilst working here. I hope other people take up the challenge and become in-house Wikipedians around the world as this spreads mutual trust and understanding. There are several other things in the works that are not ready for announcing yet but stay tuned for further British Museum - Wikipedia goodness in the future

–Liam Wyatt,
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum.
(not any more).

^[1]The largest month ever coincided with the release of the Indiana Jones Film “temple of the crystal skull” in 2008 with several million people arriving at the Wikipedia article Crystal skull which is actually about the British Museum object - not the film. However! A considerable number of those people subsequently visited the British Museum website which was no accident.

Yesterday was the “Hoxne Challenge” - an attempt to see what can be achieved if a Museum and Wikipedians work together on a specific topic in a focused effort. This culminated on Friday with an on-site tour and intensive collaboration session between Wikipedians and the relevant experts at the British Museum.

[Two of the more than a dozen gold bracelets found in the hoard: 1994,0408.20]

We chose to focus our attention on the article “Hoxne Hoard” - the largest hoard of late Roman silver and gold discovered in Britain to date. It’s a fascinating collection of beautiful objects that lay hidden underground from approx.407 AD until uncovered in 1992. The collection was brought to the British Museum and the definitive scholarly work on the subject was published less than three months ago. If you would like to know more about why we chose this topic and who were the Wikipedians and experts that assisted in this challenge please read the event page.

Stats:

• In the time since the announcement of the event (just over a week ago) the article has grown from barely more than a 2Kb long stub[1] to a 45Kb fully fleshed out article.
• There have been over 400 intermediate edits in the last week by over 30 different authors adding in nearly 80 footntotes.[2]
• Pageviews for the article have quadrupled since last month already.[3] Granted, many of these hits are from the editors themselves, but I don’t think their engagement with the subject (at such an intense level too) should be discounted from the statistics.
• “Hoxne Hoard” is now the 6th largest referrer of traffic from Wikipedia to the British Museum website whereas in April it was 27th. Wikipedia as a whole is comfortably the largest (non-search engine) generator inbound traffic to the British Museum.
• The museum even changed the front page of their highlights website to display the most prominent item from the hoard - the “empress” pepper pot in quiet recognition of our efforts.[4]

[During the backstage workshop part of the day, looking at some of the items normally in storage. In this case, some of the roughly 100 silver spoons and ladles.]

Metaphorical significance:

I recently read this amusing piece by Shane Greenstein (Professor of Management and Strategy at Northwestern University) discussing the current relationship of the British Museum and Wikipedia - which he calls a “treaty”:

“This little treaty did not involve a humiliating victory, nor a revolutionary coup. Rather, it is as if the peasants from the kingdom of the Web stormed the venerable palace and then, perched at the entry to the throne room, acted in a civilized way.  Both sides sat down to have a beer together…

Wikipedia needs the experts too. Perhaps this is a precedent.”

Perhaps it is indeed… Now, compare Wikipedia’s relationship to the GLAM sector with the metal detectorist community’s relationship to professional archaeology.

In Britain at least there has been for decades a dedicated community of people who go out into the fields and search for buried gold from former civilisations - it is their hobby and they are volunteers. Traditionally, there has been a feeling of ambivalence and disdain between them and the professional archaeologists (and the feeling has been mutual). Yet over the last decade, especially with the leadership of the Portable Antiquities scheme based at the British Museum, the two communities have come to recognise each other’s strengths and build a productive relationship rather than fighting for - literally - buried treasure.

The Hoxne Hoard is a perfect example of this relationship. The professional archaeologists would never have found this hoard had it not been for the diligence of metal detectorist Eric Lawes in 1992. Equally however, Eric was one of the first detectorists to leave his find untouched and call in the archaeologists (rather than dig it up himself). This choice to work with the professionals changed the course of not only the history of this hoard and our understanding of that period but also the relationship of the amateurs and the professionals. Both communities saw how valuable it could be if they worked together. They had come to a treaty and whilst the relationship is not perfect they try to see each other as allies rather than enemies.

I think that there is much similarity between the original finding of the Hoxne Hoard in 1992 and Wikipedia’s work on the same subject at the British Museum 18 years later. This is Wikipedia’s first time we’ve sat down with the experts a tried to build a mutually-beneficial relationship.

The British Museum is Wikipedia’s Hoxne Hoard. It is our treaty. From here on out Museums and Wikipedia should see each other as allies even if our relationship is sometimes rocky.

[Some of the coins not on display brought out for our viewing, and photographing, pleasure. They have a particularly interesting story to do with their spread and subsequent clipping.]

So did the Hoxne Challenge work?

The event was billed as a challenge as it was the first time that we’ve tried this methodology for the creation of content in Wikipedia. We’ve run our own editing drives and mini-competitions amongst ourselves, but never before (to my knowledge) have a group of Wikipedians been able to sit down in the same room with all the relevant experts and all of their publications.

What went well:

• We found that although it took a little time to get rolling, working 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 with a curator on a particular subsection (e.g. historical background, scientific analysis, coins…) was quite effective. Dividing up the article and then bringing the pieces back together is an effective way of working.
• It took the curators a while to get used to the Wikipedians’ insistence that everything they mention needs a page reference from their book but that’s all part of the learning about each other’s academic culture.
• Also, we found it very effective to bring the article up on the big screen to work together on the overall flow and structure of the article. It was effective to go from focusing on the detail then looking at the overall then going back to the detail again.
• By the end of the day we now have an article that is not only good by Wikipedia’s standards but also the relevant curators feel that it is an accurate and well rounded representation of the subject. For sure there are things still to be done to get it to FA status but we know that it is not missing or misrepresenting anything major - something that is hard to tell as an amateur.
• Working in the same room as each other builds a sense of camaraderie much more effectively than working remotely. As long as volunteers feel respected rather than exploited this is a good way to build community spirit - something Wikipedia often lacks.

What would we do differently:

• One Wikipedian suggested that more homework was required on the part of the attendees so we knew the subject area better upon arrival. Because of the recentness of the major publication on the Hoard not many libraries have copies. This made it harder for people to pre-prepare.
• As a very practical thing, we would probably have been better off with monitors on the tables rather than only laptops. What you might lose in portability you gain in ease of multiple people viewing the same page.
• Methodologically, when we came to the end of the day both communities were expressing a desire to leave the article overnight and to come back, by themselves, to read it again afresh. So, whilst editing as a group is effective for getting the bulk of work done, it does not fully replace the need for work by yourself. It therefore might have been good to arrange for a follow up meeting in a fortnight.

One more thing…
Did you know that the British Museum is now linking back out to Wikipedia when there is a feature quality article on one of their collection items? This is an important recognition of the quality of Wikipedia’s best work but the people who should know good quality when they see it!

The current FAs are Dürer’s Rhinoceros and Disasters of War and you can see the external links at the bottom of the page here and here respectively. Not only is this a link but the phrase used is: “See also the feature quality article about <subject> in Wikipedia.”

Recently I was invited to make two presentations, about the nature of the GLAM sector’s relationship to Wikimedia, one day apart - the first in London and the second in Stockholm.

[The imposing looking Nordiska Museet, Stockholm.
Photo by Elephi Pelephi - CC-by-NC]

The title of this blogpost is the same as that of my second presentation and refers to one of the phrases that I often use when describing Wikipedia - an extension of a phrase often misattributed to Otto von Bismarck:

“People who like sausages and the law should not see either being made”

I add then add the line:

“The same is true for encyclopedias - though the process of making them is messy the outcome is good. You can be sure that every other encyclopedia has the same debates as we do, we just have them in public with makes for greater transperancy.”

London

This presentation was given the billing “everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were too afraid to ask” - which is a very large claim to try and live up to, but I tried my best! It was two two-hour presentations to a total of 60 members of the museum sector from across London and the region. It was great to see the diversity of organisations attending - everything from modern art museums to historic houses, from globally renowned institutions to volunteer-run historic trusts.

The seminars were arranged by Culture 24 (namely Jane Finnis and Ruth Harper) a fantastically groovy organisation that provides listings, reviews, events and resources for the UK GLAM sector and hosted by JISC who are all about IT and culture. I published my slides here, and Culture 24 even published a follow-up interview As a result of this event I’ve been contacted by a number of UK museums who want to know more about Wikipedia and how they can have a more pro-active relationship with the Wikimedia community. A few are specifically looking at bringing on board their very own Wikipedian in Residence too!

Stockholm

When Kajsa Hartig from the photographic department of the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm (whom I first met in Denver recently) started talking about organising a workshop day about Wikipedia and free-licensing for all of Sweden’s museums, Wikimedia Sverige and I were only too pleased to get involved. Wikimedia Sverige blogged about the event afterwards here (Swedish - google translate to English here). It was a highly successful day with a packed house of 80 GLAM representatives from across the country (including Norway) attending on relatively short notice.

The video of my keynote presentation is here, and here are the slides that went along with it (both free licensed, as always).

Two things I’ve learned about the Swedish GLAM sector:

• There are no volunteers in Swedish GLAM organisations

This is because of the union fears that volunteers will be used to undercut the work of employed staff. So my usual line about “every museum has a volunteer program, how many have an e-volunteer program” fell flat, oh well

• The idea that a GLAM would claim copyright in a scan or a photo of a photo is surprising to the Swedish sector.

Indeed, the fact that this is such a fraught issue between the Wikimedia community and the GLAM sector elsewhere in the world is surprising to them. It was just perfectly obvious to them that a public institution shouldn’t even want to claim copyright in a scan of something that’s out of copyright even if they could legally, which they can’t either.  So, all my usual pussy-footing around the subject was a bit pointless because no one thought it was a controversial topic. What a difference a short flight makes.

So it turns out that neither Wikipedians nor museum curators are all that scary after all…

Last Friday approximately 40 Wikimedians me for the largest ever wiki-meetup in UK - a Backstage Pass Tour of the British Museum. I was particularly please to see the diversity amongst the group - across age, gender, languages spoken, personal interests, wiki-experience and geography.

(By Mike Peel, CC-By-SA)
(Ben Roberts curator of bronze age Europe, holding a wikireader, leading his tour)

The event was covered not only by Wikimedia press (article in the Signpost and Wikimedia UK blogpost) but also in the mainstream press with a major piece written by Noam Cohen in the New York Times: “Venerable British Museum enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution“

As you can see at the schedule, we were given private tours of various departments by curators who had generously volunteered their day to come and meet us: Greece & Rome, Egypt and Sudan, Coins and Medals; Prints and Drawings; and Bronze Age Europe. Each group came back telling fascinating stories of things not normally on display. For example, the coins department showed the group the Swedish 8 Daler copper plate money which, due to such low cost of copper at the time led to people carrying around unwieldy amounts of metal - precipitating the first paper currency. The Prints and Drawings department had even curated a mini-exhibition just for us of fascinating and potentially Notable objects.

(By Fæ, CC-By-SA)
(An Van Kamp curator of Dutch and Flemish drawings, displaying a Dürer woodblock made of pear wood)

After the morning tours we had lunch together in the staff cafe (thanks to Wikimedia-UK for sponsoring that - food is always encourages a good turnout!) and then headed downstairs to fire up our laptops and do whatever we could to reciprocate.

Apart from having a nice time and learning new things, two of the underlying outcomes that this day was meant to achieve was to:

1. Build personal relationships between the two communities by simply being able to spend time talking about our mutual interest of sharing knowledge, and also
2. Ensure that my “residency” at the British Museum was not merely about my having access, but using that access to bring it to a wider community.

These two points are about increasing the bus number for GLAM-Wiki collaboration in an awareness that if my time here in London does not lead to a sustainable relationship after I’ve left then I have wasted this opportunity.

(By Mike Peel, CC-by-SA)
(Breakout groups in the afternoon. Curator expressed to me afterwards how impressed they were at our ability to coalesce around different tasks during this session - I replied that “it’s the wiki way!”)

So what did we achieve?

See for yourself here. Not only did we write 15 articles on the spot (several of which have since been featured on the Wikipedia mainpage as “did you know” leading to small spikes in inbound traffic to the BM website)[1][2][3][4], we also helped set up several curators with their own user accounts and taught them how to edit, created several templates for standardising the way BM objects are displayed in Wikipedia, uploaded photos to Commons and created a portal in Wikisource.

But wait, there’s more!

Featured Article Prize

In the afternoon session, the British Museum also announced another major plank in the growing relationship between the two communities. The head of the Web department, Matthew Cock announced that he would be offering a prize of £100 (≈$140USD/€120) vouchers to the British Museum shop/bookshop as recognition of effort, thanks and incentive to each of the first five Wikipedians who write a featured article about a British Museum collection item (or other highly related subject. If in doubt please contact me). Moreover, these prizes are valid for featured articles in any language edition of Wikipedia.

This is a recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum’s mission to engage the public. It is likely to have a positive effect for the Museum in terms of usage of the deeper resources and links back to their research material. It is a win–win situation for free cultural products, and more broadly for the cultural sector. More information here.

One on One Collaborations

Directly related to the announcement of the prize is the creation of a place where Wikipedians can list their desire to be “buddied up” with curators of a particular topic - the “one on one collaborations” page with listings for Wikipedians seeking curators and vice versa. So far we have seven proposals - does anyone want to add their name and potentially claim the first Featured Article prize? Go here.

Photos Required

We also now have a place to request new photographs to be taken of BM objects to help illustrate articles. It would be very hard for an article about a museum object to achieve Featured Article status without an appropriately licensed image of the object so this is a place to make your requests. There are six requests so far.

Yesterday was my first official day as the volunteer “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (BM) - as far as I’m aware, the first serious attempt from the GLAM sector globally to bring Wikipedia in-house. The underlying mission: To build a relationship between the Wikimedian and British Museum communities that is mutually beneficial, sustainable and replicable.

The British Museum’s digital strategy specifically speaks about sharing the collection and the institution’s expertise with the wider-web, beyond their own website. A sub-point of this is that the British Museum should engage with partnerships with the “knowledge sites” elsewhere online. These two points place a relationship between the British Museum and Wikipedia as not just a good thing™ but as a strategic priority.¹

I’ve been preparing the ground in the months before I arrived by putting together measures of the existing relationship - qualitative and quantitative - in order to provide a baseline against which I can compare the relationship at the end of my pilot project. Without this, it would be impossible to objectively assess whether my project here was successful or whether it could/should be implemented elsewhere.

Executive summary:
Increased WP article quality = increased pageviews = increased clickthroughs to your GLAM website. Therefore, if you want to increase the number of people accessing the deep resources of your GLAM’s website:
* encourage qualitiative improvement in the Wikipedia articles that link to it
* make it easy for Wikipedians to reference your GLAM website.

Part 1 - Qualitative baseline:

This graph takes every article which appears in “Category:British Museum” and sub-categories such as “collection of the British Museum” (but ignoring sub-categories of articles about staff or trustees) and scores them on intersecting quality and importance axes. Thanks to Nihiltres for coding the “BM related” article assessment infrastructure up for me. The quality rating is consistent across all of Wikipedia and is based on the extensive documentation at the article assessment pages. On the other hand the importance rating is on the basis of how fundamental an article is to an understanding of the British Museum. So for example, the article about George Bernard Shaw is high quality but low importance, whilst the article about the Water Newton Treasure is high importance but low quality.

There are 148 articles that have been tagged as related the BM (no doubt this will increase by the end of the month) and these are spread seemingly randomly across the matrix. This is because, as volunteers, Wikipedians work on articles that interest them personally - not because the subject is more “important”. On average, the articles with the highest quality receive significantly more traffic simply by virtue of their higher-than-average quality. If something is good it receives inbound links (from the rest of Wikipedia and the wider web) and inbound links beget more inbound links. For the technically inclined you can test this on 2000 randomly chosen articles v. 2000 Featured Quality articles here.

Therefore, it would seem that the most obvious candidates for immediate improvement are those two articles listed as “stub” class but of high importance - the Water Newton Treasure and the Vindolanda tablets. With any GLAM organisation, not only with the BM, ways of making it easier for Wikipedians to use your website include:

• Persistent neat URLs for records. The National Library of Australia’s system is the champion of this. Not popups, not search-strings masquerading as URLs.
• Clear information/research pages. Not splitting information about an subject across different sections of the website making it difficult to find, collate and cite. If it can’t be found, it can’t be read, and definitely can’t be linked to.
• Citation templates. If you have a preferred method of being cited, make it easy for Wikipedians to use that method. You can even create a dedicated citation template for Wikipedians to use when citing your website ensuring consistency and completeness of metadata.

Part 2 - Quantitative baseline:
The graph below takes all of the articles in the same categories being assessed in the qualitative data and aggregates their combined page-views into one monthly number to produce a measure of popularity. Thanks to Magnus Manske for creating the fabulous “Treeviews” tool for me for this purpose. These numbers are marked in BLUE. The graph compares these to the BM’s website analytics that track inbound visitors originating from anywhere in Wikipedia. These numbers are marked in RED.

[n.b. to make the comparison clearer, I've dropped the pageviews (blue) down by two orders of magnitude. So - a monthly pageview on this graph listed as 4,000 is actually 400,000. To see the raw data go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM#Quantitative]

Setting aside some extraordinary spikes (explained below) there is an absolutely clear correlation between page-views and click-throughs. In fact, averaged across the whole set it works out at almost exactly 100:1. Obviously some links are more clicked on than others but nevertheless it is fair to say that page-views = click-throughs at a quite a predictable rate. More page-views = more click-throughs!

Points of note:

• Jan/Feb 2008 - The spike in click-throughs is due to the fact that the BM made its online catalogue available during those months. All of a sudden there were a whole lot of linked footnotes that could be added where before there were none.

• April/May 2008 - The GIANT SPIKE in page-views, dwarfing the rest of the graph, is entirely the result of the article Crystal Skull. The spike corresponds to the release of the latest Indiana Jones film - “The Temple of the Crystal Skull”. People searching for the film stumbled across the article about the museum object instead. Interestingly, a fair number of readers actually clicked through to the BM website after they found the article they originally sought (as seen by the smaller spike in click-throughs for that month). This demonstrates that Wikipedia can successfully convert the casual pop-culture googler to a cultural researcher.

• July 2008- The big drop in page-views is because the stats failed to compile that month, not because people stopped visiting Wikipedia. Ignore that one.

• January 2009 (in fact January 15th each year) - The article about the British Museum appears on the main page in the “on this day” section. Even this extremely small reference on the main page results in a visible spike in page views for the whole category and also click-throughs to the BM’s own website.

• April 2010 - The article Disasters of War, a series of sketches by Francisco de Goya, appeared as “today’s featured article” during this month which accounts for the page-view spike. However, despite many of the original sketches residing in the BM there is not a single link out to the museum’s catalogue and therefore there is no equivalent spike in click-throughs. This is because all of the BM’s resources are object centric (catalogue references for individual sketches) whereas Wikipedia’s article is subject centric (one article about the whole series of sketches). There actually is not anything on the BM website that talks about the whole group of sketches and so Wikipedians cannot easily reference the BM even if they tried.

• Overall - Prior to the qualitative assessment of all British Museum related articles, many articles were not listed in a BM category. Consequent to this assessment, many uncategorised BM related articles were discovered, added to the categories and therefore counted in the quantitative survey. The results gave a significant increase in page-views reported. For example, before I undertook the survey the combined pageviews for March 2010 were 350,340. After the comprehensive survey and discovery of more related articles this figure jumped to 513,049 - an increase of 32%.

It needs to be said is that improving Wikipedia articles can and should be an end in their own right but this should not be at the expense of sharing link-love with organisations that actually host the original research that Wikipedia requires. Indeed, ultimately Wikipedia should be encouraging our readers to leave Wikipedia via external links in the footnotes. Wikipedia is a place to start but not end your research after all. Wikipedians should count every person who leaves Wikipedia through a linked footnote to continue their research as a satisfied customer.

¹ The responsibility, the number of skeptical eyes watching (from both communities), and the potential to do amazing things together are all very large. And yes, I agree with those who have (pointedly) said to me that there are more qualified people than myself to have this opportunity. All I can say is that I’m doing the best I can to represent Wikimedia and free-culture well, I’ve earned my chops and that I’m a volunteer doing it because I believe it should to be done.

Thanks especially to the director of the Copyright Centre Kenneth Crews (bio, twitter) for inviting me to come and most importantly for organising with Melissa Brown a study of museum licensing practices funded by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The first paper to come out of this research grant is a broad survey of the multimedia access practices of many U.S. art museum:

Control of Museum Art Images: The Reach and Limits of Copyright and Licensing
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1542070

and I cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone who’s interested in the topic!

Here are the slides from the presentation. I took the opportunity to be, shall we say, more forthright than I would usually be as this was my first presentation to a legally-trained audience. Given that I, on the other hand, am not a lawyer I figured I’d better pull something new out of the hat to impress So, after first going on a whirlwind tour of art copyright on Wikipedia (everything from Fair Use to Freedom of Panorama) I decided to use the occasion to propose a metaphor I’ve been thinking about. One that uses museum terminology to explain how people in the free-culture community see some relatively common practices in the art museum world.

That placing restrictions on the usage of digital objects, where those restrictions would not be countenanced for the physical object, is akin to “deaccessioning by copyright”

Deaccessioning is the process where by a museum decides to dispose of objects from its collection and is generally considered to be a necessary evil that should only be done with the long-term purpose of the institution in mind. Especially in public museums it is considered to be such a fraught issue because it implies the reneging of a promise - to accession something is to promise to preserve it so that future generations may be able to have access to today’s culture, de-accessioning is to go back on that promise even if for a good reason.

It is this slightly-guilty feeling that I am trying to encapsulate with the metaphor of “deaccessioning by copyright” - that digital copyright and access policies should be thought out with the same care for the future generation’s access to the collection and not as simply a way of raising some income. I am not saying that museums are actually deaccessioning things by putting restrictions on them, and I’m not saying that a museums aren’t allowed to have a business model.  it’s just a metaphor to make a point. Of course, if a public museum is forced to chose between selling high-resolution images or charge an entry fee then I would go with the former as the lesser of two evils.

Many public museums have policies that encourage visitors to the building to feel that they are the “owners” of the collection. The museum might have a free-entry policy, publicly available
research library or special events for local residents. Yet, often these same museums will consider their digital visitors to be not deserving of the same access-rights and deliberately restrict the ways a digital visitor can access the collection - either for fear of losing some revenue or for fear of the digital visitor not using the collection “correctly”. Where a physical visitor is a welcome guest a digital visitor trying to negotiate the rights/access pages can feel like they’re at best a burden and at worst an art-thief.

Some examples of what I’m talking about are:

• Requiring payment from a digital visitor simply to send you a file of a Public Domain work (not for staff time or equipment usage which I can understand) because there are “problems”. I call this one the “papal indulgence” fee - money seems to magically make “problems” disappear. An in-person visitor would more often than not be allowed to see/study the original object for no charge.
• Requiring the digital visitor to sign a contract explaining the precise ways in which the digital file will be used, even when there it’s in the Public Domain. An in-person visitor is only on extremely rare occasions asked to sign a contract explaining the purpose of their research before being allowed access.
• Claiming copyright in scans of archival documents, transcriptions, paintings, prints that are hundreds of years old. See also Bridgeman v. Corel for a legal reasoning, not just a moral one.

I met up with Multichill who was stuck in town due to ash, meanwhile our local contact Pharos was stuck over in Europe for the same reason!

[Strange event 1: Skylarking with Richard Belzer whom we met whilst having a beer with Peter Kaufman from the Open Video Alliance. Note especially the HHG2G tattoo - too awesome!]

We took the opportunity to visit one of the best GLAM partners in the wikiverse - notably with their nascent “Wikipedia embassy” and their “how to edit Wikipedia” public lecture series  - the New York Public Library (NYPL). Thanks to Josh Greenberg and Joe Dalton especially!

[One of the stone lions guarding the entrance to the NYPL. (Ktylerconk, cc-BY)]

The Alicia Keys song that I borrowed for the title of this blogpost is actually quite pertinent to our visit to the NYPL. I’ve never been to New York before and it really does exude a sense of being the “centre of the universe”:

There’s nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York!
These streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you…
(Audio Clip of the chorus)

But it does make you wonder - since the State of New York is officially nicknamed “the empire state” to what empire are they actually referring!?

The most famous manifestation of this is the Empire state building but that in reference to the nickname not the other way around. If you’ve read Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Big Country you might recall he poses the same question when he noticed a New York car’s number-plate.

So, I asked the NYPL reference librarians if they could give me an answer whilst I tried at the same time using my reference source of choice…

[We also met up with Noam Cohen - the Wikipedia journalist 'ne plus ultra' - who showed us around the beautiful NY Times building. Strange event 2: He gave us a copy of Sunday's paper, on Friday.]

Wikipedia has two potential places where the answer to “the empire question” might be found,
[[New York]] or [[List of U.S. state nicknames]]. Unfortunately, both refer to the name but give no indication as to its origins. WikipediaFail.

The NYPL reference desk can receive requests in-person, by twitter, email, phone SMS, live-chat and carrier pigeon. They fared somewhat better, coming up with a couple of potential answers. However, most explanations online try to lump them together. There’s one ascribing it to a quote from George Washington (here) and another that refers to NY’s “wealth and resources” and that at the time the word “empire” could also be used to refer to progress (here or here).

Whilst the reference-desk staff were searching, I mentioned to them the recent research that has been done comparing Wikipedia’s own reference desk with the professionals - “The paradox of expertise: is the Wikipedia Reference Desk as good as your library?.” Journal of Documentation, 65:6 (2009) by Pnina Shachaf with the conclusion that,

“The quality of answers on the Wikipedia Reference Desk is similar to that of traditional reference service. Wikipedia volunteers outperformed librarians or performed at the same level on most quality measures” (pp. 989).

The Wikipedia “Singpost” article about it is here. Ironically, the original cannot be seen online.

Incidentally - the NYPL is currently running a campaign to raise awareness of the attempt by the authorities to drastically cut their funding. Find out more here:

Looking up underneath the extraordinary work by Dale Chihuly in the atrium of the Children's Musuem of Indianapolis

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before in this blog, WPSPA, in my opinion, is best-practice for museums engaging with the big, scary thing that is Wikipedia if they want to produce some fantastic results for all concerned. It has taught new methods and skills to the students in the initial pilot project raised awareness of their particular subject-area both locally and internationally, and created a replicable model for other groups who might wish to follow in their footsteps.

Many thanks to Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (WP, Twitter) and Jennifer Mikulay (WP, Twitter) from Indiana University-Purdue University Indiana (or IUPUI for short) for having the temerity to propose and follow through with the project. It has not been without its hiccups but their perseverance and willingness to engage in good faith with the Wikipedia community has set this project apart. Two students - Lori Phillips (WP, Twitter) and Sarah Stierch (WP, Twitter) - also deserve special mention for enthusiastically doing so much of the ground work setting up templates and taking photos etc. All four of them showed me a grand old time in Indy and all the good local watering-holes. I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality!

For this (Northern-hemisphere) summer, the WPSPA team have taken inspiration from user:Poulpy who is setting out to catalogue every public sculpture in Paris for the French-Wikipedia! Take a look at: “liste des oevres publique de Paris” and click on some of the arrondissements. Have a read of Poulpy’s blogpost on his work here (translation). To that end they are going to try their hand at some list style articles to create a complete listing of all public art in a given geographical area.  Wikipedia lists are a great way of scoping-out a topic area as they a) give an indication of how many things already have an article about them, and b) because they have a finite-ness about them that an encyclopedic entry does not. This is why there are so many more featured quality lists than there are featured articles - it’s easier to know when they’re finished!

Attendees at my Wikimedia workhop at IUPUI - I'm particularly pleased by the high turnout of women: Wikipedia has a very male-dominated gender ratio. This group is helping to redress that!

IUPUI

Unfortunately my audio recording of my presentation itself is not very clear but you can get an understanding of what I said to the audience during the formal proceedings from my slides here on slideshare. As with the slides from all my presentations, these are listed on my website here.

Some of the particularly interesting things about Public Art and Wikipedia are “freedom of panorama” and “notability”:

1. Freedom of Panorama

The US has a very strong commitment to Public Domain in its law. On the other hand, frustratingly, the US has no concept of “panoramafreheit” (that is to say, freedom of panorama). The stance of my own country, Australia, is the reverse - we have all-rights-reserved “crown copyright” but do allow freedom of panorama. This means that unlike Australia and the UK among others, in the US, one is not free to take photographs of in-copyright artwork that is in a public place (sculpture, fountains, even architecture). Only the artist has the exclusive right to authorise photography. As a result, Wikipedia may only present photographs of these works in quite limited circumstances by using our strict definitions of Fair Use. In many other language editions, notably the French and German, photographs claiming Fair Use are not permitted at all.

Given the legal situation in the US and other countries with no freedom of panorama, I would like to see a day when artists themselves choose preferred photographic representations of their art work and release them under a free licence. Undertaking this pre-emptive action would avoid having their work represented poorly or not at all in Wikipedia or other places. The current problem for both Wikipedia and the artist is that if Wikipedia is to have an illustrative photograph of a recent public artwork at all, it is obliged to publish only a reproduction whose quality is low enough not to impinge on the commercial viability of the artist’s intellectual property.

In short, unless artists from countries with no freedom of panorama legislation (such as the US) give Wikipedia a photograph of their public artwork, Wikipedia must intentionally use a “bad” photograph or none at all.

2. Notability

I have a running joke with Richard McCoy about the notability of public art: he argues their notability is almost inherent and I argue that the notability of public art is highly contestable … but I must admit I think he’s won me over.

I originally argued that art - especially public art - is often commissioned to be intentionally boring and uncontroversial. Remember the jibe about “destroying a piece of corporate sculpture” in Fight Club? Further, many pieces of public art attract popular criticism: “Is that art?” Surely then, if the definition of “art” is so famously controversial, then it must be impossible to say that each piece of public art should eventually have a Wikipedia article. However! Both of these points of mine are irrelevant to the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. In fact, a lively real-world discussion about whether something is art, is itself grounds for claiming notability in Wikipedia. For example, “Bucket of Rocks” and pretty much anything by Marcel Duchamp. For non-art examples of notability generated through banality, see the deletion debates for “Balloon Boy” (which stayed) and Corey Worthington (which didn’t).

To illustrate my points: This is a "Fair Use" image of notable-yet-non-notable art...

Richard’s point is that each piece of public art has by definition, at least three different references: the commissioning documents (probably in the local archives/mayor’s office); some form of public announcement of its unveiling (often a newspaper article); and in America at least the “Save our Sculpture!” Database record. So, irrespective of the quality or importance of the work (recalling that notability for Wikipedia ≠ importance), each commissioned piece of public sculpture is thrice-noted and therefore notable.

Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA)

I was also fortunate enough to be able to get a “backstage tour” of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. They are not only a fantastic art museum in their own right but they are at the forefront of innovative web activities too. (I’ve previously blogged about these here). In the physical galleries, I particularly like subtle touch of placing sofas with coffee tables with art books strewn across them - really makes you feel at home and comfortable enough to enjoy your surroundings rather than merely trying to sidle past a series of canvasses. Not only this, but the public gardens are a flâneur’s dream.

Just part of the IMA gardens - Suezsue, CC-by-nc-nd

Being able to get “behind the scenes” at the IMA underscored to me just how much important work in art museums goes on with little public awareness. I am specifically referring to the research and preservation department - everything from investigating the manufacturing processes of African wooden sculpture, properly preserving centuries-old Tibetan clothing or removing stains on the backs of Dutch masters. All of these require highly skilled staff, time-consuming processes, specialist equipment and a constant awareness of industry best-practice.

It is these best-practices that large art museums like the IMA help to develop. Whilst I was there presenting to the staff, I suggested that sharing the professional expertise of large art museums could be a unique way for them to leverage the platform offered by the Wikimedia projects. Yes, certainly collaborating with Wikimedia projects about the content of their collection is something I would love to see, but where an institution sees itself as a leader in a particular field of professional practice then sharing of that knowledge via Wikimedia projects could be particularly valuable.

Pigments used in the IMA labs as comparison samples when restoring artworks

Some examples:

• Photographs of particular procedures or equipment (e.g. infra-red art photography) placed in Wikimedia Commons. (See also my previous post “low-hanging GLAM fruit“).
• Re-purpose internal guides/manuals for WikiBooks (Wikipedia’s sister project which creates textbooks) so smaller museums have access to best-practice (e.g. “how to clean antique textiles”)
• Collate reading-lists and reference resources to be used as the “Bibliography” and “External Links” sections of relevant Wikipedia articles.
• Publish “grey literature” to the institution’s website, even if hidden deep down, so that it can be used as a reference for more technical statements added to Wikipedia.
• In the tradition of “Wikipedia’s Vital Articles“, put together a list of “most important” things in a professional subject area and working with the relevant Wikiproject (in this case Wikiproject Visual Arts) to try to:
  • Ensure there is a section about of techniques in already existing articles about materials e.g. a sub-section about the process of illumination in the article “illuminated manuscript” (which exists) or the process carving in the article “marble” (which does not);
  • Create stubs for any remaining redlinks;
  • Make sure there’s a reference to the professional application in more “domestic” topics e.g. dry cleaning

This one is actually already underway at “list of 100 art concepts that Wikipedia should have” if you’d like to help.

In all of these examples it’s important to remember that nothing should go on Wikipedia that isn’t footnoted or at least footnotable - so if you’re from a professional cultural institution has some particular knowledge that is otherwise obscure, please put it on your website in some form so Wikipedia can reference it. The criteria for inclusion of any fact is verifiability, not truth!

¹ I’d like to thank the IUPUI Conference Fund for making this visit possible.

One of the breakout sessions during our workshop.

My personal feeling about Wikimedia’s appearance at the event is that this represents the second or third step on a much longer road. The museum community recognises the need to know what Wikipedia is all about, and vice versa. This does not mean that either community groks the other yet, but the recognition that we need to is the biggest breakthrough of all. There are likely to be many projects resulting from contacts made in Denver on an individual basis but at the sector level Wikimedia has “stood up, waved and introduced itself” at the most important party in town.

Here are a couple of things that I personally learned in Denver about Museum-Wikimedia relations:

1 - Museums are searching for the “Wikipedia Application Form”
Whenever a museum representative proposed a potential collaboration activity or asked for clarification on a particular policy it appeared to them that we were being evasive when we typically responded with, “yes, you could do that” or “that might work”. Other collaborative partners can sit down and nut-out a contract detailing all contingencies. In the Wiki-verse we cannot achieve such certainties because of the lack of central control of the projects. In fact, as one museum representative put it to me - museums find it confronting to talk with Wikipedia as they have not usually met anyone as loosely structured as themselves.

This is about as close as there will ever be to having a Wikipedia application form :-)

Whilst it is true that there will never be “an application form” for GLAM-Wikimedia partnerships there are many ways we could be lowering the risk factor for them. This is one more reason why I am so keen to see the Chapters professionalise as it will mean there can be an official contact the museum can call to talk through the inevitable problems. Simply having a local phone number and a business card will do the world of good in our outreach efforts.

2 - Erik Moeller can wax lyrical when he wants to
Here is the last half of his impromptu call to action immortalised on film. I think he was channeling Ghandi - “be the change you want to see in the world” and suchlike. Onya Erik! Here’s the video.

3 - External Links is an issue on which we are talking at cross-purposes
The very first thing that many GLAMs wish to do with Wikipedia is to add links back to their own website. The very first thing that many Wikimedians say to GLAMs is “stop spamming Wikipedia with your website”. This contrast is borne of museums’ misunderstanding Wikipedia’s culture and Wikipedians’ misconstruing the GLAMs’ intentions.

When Wikipedians says “external links” we mean the specific section at the end of any article that is akin to a bibliography of web-links. When museums say “external links” they mean inbound links to their website(s). What this differentiation hides is the fact that whilst Wikipedia’s external links section is kept deliberately short (see the EL policy for the reasons why) Wikipedia will take as many linked footnotes as we can get. So, generally speaking, GLAMs are asked to please refrain from adding external links but highly encouraged to add as many inline citations (a.k.a. footnotes) as you wish to the facts in articles. The more footnotes an article has the better the quality the encyclopedia - as per our “verifiability” policy.

Case study in what not to do. This is the full edit history of “user: Paeolography room” who was active for 40 minutes in 2008. The contributor making these edits failed to:

• Create a personal user account. Instead, they created a “role account” - that is, one username for their whole organisation. Wikipedians are individuals, not companies.
• Create a user page and introduce themselves. The userpage is a “red link” this means that they have not made any attempt to say hello and explain who they are and why they are on Wikipedia - this makes them faceless. If they had, then people would have been able to converse with them and potentially work with them.
• Make a couple of test edits in the sandbox or fix a spelling mistake or any of the kind of edits you might associate with someone interested in improving the encyclopedia. Instead, the only edits this user has made are to the external links sections of articles related to their organisation. This effectively makes this a single-purpose user account - to add links and nothing more.
• Make a couple of edits and then wait and see what happens. All of the edits were made in quick succession rather than trying out their approach on a small scale first to see what others would say and then engaging with them when they do.
• Leave an edit summary. None of the edits have a description of the purpose of the edit. An edit summary is strongly advised as it gives other editors coming later an understanding of what you were attempting to do, even if you didn’t necessarily succeed. Again, it gives the editor a “face”.
• Tailor the edits for purpose. All of the edits add the same link - to the organisation’s home page - rather than tailoring the links to specific sections of the external website that might be more relevant to different subjects.
• Be humble. The edits didn’t merely add the external link but the first few also added the description “this collection is the best resource in the western world”. Whilst that might possibly be true, you wouldn’t say that to your own colleagues in the industry so why would you say that to the world on Wikipedia.

Not surprisingly, another editor came along afterwards, found one of the edits, looked up the editor’s userpage (and found it didn’t exist) then looked up the user’s edit history and in rapid fire removed all of their contributions. As it says on the subsequent discussions about these edits this resource is indeed a valid and useful one and could potentially be incorporated in the various articles, but not in this way…

You can read more detailed discussion about external links and much more besides at the help page: “Wikipedia: Advice for the Cultural Sector” (also known as WP:GLAM). It is equally true that Wikipedians are becoming increasingly harsh to new editors and has never been exactly welcoming to experts… So, I don’t mean to suggest that the blame for this problem should be entirely directed in one direction. As a friend of mine put it recently, “It’s a place written and vetted by expert Wikipedians, not experts”.

The sign attached to the artwork "The big sweep" outside the Denver Art Museum http://www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/bigsweep.htm

4 - Ask and you shall receive

The day after our event in Denver the representative of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona - Conxa Rodá (who took both the “model projects” and “big sweep” photographs used above with permission) - wrote a blog post about what she had seen and learned. Here it is (Spanish). Twenty four hours later she informed the Denver audience that a Barcelona Wikipedian had contacted her museum asking if he could help out in some way. I’m delighted with this as it illustrates two points nicely:
1. there are Wikipedians everywhere who are willing to work with GLAMs if they are given the opportunity; and
2. using an institution’s existing communication platforms (especially its blog) is a good way to draw people from the wiki-world into the real-world.

5 - Seeing Wikipedia as a form of “social media” is both a good and bad thing
If a museum does wish to undertake projects with the Wikimedia community it is often managed out of the social media office - by the same people who run the museum’s Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube accounts. This is the most logical place for it to be and these are the staff members who are used to dealing with external communities, each of which has its own norms and structures. So far so good. However there are some subtle differences that bear clarifying:

• To see Wikipedia alongside Twitter or Facebook is a good thing as it recognises the importance of engaging the community. HOWEVER, in Twitter and Facebook the community exists for its own sake whilst for Wikipedia the community is there to serve the purpose of building a better encyclopedia. Therefore, community members are valued in Twitter and Facebook on the basis of who they are and how many friends they have and how interesting their status/events are. On Wikipedia, a community member is only as valuable as their contribution to the greater project - in whatever form that contribution might be.

• To see Wikipedia alongside Flickr or YouTube is a good thing as it recognises that content is king. The better the content the more it is seen, re-used, engaged with, etc. HOWEVER, Flickr and YouTube are publishing platforms where others can choose whether or not to engage with your content. Even then their options to engage are to comment, tag or make their own multimedia in response. On Wikipedia, publication is the first step in the process but after that it is not possible or even desirable to control the original publication. This is the difference between releasing your band’s new record at the shops and inviting the fans into the mixing studio.

6 - Both the museum sector and the Wikimedia projects are having difficulty structuring their data for third-party use
One of the frequent requests made of Wikimedia was easy and automated export/import datasets. For example, to have multimedia metadata update in Wikipedia automatically when more/better information is uploaded on the museum’s catalogue. Not surprisingly, if a museum is going to place multimedia in Wikimedia Commons they want to make sure the metadata/captions are as accurate as possible. If/when the museum updates its information (which they do all the time) they want to make sure it is accurate in third-party websites too. However, if they have to manually check each Wikimedia Commons entry too this is both inefficient and a waste of money (in the form of staff time). Equally, they would like to know if/when Wikimedians change their original metadata.

On the other side of the coin, one of the things that was debated amongst the museum representatives (and it apparently has been many times before and will continue to be debated for a long time hence) was the idea of the universal item registration number - effectively an ISBN for museum objects. This would be extremely useful for the sector. A single identifier  would also assist any downstream users to reference a particular object easily. Not surprisingly though, the devil is in the detail and no one wants to let go of their in-house cataloguing system.

Each of these things are technically feasible but for a variety of cultural and organisational reasons none is likely to eventuate any time soon.

7 - Museum folks know how to edit Wikipedia when they want to
Ever heard of a “spinney bar“? Wikipedia now has a footnoted reference (here’s the diff) to the fictitious multi-year in-joke at the Museums and the Web conference. As we say on wiki: “Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked. Please use the sandbox for any other tests” So, since we’re playing, I have decided to make a point of my own by testing the policies of an art museum - fair’s fair in love and art.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is possibly the spinniest museum in the world - a single spiral ramp departing from a gorgeous atrium in the centre. The museum has a policy of no photography of the building from inside. It is, after all, copyrighted to Frank Lloyd Wright. Not that this stops the myriad tourists who, upon reaching the top of the ramp, try to take a photograph down through the central core. This leads to a never-ending dance, Benny Hill style, of the security guards chasing tourists and new tourists behind them. So, if you are not allowed to take a photo of the atrium, what about a photo of a diagram of the atrium? Here therefore, is a photograph entitled “Self-portrait with the Guggenheim Evacuation Map”.

The security guards even yelled at me for taking that
Are we even now - a Spinney Bar for a Spinney Museum?
(By the way, if you’re interested in re-imagining the Guggenheim space, there’s a competition on right now to do just that: “contemplating the void: create your own Guggenheim intervention“. Applications close on May 14.)

p.s. Bonus points go to the Dutch contingent at Denver. Whilst many individuals were stuck there afterwards because of the Volcano, they were the only ones to make a blog about it. The imaginatively titled: http://thingstodoindenverwhendutchandstuck.blogspot.com/