what will the museum of the future be like?

Announcing the Australian Musuem's new website

On Sunday 7 June 2009, the Australian Museum launched its new website. After four long years of planning and preparation we finally have a site that enables staff to manage their own online material and which enables us to engage in two-way interaction and community building.
For the past two years we have been actively working on organisational change, using the staff mantra of working 20% differently, not 20% more. We have also been using the Engaging with Social Media in Museums research project to conduct online experiments which resulted in an added benefit of inspiring staff into wanting to engage further in the online world and become proactive – we have been blogging about that project here on Museum 3.0.

I invite you to visit our site, sign up to our community and please give us feedback either via the commenting function or the email form.

For further background on our site and Web 2.0 I have writen a post on the Westmuse blog here.

Tags: 2.0, Australian, Museum, change, organisational, web

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Kelly on July 17, 2009 at 2:31pm

Eerr, think I can answer this Richard.

There are 15 assets and we use them all, not all users have access to them all (for example media releases and poisitons vacant). The CMS supports as many admins as we choose. The idea behind this approach was that anyone can be an author and upload materaail, however we do have some checks put in place where in some cases a Manager would need to approve staff members' content before it goes live. It really depends on the area.

The overall aim is for everyone to be responsible for managing their own content and interactions with our online visitors, and actively recruiting "experts" to help out too.

I'll be doing a project de-briefing with our web people later this month and will upload a 'lessons learned' list as others have been asking questions too.

It is still a work in progress and I think it'll be a good 6 months before we know where we're up to. One piece of good news was that our figures dipped but not as substantially as we thought.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Hayward on September 2, 2009 at 2:20pm

Thanks Lynda (sorry for not acknowledging your response in July!), I think we will have a similar number of assets (content types in Drupal). Where you have a requirement for a manager to approve some new content, how does your CMS operate to enable that?

More Questions ...
1. Archiving Content During Site Migration.
When you migrated to your new site, how did you manage old material that you no longer needed on your new site? Did you still keep it on a web server, or create an offline archive of the material? Some of these might be useful for future development, e.g. an animation that you might use again one day.
2. Site Traffic Change.
How did you estimate the amount of traffic that you might lose through migration? Was that based on the change in volume of content, or changes to old URLs etc.?

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Permalink Reply by Linda Ferguson on September 8, 2009 at 11:19am

Hi Lynda,

Congratulations to you and the team on your new website. I particularly like your ‘What’s on’ tab which groups exhibitions, displays, events, tours and other activities for 6 different audience groups. I also think your site packs in a whole lot of information, but it seems to do so much more simply than your old site. You still seem to be changing some elements over - like your online shop, which still has your old logo?

As a four-year project to get to this point, what sort of evaluation did you use in its development, and at what stages? And what are you doing to evaluate the site now that it's live?

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Kelly on October 10, 2009 at 11:30am

Thanks Linda and sorry for my tardy reposne. I have done a project review with the Webteam which I will post here (once I write it up that is!). We did user testing all along the way with both users and staff. We're still migrating stuff across (like the shop) as we found the commercial (ie money-changing) sites especially challenging. We're also in the process of changing some elements like the front page and news sections.

On another note, I have finally migrated my Audience Research website across this morning so be keen to see people using it. If you want to become an Expert (ie you can write pages, upload stuff and write blog posts) please feel free to ask me as I really want to hear from people like you Linda (and Gillian and Carolyn and Susan...)!