Do we need labels now that we have social media?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Cooper on March 23, 2010 at 8:17am

I guess it depends on what you regard as "pertinent contextual information about why the object is in the gallery" and "all this other information". And what's the connection with social media? Aren't you just talking about content on your website?

Permalink Reply by Robin Boast on March 23, 2010 at 7:56pm

Dear Jonathan,

Well, yes and no. I think it depends much more on what we actually intend to communicate in the gallery and how that relates to the object's presence on our website -- and its many other identities in print, exhibitions and on the web. Of course this all depends a great deal on what the actual gallery is for, that is obvious, but my question was to look at a practice that I think is not really questioned very much. I also recognise that this may be more of a European problem than a global one, but my question still stands. Why do we continue to see it as necessary to reproduce a catalogue entry for every object in a display case? The reason in the past was because it was necessary for connoisseurial and expert audiences. However, now, we have far broader audiences to accommodate. So, why all this catalogue data?

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Cooper on March 24, 2010 at 9:42am

The situation is obviously different in an archaeology museum. In the art museum I work in, our labels are normally just in this format:

Artist-name
Country/ies + lifespan
Title date-created (if known)
Medium
Accession-number or Collection (if not from this museum)

Some works have "extended labels", but this just adds a paragraph or so of extra interpretive text to the bottom (not a full catalogue entry).

I agree that a "full catalogue entry" on every label would make for very cluttered displays (especially multiple objects in a case). So, yes, moving that extra info online (as long as your physical displays indicate how to get that info) would be a better solution. The contribution of social media, then, would be public tagging, etc.

Permalink Reply by Kelly Dolan on March 25, 2010 at 9:05am

Robin,
I think that's a great idea! I think that allowing visitors to interact on the museum website and add their own tags (as on Flickr Commons) would be a great way for visitors to interact with museums after the physical museum experience. It keeps visitors involved in the learning process and builds a relationship between the museum and visitor.

Permalink Reply by jana on March 26, 2010 at 1:18pm

This is a good question. Many of my friends found that labels in historical museums are quite boring and bothering. It's no longer the time that people go to the museum for the curiosity of material life alone, they want more relative experience.

I am doing a research on how social media, especially online tags will change the method of collection management, like the difference of online collection management and physical collection management, re-structure of the staff, financial issues. Do you have any ideas?

Thanks!

Permalink Reply by Robin Boast on March 26, 2010 at 8:44pm

Dear Jana,

Your research sounds very interesting. We too have been working for some time on reconstructing documentation, and documentation systems. Our latest CMS, for example, allows outside experts, which we define very broadly, to log in to our CMS and add their own tags, descriptions, context, place names and relationships to other resources. Even when our own staff enter new data, it is under their own name. We are also working with source communities to distribute documentation between the museum and the source community thus decentring the documentation role. I would be very happy to discuss your work more.

Thanks

Permalink Reply by Kelly Dolan on March 27, 2010 at 3:19am

The Brooklyn Museum just launched a mobile website that includes a "game" called Gallery Tag which encourages visitors to tag objects while in the museum. The museum's website also has a tagging game and a game to edit tags. I don't know if they've been allowing visitors to tag items long enough to collect research but they might be a good source for research as well.

Permalink Reply by Robin Boast on March 27, 2010 at 4:16am

Kelly,

Thanks for this. We certainly know of the many good works of the Brooklyn Museum, but I didn't know of these two. Our systems, at the moment, are for experts to add information to the CMS. We define "expert" very broadly as anyone who has a deep and lasting relationship with the object. This includes not only academics, but artists and source community experts as well. However, we are just beginning a redevelopment of our archaeology galleries where we will be building a lot of on-line interpretive apps including many that give a great deal of control to the visitor.