Museums and Web 2.0
A study of adoption of Web 2.0 features byDutch art museums and of ways to encourage user participation in museumsocial media campaigns.
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM
Master Thesis Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship
Natalia Ivanchenko, 351562
August, 2011
Supervisor: Dr. F.J.C. Brouwer
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ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM
Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication
Master thesis Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship
Museums and Web 2.0
A study of adoption of Web 2.0 features by Dutch art museums and of ways to encourage user participation in museum social media campaigns.
Natalia Ivanchenko
351562
August 2011
Supervisor: Dr. Dr. F.J.C. Brouwer
Second reader: Dr. Filip Vermeylen
Illustration cover page: made by the author using
(both last accessed25/08/2011)
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Web 2.0
1.1. What does Web 2.0 stand for?
1.2. Theoretical basis for Web 2.0
1.2.1. Social angle
1.2.2. Technological angle
1.2.3. Socio-economical angle
Chapter 2. Applications of Web 2.0 within the museum sector
2.1. Barriers in the application of Web 2.0 by museums
2.2. Reasons for application of Web 2.0 by museums
2.2.1. Museums and the Long Tail
2.2.2. Museums and User Generated Content
2.2.3. Museums and the Network effect
2.2.4. Museums and diffusion of innovations
2.2.5. Museums and the Gartner Hype Curve
2.2.6. Museums and informational cascades
2.2.7. Museums and the wisdom of crowds
2.2.8. Museums and data ownership.
Chapter 3. How museums implement Web 2.0. A study of Dutch art museums in the region of North Holland
3.1. Research methodology
3.2. Validity and reliability
3.3. Description of the sample
3.4. Findings
Chapter 4. Encouraging participation in museum social media campaigns
4.1. On-line participation
4.1.1. Audiences demographics
4.1.2. Behavior patterns
4.2. Motivation for contributions to social media
4.3. Encouraging participation in museum social media campaigns
4.3.1. Museum audiences in the Netherlands
4.3.2. Looking for correlations
4.3.3. Key strategies for encouraging participation in museum social media campaigns
Chapter 5. Case study: Hermitage Amsterdam museum
5.1. About the Hermitage Amsterdam museum
5.2. Campaign description
5.3. Campaign design
5.4. Campaign aims and target audiences
5.5. Limitations
Limitations and suggestions for further research
Conclusion
References
Introduction
Lately the world has been witnessing the Web 2.0 climbing the scale of popularity. Its techniques and services have penetrated into many areas of people’s lives, including education, business and politics. A lot of organizations have realized its marketing potential. Museums are also trying to find their way of adopting Web 2.0. Forthemitisachancetoconnect to their audiences and to promote their activities. However, correlating the user-centered paradigm of Web 2.0 with the authoritative position of museums is a difficult task.
Thisthesis is devoted to the study of the way museums adopt Web 2.0 technologies and services and of the strategies to encourage user participation in museum Web 2.0 campaigns in order to make them more successful.It has a focus on Dutch art museums in the province of North Holland in the Netherlands.
The term “Web 2.0” refers to multipleissues. Chapter1 sheds light on the phenomenon of Web 2.0 itself and provides descriptions of a range of its features. The scientific concepts behind Web 2.0 are discussed here from three perspectives – social, technological and socio-economical. The discussion is followed by revealing the meaning of these concepts for museums in Chapter 2. Attention is paid to both advantages of Web 2.0 for museum practices and possible barriers for their adoption.
In order to find out how Web 2.0 techniques are being adopted by museums a quantitative research of Art museums in North Holland is undertaken in Chapter 3. Cross-sectional design of the study allows toinvestigate 27 museums of the region under 10 variables. The research provides an idea of whether Dutch Art museums in North Holland adopt Web 2.0 in their practices and whether their social media activities have been successful in attracting followers.
The latter question leads to the discussion of strategies of encouraging user participation in museum social media campaigns in Chapter 4. Issues like audience structure of social media and its match with museum visitor audiences, user behavior and motivations to contribute as well as types of participatory projects inherited by museums from science labs are covered in that chapter. Basing on the conclusions of all the previous chapters a business modelfor organizing museum social media campaigns is presented.
Finally, in order to illustrate the strategy at work a development of a participatory project is undertaken within the case study in Chapter 5. The project’s main principles are designed in accordance with the master thesis’s research findings. The museum under investigation of the case study is Hermitage Amsterdam museum.
The thesis aims to answerquestions like “What is Web 2.0?”, “What are the barriers and benefits of its adoption by museums?” and “How do museums adopt Web 2.0 features?” in order to find out the answer to the main research question: “How to encourage user participation in museum Web 2.0 campaigns?”
The actuality of the research follows from the financial situation of the museum sector. Museums have already created marketing departments and learned to raise money from ancillary activities. However, inthetimesofunstableeconomyandtheworldfinancialcrisis these methods alone can no longer serve as guarantors of survival.In the current days of scarce funding and subsidies cut each year museums have to explore the world of entrepreneurship. They have to apply new technologiesand the latest media trends in their practices in order to be able to find and connect to their audienceswhere they are, not where museums would prefer them to be. Museums have to search for new business models, which would be able to comply with the specifics of the cultural environment but will be efficient enough to suite business needs of a modern day museum. Assistance and help in this search is one of the tasks of cultural entrepreneurship studies and one of the problems this thesis aims to elaborate on.
Chapter 1.Web 2.0
Created by a group of scientists as a tool for information exchange Internet has quickly gained popularity within science institutions. After Tim Berners-Lee introduced his idea of a World Wide Web in 1989 and later created HTTP protocol, HTML language and URI identifiers Internet became a truly public domain with hundreds of millions users all over the globe.
Currently it seems to live through a new turn of its evolution, focusing on social and participation aspects. This trenddrew so much public attention that Time magazine pronounced “You” as the person of the year in 2006, alluding to the significance ofusers’ part in creating Internet content. Moreover, it is believed to be a new version of the Web – Web 2.0
It started gaining its popularity after Tim O’Reilly organized the first Web 2.0 conference back in 2004 (Simon A. Frank in Klein (ed.), 2008). He later published an article “What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, where he formulated the key concepts Web 2.0 can be described with as well as main points that differ it from the previous Web 1.0. He does not provide a precise definition to the term stating that “Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core”. What he does admit however, is that in order to succeed in adapting of Web 2.0 techniques one should be able to use Internet for harnessing collective intelligence (O’Reilly, 2005, p.1).
Tim Berners-Lee says Web 2.0 is just a “piece of jargon”[1] as it rather continues his original ideas and concepts than suggests anything new. According to his words, Internet was from the very beginning meant to be "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write"[2]. Nevertheless, whether to count Web 2.0 as a new version of the Web or not, the term has spread quickly over the virtual space and has won a firm place in scientific literature.
Surely, there are Web 2.0 services that are very well-known. These are, for instance, blogs, tags, bookmarks, wikis, RSS etc. However an impression of the whole technology as of a set of “cool tools” is wrong and it is important to know and understand the broad social concepts that stand behind it. Web 2.0 has very strong cultural and sociological backgrounds with ideas of social networks and collective consciousness in its core and technology as a catalyst for their progress. In that way what is happening now is a result of a junction of social and technology development.
Thus, Web 2.0 is a compound structure. In order to understand the interplay of its components one should have a clear idea of their contents, specifics and purposes. This section, therefore,discussesboth technological improvements of Web 2.0 and its social-servicenovelties in order to give a clear notion of what Web 2.0 is and what are aims and consequences of its implication.
1.1.What does Web 2.0 stand for?
Everyone likes to get personal approach. It is always a pleasure to have something designed or adjusted specifically for meeting your personal needs. The most illustrative example for this situation would probably be a car purchase. A car is the thing a buyer will use every day, so he definitely would like it to meet his expectations of comfort and quality. However, each customer has his own preferences, which the car manufacturer is unable to guess beforehand. Therefore the latter introduces the basic set and a list of additional options available, so that each and every customer can adjust interior and exterior characteristics of his car.
Next thing that happens is that this customer goes on the road in his new car and enjoys that everyone sees the nice exterior features his car has. Later he’s showing his car to his friends and tells also what’s special about interior and engine.And after he has used it for a while, he will be sharing his impressions and giving advices to those thinking about buying a new car.
In other words, everyone likes personal approach but needs to share his experiences with society. And as Internet has become strongly integrated in people’s lives, it would be reasonable to provide them with fulfillment of both the above mentioned demands on-line.
Thus web-developers took ideas of interaction, participation and contribution as a basis and created a number of web-based applications and services, which would provide users with even wider possibility to express themselves and to communicate with each other on-line as well as to adjust the software they are using according to their needs and preferences. No wonder they became extremely popular very quickly. Nowadays the usage of Web 2.0 is more a standard of modernity than an optional choice. Users expect to be able to enjoy the advantages of the new kind of web-services wherever on the web they go, be it a political resource or a museum website.
There are already multiple Web 2.0 services and new kinds continue to appear. This thesis, however, doesn’t have an aim of figuring out and describing each of them, but rather only those most important, which can be adopted by museums. They are social networking sites and on-line communities, blogs, wikis,folksonomies,multimedia sharing sites, hosted services, mashups, web applications, RSS and microformats.
Social networking sites are focused on representing an individual, his interests and social connections (usually through a member profile) as well as on providing individuals with the means to communicate and share information with each otheron-line (through instant messages, statuses, emails etc.). The most well-known examples are Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace,etc.On-line communities are similar to social networking sites but are focused on providing services to a whole group of users rather than to each of its members individually. Lots of them can be found at livejournal.com
Blogs (merged from web logs (Blood, 2000)) are on-line journal ordiary-style web pages maintained by individuals, who use them as the space for expressing their opinions on various topics, describe various events or share content (audio, video, pictures, images) with other Internet users. The lattercancomment on the entries of the blog. Examples are Blogger.com, Livejournal.com. Twitter.com is a highly popular microblog.
Wikisare web pages designed in a way which allows users to edit its content directly ina web-browser using a simplified markup language. The most famous example is Wikipedia.
Lots of content generated within social media should be properly categorized in order to be easily found by others. The practice of classification of content on the Web through tags and social bookmarking is calledfolksonomy. Tagsare keywords best describing the content. Sometimes tags are visualized in a shape of a tag cloud, which illustrates the tags used on the website as well as their frequency/popularity. Social bookmarking is a method of saving, managing and sharing the links to on-line content.Clicking on Facebook’s “like” button is social bookmarking as it puts the link and an annotation to the chosen content onto the user’s personal page and shares it with the users he is connected to within this network.There are also resources like reddit.com, del.icio.us or digg.com created specifically for bookmark exchange.
Multimedia sharing sitesare hosts of multimedia content uploadedby users. After uploading a file the user gets a link or a code which allows him to share this video with others.For instance, YouTube.com, Flickr.com or Vimeo.com.
Hosted services or web servicesare basically the ability to programmatically access a website and use its services.For instance, embedding Google Maps into a website’s contacts page is a web service provided by Google. This option certainly requires certain technical advances such as use of open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which is specific manual telling programmers how to use the service without actually providing them with the source code.
Open APIs made possible the emergence of mashups. Literally these are “mixtures or fusions of disparate elements” (Oxford English Dictionary).But in relation to Web 2.0 mashup stands for a type of websites which provide their services basing on aggregation and reorganization of the data from two or more other websites. For instance, FlickrVision.com uses data from both Flickr and Google Maps to show the geographical location of new photos uploaded on Flickr in real-time mode.
Web applicationsare software applications which have “moved” on-line and can now be completely accessible through the Web. For instance, Google Docs or Zoho are office suits similar to Microsoft Office but are completely web-based and don’t require an installation on a user PC. Certainly this kind of software supposes a high level of interactivity. Such as support for multiple dropdown menus and reach text formatting. For these purposes technologies like Ajax, JavaScript, Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight were created.
RSS(Really Simple Syndication) isa bunch of formats for collecting information about updates on specified web resources and delivering it to the user in a standardized format (usually a feed which includes the name of the resource, the title and annotation of an update).In order to make RSS work they should be enabled on the source-website and a feed-reader should be installed on a user’s PC. The latter also has to decide which RSS he wants to receive and to subscribe to the selected ones.
Microformats are pieces of semantic information embedded into a webpage’s code. They cannot be seen by a user and serve mainly for a better processing of page content by search engines or web browsers.For instance, contact details described with the use of a microformat will be recognized by a web browser not only as a text but as contact details specifically. As a result a user maybe asked if he wishes to add these details to his contact book, which will only take one click of a mouse.
All these features can be successfully employed by museums and other cultural organizations in order to provide a better and more up-to-date service on-line. However, apart from the direct profit coming from the use of Web 2.0 features there can also be indirect profit derived from the understanding of social and economic concepts behind it. They are discussed in the next chapter.
1.2.Theoretical basis for Web 2.0
A new technology is rarely a result of pure luck or an accident. Web 2.0 features with their interactive and entertaining interface are certainly attractive to play with. But their invention and success weren’t solely due to the desire of web-developers and users to make the Web even more attractive – there were certain aims that were kept in minds when designing each new feature. Thus, some of the basic concepts for Web 2.0 existed long before it has appeared and some of themappearedas a result of observation and analysis of Web 2.0’s success progress and specifics of itsdevelopment.
Tim O’Reilly has pointed out several concepts for Web 2.0. Namely, he has written about phenomena of collective intelligence, data becoming a key resource to own, software core moving on-line and rich user experiences. (O’Reilly, 2005) In this chapter these concepts will be explained and enriched with several more theories in order to create a full picture of Web 2.0 functioning.