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Display Case
It’s Not the Size of the Online Collection…
By Chris Norris
Let’s imagine that I go to Amazon.com and do a search for a book. Before I even run the search, I get a whole list of featured content. If I’m logged in as a customer, this will be tailor-made to fit preferences that I’ve already hinted at through previous searches or purchases. Then I run my search, and I get told what other people who have purchased the book have ordered. I can read reviews by other readers, write my own review, create my own list of favorite books and share the book with my friends. And as I go on to search the site for more books, I can continuously view a growing list of what I’ve looked at.
Even if you are not one of the 615 million people who visited Amazon’s website last year, many online vendors employ some or all of the same tools. There’s a great deal of benefit to them in inviting you to spend more time on their website; ultimately it increases the chance that you might buy something or buy more than you originally intended. For a company such as Amazon, this technology helps it tackle one of the few remaining advantages that a traditional bookstore has—namely the ability to browse the store for a book when you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
Museums should be worrying about browsability. We hold enormous numbers of specimens and artifacts in the public trust. At the same time, the fraction of these collections that we actually make available to the public is miniscule. This problem is particularly acute for natural history collections, where specimens can number in the tens of millions, but where the number of items on display may be a few thousand at most.
So how do you let the public browse these collections? Traditionally, the answer to this has been to trumpet “virtual access,” which is usually in the form of a collections database that can be searched via the Web. Visitors typically are presented with fields into which they can type search words. Assuming that what they input matches something in the database (a big assumption), they get back a list providing minimal information about what each item is and where it comes from. If they’re really lucky, they may get a picture.
This may serve the needs of the relatively small fraction of the public who are professional users of collections. But as far as public education and access is concerned, traditional Web interfaces of this sort are next to useless. Most visitors to a museum’s collection database are like casual browsers in a bookstore: They want to look, but—to begin with, at least—they may have only a vague idea of what they’re looking for.
It’s not enough when online visitors are given the opportunity to check out the collections. They should be invited to explore, be rewarded by finding out interesting things, and given opportunities and incentives to explore further. For instance, you could show them some examples of what other people are searching for, or you could let them enter their Zip code and give them a list of all the fossil specimens that come from within 10 miles of where they live. They also need to be encouraged to participate in the collections by providing and sharing information and by bringing the cool things that they discover to the attention of their friends and the wider public. Many websites let people tag pages or objects with their own search terms to improve discovery—so why not let them tag specimen records? The pioneering work done by the steve.museum project suggests that a high proportion of users’ tags are both novel and informative. Or you could encourage a sense of ownership by allowing visitors to create and share their own virtual collections of specimens. All of these things—tagging, linking, grouping and sharing—can be done using the same tools that have been routinely available on commercial and social-networking websites for years.
There are a few sites that already do this (for example, Creative Spaces, a social networking site for UK museum collections), but why are we not rushing to embrace these new opportunities? In natural history, I suspect, the reason is that we have become side-tracked by numbers. Museums frequently measure their success at providing public access to collections by the proportion of their holdings that have been databased and are available online; it’s the sort of concept that can easily be grasped by trustees and funding bodies. The larger museums, in particular, worry a great deal about how to address the often enormous backlogs of material that have not been databased.
Assuming that the collections have been databased, attention often shifts to “digitization”; this ought to encompass databasing as well, but is usually shorthand for taking pictures of specimens and sticking them on the Web. More often than not, this also falls prey to the numbers issue. I remember in a previous job being asked why we had not imaged our entire collection of dinosaurs; the problem was that around a quarter of these specimens were actually boxes of unidentifiable bone fragments labeled “Dinosaur.” Shooting images of these might have improved the museum’s specimen count but was unlikely to significantly enhance our Web presence.
There’s a lot more to databasing than public access, and there are plenty of good reasons to devote time and effort to tackling those backlogs. But as far as public accessibility is concerned, one has to wonder what the point is of putting more stuff online when we do such a bad job of helping people explore what’s already there. Perhaps some of the funds that are devoted to data and image capture would do more good if they were targeted on improving the experience of the end user and making a reality out of virtual access.
Christopher A. Norris is senior collection manager, division of vertebrate paleontology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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