What's On: The Cuberis Podcast

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Episode 14: #MuseumBouquet and #MuseumSunshine May 22, 2020

Show notes

My guests today are Emily Haight of the New-York Historical Society and Hilary-Morgan Watt of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. They manage the social media accounts for their respective institutions, and during the COVID-19 crisis, they’ve been collaborating on campaigns that offer a little bit of light and joy, in an otherwise dark time. You may have seen the hashtags #museumboquet and #museumsunshine, through which they’ve shared virtual flowers and rays of light from their collections.

We had a great talk about the importance of connecting people to museums and each other through simple human gestures and explored the importance of digital media during the shutdown and beyond.

But first, I wanted to know how these two social media managers, from two different types of institutions in two different cities became close collaborators. So, that’s where we’ll start.

If you’d like to be a guest on What’s On or know someone else doing innovative work online for their museum—especially now—send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com.

(Other links mentioned in this episode: Museums are Not Neutral & Museum Workers Relief Fund)

Episode 13: Claire Lanier from The Metropolitan Museum of Art May 11, 2020

Show notes

If you work in social media for your cultural institution, there’s a pretty good chance you know Claire Lanier, or are at least familiar with her work. I first interviewed Claire for this podcast about two years ago, when she was managing social media at the New-York Historical Society. She and Meredith Duncan, who was at the Museum of the City of New York, had just won MUSE Award for the #MuseumSnowBallFight campaign, in which museums around the world lobbed snow-related images at each other via social media, while much of the US was shut down during the Bomb Cyclone storm.

Based on that conversation, I knew that Claire had a knack for using social media to connect a museum’s mission with its audience, even when that museum’s doors are closed. So I thought this would be a good time to check in to see how it’s been running social media for the Met during a pandemic.

Episode 12: Alison Byrne and Brad Tuggle from Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art Apr 27, 2020

Show notes

If you’re listening to this in April 2020, which is when I’m recording this, I don’t need to tell you how much has changed in the world since the last time I did an episode of What’s On. If you happen to be listening in the distant future and don’t remember what I’m talking about, we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and museums are temporarily closed to the public. Physically, at least.

As days of sheltering in place turned into weeks, and now over a month, museum members, families, and just people in general have been hungry for the sort of cultural and educational sustenance that only a museum can provide. And some museums are using digital tools to rise to the occasion.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through the excellent thread of posts using the #MuseumFromHome hashtag, and I spotted a tweet from Virginia MOCA announcing the launch of a new site: Virtual VA MOCA. When I clicked through, I landed on a pretty robust site, with virtual galleries of current exhibitions, educational resources and videos made from home, and interviews with artists, who are exhibiting from home. All of this was built out on a free Google site, and it felt totally made for this exact moment. Because it was.

I started this podcast two years ago to showcase the great work museums are doing with online content, in the hopes of inspiring other museum professionals who are struggling with content strategies. And now, more than ever, that’s my goal. So I spoke with Brad Tuggle, Virginia MOCA’s Director Of Audience Development, and Alison Byrne, Director of Exhibitions and Education, to ask them to share a little inspiration in this strange and challenging time.

Episode 11: Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell of Oregon Historical Society Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon. **FULL TRANSCRIPT** NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon. I met Jay last year in Vancouver, at the Museums and the Web conference. It was my first time at MW, and I was co-hosting a content strategy workshop with our CEO Eric. I’d like to think that everyone in the class got something out of our session, but Jay, in particular, seemed to be especially excited to be there. JAY: So I walked in thinking, well I know a little about content strategy, but not focused on museums, this will be great. But then, in like the first two minutes, Nick says, “So, content strategy is a big topic, but what we’re going to do to get your feet wet in an actual project, we’re going to pretend that your organization is starting a blog. And I was like [clap, clap] awesome. Because, of course, we were… ERIN: We were starting a blog! NICK: A few months ago, I checked in on the OHS website to see how the blog was going. And I was so thrilled to see that their new blog, Dear Oregon, had not only launched but was producing some really rich collections-based content. So I reached out to Jay to see if he wanted to talk about the blog, and he insisted that I meet Erin Brasell, too, who Jay described as the brains behind the blog, and they joined me over Skype. Since I’d never been to the Oregon Historical Society, I wanted to know a little bit about what I’d find there, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. ERIN: Our mission is to preserve our state’s history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon. And it’s a mouthful, and it’s a pretty broad mission, but we do work to advance the mission in a number of ways, including, we have permanent and temporary exhibits, both here in the building and online. We have a research library, we do a number of public programs and workshops here in our downtown location. We also partner with other organizations across the state. And the Oregon Historical Society recently launched a digital collections site in 2017, which makes available online thousands of images. We also have oral histories and documents from our collections. And they’re constantly being updated. So, like hundreds a week, usually? JAY: Yes, hundreds a week. There’s tens of thousands of documents on there and the diversity is astounding. And there’s just more and more stuff up there all the time. And part of what’s important about that is that even though we’re located in downtown Portland, we’re the Oregon Historical Society. So we’re really charged — we’re not a part of the government, we’re an independent nonprofit that is charged with — we have a duty to preserve and share the history of the entire state with the entire state. So one of the reasons that — my title is web strategist — one of the reasons I was hired almost five years ago was because we needed to do a better job providing services to people who aren’t physically here. And so that’s really where the web comes in. So the digital collections site has been a huge leap forward in our abilities to provide access to our materials to people who aren’t just here. NICK: Awesome, and actually, I had this as a question later on, but Jay, since you mentioned being a web strategist, could tell me a little bit more about what you do at the Oregon Historical Society? JAY: Sure, so my title is web strategist and it’s really “web everything.” So on a typical day, I might do anything from input and manage content to write code to sit down and meet with folks and figure out where our web strategy should be in five years. So I do everything from the 30,000-foot perspective down to the nitty-gritty of why isn’t this page working. And that’s fun for me, because I’ve been in web development for 20 years, and I’ve done all of those different things at one point or another as part of a team, and so now I pretty much get to play with all the fun toys and participate in all the different aspects of communicating and working with the public online. And so that, to me, is just very satisfying. NICK: And how about you, Erin? What’s your title? ERIN: Yeah, so I’m the editorial design and production manager for the Oregon Historical Quarterly. And the Quarterly is a peer-reviewed public history journal that’s published by the Oregon Historical Society. And we’ve been publishing continuously since 1900. And so the Quarterly is a benefit of our membership. On a day-to-day basis, I’m responsible for production at the OHQ, meaning design and layouts, setting schedules. I also do editorial work, including bringing some manuscripts for peer review and getting the files ready to go to the printer and managing that sort of process. NICK: So blogging is not your full-time job. And managing a blog is not your full-time job. ERIN: And it’s funny, we wrote a little piece of it into my job description and this sort of goes into one of the motivations for creating the blog was, I was personally motivated to become involved with it because OHQ produces this great scholarship about Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and I wanted to get some of that information out beyond just our readership, which ranges between 4,000-4,500 on any given print cycle. But there’s so much information that we produce, and the Oregon Historical Society just didn’t have a platform to disseminate the information more widely than just what we print in OHQ. JAY: Absolutely, and the other thing, too, the blog really fills a gap. Especially in our content strategy and in our social media strategy. We put out a lot of really cool and interesting chunks and nuggets of content relating to items in our collection, relating to events, either current or historical, through social media. But there’s only so much you can put in a Facebook post. There’s even less that you can put on Instagram or Twitter. And so in between that and — how long is a typical OHQ article? 5,000 words? ERIN: Well, it can range from 3,000 to 9 or 10,000 words, so a pretty big range, but that’s a lot. JAY: That’s a lot, and in between a tweet and 5,000 words is a pretty big gap. And there are a lot of, again, items in our collection, events in history, either well-known or obscure, people, places, all these things that there’s more to say than you could fit in a Facebook post but we don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or reader interest to write an OHQ article about every single thing like that. And so the blog really allows us to hit that sweet spot and to not have to be as soup-to-nuts comprehensive. When it comes to scholarship, we should also mention we have a number of digital history projects that put historical content out there online, and one of them is the Oregon Encyclopedia, which is a fantastic resource, peer-reviewed, has a fantastic stable of writers and historians that develop content for it on a continuous basis. ERIN: And a pretty robust editorial board, too, so it is an authoritative source on Oregon History, so it’s really important. JAY: Absolutely. And if you’re going to write an OE entry or an OHQ article about a subject, you can be darn well sure that it’s going to be comprehensive. It’s going to be reviewed, fact-checked, this is not a trivial process. It’s also not a shallow or… NICK: Ephemeral was the word that I was thinking of for social media… JAY: Right, and so, for the blog, we can kind of dance between those boundaries. We can have — one of my favorite blog posts is a wonderful woman in our museum, a cataloger, Silvie Andrews, talking about this really bizarre Victorian-era tricycle in our collection. And she talked about it, and she shows how it runs on a video, and it’s just, nowhere else could we say, ‘Here’s this weird thing that is in our warehouse, that doesn’t necessarily fit into some bigger picture story. It’s just weird. And it’s cool. So take a look.’ ERIN: The cool thing about it is the mechanics of it. So it doesn’t have pedals, it has these leather stirrups that you kind of push down and force your seat up, and then it propels itself forward in that way. So it’s really awkward, and obviously didn’t catch on because there aren’t many of them, but the blog is a great place for us to put that out there for people to see and hopefully generate interest in other things that are going on. And one of the other things that I really like about the blog is it gives us a platform to stay relevant with rapid responses to current events that are going on. And so there are a number of things we published recently in OHQ that deal with immigration, citizenship, a lot of the really hot topics right now, that are really put in perspecitve. Some of the things that we’re seeing in the news today that need a little more thought than what can be put on Twitter or Facebook. It gives us the space to do some of that analysis and bring in these resources that we have and this scholarship that we produce, and put it out there for people to consider. So that’s some of the work that I’m really excited about. NICK: So obviously you do need to leave some room in your editorial plan for these topical stories that you can relate your collections to, but beyond that, how do you decide— you know, the funky Victorian tricycle — how do you decide which stories are best to tell and when? ERIN: When we started out, we basically started out with a list of ideas that we had gathered over the course of a year or so. Talking to colleagues, going out to coffee, having folks pitch stuff to us, us finding interesting things in the collection that we sort of ask people to run with… So right now our editorial calendar is part strategic, in that we have certain events that we would like to promote… JAY: We have a huge event coming up, which is the opening of our signature exhibit on Oregon history, which is called Experience Oregon. We had a previous exhibit that was in the same space, that covered roughly the same subject matter called Oregon, My Oregon, that was opened in 2005. And so it’s a big deal that we closed this big exhibit and completely created a new one from scratch. And that’s opening February 14, and that’s a big deal, and so one of the things, again, fun about the blog. The blog lets us tell, again, these little interesting stories within the story. NICK: Well, so one of the things I wanted you about was, Experience Oregon, as you mentioned, is replacing Oregon My Oregon, and having not been to the museum or the Historical Society, from my perspective I would assume that those are sort of marquee exhibitions, sort of all-encompassing broad exhibitions about your state’s history. And so while the former version of it was closed for renovation while you’re building Experience Oregon, did you see your blog as an opportunity to — in addition to marketing the exhibition itself — to sort of supplement or augment the stories that would have been told if there hadn’t been a renovation or the types of stories that will be told when the new exhibition opens. Do you see the blog as sort of a digital version of what that’s going to be? ERIN: I definitely see it as potentially a digital supplement. Because like you said, if we had unlimited space, we would tell all the stories of all the people and places and events in Oregon. But we are limited by exhibit space, and so we do have plans to try to make connections to the new exhibit, especially since it is designed to provide an entry point for people coming in to learn about the history of Oregon. And so, getting into the specific stories and things on the blog, and particularly through the artifacts that are on display, and the documents from our collection that are going to be on display, it provides a really nice space to get into a deeper history associated with those things that will be there for visitors to see when it opens. JAY: Absolutely. I think in some ways when we knew we were going to have to close the exhibit, this was actually long before we even thought of the blog. It’s certainly long before the blog was launched. ERIN: I think the exhibit has been a three-year process. The idea to redo Oregon, My Oregon, to actually opening the door. So, I think we’ve been working on the blog for about two years. JAY: We’ve been working on the blog for about two years, but it’s only been open to the public, as it were, since November. So really, all different aspects of our websites have been getting beefed up over time to fill that gap. With new entries on the Oregon Encyclopedia, we’ve added some digital exhibits, of course, the OHS digital collections site has been expanding during that period that the old exhibit was closed. So really, in some ways having to close a big exhibit like that was really a blessing. At least, for someone like me with my nefarious purpose do more of our work online. Because we had to. It highlighted the need to do a better job and a more comprehensive job of telling the stories of Oregon’s History online. And to provide people with the resources, so that they can learn more about the stories that are interesting to them. And that’s what I think is going to be really interesting. Because now we sort of had to beef up what we did online with the closure of the exhibit, and because we knew we had to anyway, but now that we’re opening the exhibit, that exhibit is really going to be the gateway drug to Oregon History. It’s going to be wonderful in and of itself, but every photograph, every little text panel, chances are there’s a full-blown article on the Oregon Encyclopedia about that person, place or thing. There’s probably a few OHQ articles that relate to that. There could be digital exhibits or primary sources that are on the Oregon History Project or the digital collections site. There could be a wealth of content. And in a physical exhibit, you only have space for one paragraph or one little photograph. So we’re really hoping that we can connect people to the online resources that are necessarily more detailed and more exhaustive through the physical exhibit because you never know. Somebody walks through a 3,000 square foot exhibit, you don’t know what’s going to capture somebody’s attention. You don’t know what they’ll wish they could learn more about. You have to make your curatorial decisions, and balance everything. But then someone’s going to really want to do a deep dive into this one thing. And if we can make it easy for them to find that one thing, well, then we win. NICK: Well, so, on a similar note to the idea of somebody in your exhibit seeing something that grabs their attention and being able to find a full-fledged article about it online, I’ve noticed that on your blog, at the bottom of your posts, there’s related collection items. And I was wondering if that — how should I put it? — was your content management system built with that in mind? Was this something you have to manually do? I am wondering about the technical aspect of it, but also strategically, how important to you was it that somebody reads an article and then decides they want to dive into your collections? JAY: So that’s very important, and that’s actually a feature that predates the blog. That was something that was developed when we designed the strategy behind our current website, which was launched in November of 2015. A big problem with a website for an organization like ours, or for a lot of organizations, is that you want to provide people with an easy way to find the content that they’re looking for. Right? The basic user experience design. But how do you help people find the content they don’t know they’re looking…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 10: Jennifer Henel of Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art Nov 21, 2018

Show notes

Jennifer Henel is Digital Humanities Developer at Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art My guest today is Jennifer Henel, Digital Humanities Developer at Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. When we talk about museum website content at Cuberis, we break it down into four types. We call one of those types “Essential Content.” This refers to the day to day work, mostly scholarly in nature, that occurs at your museum, and would even if you didn’t have a website. Thanks to recent innovations and initiatives, more and more institutions are finding innovative ways of repurposing Essential Work as web content. Jennifer has been helping curators and historians publish their work online for years, and joined me to talk about some of the unique challenges of digitizing scholarly works. She also has some great ideas and insights for others who are looking to do something similar for their own institutions. **FULL TRANSCRIPT** NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On: The Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber. If you’ve ever worked on a website redesign project, you know that it takes a lot of content to fill an entire website. But for a moment, imagine that your museum didn’t have a website at all. Think of how much content your museum would still to produce — Catalogs, scholarly research, educational resources, labels — all of the work that is essential to your museum’s mission and purpose. But your museum does have a website, and that work can now impact people who can’t make it to your physical location. When we talk about museum websites at Cuberis, we refer to that type of content as Essential Work. Thanks to recent innovations in digital technology, more and more cultural institutions are making their Essential Work available online, making it accessible to more historians and scholars, and taking advantage of the Internet’s intrinsic properties to make it easier to read and understand. My guest today is Jennifer Henel. She is working with Research Conservator Melanie Gifford of the National Gallery of Art to produce a new publication for the all-digital Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. I invited her to join me to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of publishing scholarly work online, what peer review looks like for digital publications, and what sort of insights she has for museums looking to make more Essential Work accessible to more people. Jennifer joined me over Skype from the National Gallery of Art. Before we dove into the technical aspects of her work, I wanted to know more about the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Arts. JENNIFER: Sure. It is the scholarly production of articles, etc, relating to Netherlandish art, Flemish art, Northern Baroque paintings, by and large, Dutch Art, that kind of spans the 1400s – I’m making large generalizations here — through, I’d say the early 1700s, depending on the subject matter. And they are deep scholarly dives, often, into a particular painting or paintings, that sort of thing. It is a community of these various historians that are spread out throughout the world, and they can all contribute. And they aim for quarterly publication, though it just depends on what is coming up when they produce certain publications. So that is what the journal does. NICK: So you just started working with them — or recently started working with them — as a digital humanities developer. What is your role there, and what does that title mean? JENNIFER: So I am working on a specific new publication that is part of the journal offerings. It’s going to be slated for next year. We’re aiming, I believe, for late June to push this out. And what I’ll be doing is, I’m working with a scholar, Melanie Gifford, on her research on the Sir Peter Paul Rubens painting The Fall of Phaeton, which is at the National Gallery. Melanie is a scientific conservator here at the National Gallery, and she is interested, not only in doing an article, but allowing for the narrative to take the reader through an exploration of the painting on a very technical level, but also to allow space for users to play around and see the different layers. So we envision having not only the article, where you can go in a very linear fashion, but also using IIIF is our goal to allow a user to get really deep into a painting, to layer different images such as technical imagery, such as infrared reflectography and x-radiographs to reveal certain things about how the painting has changed, and also to draw comparisons with other paintings that are not in the gallery’s holdings. So it is a very specific project, but the idea is there will be an expansion of how the Journal works in order to allow for future articles to have some of this functionality. NICK: How does that work as far as rights or, you know, what do you call it, provenance, or you know…? How did that scholar decide, ‘I’m going to do this piece,’ and what is the National Gallery’s role in that, as far as saying — do they have to give permission since the Journal doesn’t hold it, the Gallery does. So how does that relationship work? JENNIFER: How does that work? It’s a good question, and it is one that is becoming increasingly relevant, I think, in terms of digital scholarship right now. And thankfully, I think the tide is moving toward more openness and more allowances with regard to what you do with it. Because, ultimately, the Gallery is perhaps the best example because it is the Nation’s collection. So we feel very much that this is the collection belonging to the people. Just a few years ago, we were able to make all of our images Open Access, and earlier this year we migrated all of the images of the gallery to IIIF compatibility. So those images are done. The technical images that have been produced, which I believe has just happened, we have to see how we can make them integrate because we have not yet rolled that out, at least at the NGA. So we are kind of watching to see how IIIF is put out in other places because JHNA is not built on the same platform. So we have a different sort of hosting mechanism. But as far as the image permissions, and deciding to work on it, it’s really at the discretion of the scholar. So in most places, when scholarship comes up, it’s because it’s either maybe prompted by an exhibition or just general interest, or perhaps even kind of that fun scholarly rabbit hole. Like, you’re looking at something else and you happen to stumble upon a little piece of information that leads you down another path. With the impetus for what Melanie wanted to do, I’m actually not sure what totally led her to this, but she has done some really great scientific wok at the NGA. She did a large bit of scientific analysis for the most recent Vermeer exhibition that we had, as well as with the van Aelst exhibition in 2012. So she’s actively working on these kinds of questions around how works are painted, what pigments are used, what the composition is, etc. So form that perspective, it’s really scholar’s choice. And for rights and reproductions, that sort of piece of it, at least at the NGA, this is all contributing to the dossier on this painting. So we want it to contribute to better understanding of the work, and I believe strongly that this will help do that. So the article is definitely a plus for the Gallery and to draw more attention to some of these paintings. NICK: Wow, that’s great. And I was actually looking around the National Gallery website because I was trying to find van Eyck’s Annunciation, which I told you before we started recording, is one of my favorites. But one thing I forgot to look at, that I’m really curious about, is would that article then be linked to from the NGA website back to the Journal? When you say it becomes part of the dossier, is that what you mean? JENNIFER: It is what I mean, in terms of — actually, I’m currently working on some projects withing Curatorial Records, so it would become the record on the object. From a practical perspective, ideally, that is what would happen is that we could link to this wonderful content. The Gallery is undergoing quite a bit of change with regard to its digital strategy and establishing one, and we are by extension getting a new director soon, so I think there are a lot of changes coming down the pike. How that will ultimately materialize, I don’t really know yet. But I do think that’s the ultimate goal, is to have better connectivity with things that– with resources, especially that can relate to our content and make it richer for our user. NICK: That actually leads me to a question I was going to ask a little further down, but before I get to that, when you were talking about the National Gallery of Art, you said “we” a couple of times, so for our listeners, could you explain your relationship to the National Gallery of Art and how you work now for the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art relates to that? JENNIFER: Sure, so I worked formally at the Gallery in a number of roles over the course of about 15 years. And my formal time drew to a close earlier this year, but I am now working on contracts that relate to the NGA. Earlier this week, I began a new project working on a digital project for the Kress Foundation, an ongoing effort that will continue, I believe until 2020. My piece of it is set up at least through next year, but I have worked on a number of projects at the NGA and I am actually sitting at the NGA right now. I most recently was the curatorial coordinator for digital content, and I was responsible for helping our curators bring their ideas to digital format, making them accessible. The bigger projects that we did, we had Molly Donovan’s essay on Rachel Whiteread. That exhibition is up right now but we preempted it with a scholarly essay that has a lot in the apparatus that allows a user to read, and cite, etc. I also worked on the online scholarly catalog initiative effort here to produce Dutch paintings of the 17th Century. And that was roughly a five-year endeavor that was 30 people plus. And was in the curatorial office for many years, in Northern Baroque paintings, so I know the content pretty well and I was able to serve as the project coordinator, so I was responsible for working with the curatorial staff and the technical staff and kind of liaising with everybody to ensure that we have a catalog up, which is now happily online and accessible to all and free. So that’s a little bit about my background, and I hope to continue getting to work on NGA projects as we move forward. NICK: Yeah, that’s great. It’s neat that you have found this overlap between the two and that your work with the Journal can benefit from your work at the NGA. I’ll jump ahead — the question that I was kind of saving for last, but I think relates to what you were talking about, about working with curators to make the digitization of their work accessible. When we work with museums in a content strategy consultancy role, we help simplify the process by breaking down their websites into these four different categories, and I won’t get into each of them — well, maybe it would help if I did. So the four categories would be Foundational Content, which is just the stuff that you need to have a website. Blogs and social media, we know what that is. Digital projects and productions, and then Essential Work. And Essential Work is the label that we’ve given to the types of things that happen at a museum, whether or not there was a website. So, particularly scholarly work particularly. And so there’s often a challenge for making web content out of that Essential Work, and so it sounds like what you had been doing at NGA, but also what you are doing at JHNA is all about this Essential Work, putting it online, making it accessible to audiences who care about it. So what sort of things have you learned over the years, and what sort of advice would you have for the museum who says, “Gosh, our curators do so much work, but it doesn’t all see the light of day, particularly on the website.” What sort of parameters, or advice, or words of wisdom would you give to somebody hoping more of that accessible? JENNIFER: To bridge that? It’s a really great question, and somewhat complicated. I think that it is entirely essential that we think of that kind of essential work that you do as married with a digital platform to do that. Because that is really making that bridge between what is accessible and what is not. The great example that I can give from the NGA’s perspective is that we produced and worked upon the Systematic Catalog Initiative in 1986 to produce scholarly research on our permanent collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. The reason that prompted the Dutch Catalog to get worked on — it was published in 1995 originally — and then in 2004, it went out of print. So at that point, our curator and then-publisher, editor-in-chief, rather, said, “You know, we have to figure out a way of going forward with this.” And that’s what prompted us to say, “Well, how can we leverage what is being developed online to try to get some of this content out?” Because the reality is when these things are produced, they are beautiful, they are low-production in terms of quantity, they’re expensive, both to produce and to buy. So an average consumer may not acquire a collection of information. And they’re hard to get to. So if you live in the middle of nowhere and you cannot get access to this book, we’re effectively blocking you from getting this information. We are trying, at least at the Gallery, to make inroads to get the content out and making it accessible. So, I think that a lot of times, there a bar of, “We have to have everything figured out in advance,” because we, at least in the curatorial sense, and in the scholarly sense, often like to like to think like a book model. Like, we have to know everything about this there is to know. Period. Full stop. In order to push it out there. But that’s not really the case. I think that the way that digital and museums can change the direction of how we approach scholarship, is that we need to be somewhat compartmentalized and take granular steps toward a better and deeper understanding. This is not an endpoint. The publication is no longer the endpoint, the publication is a progress. So I look at it more as what we’re trying to do is, with journal articles, like this one at JHNA, with the scholarly catalog initiative, that many museums are now getting on board. It’s just, put your information on it out there. Work on having it fine-tuned and letting peers review it after the fact, after it goes up there, because you can get feedback and you can change things on the fly, and you can version something, and you can archive that version, and we can basically create a really great space to get a dialog going. And further, I think this is some of what you were asking, too, is that I think it will also help expand the audience. There are some people that I’m sure would love to know about Rembrandt’s self-portrait and they maybe only know it because they’ve seen a postcard of it. And the way of approaching it is getting a little piece of content, like an overview to let a user get into the content gradually, and then if you want to go deep, there’s a full entry there for you. So I think it’s a matter of saying, “How can we best do this?” I think it’s really pushing the importance of the permanent collection, is the key for museums. And then, focusing efforts on expansion of ideas in the permanent collection is critical. We don’t necessarily — I mean, exhibitions are great, but the permanent collection is what your external people come to see, and it’s where I think the heart of any museum lies, and that is the Essential Work. NICK: Excellent. So on a more technical level, are there any tools that you have used or that you have come across that you think museums would be interested in learning more about. JENNIFER: Yeah,…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 9: Adrienne Clark of Museum of Pop Culture Oct 19, 2018

Show notes

If you’re like Adrienne Clark, you might find that you have more in common with your museum’s audience than not. Before she was the Museum of Pop Culture’s Content Manager, Adrienne was a member of the museum and a fan of their collections. And because she can empathize with her audience on that level, the MoPOP blog and Instagram feed always feel vibrant and relevant. I came across the MoPOP blog a few months ago as I was scanning through hundreds of museum websites, and her work immediately stood out to me. Not just because of the subject matter — as you’ll hear, I’m also a fan of the museum’s topics — but because of the content’s voice. I wanted to know how she developed the voice of the MoPOP blog, so I asked Adrienne to join me for a Skype call. **FULL TRANSCRIPT** NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. The Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guest today is Adrienne Clark, Content Manager at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. As someone who produces content for your museum, how often do you think about your audience? It might sound like a trick question, but in my opinion, it should always be the first thing you do as you sit down to write an article, take a photo, or produce a new web page. If you start out by asking some simple questions — Like, who is this content for? What value do we expect to give them? And how could this shape their experience with our institution? — you can ensure that your website, your blog, or any other digital content you create is making an impact and reinforcing your relationship with your audience. And if you’re like Adrienne Clark, you might find that you have more in common with your audience than not. Before she was the Museum of Pop Culture’s Content Manager, Adrienne was a member of the museum and a fan of their collections. And because she can empathize with her audience on that level, the MoPOP blog and Instagram feed always feel vibrant and relevant. I came across the MoPOP blog a few months ago as I was scanning through hundreds of museum websites, and her work immediately stood out to me. Not just because of the subject matter — as you’ll hear, I’m also a fan of the museum’s topics — but because of the content’s voice. I wanted to know how she developed the voice of the MoPOP blog, so I asked Adrienne to join me for a Skype call. But first, I’ve never been to her museum, so I wanted to know what I could expect to see if I ever got the chance. And that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. ADRIENNE: Well, the first thing you’ll see is a big, colorful kind of crazy-looking building designed by Frank Gehry. It’s right underneath the Space Needle. You can’t really miss it. The monorail, which you probably would have seen swooping through the neighborhood goes straight through the building as well. So that’s the first thing you’re going to see, and you’re gonna go, what is this place? Inside, you’re going to see exhibits on music — Nirvana, Pearl Jam — exhibits on science fiction and horror film, as well as indie games. And right now we have a huge, massive — our biggest exhibit to date — of Marvel Universe of Super Heros, so a pretty cool addition. NICK: Awesome. Yeah, I noticed lately that you’ve had a lot more Halloween related content, so I was wondering how much horror is actually on display in the museum. Is that a pretty big part? Is it like film in general, or are you pretty genre-specific? ADRIENNE: It’s actually one exhibit that focuses on horror. You’re seeing a little bit of my joy of horror as well, I’m a big horror film fan. And every year we do a kind of initiative called “31 Days of Horror”, but we only have four or so events, so the rest of that is filled out with content. It’s our bread and butter this time of year. NICK: Yeah, it looks that way, I’m a big horror fan, too. I love when October comes around and all the streaming networks start adding more horror films, and so when I was just checking in on your blog, I was like, “Oh, wow, this must be like Christmas for MoPOP to have Halloween!” Cool. So the reason I reached out to you in the first place was when I work with museums, something that comes up a lot during content strategy planning is this idea of voice. And a lot of times that can be a struggle for a museum to figure out, what is the voice of our institution or our content? And then to keep that consistently from author to author. And so, I noticed that you’re not the sole author of the blog, but that you seem to have most of the posts there… I really like the voice of your writing, and I imagine a lot of that comes from you, but you also work at a really fun place. So I was wondering how much of that is just your own personal flair, or was there some sort of conscious decision of, this is the voice of MoPOP and you should write like this? ADRIENNE: Well, thank you. It’s a little bit of both. I feel like it would be incredibly big-headed to say, “Oh, it’s all me!” But it is a lot of how I’ve approached writing. But there’s definitely conscious choices made to it. What I like to say when I talk about our content and the way we speak, and my personal rule of thumb working here is that we don’t yuck anyone’s yum. We’re constantly positive — almost a little breathless. We are a fan of fans. So that guiding principle really helps a lot of our writers. In addition, I do copy edit everything that goes on, so there will be times when Sarah — our recent contributor wrote something, and I just — twisting some things around a little bit, putting some adjectives in front of nouns that can keep things seeming consistent. NICK: I’ve noticed a lot that the most successful communication to fans is to really treat their fandom with respect. I remember, it wasn’t too long ago, kind of pre-internet, where the “Trekky” was a negative stereotype or something, and so it’s cool that you are really celebrating people’s interests. Because you’re the holder of everything they think is cool. ADRIENNE: Yeah, and you know, we think it’s cool, too. We’re an organization of fans. Like we already said, for me, every day is Halloween. And nobody — well, maybe they think I’m a little crazy. But this is a place where you’re welcome to be a fan — NICK: That’s awesome. ADRIENNE: It is awesome. NICK: What else do you do at MoPOP besides writing in the blog? ADRIENNE: Sure, I also — well, my title is Content Manager, but I actually also do our social media. So that voice stays consistent across the board, and they really are hand in hand. You can’t do a deep dive into the first Iron Man film in a tweet, but you can pull people into your blog and say, hey, here’s where we’re really talking about this stuff. So that’s my two balances. So that’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Sometimes also doing some writing for YouTube, etc, but those are my focuses. NICK: Cool. And as the manager of your social media channels and the content producer for those as well as your blog, what sort of interactions do you get from your readers and your followers on social media? And is there any single piece of content that you’ve put out there that has either done better than you expected or maybe fell flatter that you wished it would have? ADRIENNE: Oh! Yes, yes, and yes. The great thing about working — we kind of touched on it — in pop culture is your job is to make people happy. It’s the things that you want to see on Facebook, it’s not the darker side that we’re always being reminded of. So it’s a joyful job, and you’re hopefully bringing joy to people. And so it’s often overwhelmingly positive. The one thing that constantly blows my mind but I don’t know why is Gizmo. Anything Gizmo performs so well — that’s Gizmo from Gremlins — NICK: Yeah, the Mogwai. ADRIENNE: Yeah, we have a puppet of him and I just actually did a piece on why he looks the way he does. So, if you’re listening to this, you can go to our Instagram and see a shot of him — or the blog. He looks very surprised. Almost — I don’t want to use the word deceased, so I’ll use the word frozen, and people really don’t understand why and so we get a lot of pictures on Twitter saying, what’s wrong with Gizmo? Why is he so upset? So I thought I would dispell that concern in a post. So I got to tell everyone that that Gizmo puppet is from the very end of the film when he ramps the toy car over the shovel and he surprises himself. So that puppet’s from that one sequence. NICK: Oh, wow! That’s really cool! ADRIENNE: Yeah, and I’d been telling people over Twitter because I didn’t want them to be sad for him. NICK: Oh, yeah! ADRIENNE: I’ve been telling people over Twitter this story and I finally realized it was time to immortalize it on the blog so I could just pass that to people when they’re concerned for little Gizzy. But that always… People love him, it’s amazing. NICK: So would you say that part of your strategy is to try to address things that you’re hearing from your followers and readers just to either have a link that you could send next time somebody asks for it, or by getting that feedback you learn that this what people are maybe interested in learning about? How much of your editorial plan draws from your audience and those sort of interactions? ADRIENNE: I would say quite a bit. I think that, institutionally, is a truth for us. It’s pop culture, right? So we’re not any more of an expert than the fan is. Quite often, the fans know more than we do. And we love that. We’re not trying to tell you, this is how you do it. We’re just showing you the things. So I definitely like to pull from that. Also, strategically, just looking at the calendar of what’s happening that year, it would be very sill for us to not talk about our Michael Meyers mask, for example, with the new Halloween film coming out next week. People are interested. So I try to take from what people are talking about and also trying illuminate areas where people wouldn’t know something. Like that puppet, for example. NICK: So knowing that it’s Halloween and knowing that your audience knows that it’s Halloween, you have a lot of blog posts about the holiday during October. So… how much of that content is also represented in the museum? Are you using examples of movie posters or things that you might have for the post, or are you also just drawing from, more broadly, horror films and Halloween-related stuff? ADRIENNE: Sure. Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. So, you know, if it’s in the museum, all the better because then I have the curators that I can go and bother with my questions and get quotes from, and use their expertise. But also, more globally we talk about things that aren’t there, as well. But I would say I tend to look into the exhibits for examples because it’s something that we’ve studied and vetted and, you know, I just want to make sure we’re not just saying stuff. You know, there’s enough of that going on in the world. NICK: Yeah, yeah. For sure. So you mentioned talking to curators or getting input from other staff to vet your ideas or opinions. How much collaboration would you say that you get with the content that you produce? ADRIENNE: I would say a lot. And I always want more. It is a busy world that we live in, so a lot of times if we want to produce regularly, which I feel very passionate about, I just kind of move forward. But I’m always trying to pull people in, even if it’s just to get their feedback, as opposed to them writing a post. We’re slowly building that out, though. Are curators have contributed, now some of our public engagement producers are contributing this month with their picks for horror movies to watch for the season. We’re actually going to put a guest post on a local con, Geek Girl Con’s, blog, and hopefully, we can get them to bring some of their thought leadership into our blog as well. We’ve been at this for about a year, actually. It’s a relatively young blog, so we’re still getting our feet underneath us. More community voices is always the way I’d like to go. NICK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s great. That’s good to acknowledge ’cause when I was talking about the tone of how you write, but that’s the other thing we really try to encourage museums to do, is think about who works at your museum, or who does your museum represent, and are those perspectives also being represented in the content? So that’s really encouraging to hear. ADRIENNE: Yeah, precisely, I can be a fan all day, but my experience is unique to being a white woman, and that’s not the only experience out there, so we definitely don’t want just that to come through. NICK: How you say that your blog, being that it’s only been around for a year, how would you say that it’s connected to the mission and overall goals of the museum? And do you know the origin story of why the museum decided it should have a blog? ADRIENNE: Sure! Well, our mission — I’m going to read it so I don’t get any words wrong. Because we actually had just revamped it, as you do. Over time, things change. But our mission is to make creative expression a life-changing force by offering experiences that inspire and connect our communities. And what I really think is important in that mission for the blog, is that last part about connecting our communities. Access is hugely important to us. In fact, we have core values that go along with the mission, and one of those is Open Arms. And that means within the museum, and also outside of the museum. Including people, like yourself, who can’t get to the museum. We want you to come and explore what we have, and get your hands dirty, and play our indie games, and look closely at Steve Ditko’s inking of his original Spiderman comic. We want you to be there, but if you can’t, we also want to be with you. We want you to be able to experience our content wherever you are. An example of that recently was, we hosted MineCon, which is the Minecraft convention, if you will. But they’re such an incredible company. Instead of placing a steak in the ground and saying, come to us, spend a lot of money for a con. They actually stream their con online and then invite people to have parties at their various buildings. NICK: Wow. ADRIENNE: So we hosted one for Seattle. And so I thought, let’s do some Minecraft blog posts. Also, full disclosure, we have a Minecraft realm here. We have people that are that into it. I’m in the realm. NICK: Nice. ADRIENNE: We love Minecraft. So there was a lot to pull from. So I thought I would highlight our creations on the blog to show we are hosting this event, and we’re fans of it, bringing that in. Long story longer, I start putting this out on our various channels, and I get a message from — I think he’s a teenager, I believe — a teenager from Russia. He said, “I love Minecraft. I play it all the time. It’s so cool to see there are grownups playing this in America. And I learned about your museum, and I can’t ever get there…” Which, I was like, no someday you can get there. Dream it, do. “…I can’t ever get there but I feel like I’ve been because of this.” And that was crazy impactful, because that just doesn’t happen. You know, you don’t hear things like that. And that really highlights to me what that aspect of what we’re doing is. And “life-changing” in our mission is… it seems like a very… it’s a stake in the ground, it’s an impact statement. But I like to think of it from everything from maybe he’ll become the next developer, or simply maybe he feels a little more connected. And just by having a new experience, the world has changed. And that’s how I think that fits into what we’re doing. NICK: That’s really powerful, and that’s gotta be really affirming to you, too. ADRIENNE: Yeah. NICK: For anyone who’s listening to this and are feeling inspired, like, “Oh wow, we should have a blog as well, and we could be reaching somebody in another country who’s interested in what we’ve got going on here,” what have you learned in managing the blog and producing the content? Do you have any sort of advice as far as plannin…

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Episode 8: Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crewe of Carnegie Science Center Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

Screengrab from: https://youtu.be/ldqv6Y2myKI Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crew host Science News and Qs, also known as SNaQ, for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. They combine their curiosity about science with the intimacy of podcasting to help the Science Center reach people in its own community and around the world. Each new episode is not only fun and informative, but it also extends the Science Center’s mission to delight — as you’ll hear, they’re definitely delightful — educate — they know what they’re talking about and are great at explaining it — and inspire. And if you’ve ever considered starting a podcast for your museum, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to finally do it. **FULL TRANSCRIPT** NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. I’m Nick Faber, Director of Content Strategy at Cuberis. My guests today are Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crewe of the Carnegie Science Center. If you’re listening to this episode right now, I don’t have to tell you what a podcast is. But I would like to tell you why I like them so much. I grew up listening to talk radio, and not just for the news. I especially loved the shows where it was just one or two people in a studio, talking about current events, sharing stories from their lives, making jokes. Just… talking. It felt like a constant companion in my life, like a reliable, funny friend, who was always ready to hang out. When podcasts became more accessible, I started listening to those. And I sought out shows that reminded me of the radio shows that I loved. And the best part was, I didn’t have wait to tune in at a certain time, I could just listen whenever I wanted to. As podcasting grew in popularity, something really great happened. They started getting really, really specific. Now there are podcasts about board games, podcasts about a single band or movie, podcasts about other podcasts. It seems like there’s a podcast for every niche. When I work with museums on developing content strategies, one of the exercises we work through is figuring out their unique positioning. Basically, who are you, who do you serve, and what do you do for them? In other words, what’s your niche and what sort of content can you create to own it? My guests today have become experts at using the intimacy and immediacy of podcasting to help their institution serve its audience of science-curious folks in their own community and around the world. Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crew host Science News and Qs, also known as SNaQ, for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. Each new episode is not only fun and informative, but it also extends the Science Center’s mission to delight — as you’ll hear, they’re definitely delightful — educate — they know what they’re talking about and are great at explaining it — and inspire. And if you’ve ever considered starting a podcast for your museum, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to finally do it. Charissa and Ralph joined me over Skype. I asked them where the idea for SNaQ came from, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. RALPH: About… what, a year and a half, two years ago, I started talking about doing a podcast. I’m lucky that I get to make new programs at the Science Center. My title is Program Development Coordinator. And I share an office with Charissa. And Charissa and I have been working together for years, and we’ve done live planetarium programs and other things for a long time. And I just basically– I listen to a ton of podcasts, and thought, why can’t the Science Center have a podcast? So we started working together and brainstorming. We put together a little miniature episode about bees. CHARISSA: Yes, our two-minute pilot. RALPH: And showed it to the directors, and were like, hey look, we can make this kind of content and they bought it. And they were like, yeah, let’s do it. CHARISSA: It stemmed from– There wasn’t anything like this coming from our organization yet, and there wasn’t anything like this coming from our city that we were aware of. And at the Science Center, we like to be that community voice for science, and people come to us and ask us all these questions on a daily basis. So we just wanted to have some kind of answer for that that’s on a regular schedule and something that’s accessible for a lot of people. NICK: So yeah, can you guys talk a little bit about what you guys do at the Carnegie Science Center and how it might relate to…? Like, why do you guys sit in the same office, for instance? It sounds like you do pretty different things, but it sounds like you do actually work together. RALPH: Well, why don’t you go ahead, Charissa? CHARISSA: Yeah, so my title is Producer, so I’m the planetarium producer, and it kind of goes with everyone here. We all wear a billion hats. So mainly I’m 100% planetarium, except for this podcast. So I am in charge of creating shows in the planetarium, I do all of the coding and take care of all of the equipment, so if something breaks I have to fix it. I’m like the tech person in there, I guess, but I also help write shows and present. I present a lot. We also do a lot of stuff in our observatory, so I’m kind of all over the place. Most of the time, I’m behind the scenes, but every so often I’m also out in front giving presentations, doing shows, doing demos in our lobby, whatever the need is that day. I’ve been in the planetarium for — gosh, this is my ninth year here now. That’s a very long time. So yeah, most of the time I’m behind the scenes, working code, and writing scripts, and stuff like that. RALPH: Now my role is somewhat in the planetarium as well, which is why we share an office. So I help develop programming, I help run our observatory for a program, which is great. If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, come see SkyWatch. We have telescopes on our roof. So we’ll start out in the planetarium and do a star show, and then go and see the real thing. We have a large research-grade telescope upstairs. A lot of people haven’t been up there and it’s really neat. But I also do a variety of things. I host the podcast with Charissa, I host a science lecture series, where I get real scientists to come to the Science Center and talk about their work. It’s called Cafe Sci. And that’s a ton of fun. And I do a lot of program development for both the planetarium and for Science on the Road, which is our outreach program. We send science shows to schools and libraries and stuff like that all over the country. We make these big shows. Each show has its own van, and a big stage setup that goes in it, and it goes across the country. The most recent one we put out is Science Takes Flight, which was sponsored by PPG. And that show, I know, has played as far away as Los Angeles. If you’re in Pittsburgh, that’s a long van drive. CHARISSA: Yeah, they drove the whole way there. NICK: Wow. That’s dedication. And so, the two of you have been working together for a while, and you had this rapport already, and I think that really comes through in the podcast. Was it a conscious choice, like the format you guys have, of just sort of having a conversation about topics, or has that evolved over time? CHARISSA: I mean, we kind of went into it from the get-go with a few different goals in mind. We knew we wanted to talk about science news, and we knew we wanted to have certain topics that we would really dive into. And we knew we wanted an interactive element to allow people to reach out to us. We always knew we wanted it to be conversational, because that’s what we do. RALPH: Yeah, and I think that’s what people respond to the most, too. People can tell when you’re reading a script and it just sounds boring. And I think it’s also evolved a bit. If you listen to our earlier episodes, we’re a little stiffer, a little more like we’re reading news stories. And now we’ve really settled into a groove where we talk about what’s going on in a more– You know, I like to think of it like the listener is a third person in the conversation that’s just not talking very much right now. I find that that’s also fun to make a podcast that way. It just feels natural. CHARISSA: Yeah, it’s fun, too, because there are some topics that maybe I don’t know as much about, like biology stuff. Because I studied physics and astronomy. So there are genuine times when we’re doing the podcast, when we’re recording that I’m hearing stuff for the first time, and I don’t know as much about the subject, and it’s really exciting because I’m actively learning it along with a listener, who also hasn’t heard about this as much. So it’s a fun kind of– it’s exploratory for both of us, I think. It’s very much a natural conversation. RALPH: Yeah, and one thing I think we’ve started doing more and more is, we’ll split up the news and I’ll write half the stories and Charissa writes half the stories, and we actually talk about it ahead of time a lot less than we used to. So that I can actually be experiencing the story as Charissa is literally telling it to me. And I’ll be like, wow, that’s neat! And I can ask genuine questions. Like, if you hear one of us interject in a news story and ask a question, that’s a real question that we’re actually curious about. NICK: When I was hearing you talk about, like Charissa, you might know more about something and Ralph, you’re kind of learning through the episode, how do you guys pick your stories? Do they come from research that comes out of your science center? Or are they things that you just come across that you think are cool? How do you prepare? RALPH: We just look on the Internet for what’s going on in science. There are various science websites that we’ll check. Honestly, Reddit’s a pretty good goldmine for what’s interesting in science. CHARISSA: It’s also a really good goldmine for what people want to hear about because it kind of self-selects. The more interesting stories tend to get to the top. RALPH: Yeah, and the Science Center is a science education resource. We’re not like a university, although we have done tons of work with various universities like Carnegie Melon, and the University of Pittsburgh, but we don’t have a research division here that’s actually doing research. We focus on communication of science more than anything. But we do get to work with a lot of scientists who do do research. Actually, our natural history division, which is in another museum, they actually have quite a lot of researchers, including some that we visited on the show. If you listen to our fossils episode, that’s in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Bone Rooms. We got to talk to various paleontologists, we got to see dinosaur bones. It was really amazing. Everything on display there is maybe 5% of their collection, and we got to go underneath where they keep the Ark of the Covenent-looking rooms. And see all these amazing dinosaur bones, and even fossil frogs, little things that you wouldn’t even think are that interesting, and they are just totally stunning. CHARISSA: Yeah, we try to get inspiration from literally everywhere. For the news stories, it can be anything that’s a really big story that maybe everyone has heard, but we still want to talk about it because it’s really important, or maybe it’s a big story that is kind of a niche subject. Like we talked a lot about CRISPR, which is a gene editing tool that not a lot of people know or understand, but it’s still really cool, amazing breaking news science that’s happening. So we try to span what we’re talking about and I tend to lean more towards the space stuff, so Ralph keeps me in check… RALPH: Well, I love space, too! CHARISSA: But we try to keep it across the board. Anything big in science that’s happening. NICK: Well, I listened to the episode that you put out yesterday, and I think the first story was about octopi taking Ecstacy… CHARISSA: That was a big story! RALPH: It was a big story! NICK: …which is really interesting, but it’s also sort of quirky. Do you find that you tend to look for quirkier things, or do think is science just in its nature a little out there. No pun intended. RALPH: Absolutely. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Ig Nobel Prize, like there’s a whole bunch of researchers out there who do– I mean, I’ve heard of research on whether or not ponytails look like rabbits to hawks. Which, they do, apparently. So be careful out there. But yeah, I think anything can be an interesting story and you can have fun with it. Science isn’t just about huge questions, it’s about curiosity in general, which can be like, why is my toenail shaped like that? Or how did the universe start? Or anywhere in between. CHARISSA: It’s also giving people an understanding of the quirkier stories might spark their interest in a subject that they would not have gone past the front door. Once they understand, hey this weird stuff is happening, what else is happening that I don’t know about? It also depends on, you know, maybe there’s a week where there’s not really anything funny/quirky going on, there’s just some papers that were released, and these stories, and the cure for this diseases… Every story is important, every story is being reported on for a reason. Whether or not we’re encoding GIFs into DNA, or we’re giving octopi Ecstacy. RALPH: I also still, I want to know what it was like when the researcher came up with this idea. At one point, there was somebody who was like, you know what we should do? We should give Ecstacy to this octopus here. I mean, how did that happen? But from there, we learned that the nervous system of an octopus, which is very different than the vertebrate nervous systems that we have, has similar reactions to psychoactive drugs, which is surprising. When we share an ancestor with an octopus, you have to go back… CHARISSA: 500 million years. RALPH: Yeah, before vertebrates even existed. I think that tells us an insight into the larger evolution of life on Earth story. We have more in common with an octopus than you might think, and even more than you might realize on the surface. And doing research that, on its surface, might seem silly, like giving a drugs to an octopus, that gives us insights into these bigger interesting stories as well. So you never know. CHARISSA: Yeah, there’s always more questions behind any quirky story. NICK: Well, speaking of questions, that’s a big part of your show, is taking listener questions… RALPH: Yeah, so we get questions in a variety of ways. People can call in, people can email. One of my favorite ways that we’ve gotten questions is, sometimes Charissa and I will be out in the Science Center live, and people will just walk up, and we’ll record questions that way. We also recorded questions at a bar nearby, just from random people, and I think it’s really fascinating to see the curiousity that people have and get a chance to ask a science question. Also, it’s interesting: A lot of people, they say I have tons of questions but I just can’t think of any right now! It’s funny to see how I have to draw curiousity out of them. CHARISSA: But once you do, they can’t stop asking questions. NICK: Cool. Can you remember any favorite questions that have come up? RALPH: Well, one that was asked on our most recent show was a question about why, if we’re inside the Milky Way, why do we see it the way it looks in the sky? It’s the object that looks like it’s beyond us, it looks like this stripe across the sky, but why if we’re inside it, why is it like that? I thought that, on its face it’s a simple question, but it opens up this whole contemplation about the way galaxies are shaped and what it’s like to observe a structure that you’re within. From the plane of our solar system out to the Milky Way, and I thought that was really thought-provoking from just a simple question. Getting to think about the density of stars in the galaxy. Once stars are far enough away, they start to blend into that milky patch, and there’s just a whole lot more of them in that direction. But we’re within something that wo…

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Episode 7: Katharine Uhrich of Field Museum Aug 09, 2018

Show notes

My guest today is Katharine Uhrich from The Field Museum, and we’re talking about social media. Social media has become a standard part of most marketing and communications strategies, but just showing up on Twitter isn’t enough to keep potential visitors engaged. The best accounts to follow don’t just interact with their followers, they regularly provide entertainment, information, and something of value in every post. Katharine is the social media manager at Chicago’s Field Museum. Day in and out, the Field’s social media feeds are filled with high-quality updates from its collection, its researchers, and its visitors and fans. And sometimes with a little help from its Twitter-famous T .rex, SUE. I wanted to know how Katharine manages this vibrant presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in a way that isn’t just engaging but also aligned with her museum’s mission. So I invited her to join me on the podcast. *FULL TRANSCRIPT* NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. The Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guest today is Katharine Uhrich from The Field Museum, and we’re talking about social media. You know, maybe I’m stating the obvious here, but, in some ways, social media has become the 21st century equivalent of fan mail. Think about Twitter, for instance. Celebrities are more accessible than ever. Unlike the old days where you had to find an address in a magazine and hope your favorite pop star or actor gets your letter, and then really hope you hear back from them, today, there’s a pretty good chance that you can have a real-time interaction with them. And furthermore, social media has made celebrities out of people, places, and inanimate objects who would have been harder to reach in whatever niche they occupy. Now you can tweet at an airline. Or a baseball team. Or a dinosaur. But accessibility does not a Twitter follower make. The best accounts to follow don’t just interact with their fans, they regularly provide entertainment, information, something of value in every post. Katharine Uhrich is the social media manager at Chicago’s Field Museum. Day in and out, the Field social media feeds are filled with high-quality updates from its collection, its researchers, and its visitors and fans. And sometimes with a little help from its Twitter-famous T .rex, SUE. I wanted to know how Katharine manages this vibrant presence in a way that isn’t just engaging, but also aligned with her museum’s mission, so I invited her to join me over Skype. Here’s Katharine. KATHARINE: We try to be very friendly and welcoming, obviously inclusive and respectful. And sort of generally be seen as an authority, but not authoritative. We also try to be clever and fun, you know. Talk like a real person to real people. And a lot of that voice comes directly from our mission and our brand. So I think social’s a great opportunity for us to be an extension of that, and to be the living personality of the brand and mission online. And, obviously, depending on the platform, the voice expresses itself in different ways. For instance, on Facebook, I’d say we’re a little bit more formal and by the book. Whereas, obviously, on Twitter, you can have a lot more fun. The pace is more rapid. There’s more opportunity for witty banter and whatnot. NICK: And emojis. KATHARINE: Yes, and many emojis. NICK: And so, the SUE account does use a lot of animated GIFs and emoji, and makes a lot of jokes and is sort of irreverent. Would you say that, as the Field social media manager, that you’re taking any kind of cues from that, as far as what people respond to? Or is the SUE account helping to influence what you do as far as that kind of friendly voice and the style of emoji and banter and stuff? KATHARINE: Yeah, absolutely. I think the SUE account and the main accounts are really great foils for each other and they each allow the other to do something sort of unique. For us, it’s a great opportunity and asset that we have both to use and play off of each other. I think of SUE — SUE is a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s 67 million years old, so the personality is as such on Twitter. They’re sarcastic and sassy, and they do a lot of things that the main account would never touch. And I think that’s great, but we’re able to have this kind of caretaker-kid relationship that’s sort of fun at times and allows the museum to step into an area that it might not normally go. For instance, I remember a moment when SUE was mentioning that they wanted an otter from the Shedd Aquarium, and the museum was able to step in and say, “Well, until you prove to us that you can be responsible for cleaning the Tsavo Lions’ litter box, we’re gonna have to wait and see.” And opportunities like that show a little more clever side or humane side of the museum, and I think that comes across a lot more and a lot better when you’re in conversation with someone else and not just trying to create that in your own feed. And I think SUE is sort like that high school student, that cool kid. Not the popular kid, but the kid that really was into things because they were just cool. They just had a passion about them. So SUE brings in so many people that might not necessarily think of themselves as museum lovers. And that’s so awesome because maybe they find SUE, maybe they find us, maybe they don’t find us, but at the end of the day, both the SUE account and the main account are trying to educate and spread this love of natural history to our followers. And so I think they take two very different approaches but at the end of the day the end up at the same spot. NICK: That’s cool! And we’re mostly talking about the Twitter accounts here, but as the social media manager, what other channels do you manage, and what other channels is Field on in general? And in the questions I sent over to you, I did mention the Shark Week quiz on BuzzFeed. Are there any other channels that we might be surprised to find a museum on? KATHARINE: Yeah, the Buzzfeed was done — I actually started in December, and that was done before I came on, and I think pretty much anyone can go onto BuzzFeed. It’s kind of like a fun little thing they’ve got set up where anyone can create a quiz. So we just used that functionality to create that and link to it during Shark Week. But we are — the Field is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Those are our main accounts. We do have a Snapchat account that, for instance, with our current exhibition Antarctic Dinosaurs we have a filter up there that people, when they’re in the museum, that filter will pop up and they can use it. But we don’t do too much on Snapchat because, essentially, as the social media manager I’m responsible for strategizing, executing, gathering content, reporting, all of that. And I also work very closely with Caitlin Kearney, who’s our digital content and engagement manager. So we’re essentially one and a quarter or one and a half people who manage the social media for, you know, one of the world’s largest natural history museums. So I think we’re really in a place where we feel like it’s a quality over quantity game for us. And we would rather be in fewer places, having more sound strategy, and putting better content out there than trying to spread across so many different platforms. And of late, I don’t think we’re really on any non-traditional channels, or anywhere that would be especially surprising, but we are trying to really dig into the functionality of these various social media platforms. For instance, creating content for IGTV. On Instagram, doing more with the stories there. We are trying to really up our game with Facebook live. So it’s sort of like, there’s so much that is constantly evolving and changing with each one of these platforms on their own, that I feel like you can do a lot without being on a lot of channels. NICK: Yeah, so, how do you decide which channels to focus on? Do you get feedback from your audience and say, oh, we get more traction on Instagram so we should be putting more of our energy into there? With so many options, how do you choose? KATHARINE: I think for us right now, we found that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all very deserving of our attention. Each one has a slightly different audience, has a slightly different voice. So it really is great if we can be on all of those. And, I think we really let the platform dictate what kind of content we put there. So, obviously, if we have really visually striking and gorgeous images, those would go on Instagram and be talked about in a little bit different way than if we, you know, have a cool photo from the archive that might be of lesser quality, but still has a really interesting story behind it, where that might go on Facebook or Twitter. NICK: So how much planning do you do in advance for your content, and how much of it is spontaneous? Because I know social media is by its nature is supposed to be spontaneous, and in the moment, but when you have so many channels to manage and you’re essentially doing it by yourself or with half of another person’s time, how much planning do you need to put into it? KATHARINE: We put a lot of planning into it. Airtable is the main tool that we use for our editorial calendar, and it is basically our bible. If you’re not on our team and you look at it, I think it’s like walking into a garage where a serial killer is — it’s kind of terrifying. But it allows us to do what we do, really, because I don’t know how we would manage the breadth of content that we have across the museum. The museum has over 500 employees. 150 of those staff members are active scientists doing research on all seven continents. So, not only are we talking about the museum’s exhibitions and events, and one-off initiatives, but we’re also talking about our scientists’ research, their published papers, we’re trying to highlight our collections, go behind the scenes, and of course, try to do the fun social media holidays and recurring events. So to keep all of that organized, and especially to keep that prioritized, and know when it’s most important to talk about what, we have to be planning certainly days, and oftentimes weeks and months in advance. So, yes. NICK: It’s interesting because you just mentioned so many different sources of potential content, and one of the questions I was gonna ask you was, I speak with a lot of people from art museums and, you know, they’ve got their digitized collections, and so that is sort of automatically a content source that they could just post lovely images all the time every day. And I was gonna ask if not having an analog to that is some sort of disadvantage, but it sounds like there’s always plenty to talk about. KATHARINE: Yeah, it’s funny, I feel like we have infinite content in a way. But just because you have infinite things to talk about, doesn’t always necessarily mean you always have a great thing to link to or a wonderful image to accompany it. So yeah, it can be a bit of a challenge, but we were lucky to have, in addition to our staff photographer, we have a lot of great photographers and storytellers on staff so that if someone’s going out into the field, they might be able to grab photos for us and write back. And we’re trying to do a lot more of that, to highlight that scientific research that our institution does. But I would say, in general, we do have a photo archive and digitized collections, and probably about 20% of our content and our images comes from those sources. The sort of staff photography or behind-the-scenes photos that we post, about 20% comes from the staff, and then myself and my colleague Caitlin, we create about 50% of the content that goes up. And then about 10% of it, we’re sharing out user-generated content. NICK: OK. KATHARINE: So those are our four main sources. NICK: So for that 20% that comes from museum staff, do you have pipelines? Are there certain people that sit in different departments that know to send stuff over to you? Or that you know to tap for content? And also, I meant to ask, what department do you and Caitlin sit in? KATHARINE: We’re in the digital communications department. So Caitlin handles the blog and a lot of the content that goes on our website. I’m the social media manager, and then our other three colleagues work fully on the website and the development of the site. We’re the digital communications team and we sit under the marketing department. NICK: OK. KATHARINE: Yeah, to get back to your question about how we get the staff photography, we do have… I mean, I think so much of social media — doing it successfully — is building those relationships within your organization or within your institution and knowing who you can tap for great stories, great photography because so many people have great skills in those areas. So, we definitely know that, for instance, when Lesley de Souza goes down to Colombia, that she’s going to be taking amazing pictures. Or, when Adrienne goes to Wyoming for Stones and Bones, we can count on some cool pictures there. And then, in addition to that, we have our staff photographer who’s always taking really great pictures from exhibitions and around the building. We have a staff member in the division of insects who takes amazing pictures of the collection. So, yeah, I think if you can, and we sort of think of our staff as other followers that we might approach to say, “Hey, you took this really cool picture. Do you mind if we use it and share it?” NICK: I wanted to take it back to something you were talking about in the beginning of our conversation, which was that the voice of your social media accounts is informed by the mission of the museum, and the voice of the museum. The Field Museum recently went through some rebranding, including a brand new website and a new logo. Would you say that that rebranding had any sort of impact on the way that you view the voice of the institution and the work that you do? Was there any sort of, like, “Oh, regrouping. Now we’re a little more focused in this direction”? Or, do you think that maybe the rebranding or the new website was almost solidifying or reinforcing what was already the brand of Field Museum? KATHARINE: The museum rebranded in March, and I don’t think we were changing anything about who we are, we were just changing how we presented that and how we speak about ourselves. And so, similarly, it didn’t really change what we talk about on social media, it just really helped solidify that voice and be really consistent no matter what channel we’re talking about ourselves on. Whether, that’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then even beyond, in our out of home advertising that our marketing department is doing, in our press releases that PR is sending out, in our newsletters. I don’t think the substance change, it was just a really great opportunity for us to hone that voice and present it consistently across everything from our social channels to our website to our membership communications, and just remind people that not only are we this 125-year-old museum with almost 40 million objects and specimens in its collection, but we are out there doing scientific research on all seven continents every day, making scientific discoveries and enabling solutions for a better future. NICK: Would you say that you have something that you would point to as, this our social media strategy, and what is the relationship of that to the mission of the Field Museum? KATHARINE: I think, to boil it down quite simply, our strategy in social media is to tell the stories of the museum and bring the museum to the people who aren’t there in person. And those people may end up becoming visitors, or they may never come, but regardless, we are bringing education of the natural world to them and I hope that that sort of influences, or inspires or sparks some curiosity in some way. And I guess that ties back to the museum’s mission, which is, as mission statement go very abstract and broad…

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Episode 5: Tricia Robson and Emily Jennings of FAMSF Jun 21, 2018

Show notes

Tricia Robson is the Director of Digital Strategy and Emily Jennings is the Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In this episode of What’s On, we’re talking about the FAMSF’s Digital Stories platform. Tricia Robson – Director of Digital Strategy Emily Jennings – Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs If you work in the museum industry, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of their digital stories. Maybe it was de Young’s Teotihuacan story or the Legion of Honor’s Degas story. These long-form narrative pieces, supplemented with rich media elements, tell the stories of these exhibitions in immersive and captivating ways. And like many people who have interacted with these stories, you may have wondered, how could my institution do something like this? I spoke with two of the people behind the digital stories to learn more about the collaboration, planning, and production that goes into making this platform a success. We start by discussing the backstory of the project, and how it sprang from a surprising inspiration: sports fandom. *FULL TRANSCRIPT* NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On: The Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guests today are Tricia Robson and Emily Jennings of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: FAMSF. And we’re going to be talking about their Digital Stories platform. But first, I’d like to tell you a story of my own. When I was a kid, I was really into sports. And like anyone with a passion, I wanted to soak up as much information about the teams and players as I could — stats, bios, logos, and uniforms. I collected the trading cards and figurines, I played video games, wore t-shirts, and I watched whatever games were aired in my local market. But the funny thing is, even though I grew up near Washington, DC, my favorite baseball and football teams were both in Minnesota. I loved the Twins because, even though I had never seen him swing a bat, I thought Kirby Puckett was cool. I got into the Vikings because I liked their uniforms. And because I had the cards and the games, I could learn the names of everyone on their roster, their strengths and weaknesses, their backstories. So when the Vikings came to Washington during the 1989 preseason, I wanted desperately to go, and my dad took me. Even though it was an exhibition game, just being at the same stadium with this team that I adored, made it an unforgettable experience. And because I already knew who all the players were, their skills and specialties, I didn’t have to be distracted by leafing through the program or squinting to read the players’ names on their jerseys. I could just be present, and root, root, root for the visiting team. As you’ll hear in my conversation today, a cross-departmental team at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have set out to create a similar experience for visitors to their exhibitions. If you work in the museum industry, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of their digital stories. Maybe it was de Young’s Teotihuacan story or the Legion of Honor’s Degas story. These long-form narrative pieces, supplemented with rich media elements, tell the stories of these exhibitions in immersive and captivating ways. And like many people who have interacted with these stories, you may have wondered, how could my institution do something like this? I spoke with two of the people behind the digital stories to learn more about the collaboration, planning, and production that goes into making this platform a success. Tricia Robson is the Director of Digital Strategy and Emily Jennings is the Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs. They joined me over Skype. I wanted to know the backstory of the FAMSF’s digital stories, so that’s where we’ll start the conversation. You’ll hear from Emily first. EMILY: The idea for Digital Stories came from a really clear articulation from our Director and CEO, Max Hollein, and one of his pillars, which is to extend the museum beyond its walls, both in terms of the way we represent ourselves for conservation, preservation of our objects, but more importantly about education. So at his prior institution, he had very great success at engaging a large population into the core content of their exhibitions and collections. And in one of his first presentations to us, he’s like, “Think about the sports world. Sports enthusiasts can recount all sort of facts and stats about their favorite players. We want to cultivate that same level of enthusiasm with art lovers as well. How do we need to do that?” So in answer to that call to be able to give our audiences actual information, really drove the content strategy behind digital stories, as well as the user interface to make sure that it was constantly an engaging process for our users. And our first one that we ever did was in February 2016 for our Monet: The Early Years exhibition, and I believe we started working on the platform, like the actual development of it, in November. So you can see how quick of a turnaround that was developing that. NICK: And Emily sort of answered this already, but how would you say your Digital Stories fit into your global content strategy? Because obviously there are different types of content on your website. So are these part of a whole content strategy or do you look at the Digital Stories kind of like their own thing? EMILY: I would say that Digital Stories is defining the future of our content strategy. We’re really looking at how to populate across our website really rich content in multiple areas. And so, as we’re working with Digital Stories and honing the length and tone of it, we’re providing our audience with what we feel are the most actionable elements of the exhibition and solidifying that with really juicy content. But through that process, obviously, there’s a lot of information that we also have to cut out to keep it bite-sized, if you will. Or at least a half an hour sized read. So that’s really surfacing a lot of exciting opportunities for us to think about how those other stories that we’re leaving sort of on the cutting room floor can serve as additional juicy content. And so that’s kind of our next evolution, is how this really becomes a content hub of how we channel things across our different outlets through the website. TRICIA: And just to kind of add on to that point, because Emily makes a great point of this being sort of a start or a major impetus for us refactoring how we’re thinking about content at the museums. On the physical side, you know, we’re always pushing the museums to consider not just digital strategy a separate spoke itself, but really part of the larger strategy for the museum. We can’t really talk about digital-first until that sort of thinking is truly integrated into our larger content routine. NICK: So I’m curious as to how you decide which exhibitions will get a digital story, and what content you’re going to use for these big undertakings. And how do you decide between using things from your permanent collection and your temporary exhibitions? EMILY: So the scope of the project originally was to be a value-add for our temporary exhibitions. And within the last eight months or so, we’ve begun planning for how we can pivot that to serve our permanent collection as well. And in terms of how we choose and what we’re doing, it’s the curators that give us the best gifts. It’s really based on what we anticipate to be the visitation for those exhibitions. So we look at the projection and think about what has the greatest audience potential. We have pretty aggressive user percentages that we’re going after. These platforms offer us a way to increase our institutional profile for both our members and our non-members. So they get to know what are the opportunities here at the museum. TRICIA: And I would add the boring logistical point that of course we’re looking at the projection for our special exhibitions and incorporating collections, but the decision is also largely based on production. How much can our teams actually get done in a given period of time? NICK: So I wanted to ask you a little bit about the collaboration that it takes to put these stories together. Emily, you’re an educator, right? And Tricia, you’re the head of web. So working in two different departments to put a project together like this, plus you mentioned curatorial input — they’re the ones that give you the gifts of which stories to tell. How do you manage getting all this buy-in and participation from different departments? EMILY: That’s a great question. It’s been an evolution, really. And I think Tricia and I are really proud of the way that we work together, and it’s really sustaining I have to say. But when this project was originally launched, it was set within Education as the champion for the project. But it quickly became evident that we couldn’t do it without the support of Web, even though Web was there advising along the build. But as we’ve done the reiterations of each platform, it’s really become a place where we’ve been able to think about how much time do we have, what are the appropriate workflows, how do we respectfully ask for input? And for me, it’s been a huge learning opportunity about how you create content for your intended media if you will. So the reason I was put on this project is my area of expertise is actually in school, and teacher, and family programs, so I’m really attuned at distilling information for usually the written or guided experience. And for me, it was really about learning what plays well on the web. And I just appreciate it so much that Tricia’s team was able to bring a sense of nuance into understanding what actually plays well. So it was the ability of us to be able to step back and realize that even though we had these hopes and aspirations, to really execute that it meant that we had to set our goals first, and not have a solution. And Tricia’s team is so great at listening to those goals and coming with multiple solutions for us to then collectively decide on. So it is definitely a project that is co-held by Web and Education. We have had great strides in incorporating marketing in this process as well, and I would say that that was our really big learning curve. But in the beginning, our marketing department was always so empathetic. Because they have literally 50 things a week that they’re supposed to be promoting. Like programs across two buildings, and with our robust temporary exhibitions, and our special projects, and all sort of institutional priorities. But these are becoming more and more a foundation of go-to content area for the institution, and therefore everyone’s more invested in us meeting our goals so that the platforms are continued. TRICIA: And just to add on there, I echo Emily’s enthusiasm and appreciation for how well our teams work together and how we’ve built this trust and system over time. But just reiterating that it requires a lot of resources and a lot of buy-in from the institution. So not only do we have the support from our Director and CEO, but we also built a system. And it took us many months to hone. And we’re constantly refactoring it, but we’ve got clearly defined roles across departments. Education in fact hired a digital manager to lead the project. We had countless meetings going over workflows and exactly at what point each team would step in. So we’re in such a great place, and we’ve always enjoyed working together, but it’s gotten more and more smooth over time as we’ve committed to a group to working that out together. NICK: So could you talk a little bit more, on a practical level, on what goes into producing these stories? Starting with choosing which one you’re going to make the content for, and what do you need to do to get ready to put something online? EMILY: These wouldn’t happen without three essential people. One of which is our project manager in Education, Emily Stoller-Patterson, and then on Tricia’s side we have Kelly Mincey, who really coordinates and manages the execution of the projects. And then Andrew Fox, who’s our webmaster. Getting all of us queued up and on the right timeline is just a huge undertaking. So in terms of the timeline, we generally know what we’re going to be writing for usually a year out. So we’re making those decisions every fiscal year based on those projections. And then the process really starts intensely about six months out. So that’s when I start going through all of the information that Emily Stoller-Patterson has gathered for me. And then we have meetings with curators to start distilling what are the essential stories that we want to be telling about the exhibition. We’ll cross-reference possibly if there are things that have been left out of the catalog that are going to be particularly relevant to the current moment, and/or alternate interpretations that are going to be really meaningful to our audiences. So we’re constantly looking at things from a social equity issue, a feminist perspective, and thinking about how could we round out those interpretations during that period. And then, I would say about four months out we get the text all locked down. We’ve done our storyboarding, we’ve done our SEO research, we’ve looked at our anticipated profiles so that we can really synchronize how the content is meeting those objectives. And then we start to hand over the content to the Web and Digital team to start loading it into the platform, which they do in about a two-month period where we’re going back and forth about userability. In terms of the sustainability of the project, that’s definitely something we’re trying to hone in on so we’re not spending so much time in the back and forth on the design. Because it really is a tax on Tricia’s team to have to be making changes in the build when we’ve given them all the content. TRICIA: And I should say to add on to that, that goes through our standard content development and production framework. This is really possible because we’re using a CMS. We’re using a system that’s pretty turn-key and our team is equipped to manage content in that way. And it alleviates our developer from having to make too many in-the-weeds updates. But, like Emily said, there have been design needs and tweaks from feature to feature, and that’s something we’re really trying to streamline and, in many ways, eliminate moving forward. So for the first set of these features, having a functional backend system and internal working system was a primary importance just to get the ball rolling. And to ensure that we were able to keep it rolling, we’re also, on our side, working with Education and an outside agency to streamline the design of these features. We’re in the process of reskinning them so that moving forward, some of the production timeline is cut down a bit. NICK: The last thing I wanted to ask about is, if there’s someone who’s listening that works at another museum and is trying to emulate what you guys have done but might not have the same budget or resources that you have, is there anything that you’ve learned over the course of making these digital stories that you could impart to somebody who is aspiring to do their own digital story-type content? EMILY: Yeah, we’ve already had people reach out to us and inquire about what we’re doing. And we’ve been pretty straightforward about making sure that you have support across divisions, seeing as that was one of the really big first big lessons that we had. And it was definitely helpful that support was coming directly from the executive office for this project. But that’s not the reason it’s persisted. It’s persisted because Education, Digital and Web, and Marketing are supporting it. So that’s the first thing. I would think about who you already have on staff whose writing in a way that can be accessible. I was really fortunate in that I was able to get suppo…

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