Museums on the whole have had problems figuring out why they need a website, how they should get one, and what they should do with one, should it somehow appear. All but the most-well-funded museum websites seem to fall into two basic types:

1. “Under Construction”

How to spot this type? The links are all blue and underlined, the text is centred, the images are scattered randomly and not lined up with anything in particular. There’s a links page with pointless links and a hit counter, “coming soon/under construction” notes, patterned wallpaper or textured backgrounds, and the same font throughout. It looks like a personal home page circa 1996. But it cost nothing—built by someone’s nephew who’s “good with computers”, and the director fi ddles with it in their spare time.

2. “Mugged by Designers”

This has snazzy animated icons and a little movie that plays incessantly on the front page, but the content is basically the same. Lots of spelling mistakes suggest both that professional web designers were involved (notoriousl illiterate), and that nobody at the museum knows how to edit web pages. Lovely typography in the headings, lots of photographs, but actual information only occupies 10% of the screen. These sites usually cost thousands, in one brief splurge, with no money left over for expanding or even fixing them.

FINDING THE MIDDLE GROUND

How does a museum fi nd the middle ground? Begin by asking why you need a website at all. The web is no longer a cool, cutting-edge place to market or brand yourself - my city dump has a website. (In fact it has two. Presumably it will have a blog next.) Web sites are fundamentally places for visitors to fi nd stuff out, so at the very least they need opening hours, costs, location, what’s on, and contact details. Information about the collection is usually next; most museums assume this means shovelling their collection databases online, and so get bogged down at this point. But do you need a web page for every single pickled fish in your ichthyology collection? You’ll make ichthyologists happy, but there are probably better uses for limited resources.

Museum websites have the potential for much more. You can solicit stories from your visitors about your collection, so the information fl ow is not just one way. A director, or curator, or volunteer, or security guard can write a blog to put a human face on the museum. You can podcast, posting audio about your research or collections, or make your audio archives available. You can make public-domain photographs or ephemera in your collection available for downloading. Your site can host a discussion board, publish a journal, coordinate collaborative artworks or research projects, or become the world authority on the particular speciality of your institution.

If you’re all fired up about getting a web presence, there are three main strategies.

1) Hire fancy professional web designers, and build it all from scratch. This is of course expensive, and you may end up mugged (see above). Though the site will look just the way you want, it will probably be set in stone, and the inevitable mistakes you made in the design process will be hard to correct. Someone at your museum will have to learn enough web authoring skills to keep the site going.

2) Use a closed solution designed by a dedicated museum software developer, like Te Papa’s forthcoming NZMuseums project, or Kete Horowhenua. These aren’t necessarily expensive, but are often systems that only really do one thing, like get collections online or enable the community to upload photos. You will still have to edit pages yourself, no matter what the promises.

3) Start from scratch, getting a basic informational home page. Brainstorm what the site can do that the museum can’t (such as giving away images online, for example). Add pages as each new project is completed. Use a designer for the page templates, logo, and colour scheme, but build the site yourself around free, open-source software like a Wordpress blog or Omeka (a promising newcomer, intended for small museums doing online exhibitions).

DOING IT PROPERLY - INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Now you’ll have to grapple with issues of “intellectual property” or “copyright considerations”; essentially, the question here is: how much stuff do you give away? Photographic negatives or ephemera in New Zealand museum collections enter the public domain 50 years after the death of the author. Their author’s copyright has expired, and these images and documents are now available to anyone for commercial or personal use. Museums might quibble, and say that the act of scanning and uploading these images allows the museum to slap a fresh copyright on them; New Zealand copyright law does allow them to do that. But since these collections are owned by publicly-funded museums, and thus generally supported directly or indirectly by the New Zealand tax- and rate-payer, the real question is: why don’t museums have a strategy in place for giving these images back to their owners—New Zealanders? Even copyrighted images can still be legally used for critical or educational purposes, and museums always have the option of releasing images of collection items under a less-restrictive licence, such as Creative Commons, which allows non-commercial reproduction if the owner is credited.

For an example of how copyright is usually handled, take Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels , one of the most significant works of New Zealand art. On Te Papa’s site, the Tai Awatea page has a scrolling panel of text beside a tiny reproduction (350 pixels wide, or 1/3 of my screen — the gallery label is bigger than the painting above it). Even when enlarged, the painting’s only 850 pixels wide. (But at least the labels have all been translated into Maori.)

Why the clunky page design? It seems to be set up to stop people dragging the little image of the Northland Panels to their hard drive. Is this really a worry? It’s too low-resolution to use in print, or even as a computer desktop. I suppose kids who might want to use it in a school project are now thwarted, unless they’ve heard of screenshots or a Google image searches. Because Te Papa holds the Northland Panels in trust for New Zealanders and the world, they have a responsibility to make it as accessible as possible. The McCahon Database has made a start, but it’s very much of the “Under Construction” class. What should a Northland
Panels page look like?

Obviously it should have all the information present in the gallery as a starting point, enhanced with photographs, biographical information on McCahon, and photographic comparisons with his other paintings to put the work in context. That would be a bare minimum. An interactive walkthrough of the panels with pop-up annotations would be nice. You should be able to see the panels full-screen, with no clutter or framing, and scroll across to examine them one after another, like walking past them in a gallery. A scholarly discussion, PDFs of articles written about the panels including the first gallery reviews, a bibliography, and links to other museum sites displaying McCahons—in fact, why not a gallery guide to all McCahons on display anywhere in the world, sort by location? The page could be the nexus of a McCahon discussion group, or a multi-authored blog on the scholarship of the Northland Panels . None of this would require any investment in technology or programming; all these tools and techniques, and tutorials on how to use them,
are freely available on the web.

SWITCHED-ON OBJECTS

What are museum websites for? At their core, museums are about real objects. Objects are what people come to see. But the web can allow a richer experience of these objects than is possible solely from standing in a gallery, and some museum treasures are lost without this cultural context. A whakapapa stick, for example, is normally displayed moodily lit in a glass case, with a discreet text label indicating to whom it used to belong. But a rakau whakapapa, by its very nature, embodies a specific group of people, who are usually excluded from the museum gallery. Not necessarily maliciously; they may live far away, or have day jobs. But we can see and hear them online, where they can talk about the stick, tell stories, and decide what they would like us to know about it. Ripped from its context in a gallery, the stick is dead. Online, it can be alive.

PDF

Te Ara - Journal of Museums Aotearoa; Volume 32; Issue 1 & 2; December 2007