Tag Archives: content

A week in the Bristol Museums digital team

Digital skills, Websites, ,

rachel-and-darrenHello! My name’s Rachel and I’m a Heritage Lottery Fund Skills for the Future graduate trainee. I am usually based in Worcester as part of the Worcestershire’s Treasures project, with my traineeship focused on audience development and events. As part of the traineeship I’m able to do a week’s secondary placement at another museum or heritage venue, and this week I joined the Bristol Museums digital team to get an insight into what they do, and generally learn some new stuff. I got in touch with Zak and Fay as I knew I wanted to spend my week elsewhere learning more about museums and digital. I had seen both of them speak at conferences – Zak at the Museums Association’s annual conference in Cardiff, and Fay at Culture 24’s Digital Change: Seizing The Opportunity Online in Birmingham – and thought Bristol seemed like the place to be for museums and digital!

I’ve been involved with some really interesting and useful things since the start of the week. On Monday I did some content management on the development site in preparation for user testing later on in the week. On Tuesday I sat in on a meeting with fffunction, and then joined the museum’s new digital marketing intern, Olivia, in creating some content for social media. As the Shaun the Sheep trail started this week, we had fun coming up with some awful sheep-related puns – keep an eye out for these on @bristolmuseum! pirate_shaunOn Wednesday I visited The Georgian House Museum and The Red Lodge Museum, conducted some visitor surveys down at M Shed, and then yesterday I sat in on some user testing sessions with teachers, for the new learning pages of the website. They were given a number of scenarios to work through and it was really fascinating to see how users interact with the site and the different ways people navigate through it.

Some of the other useful things I’ve been introduced to this week are the organisation’s Audience Development Strategic Plan and their social media guidelines, and how data collected from users is collated and reported.  I also sat in on a meeting with some of the team involved with the upcoming exhibition death: the human experience to discuss the digital engagement to go alongside the physical exhibition and programme. This is just one example of the collaborative nature of the digital offer, and it came across to me that it is viewed as an integrative part of the exhibition, as opposed to just an add-on, which is really positive.

It’s also been great seeing how a different museum works. The museum I work at is quite different, in terms of size, staffing, collection and audience, and so coming to a large local authority museums service with seven physical sites has been a valuable experience in itself.

Overall I have had a brilliant week, I think it’s been a good overview of the team’s work, with lots of variety and things to get involved with. I have felt really welcome and included, and everyone at the museum has been so friendly. Thanks so much to the team for hosting me this week, and especially to Fay for letting me follow her round for most of it. My traineeship comes to an end shortly, so hopefully you’ll see me on a digital team soon!

5.13 Passing on the app – Hidden Museum Development

The Hidden Museum, ,

Progress

Last week we began our pilot testing: it’s time for all the hard work we’ve done to be prodded and poked by people who have never heard of the project and who have no personal investment in its success. This is a somewhat daunting proposition since we clearly want visitors to love what we have created but for us also to be able  learn from our testers as ‘critical friends’ and trust they will highlight any mistakes!

My role

Most visitors need a real helping hand to get around a building created over several floors and split levels.
“Most visitors need a real helping hand to get around a building created over several floors and split levels.”

As an experienced museum curator I am used to telling stories (interpretation) using a variety of different tools – these might include 3D real objects, images, AV, IT, graphic text, physical and mechanical inter-actives. I like to think that in creating the Hidden Museum we will be adding to the varied menu of possibilities we provide which enable our visitors to engage with our collections, with the space (museum) and especially with each other. My role has been to help inform the user journey from a museum perspective and to learn more about how we might better approach visitor engagement utilising new technology. It has also been my task to liaise with project partners who have no direct knowledge of the collections or experience of delivering ‘museum style’ interpretation, public visiting habits, desires, wants and needs, or of the intricacies of an Edwardian building. Clearly it has been just as important for me to be guided by them and the fresh perspectives they bring since we want this app to be innovative in its approach rather than just a digital version of things we already do – its been a good to have our assumptions challenged by each other and to learn new skills from each other too!

 

Content

Who knew we didn't have an image of one of our biggest specimens?
Who knew we didn’t have an image of one of our largest specimens?

I have mainly been responsible for the collation and creation of the museum ‘assets’ we needed in order to be able to populate the app with content. Having worked on the delivery of a number of software based AV/IT inter-actives at M Shed I knew that this would always take longer than anticipated and true to form it did! We are fortunate to have a sophisticated collections management system (CMS)that contains high quality images of objects, so some of those we required could be sourced this way: others proved more elusive and I often found myself running up and down the stairs to various galleries to take just the right shot or to check a detail.

The biggest question we needed to resolve was how objects would be linked together across galleries and how playful we could be with this . We began by looking at some pre-existing paper-based trails used on museum activity days but after preliminary user testing we realised these were too prescriptive and we needed a much more interesting, dynamic  and perhaps more random way of linking objects together. We used our CMS to create a digital data set of all the items on display with images attached to their records and then began to interrogate this by randomly selected keywords: the latter produced more playful connections, for example, the word ‘fish’ linked live specimens in tanks in one gallery with oil paintings in another.  Although this method started to lead us in the right direction we didn’t manage to refine our thinking until after we’d analysed the feedback report from our ‘Kid In Museums’ testing day.

"Wireframe images within templates helped to keep content consistent"
“Wireframe images within templates helped to keep content consistent”

Themes began to emerge that could be interpreted in a really flexible way based on words such as ‘weird’ or ‘oops’, but these weren’t words that generally appeared in our databases and so we had to resort to pounding the galleries to create lists of possibilities.  In order to achieve a consistent approach, and for easier referencing whilst uploading content, we agreed that we would work to two templates: one that set out game content and the other museum ‘secrets’. The latter act as  the ‘rewards’ given to players after they complete each game in a tour. These are designed to be exclusive to the Hidden Museum experience  and so needed to be more revelatory  or anecdotal than anything that can be found on a museum label. Interesting discussions took place between the partners as to what words should or shouldn’t be used to describe each theme. The word ‘weird’ became ‘extraordinary’ since it was felt the former could have been easily misconstrued in a negative or insulting way , whilst ‘oops’ became ‘broken’ because that more adequately reflected the objects represented within the theme.

Journey

This is not the end of the road as far as my role is concerned since we will almost certainly need to refine the content based on our user testing and research. At the beginning of the project were were working in ‘sprints’ – the first round of these involved all project partners but then each one of us played different roles and had differing degrees of responsibility for its delivery over time. The technical and museum teams have now passed the baton well and truly to the research team who will be gathering data ready to feed back to us all  – can’t wait to see and hear the results!

Video Subtitling – making content more accessible

User Research, , , ,

We aim  to make the museum more accessible for all visitors and adding subtitles goes a long way to help us achieve this. For example see the video below, of the audio description DiscoveryPens, in use in the French Art Gallery, at their launch event.

DiscoveryPENS launch – at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

I realised that our museum videos too, can and should be made more accessible! – and I don’t just mean spreading all over the world web – but for all our visitors of our website!
Our aim: to increase the accessibility of a video’s content -by using subtitles for all video and audio content.

The simple task of subtitling.
I’ll tell you now: It isn’t too difficult, but it can be considered a monotonous task. I have detailed what I did, with some advice how you can do this effectively. So bear in mind, that in my personal experience and if you have found a better way then let me know:

About 1min of video = 1hour of transcribing

Therefore, before you start, you can estimate how long it will take to subtitle your video. It does depend how long your video is, and how much of it is dialogue! Essentially it is a small thing to do, to advance the accessibility of your video content.

What I did:
• Watched the video and listened to the person talking.
• Paused the video and wrote down the speech in a document.
-this is for record keeping and to make sure there will be no spelling and grammar mistakes! When I copied this to subtitling my video on Youtube.
• I needed to make the subtitles match up to the visuals (usually the person speaking).
• But to have to enough time on screen to be read.

*Helpful tip: -to check if the timing was correct I would turn off the sound and see if I had enough time to read it.

• I would cut the dialogue to a sentence length which I thought looked well on the screen,
• fitted appropriately to the natural pause in the speech,
• and to not repel the editing cuts when the subtitles would change from sentence to sentence.

The cuts between shot to shot should be in accordance to the cuts between sentence to sentence.

Both words and visual cuts should appear smooth and not resisting each other.

• When the sentences were added to the video, in the appropriate place, I would record their start and end time.
• I would add this to the word document next to the deciphered speech.

*Helpful tip: To avoid your transcription document looking like a mass of unapproachable entries, I suggest separating the different parts of your video.

Written dialogue

• For example: Beginning, Middle, and End.
• Or of different people speaking if they are speaking in separate chunks.

This is usually where the video cuts, to a different part – your word document should try and reflect this.

• I also suggest doing this as you go! Your document will look a lot better and doing at the end will be a harder task.