Museums and Big Data: Measuring and Evaluating Trends

TRILCE NAVARRETE | CARLOS MANJARREZ | SIMON TANNER

Saturday 22 November 2014

@trilcenavarrete

@carlosmanjarrez

@simontanner

MCN 201402

Museums have been digitizing for 50 years, where are we at?How many objects do you have in your museum?

How many are digitized / available online?

What is your overall budget?

What is your digital activities budget?

Is your current project going to be accessible in 5 years?

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Right …

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The EC funded 3 surveys (2009, 2012, 2013) to gather data that would inform future resource allocation.

• The questions were (in a nutshell):

‒How big is your collection?

‒How much has been digitized / published online ?

‒How many resources are needed to digitize / publish the rest?

‒How do you ensure sustainable, unrestricted and reliable access?

• Some of the challenges (in a nutshell):

‒Definitions are not standardized (what is digitization)

‒Methodologies are being developed (unit of measure)

‒Museums are not used to gathering / reporting such data

‒ Transparency is … beneficial ?

So, what do we know?

MCN 201405

Digital collections EU: digitization (N=1,626) enumerate.eu

So, what do we know?

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Digital collections EU: type object museums (N=658) enumerate.eu

So, what do we know?

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Digital collections EU: annual expenditure (N=1,584) enumerate.eu

So, what do we know?

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Digital collections EU: % of total budget (N=703) enumerate.eu

So, what do we know?

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Digital collections EU: publication (N=774) enumerate.eu

So, what do we know?

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0

Digital collections EU: national digital strategy (N=1,462)

Metrics? Evaluation?Why?What data do you gather?

Since when?

How are results feeding strategy / future resource allocation?

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1

Great !

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Museums are increasingly gathering online stats (N=1,495)

Looking back …

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In the Netherlands, there is no centralized data gathering so surveys respond to changing goals. Variables and definitions are yet to be harmonized.

Looking back …

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In other words …

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Museums using computers

museums connected to the Internet

Collections registered digitally

Collections published online

Information plans

Looking forward …

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New tools may emerge -bringing new insightshttp://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama2/

13,313,496 page views in Sep 2014

772,835 JAVA page views English site

Looking forward …

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Examples from the field: Amsterdam City Archive web stats

400% visitor increase in 10+ years

So, what can we say about this?

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• Results make up for data gathering

‒ Institutions with long histories deserve long time-series

• Data can inform decision making

‒ For allocation of resources / strategic planning / benchmarking

‒ Responding to the user needs / environment

‒ Strengthen arguments / value proposition

• Much has been done, much much remains to be done

‒Harmonization of tools / methods / definitions / goals

‒ Automation of data gathering to facilitate analysis

‒ Bottom-up / Top-down organization?

Think Big, Start Small, Create

Thank you

MCN 201418