Papers 7

The mobile future

There is currently a dramatic global increase in the use of mobile ICT. Future users will have high expectations of heritage institutions in this field. How can they get involved in this growing trend?

Chair: Cathy Brickwood
There are three participants in Papers 7

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Cathy Brickwood is programme manager of Virtual Platform in the Netherlands.
She founded the European Cultural Backbone, for which she wrote articles on European funding and policy in the field of new media and culture. She edited the books ‘New Media Culture in Europe’ (1999) and 'Uncommon Ground' (2007, BIS publishers).

iDiscover: mobile ICT to enhance the visitor experience
Speaker: Jolien Schroyen

The kind of visitor experience we want to achieve using mobile ICT is a surprising, fun and social learning experience, tailored to the audience and to the museum environment. Although ICT as a means to enhance the visitor experience is generally accepted, only a few ICT applications fully exploit the potential of the medium and go beyond the mirroring of traditional media to support the individual visitor experience. We argue for the usage of mobile and ubiquitous ICT to create a social and highly interactive visitor experience, optimally aligned with the messages and goals of the heritage institution. In order to obtain this close match between content and mobile ICT implementations, they should be carefully tailored to the specific context of a visitor experience in a certain heritage institution.

Various factors take part in the complex context that constitutes a visit: the content presentation (narrative, game-based or information-based), location and environment (indoor or outdoor, subject of the exposition or tour, proximity of the objects), scale (duration of an average visit, extent of the museum or site), target audiences and so on. We offer both a conceptual and a technological framework to support decision makers and heritage experts in deploying mobile ICT that leads to a surplus value for their visitors. We used this framework to develop amongst others a mobile museum game for youngsters, visiting a museum during a school trip. Large scale evaluations of this game have shown the potential power of our approach to create fun and social learning experiences. Our mobile museum game proved to be able to increase the attractiveness of museum learning and heritage education for this target group.

This presentation will discuss iDiscover, a project that encompasses:

a framework which supports heritage institutions through the concept generation of a mobile ICT application, focusing on the possibilities regarding social interaction, personalisation and interaction with the environment
a flexible software architecture to tailor mobile guides to the specific requirements of the target environment
a demo- and test-infrastructure which allows us to test and evaluate various prototype implementations in different contexts and to fine-tune the implementations with the target audience
a central gateway to guidance and consultancy on the usage of mobile ICT in heritage institutions

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Jolien Schroyen Jolien is a researcher and educational assistant at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University). Her main research focuses on ways to use mobile ICT to enhance the visitor experience at various heritage and cultural sites or institutions. She contributed to the ARCHIE and iDiscover projects, where mobile ICT is put to use to support personally meaningful, social and interactive visitor experiences. Jolien holds a master's degree in History and an abridged bachelor degree in Theology and Religious Studies. Before joining the Expertise Centre for Digital Media, she worked several years as a teacher and a teacher trainer.

Waag Society

Speaker: Ronald Lenz

More and more location-based projects are being developed in the heritage domain. Although they are still relatively small in number and in size, the impact of these projects on established cultural practices may turn out to be greater than we would expect at first sight. How can museums employ new media to enhance their visitor's experience and their collections' accessibility? With the Internet moving into the public domain by the advent of wireless connections, broadband mobile telephony and location aware technology museums are no longer bound by their physical limits (the building) but can use all relevant spaces, be it the city, the country or the public domain.

Technology enables audiences to access, produce and share media everywhere and at all times and museums are quite far in digitizing large parts of their collections. This combination - people being online all the time and the availability of rich cultural content - brings ample opportunities to create new cultural experiences.

In this context Waag Society has developed several projects in which users are guided by mobile technology. These projects are conceptualized very differently - due to the nature of their respective subjects - leading to different technological solutions.

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Ronald Lenz. Strategist, technologist and researcher in the field of Location-Based Mobile Services. Focus on strategy and concept development in a world where location-aware mobile technology enables new ways of interactive formats for education, cultural heritage and the public domain.

Currently heading the research department on locative media at Waag Society and creative director at 7scenes, a startup developing a mobile and online platform that enables you to create, play and share GPS-based games and tours.

Glasmuseum and TNO

Speakers: Jenny de Boer, Arnoud Odding

In 2009, the National Museum of Glass Objects in Leerdam carried out a real life pilot in which the museum explored to what extent

the digitized collection could be used to communicate the fascination of experts, ranging from glass blowers and designers to art enthusiasts. By setting up a pilot based on a web based application disclosed on an iPod to visitors, the museum aims to explore how

the digital archive can be used to convey this message. The application allows visitors to walk through the exhibition by providing several options to browse the collection of the museum, adapted to the skills and needs of visitors.

• Gallery: visitors are able to search for background information and visuals on objects in specific galleries. After selecting an object,

visitors are able to choose viewpoints of different sorts of experts (glass blower, expert, designer), in different types of media (audio,

video, text or pictures)

• Tour: visitors are able to take a tour through the exhibition. The tour has a specific theme and leads the visitor through a selection of

the exhibited objects. Each object contains the same amount of information as exploring the exhibition with the gallery option.

• Object number: users are able to browse the information on objects in more detail by entering the number associated with an object

on the iPhone.

Preliminary research (the pilot runs from may to september 2009, the results outlined here are explorative) shows that using the iPod application stimulates visitors to explore a wider variety of content and information. Especially the visual material not available in the

regular exhibition seems to appeal to the iPod users. However, a significant number of people also feel less inclined to put effort in getting acquainted with an iPod in a museum, as they are used to a regular audio tour.

Currently, TNO carries out usability tests and interviews in the museum with users of the iPod application. The pilot with the iPods is part of the ambition of the Museum for Glass to grow into a knowledge centre 2.0. Besides the web application on the iPod, the museum is working on a relational database structure that allows for forging smart links between objects in the digitized collection (www.stichtingglas.nl). It aims to give the right amount and right kind of information to the variety of visitors of the Museum for Glass. Also, the on-line collection enables enrichment with User Generated Content: on-line visitors can submit messages, ratings or additional information. After moderation by museum personnel, this content can be included in the database and is visible to other visitors of the website as well as the users of the iPod application in the museum.