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Theresa Regli

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MAM makes the difference between an immersive and merely acceptable experience

29-Mar-2011

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Selecting Technology

A few weeks ago, I stood transfixed by the Code of Hammurabi at the Louvre in Paris. I took in the rather sparse exhibit around the stele for at least 20 minutes, reading the French translation (no English one was provided), and closely examining the cuneiform carved into the stele. It was quiet; a few people asked me to take their picture with the object.

Two weeks later, I’m at the 5-year-old modern museum marvel of Paris, Le Musée du Quai Branly. I’m looking at a ceremonial mask from the Polynesian Islands of Vanuatu. As I read about the mask, music from the islands plays through a speaker above my head. Next to the mask, there’s an interactive touchscreen where I watch a video of the ceremony when the mask is worn, then an interview with someone who makes similar masks – with sub-titles in any of 5 languages (no dubbing – I get to hear his native dialect). There’s also a very clear map indicating where the islands are, what part of the island chain the mask is from, and an interactive timeline outlining the creation timeline of objects of this type.

Music. Moving pictures. Geo-location. Multi-lingual display. Historical context. I’d never even heard of this particular chain of islands, but after taking in this exhibit, I was ready to pack my bags for the South Pacific and jam with these cool guys in the video. Then on the screen, an unwelcome Windows error message: “A script is causing Macromedia Flash Player 8 to run slowly. Would you like to abort the script?” Fortunately I was able to abort the script and re-boot the application, and complete my experience of Vanuatu art.

Curation – a word not even recognized by my Microsoft Office spell checker – has taken on a whole new meaning in the age of multimedia. Real Story Group is fortunate to call many of the world’s largest museums our subscribers, and in the last year-to-18-months their inquiries about media management have skyrocketed – precisely because they want to deliver experiences like the one I had at the Musée du Quai Branly (minus the Flash error). It’s not that my experience at the Louvre was a negative one (on the contrary), but it was much less immersive, and didn’t have the richness of multi-sensory context that I’ve had in more modern museum settings.

Curators are eager to extend their trade to engage people beyond looking at an object and reading a paragraph or two about it. The first step, which debuted a couple of decades ago, was the audioguide -- which these days feels about as modern as an Apple SE.  But in most museums, the technology to manage modern multimedia curation simply isn’t there yet – often due to lack of funding, but also due to lack of sponsorship at the higher levels of museum management.

In some institutions, there’s a lack of awareness of the many elements required for multimedia curation: not just Media Asset Management technology, but rich geospatial and historical metadata, the breaking down of curative silos, and the integration of media with collections management. (A CMS in the museum world is not a Content Management System, but a Collections Management System, which manages the details and whereabouts of a museum’s tangible assets).

Multimedia curation is something every curator should be thinking about, whether you curate objects in a museum, or information within an enterprise. It’s an area where we closely evaluate vendor capabilities within our Digital & Media Asset Management Report.  Of course, the tools vendors sell represent only a small part of the overall solution.

In the meantime, I’m thinking about starting my own multimedia curation awards. After the Quai Branly, I’d award the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Basque Country (I dare not say Spain), and the The Winston Churchill Museum in London, UK (a multimedia-rich complement to the fascinating Cabinet War Rooms), my second and third prize for best multimedia curation. Do any of you have some more nominations? If so, I'd love to hear from you.