Information Technology

Alison Circle, a librarian who writes the “Bubble Room” blog for Library Journal, recently had a posting on “Top Ten Things for Marketers to Try.”  Number 5 is Learn a New Technology: “Last Friday I had a conversation with a friend about social media. I loved what she had to say: the people who are successful in this arena just jumped in feet first into the deep end. They didn’t worry about how, or who, or metrics, or audience. They just went for it. So if you don’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, open one today.”

Do you agree or disagree that jumping right in the deep end is the best way to get started with social media?

~Kathie Otto

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McLeod County Historical Society uses Past Perfect Museum Software on its network computer system, like many small historical museums. In the last three years we have been adding a tremendous amount of digital media, i.e. photos and recordings, to the system. This has created some storage and backup problems for us. My board would like to explore the option of offsite memory storage, and was wondering if any other organizations have done this or have looked into it. 

Thanks,
Lori Pickell-Stangel
Executive Director

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Dear Colleagues:

http://bit.ly/MuseumSurvey

I’m interested in learning how other museums and cultural institutions are engaging their communities through social media technologies.   Are you?    Help me gather benchmark data by completing this survey about what types of social media are being used by museums, how much time is spent on it and who in the organization manages this engagement.

This survey should take less than 15 minutes to complete.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the survey results, please provide your email address.

Thank you!

Rose Sherman
Director of Enterprise Technology
Minnesota Historical Society

rose.sherman@mnhs.org

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Like many museums, we receive copies of newsletters and mailing from a goodly number of our fellow historical organizations.  I will admit that I don’t always have time to digest everything that is printed.  But on occasion, an item will get my attention.

A copy that recently crossed my desk contained an intriguing statistic.  In a breakdown of their 2008 attendance figures, this organization included web site visits, which amounted to nearly 2/3 of their total attendance for the annum.  It got me to ponder again the question of whether or not we should include web site hits in our attendance figures. 

We have never counted web hits and have no plan to do so any time soon.  Why? For one, we do not use a pay counter service so out stats are not as thorough as others might have.  (We use the free feature of StatCounter dot com.)  Differentiating from actual “human” contact versus machine or spider contacts could be time-consuming. As a result, I have been somewhat suspicious of institutions that have rather large web site hit figures and use those to bolster attendance numbers.

Is there a better way to handle this issue?  Have any of you found a good way to parse those hits to determine a reliable number?  Should grants applications from foundations and other agencies even be asking institutions for those figures as a requisite for funding?

Mike Worcester

Cokato Historical Society

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The August 17 issue of The Daily Tell documents the efforts of a mid-size nonprofit with four employees in the Washington DC area in fundraising through a method dubbed “crowdsourcing.” The nonprofit, Critical Exposure, used Social Media applications to raise $15,669 from 614 people. Through Social Media, Critical Exposure targeted a large, undefined group rather than the usual practice of fundraising from members or close contacts primarily.

Will stories like this encourage small history nonprofits to neglect their constituents and seek “white knight” support from others? What might be the proper role for Social Media in a fundraising campaign? Are there any examples of a historical organization using Social Media to fundraise?

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David Grabitske asked me to post about our new website (http://www.morrisoncountyhistory.org) and the reasoning behind how I chose to assemble it the way I did.

First, a bit of history. The Morrison County Historical Society first went online with a website in 2002. I had learned enough html to build the text portion of each page, plus I decided how the site would be structured. At the time, I didn’t know much about coding web pages, so I couldn’t figure out how to insert tables or images, which meant I didn’t know how to make the page attractive. We had help on this from Eric Swanson, our Web Guru, who formerly did work on the early Minnesota Historical Society website.

In 2006, we released the second version of our website. By this time I had learned enough to create the entire thing in html, including all the pretty stuff. While the first site had quite a bit of historical content, the second site had even more - at least 100 history-related articles. Since the beginning of our web presence, when someone reviewed our earliest version of the site and asked, “Where’s the history?”, we’ve been conscious of the fact that people want more than just information about our organization. Our website had to contain history, too.

On August 9, 2007, we started a blog called “Skimming the Cream.” The original intent of the blog was to have a space where we could easily notify our members and friends about MCHS news and upcoming events. Ideally, I wanted to have our current blog posts appear on our Home Page, but I couldn’t figure out how to accomplish that, so instead, we linked to the blog from our Home Page.

As staff got used to the routine of blogging, we evolved away from strictly news and upcoming events and started posting about collections items. We also developed a series called Morrison County Influentials, examining 150 influential people related to the history of the county.

We used WordPress as our blogging platform, having installed it onto our server so that our domain name would be attached to the blog. The fact that our blog did not appear as part of our Home Page still niggled at me. Would people link over to the blog to get the current posts, or would they skip it because it was too much bother?

Around about late 2008, early 2009, I began thinking that our website needed freshening up. I also wanted to overcome the problem of having to recode every single html page in order to change the website’s look. With around 200 pages, that was more work than I really wanted.

There were several potential solutions to this problem, one of them being to create an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). An external CSS is basically a page of web coding that sits outside (hence, “external”) the rest of your web pages and tells them how they are going to look. Your regular web pages, the ones with the content, contain a piece of code that references the external CSS and grabs the instructions for dressing the page. The beauty of external CSS is that if you want to change the appearance of your website, you merely change the code in this one CSS document and all of the other pages will grab the new code and change automatically.

While I know a little bit about external CSS, I don’t know enough to be comfortable creating an entire site based on it. Plus, there was still the problem of the blog not appearing on the front page of the website. In addition, I wanted other staff to be able to create web pages without having to wait for me to do it.

I sought another solution. It was suggested that I find a Content Management System (CMS), which is basically a program that helps to create a structure for the content of your website. There are various CMS programs available - Drupal, Joomla!, Mambo, etc. - and each one has its own learning curve. I wasn’t keen on having to learn another program (some of them are quite complicated) in order to rebuild the website.

In discussing the problem with Eric Swanson, he suggested I look into using WordPress as a CMS. While WordPress is first and foremost a blogging platform, because it allows users to build static pages, it can easily be repurposed as a CMS. I have extensive experience with WordPress through my personal blog and the museum blog, so this didn’t seem too much a stretch. WordPress allows for quickly and easily changing the look of a website through a variety of templates that can be uploaded to a server with little trouble. No need to fuss with external CSS or coding individual web pages. And, best of all, our staff had experience with WordPress through posting to our blog, so it wouldn’t take much to show them how to add new static pages to the website. Woohoo!

Before tackling a website redesign, I solicited feedback from users as to how the site should be changed. One of our members kindly took the time to give me specific advice. What I learned from her was a shock. She followed our blog exclusively and didn’t realize we had an entire static website packed with info available online (even though the blog had a link to the Home Page of the main site). That cemented it. We HAD to get our blog onto the front page of our website. WordPress would solve that.

There are gazillions of potential ways to structure a website. With the 200 pages we had on our website, I had to decide how I wanted to rearrange them. They roughly fell into two broad categories: organizational information and history. Within the history section, we had a number of articles related to museum life and preservation methods, plus some genealogical forms. These appeared to be getting lost in the history section, so I decided I would move them into the organizational info section of the new website.

After sorting out the pages for each section and looking at the number of History pages I needed, I decided to upload 2 installations of WordPress onto our server. I did this for two reasons. I didn’t want to load the organizational info section with history articles and thus risk confusing or overwhelming users. I also knew that I was going to be building the site while it was live. If I built the History portion first, I could do this quietly, without disturbing the old Home Page.

The History section was installed in its own directory: morrisoncountyhistory.org/history/. Before getting down to the business of building pages, I had to pick a WordPress template. I chose Atahualpa, which is highly customizable, and arranged it to suit our needs. I then spent a couple of weeks creating pages of history articles, merely copying and pasting from our existing html site.

After the History section was finished, I held my breath and ripped down the Home Page of our old site. I quickly installed WordPress in the main directory of our server and madly built the new site. Remember, I was doing this while the site was live and available online. That meant that anyone who came looking for morrisoncountyhistory.org was going to be seeing the work in progress, finished or not. I wanted to make sure I completed the majority of the site in a very short time, which I did within 2-3 days. Part of the process was to export all of the content from our Skimming the Cream blog and import it into our new Home Page. WordPress makes this process simple. A few button clicks later and the blog was now part of our new Home Page.

The Main section of our new website contains our organizational information, plus what I hope is an obvious link to the History section of our website. The History section also links back to our Main section. I used the same theme to build both portions, but created subtle differences between the two. Our Main section is green; our History section is blue. The banner pictures on the Main section feature various views of the museum and grounds; whereas the banner pictures on the History section are historic pictures from our collections.

Those are the basics behind our website redesign. There’s more to it than that, of course, such as fixing broken links elsewhere on the internet (i.e. Wikipedia), creating a customized error message page to redirect people, waiting for the search engines to pick up on our changes, and playing with various WordPress plugins (note the Twitter feed on our Home Page).

You can see our new site at http://www.morrisoncountyhistory.org. If you have technical questions, drop me a line at contactstaff (at) morrisoncountyhistory (dot) org.

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At the Minnesota Digital Library conference on June 8, 2009, we were reminded that the past is part of the future and preserving the past advances civilization. These are very good admonitions to remember about the usefulness of our work. Since MDL seeks to utilize advanced technology to preserve history, a “devil’s advocate” question occured to me:

To advance civilization must we use advanced technology? Is digitization the only way to make history accessible now? Is there still a use for analog media such as paper or microfilm? What are local historical organizations experiencing in terms of consumer demand for local history content?

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The Cokato Museum & Historical Society debuted its web site in the late summer of 1997.  At the time, and to the best of our knowledge, only three other museums in the state had a presence on the web.  A culmination of what seemed like months of planning, this event was met with little fanfare, other than a small article in the museum’s quarterly newsletter.  The local newspaper did not even provide coverage. During our discussions about creating a web site, I made the comment: “Within ten years, the Internet will be the preferred method of information retrieval for a large chunk of the populace.”  Needless to say, I was a little off on that estimate.

Since that humble unveiling, it should come as no surprise that Internet has radically transformed how historical organizations can and should conduct business.  For the Cokato Museum, those changes can be seen in numerous ways. 

One is in handling genealogy requests.  Since we are not the county museum, we were not typically the “first call” people made.  But with a presence on the web, genealogists can find us quite easily.  With our list of available resources, they can decide if we can assist them, and send an e-mail query.  Our research numbers have tripled since 2000, due almost exclusively to the web site.

Another item is providing general historical information about our community.  From a simple “Quick Facts” sheet, to our Lost Cokato series, and articles from our newsletter and the local newspaper, interested persons can learn a great deal about Cokato’s history from the comfort of their own home.  Those who seek further information can easily contact us.

Membership services are another area of benefit.  Early on we utilized email to contact members about upcoming events and other items of interest.  Unfortunately, the proliferation of spam forced us to curtail that avenue.  Now we encourage members to visit our News & Upcoming Events section of the web site, which is updated weekly or as needed.

A list of available publications, membership forms, and other information helps keep the activities of our organization in full view of not just our membership, but all who choose to view our page.

Social networking sites are quickly becoming another avenue by which museums can further advance name recognition.  Pick a network, and you can find organizations which have established a presence there in one form or another.

The negative side, and of course there always is one, can be found in the staff time needed to maintain these digital presences.  With so many organizations struggling to maintain current staffing levels, an honest conversation about time management must take place before embarking on these ventures.  Setting up that initial presence is easy.  Devoting time on a consistent basis for site maintenance can be the difficult part.

The obvious question remains then: what will the future bring for museums as the digital age progresses.  Considering how rapidity by which the technology had advanced, one can only guess at the next directions.  With barely over a decade having passed since museums made their initial forays into the digital universe, many of us in the field are anxious to see those new directions, and to determine if they will be beneficial to the advancement of our mission.

Mike Worcester

Cokato Historical Society

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When contemplating a means in which the Fillmore County Historical Society could achieve a web presence, I chose a free blogging service, Word Press.com.  Our Board wasn’t quite ready to embrace internet technology by purchasing a domain and paying for web hosting.  Yet I wanted to get our museum out online, as well as to give our members an idea of what is possible on the World Wide Web.   I decided it best to begin simply, and with no cost involved.  It’s my hope is that our starter web site will grow up and one day serve as the foundation of a larger, commercial site.  At the very least, we’ve put ourselves out there in cyber space for the time being until we’re able to take it to the next level.

The following are a basic dozen steps to get your non-profit organization launched on the web.

12 STEPS TO CREATE A WORDPRESS.COM BLOG:

1. Register to sign up for your blog. 

2.  Choose a user name that will be your blog domain name.  Ours is fillmorecountyhistory.wordpress.com.  Make this choice with careful thought to your own brand as you cannot change your user name later.

3. Choose a blog title - this may be changed at a later time if you wish.

4.  Choose your language and privacy settings, and then create your blog.

5.  Choose your password, and key in your email address.  Your account will be activated by following instructions in a confirmation email sent to you.

6.  Every time you log on to your WordPress blog, you will need your user name and password.  (Passwords can be changed later.)  As the administrator(s) of your blog, you have access to the dashboard and control over settings and content.

7. Choose a theme for your blog from available options.  Go to the Appearance/Themes menu option at your dashboard.  The theme becomes your blog’s style, appearance, and color motif.  In many cases, themes offer extra bells and whistles, called widgets, which the web designer created expressly for that theme. It is possible to preview themes by clicking on screen shots.  You may easily choose another theme with just a click of your mouse, should you change your mind.  Certain themes support widgets.  In themes that do, you may replace default widgets with ones of your own preference.

8.  Not every theme supports custom headers.  I expressly chose one for our site which did since I wanted to customize the header image with my own photo.  I sized a digital image to exactly the same pixels as that of the default header image.  If you skip this resizing step, you will be given opportunity to crop the picture to fit when you upload it, but you will lose a portion of the image when cropping.

9.  The ability to create “pages” which look very much like traditional web pages, rather than typical blog posts was the prime feature that sold me on using WordPress.com to host our blog.  I created ten separate pages that can be accessed from the top menu bar or sidebar.

10.  A free blog account at WordPress allows for 3 GB of free file storage.  To go above that limit, you will need to purchase optional premium upgrades.

11.  Your posts or pages can be composed in either WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get: Visual) or traditional HTML.  Both posts and pages may be edited or deleted at any time.  You may upload images, audio, video, and certain other media files to your posts or pages.

12.  The statistics system offered to WordPress bloggers is awesome.  How easily and informative it is to check stats.  Clicking on “View All” will allow your administrator to observe the traffic your site has received in days/weeks/months.   It also tracks referrers- people who clicked on links from other websites to get to your blog as well as incoming links from other sites.  Your top posts or pages provide traffic count so you’ll know which page or post is currently receiving the most hits.  A list of search engine terms helps your administrator know how your viewers found your blog.  Click on the summary tables for your blog for detailed numbers as to your traffic.

My decision to use WordPress.com came after testing several other blogging services. As I understand policies at WordPress.com (which is sister site to commercial blogger WordPress.org) bloggers may use WordPress.com for non-commercial use.  It’s been my intention to use our site for informational, rather than commercial, purposes.  I wanted a web presence for promotional reasons only.  I don’t plan to use it for the sale of merchandise.  I want our viewers to be kept informed on what is happening at our museum.  The blog is used to spread the word about upcoming events.   One of the drawbacks of a free blog at WordPress is the possibility of Google text ads occasionally popping up on your site.  But in my experience, this happens rarely, if ever.  All in all, I’ve been pleased with hosting our site as a free blog at WordPress.com.  I highly recommend any small non-profit with limited funds and means to try their hand at it putting themselves out there in as creative manner as possible.  It’s working for us in Fillmore County.

Debra J. Richardson, Executive Director
Fillmore County History Center

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On February 17, 2009, Randal Rust, a consultant with R Squared Communications, stated on the Small Museums listserv: ”Right now, I am putting money into research and development that will hopefully result in low-cost options for small museums and historical societies to better make use of the web.”

How much are small museums willing to spend to make better use of the web? And, what sorts of applications do small museums desire to use?

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