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Nancy Proctor at the Tate Conference

I owe a lot to Nancy Proctor, the Head of New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She can safely be labeled a guru of mobile museum tours because her knowledge of the subject matter is extensive. She has also been a great advocate for the work that I have been doing at the San Jose Museum of Art by inviting me to speak at conferences like the Tate Handheld Conference in September 2008.

Recently, I was honored to be involved with two side projects of Nancy’s.

Learning Times Handheld Conference

On June 3rd, 2009 I was part of an online conference through Learning Times (sponsored by the American Association of Museums) and organized by Nancy. The conference was focused on handheld tours and built on the collective knowledge of the previous Tate conference. For my part I was involved again with the getting it done section. My presentation titled, “The Little Engine That Could: Mobile Tours on a Shoestring Budget” was paired with that of Silvia Fillipini Fantoni from the British Museum which provided a good contrast of what goes into developing a large mobile tour versus a smaller scale one.

The outstanding list of presenters that day also included – Nancy Proctor herself, Koven Smith from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Titus Bicknell from Experius/Gateway Auto Museum and Bruce Wyman from the Denver Museum of Art. Nancy and Koven’s part talked about the future of mobile and Titus and Bruce spoke about the rapid development of a mobile tour.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

This was my first online experience and I have to admit I had some concerns going in, but overall I thought that it was very effective. The one bit of strangeness that was prevalent, and expressed by Bruce during his presentation, was that you are speaking into the phone with no gauge on how people are reacting on the other end. A large part of speaking at a conference is gauging the expression on peoples faces as you are talking and making adjustments as necessary to make it more entertaining or more informational. There is obviously no way to do this via an online conference.

My part of the conference is available in it’s entirety and you are more than welcome to listen to all the other sections of too.

Museum Mobile

The other side project that I was a part of is on her wiki called Museum Mobile where she features regular podcasts around the subject of mobile tours. She had asked me at the 2009 Museums and the Web conference if I would like to be interviewed and I was quick to say yes.

For the interview, which also took place in June, she paired me for a discussion with Ted Forbes from the Dallas Museum of Art who has recently been developing a tour for his museum. In the podcast Nancy asks us a variety of questions about the development of our tours, web app vs. SDK, implementation in the galleries and a host of other juicy tidbits. The conversation was over an hour long and very enjoyable.

You can listen to it on Museum Mobile – Chris & Ted’s Excellent iPod Tours or listen to it here.

I recently implemented a feature on our tour at the San Jose Museum of Art which I have been wanting to do for quite a while. We are currently only offering a small tour at the museum so I figured it would be a great time to try it out. If you read this site regularly you are familiar with the WiFi driven iPhone/iPod Touch tour that we have been offering since May of 2008. If not, please read the previous link!

The feature I added was full screen mode which has been sporadically mentioned on the web and is not a well known feature. It’s basic purpose is to make a web based application act more like an installed app. It does this by removing the URL and navigation bars from the top and bottom of the Safari Mobile Web Browser window – virtually locking a user to your site. It does come with some quirks which I wish to document here. First here is a demonstration of how it works:

SJMA iPod Touch Tour Full Screen Mode from Chris Alexander on Vimeo.

Apple has documentation of full screen mode (free developer’s account required) available on their developers website. To implement this feature you need the following bit of code in the header of your tour or app:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black" />

Web Clip Icon

So, here are the quirky things about this. In order for it to work the viewer of the site must add a “web clip” icon to their home screen. If the museum is offering iPod Touches for check out or has them tethered to the wall or shelf this can easily be done in-house. Patrons using their own device might like the full screen feature or might not. It’s up to them to add the icon themselves if they would like full screen mode.

Additionally, if there are any links that lead the visitor away from the root URL the full screen mode will revert back to regular mode. This will bring back the URL bar at the top and the navigation bar at the bottom. I have not found any way to eliminate this problem yet.

SJMA iPod Touch Tour full screen mode

The obvious benefit of full screen mode is that it basically keeps the visitor on your tour and prevents them from surfing the web using a museum device. While a tech savvy visitor could still figure out a way to get into the apps and settings, it puts us one step closer to a type of Notes-Only mode (pdf download from Apple) for the iPod Touch that is only available for the non-touch screen iPods. Also known as “Museum-mode,” Notes-only helps to lock users out of all the settings of the iPod. We are using full screen mode paired with special cases that we had made by Coutour which help prevent access to the Home Button thus preventing users access to other applications on the device or access to the settings. The set-up works extremely well and we have had few incidents of visitors tinkering with settings.

Full screen mode has been implemented for a few weeks now and has been successful and trouble free.

Yep - That's me!

In April 2008, at Museums and the Web in Montreal, I was fortunate enough to be involved in the preliminary planning for a conference at the Tate Modern. The focus of the conference was on handheld tours and came to be called Audiotours to iPhones. Jane Burton, Creative Director for Tate Media, searched me out in Montreal to see what the San Jose Museum of Art was doing with the iPod Touch. Thankfully she was impressed and invited me to attend a luncheon centered on the planning of the conference to be held in London. At lunch I found myself in unbelievable company with museums like the Smithsonian, New York MoMA, and Tate. Yes – me in the company of these prestigious museums!

Flash forward to July, I had almost given up on the conference because it was to be in September. That was only 3 months away, but lo and behold an email came from Jane asking me if I was still interested. Uh…yeah!? I was asked to be one of 8 keynote speakers because of our recent forays into handheld tours at the San Jose Museum of Art, particularly the iPod Touch/iPhone.

After attending I can say that it was definitely the best conference that I have been to. This is due in large part to the intense focus on the subject matter. Most conferences offer a wide variety of topics where you can pick and choose, but not this one. It explored many aspects surrounding handheld tours from simple basics to what the future may hold.

The conference was preceded by a full month of active involvement on a Wiki created especially for the event. Invited contributors were asked to provide information and insights relevant to the conference and four predetermined topic points: Handheld Basics, Choosing a Platform, Getting it Done, and Advanced Handhelds. Anyone who is interested can view the Wiki at http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/. If you wish to contribute you can request access through the Wiki administrator.

Conference Day 1

The conference was a two day event held on September 4 and 5, 2008. The first day was by invitation only, where I joined 30 people selected from museums around the world. The focus of discussion was on the four topics from the Wiki. The new information gathered during each discussion was added to the Wiki and was synthesized into four mind maps. A mind map is a diagram used to represent ideas linked to a central key word or theme.

Conference Day 2

The second day was a public symposium attended by 200 people. Each mind map topic from the day prior became a session of one and a half hours with two keynote speakers presenting their own experiences related to their topic. As one of the selected keynote speakers, I co-presented along with Célia Meunier from the Louvre during the “Getting it Done” session. Presenting on SJMA’s in-house content creation and delivery via iPod Touch offered a unique contrast to the Louvre who works closely with Antenna Audio producing large quantities of audio and video content. Following our two presentations, there was a round of questions and answers which provided rich followup discussions about the work at the SJMA and the Louvre. Many of the keynote presentations from day 2 are available via embedded SlideShare players on the Wiki.

I have to say, one of the most pleasurable parts of the conference were the people involved. The mind-power that was there was truly impressive and to be a part of it was an honor I will not soon forget. I must concur with my new friend Daniel Incandela from the Indianapolis Museum of Art where he wrote on their blog, “The conference represented some of the most innovative and brightest minds working in museums today.” I made so many new friends and connections; I cannot wait to talk with them again in person. Everybody made me feel so comfortable with their warmth and kindness.

I want to thank Jane Burton from the Tate and Nancy Proctor from the Smithsonian for inviting me to attend. It was a privilege to learn from the many brilliant people who attended and, in turn, share the accomplishments of the San Jose Museum of Art with the iPod Touch tour.

One of the Mind Maps created

There are other mentions of the conference on the Musematic blog by Nik Honeysett; the IMA blog by Daniel Incandela; Buzzeum by Diane Drubay (in French, but page has a translator); and Nina Simon makes a mention of the Wiki usage on her Museum 2.0 blog.

Dave Patten of the Science Museum in London started a Flickr Group with images of the event if you are interested.

San Jose Museum of Art’s iPod Touch/iPhone tour: http://www.sjma.mobi (best viewed on one of the devices)

These are the slides for the presentation that I gave at the Tate Handheld Conference From Audiotours to iPhones. The conference was in London on September 4th and 5th, 2008 and there were about 150 people in attendance. The focus of the presentation was the San Jose Museum of Art’s iPod Touch tour. You can read more about the conference or more about the tour. Whatever tickles your fancy!

The San Jose Museum of Art hosted the Annual meeting of the Museum Computer Network’s California Special Interest Group (say that fast five times) in August of 2008.  The day long meeting had several presentations from local museums including History|San Jose, the Magnus, the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco and our museum.  For the meeting I spoke about our iPod Touch tour and then invited the 20 participants to check it out for themselves in the gallery.  The day was a success and it was great to meet so many new people and learn about their organizations.