Museums deserve better than mermaids. Let me explain…

(3 updates)

When Jim Richardson posted his spreadsheet of museums using twitter, a couple of things were immediately obvious: 1) it was a great dataset and 2) collecting that kind of data was very time consuming and error-prone. Even if you can bid out the work of collecting it in a global marketplace as Jim did, that’s just not something you can keep up in the long run or stay ahead of no matter how hard you try and even with knowledgeable collaborators like Museum Nerd volunteering their time. I got me thinking about better ways to solve the problem of finding museums using social media like Twitter and Facebook. Right away I made a version of this list with data collected via Twitter and Klout APIs.

This is what Clay Shirkey describes as a collaboration problem, the kind of problem that the internet is better at solving than are classical institutions (like, say, museums). In his TED talk on institutions vs. collaboration Shirky uses as an example the problem of finding everyone who has pictures of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Flickr is very good at solving this problem by providing a framework that allows people to upload their photos and tag them. This work is collaborative and completely undirected, answering needs in advance, before anyone shows up looking for all the pictures of the Mermaid parade they can find.

Museums aren’t a medium and there’s no Flickr for them. You can find museums on Google, by searching Facebook and paying attention to Twitter, but nothing solves this problem as well as Flickr does for mermaids. What’s the next best thing? What’s the most practical cowpath that we can pave?

Richardson’s spreadsheet was a good starting place. With a Twitter name, I was able to use the Twitter API to look up more account information including, for most institutions, a website. I quickly wrote a little program to crawl these websites looking for links to Facebook and stating with 1,681 Twitter names, I was able to find the Facebook pages for 674, or 40%. This did nothing to find more museums, though.

Facebook pages have categories and one category is “Museums/Art Gallery.” It would be great if you could search Facebook for all pages in this category, but Facebook being part of our new Awful Technocracy, you can’t. What you can do, is search Google for them. and in this way I was able over 300 more museums and galleries to the list. What’s more, you can list all your other social media accounts in your Facebook info. Once you have the page, you can use Facebook’s Graph API to gather all this other information.

I looked into several other methods of finding this data and so far this is the best and should be a community standard, at least for now. So, if you are a museum or a gallery:

1. Have a Facebook page, and give it the category “Museum/Art Gallery”
2. Link to all your other online presences in your Page info (like, for instance, The Guggenheim)

Most do, but a surprising number of museums and galleries don’t list themselves as so on Facebook. The next most common category is “Local Business” (such as The Getty) followed by “Non-profit Organization” (The Tate). Neither of these categories is helpful to people looking for art!

Update: The Getty has changed their category, so now “Local Businesses” SFMOMA and MoMA PS1, I’m looking at you!

Update 2: The Tate has also changed their category. The top “Non-profit organizations” are now The Design Museum and LACMA.

Update 3:  SFMOMA, LACMA and MoMA PS1 have all changed their categories.

Image by Paul Stein, via Flickr