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Museum Podcast Newsletter
MuseumPods.com |
July 2006 - Vol 1, Issue 5
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In This Issue |
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Quick Links |
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Greetings! |
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New Community Based Museum Search Engines on MuseumPods
Add the Museum Search Engine to your website.
MuseumPods is creating community or topic specific search engines. The engines learn each time someone conducts a search
and refines the results unlike Google and some of the larger more generic search engines. You can download the HTML code for
each specific search engine and add one or all of the search engines to your website. Some of our specific Museum Search engines
include: (click on links to get HTML code to add search engines to your website) Museum Podcast RSS, Travel Podcasts, Museums, Museum Jobs/Fellowships/Internships, University and College Podcasts, plus a lot more...
The more search engines and users helps to develop very specific intelligent
search networks for users in the museum community. IT'S FREE.
Introducing the MuseumPods Podcasting Blog
Copy and paste this http://museumpods.blogspot.com/atom.xml XML Feed into your Blog Feed Reader to get and post constant updates on new museum podcasts, museum news and articles,
museum jobs, résumé posts, plus a lot more.
If you are not familiar with Blogging, having a Feed Reader will allow you to view everything on the blog when it is submitted.
Post your museum's exhibition, podcast, job, internship or event for tourists and other museum community members to view on
their desktop
If you don't have a Feed Reader there are many FREE Readers available for download on our Best Podcast Freeware page. |
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* Join our FREE chat room and discuss issues about
podcasting - talk about technology, marketing and networking. * Learn how to podcast (almost everything you need to get your
museum podcasting is available at Museumpods.com and it's all FREEWARE) * Stay tuned for special guest chat room hosts. *
We are seeking moderators with special skills to contribute to our chat sessions.
Scheduled hours to chat with an experienced podcaster:
12:00 - 2:00 P.M. Monday-Friday (EST.) 7:00 - 9:00 P.M. Every Evening (EST.) (chat room is open 24/7 for discussions) | |
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Thanks to podcasting, it's becoming as easy to download
a museum visit onto a portable digital audio player as it is a pop tune.
And museums, realizing this is a way to reach a younger
generation of potential patrons, are racing to get involved. They are making their in-house audio tours of special exhibits,
as well as original programming, available on their websites for free use on iPods and other MP3 players. And art lovers can
listen through their home computers as well. There's even a newly coined term for the phenomenon - "artcasting."
"It's neat to see museums - even low-budget museums
- do high-tech things," said Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, publisher of PodcastingNews.com. "And it may drive new participation
in the fine arts as the traditional audience is aging and dying."
As a result of this trend, Coloradans can "tour" the
new Dada exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art while they drive, jog or hike in a mountain park. Or, an expatriate Colorado
art lover in Los Angeles can sit by his laptop and listen as Suzzette Kraus - a professional voice-over talent - narrates
a tour of the current Emmi Whitehorse exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
"You enter a world filled with the smoky palette of
the Southwest and steeped in a mysterious vocabulary of doodle and symbols," she alluringly intones, drawing the listener
in like an old radio serial.
The Boulder museum believes itself to be the first
in Colorado to offer podcasts. Its offerings - tours of three simultaneous shows - became available May 31 at www.bmoca.org.
They were produced in-house, under the supervision of associate curator Kirsten Gerdes, for approximately $5,000. A donor
provided the museum with six iPods so visitors can listen on site, if they don't have their own to bring.
"Amazed" by results
Since the podcast inception, Gerdes said, the museum
has had 14,222 total "feed views" - website visitors listening online - as well as 304 downloads of the files to personal
listening devices and 107 subscriptions to a museum service that will automatically download new podcasts.
"As a contemporary art museum, we need to be moving
forward," Gerdes said by phone. "This is our first look at how to direct our education program to a more technically inclined
crowd."
After compiling the first month's numbers, she added
by e-mail, "We are amazed and pleased by this result."
Several other Front Range museums said they intend
to begin podcasting in the future - Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum (sometime in 2007) and the
Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Additionally, Gerdes said she's been contacted by the Vance Kirkland Museum about it.
It's hard to compile a complete list of museums now
offering podcasts, since new ones are constantly starting up. But the sites Museumpods.co m and Podtrip.com list, among others, New York's MoMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco's de Young Museum and Museum
of Modern Art; Los Angeles' UCLA Hammer Museum; Washington's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; London's Victoria and
Albert Museum; even the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss.; and Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Maine's Bowdoin College.
Contemporary art museums, science and technology museums,
and university-affiliated institutions seem to be especially active. But there's also room for idiosyncratic ephemera like
the Burlingame (Calif.) Museum of Pez Memorabilia.
Young demographic
According to one study, more than 20 million Americans
18 and older have Apple iPods or other digital music players. And because the iPod revolution has been youth-driven, the challenge
for museums is to make podcasts less didactic and one-dimensional than traditional on-site audio tours.
"Assuming the audience is a younger demographic, it
needs to be more hip, lively and contemporary," said Pamela Glintenkamp, whose Los Angeles-based Sandpail Productions is getting
into podcast production after specializing in on-site audio tours. "That relates to the voice of the narrator, the background
music. You have to think of the kind of people on the street who use iPods."
San Francisco MoMA's Peter Samis, the associate curator/interpretations,
has been especially aggressive in experimenting with "artcasting," as he calls it. Working with Antenna Audio, a Bay Area-based
international leader in the production of audio tours, he has developed what he calls a new "'zine" (as in magazine) available
for downloading every six weeks at sfmoma.org. It also includes video images. Each costs about $5,000 to produce.
The June episode, which is audio only, packs a remarkable
variety of compelling and unusual material into its tight 37-minute length. Avant-garde artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney
discusses his current exhibition, "Drawing Restraint." And singer-songwriter Will Oldham performs a whaling song, "Rolling
Down to Old Maui," inspired by a Barney film and commissioned exclusively for the podcast. Samis said the role model for his
"artcasts" is National Public Radio. "It's just like listening to an NPR feature story," he said. "It's been in my lifetime
that this form of radio has developed, where the radio story has such a rich acoustic tapestry and can evoke a visual world
through wordplay, not to mention the use of sound."
The San Francisco museum is sponsoring an Artcast Invitational,
where listeners can submit their own podcasts. As viewer input catches on, it could make things really interesting for museum
podcasts. "It seems in the near future people will have an opportunity to interact with a podcast, just like people can interact
with blogs," said Lewin, of PodcastingNews.com. "And podcasters don't necessarily have to bow to a curator's view. They can
be irreverent." |
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By Chris Cabe, Web and Media Coordinator – The
Mayborn Museum Complex, 1300 S. University-Parks One Bear Place #97154 Waco, TX 76706
When first starting out, creating and publishing a
podcast seemed like a fairly hefty task, but as I got into the project and learned more about podcasting and the tools involved,
the task became less and less daunting. I imagine like most people, I was excited about the prospect of having a podcast,
but at the same time I was intimidated by the fact that I would need to learn an awful lot if I was ever going to get a bona
fide podcast out and available on the internet. As it turned out, I did not need to learn a great deal and I did not have
to know a whole lot. There were several resources out there to help me along the way, and I found that once I got going, the
process was pretty straight forward, fun, and rewarding.
I would like to give you a little bit of background
on our museum. The 142,000 square foot Mayborn Museum Complexopened in May of 2004 at Baylor Universityy in Waco, Texas. It features a natural history museum focusing on central Texas with walk-in dioramas including one on the
Waco Mammoth Site, and exploration stations for geology, paleontology, archeology, and natural history. Sixteen themed discovery
rooms encourage hands-on learning for all ages in the Jeanes Discovery Center. The complex also includes a 13-acre historic
village, a traveling exhibit gallery, theater, museum store, and snack area. Each summer the Mayborn places a temporary exhibit
on display to attract summer adventure seekers. This summer’s exhibit is “Feathered Treasures: Ceremonial Objects
of the Amazon”.
The Feathered Treasures exhibit showcases some beautiful
and unusual head dresses, masks, breastplates, full-body costumes, and other items made by indigenous tribes found deep in
the Amazon rain forest. These rare objects, all of which are made of natural materials found in the forest, were used in rites
of passage and other traditional ceremonies. Materials used include brilliantly colored feathers, iridescent beetle carapaces,
clay, shells, bees' wax and raw latex. The exhibit provides a rare glimpse into the vanishing cultures of the Amazon and is
the focus of our first podcast.
In the months leading up to the arrival of our summer
exhibit we had several meetings and discussions all revolving around how we could make our Feathered Treasures exhibit more
exciting and accessible to the public. During one of these meetings a proposal for a podcast was introduced. The idea was
to publish several audio bites that discussed certain objects of the collection in greater detail. Guests to the museum could
load the audio bites, or mp3s, onto their iPod or other mp3 player device and listen to them as they walked through the exhibit
and experience a kind of self-led, self-paced tour. I was given the task and went to work.
I learned early on that podcasts are transmitted over
the internet through webpages that are referred to as RSS or Really Simple Syndication feeds. These RSS feeds are indeed just
ordinary webpages in effect. You type in the web address of the RSS feed and the site comes up. But there is a catch. When
the site comes up it looks like a bunch of nonsensical computer code. The computer code you see is XML (short for Extensible
Markup Language) and it is the computer language that all RSS feeds are written in. There is a piece of the puzzle missing
here, and that piece is referred to as an aggregator. An aggregator is a software package that looks at an RSS feed and presents
the RSS feed’s information in a way the consumer can understand.
At this point I feel that I need to make a distinction
here between RSS feeds and podcasts. Not all RSS feeds output a podcast. An RSS feed is simply a means of transmitting information
to a consumer, whether it be an audio file like a podcast, a news article, or a photograph. The big advantage of transmitting
data via an RSS feed is that a consumer can be updated on news and information effortlessly. The consumers use their aggregator
to subscribe to the feeds they are interested in and the aggregator will do the grunt work. It routinely checks the selected
RSS feeds for any updates. If it finds updates it adds them to a list of new postings for the consumer to review. This method
of obtaining information is contrasted against the consumer’s alternative of going from one website to another and finding
out whether or not anything new has been posted.
Having researched podcasting, RSS feeds, and brushing
up on XML, the time had come to make the audio files. Adam Mekler, our guest curator for the Feathered Treasures exhibit and
the former owner of the artifacts contained within it, agreed to do the recordings, and so our marketing department started
the process of recording the sound bites that would be used for our podcast. Early on we encountered our first challenge.
While our guest curator was very knowledgeable, he had a thick accent and so our recordings sounded as though Henry Kissinger
were giving a report on feathered objects of the Amazon. Fortunately we had a student worker on hand here at the museum whose
major is in performing arts. He agreed to re-record the audio files. We now had a comprehensible set of audio files ready
to be integrated into an RSS feed.
One of the biggest challenges I faced while integrating
the audio files into an RSS feed dealt with images. With the advent of the color screen and new video iPods, we wanted there
to be an image associated with each sound clip we recorded so that visitors could see the image on their iPod as they listened
to the description. In looking at the code for other RSS feeds that had images contained within them I noticed that all they
appeared to be doing was adding an < img> html tag in the item’s description to get their image to appear, but
mine was not working. The problem I had encountered was that when I placed my < img> tag in the XML code, the aggregator
was trying to translate the < img> tag as an XML tag and not an HTML tag. The aggregator did not know what to do with
the tag as it was not a standard XML tag and so my images were not being displayed. To alleviate this problem I had to replace
the brackets (‘<’ and ‘>’) associated with my image tag with their “named character entity”
counterparts. By replacing ‘< ’with ‘<’ and ‘>’ with ‘>’ the aggregator
no longer tried to decipher the tag and the images were allowed to be viewed through the aggregator as intended. I now had
working images for my podcast, or so I thought
Once the audio files and images were uploaded and integrated
into my RSS feed it was time to submit my feed to iTunes. This part turned out to be very easy. Open up iTunes and go to the
“Podcasts” section. Under “Podcasts” is a “Submit a Podcast” link. This brings up a page
with a blank text box in which you enter the complete URL address where your RSS feed resides. Click “Continue”,
and follow the instructions given. If your feed is valid, it will show up in iTunes in a few days. I should point out that
if you would like to verify that you have created a valid feed you can visit www.feedvalidat or.org and enter your feed’s URL here prior to submitting your RSS feed to iTunes. Feed Validator will look over your RSS
feed and tell you whether or not your feed is valid. If it is not, it will tell you what pieces are incorrect.
Upon submitting my feed to iTunes, and after a bit
of waiting, I received an email from Apple informing me that our podcast had been accepted and could now be found in iTunes.
This email also provided a handy URL that when clicked launches iTunes and goes directly to my podcast within the iTunes Music
Store. I subscribed to our podcast and upon subscribing, came to realize that there was one element missing from our podcast.
Although the images showed up fine when I viewed our RSS feed using an aggregator, in iTunes the images were not being displayed.
After a little research I discovered that for iTunes, in order to have a different image show up for each episode, the image
needs to be a part of the audio file’s metadata. Associating an image with an audio file’s metadata I found to
be a bit like chasing your own tail in that you have to first upload the audio file, downloaded it by subscribing to the podcast,
then modify the audio file you downloaded, and finally re-upload the file. Though a bit tedious, the following approach worked
for me. First, open up your iTunes and go to the “Podcasts” section. Go to the podcast you have created and subscribed
to it. Highlight each episode and select “Get Info” from the “File” menu. Click the Artwork tab. Next
click “Add”. Navigate to and select an image file, and click “Choose.” Once this is done, the image
is now within the audio file’s metadata. Now navigate to and select the audio file outside of iTunes using “My
Computer” or Windows Explorer. Upload this updated file to the web server, replacing the audio file that currently resides
on the web server with this one. Repeat this process for each of the audio files you have. I had to clear out my podcast subscription
by right clicking on the podcast and selecting “Clear” from within iTunes, but when I re-subscribed to the podcast
and viewed the individual podcast episodes, the images were there.
After getting my podcast episodes in the order I wanted
them, and the images and audio to functioning as intended, all that was left to do was make both the RSS feed and the iTunes
podcast available to the general public. For those consumers that have aggregators loaded on their computers but might not
have iTunes I provided a direct link to the RSS feed on our Mayborn Museum website. For those that do not have aggregators
but are iTunes users, I went back to the iTunes email I received that provided the URL that opened iTunes and took the user
directly to our podcast within iTunes. I copied the link and added it to our website as well.
My project was complete. I found that through just
a little research, effort, and a bit of trial and error I was able to make a fully functional, readily available podcast complete with images for each episode. I hope this article has helped you in some way and, if you are like me, do not be so
intimidated by the prospect of creating a podcast; it is not as hard as you might think. |
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Next time you're at a museum, don't assume that the
guy listening to an iPod is too into his music to enjoy Monet. Podcast tours are available for a growing number of museums,
from the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka to Paris's Musee d'Orsay. Tours tend to avoid the stuffy "enter here and notice
. . ." lecture format so frequently heard on rented headsets. Instead, the new audio guides are big on discussions with artists,
casual conversations with critics and academics, and sometimes even the irreverent comments of amateurs. And for now at least,
most are free
Downloadable tours sanctioned by museums are available
on websites of institutions like New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Louis's Contemporary Art Museum, and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A recent "artcast" about the latter's exhibit, "1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures,"
included the first winning entry from the museum's ongoing podcast competition--in which the catastrophe is re-created with
narration, music, and sound effects. (SFMOMA even knocks $2 off admission if you show you've downloaded one of its podcasts.)
Minneapolis's innovative Walker Art Center has iPod docks in the lobby so you can download tours on the spot.
Perhaps even more interesting are unauthorized audio
tours. In Slate's guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan (slate.com/id /2123266), which includes a printable PDF map of the tour, you can listen to art critic Lee Siegel seethe over "Therese Dreaming,"
a 1938 Balthus painting. "I think Balthus is one of the most overrated painters in this museum," he says. "Please pass into
the next room." Like his TV shows and guidebooks, Rick Steves's podcast tours of Paris's Musee d'Orsay and Louvre are informative,
with a dose of cornball humor (ricksteves.com). BBC host Paul Rose leads wacky, 25-minute tours in six U.K museums in his "Take One Museum" series (bbc.co.uk).
Because these podcasts are so new and topics change
frequently, a comprehensive list of where they're offered is hard to come by. MuseumPods.co m welcomes museums to submit audio tours; at last check, there were 22. A search for "museum podcast" at iTunes returned more
than 30 tours.
For those who don't own an iPod, some museums, including
the Walker Art Center and the San Jose Museum of Art, offer cell-phone tours. Dial the numbers listed in museum handouts or
on plaques near sculptures and paintings to listen to artists and curators discussing the works at hand. Like podcasts, cell-phone
tours are free for the time being, but the minutes are on you if you go over your monthly allotment.
iPod tour help desk
Getting audio files onto your iPod can be complicated.
If you're downloading MP3 files directly from a website, rather than from an aggregator service like iTunes, you might have
to save the files to a folder on your desktop. If you have a Mac, click on the files and they should move to your iTunes and
start playing. If they don't, or if you have a PC, drag them in yourself. You can also download podcasts automatically through
iTunes: Go to the "Subscribe to Podcast" option, and then manually paste the feed (links ending in .xml) into the box that
pops up. |
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MuseumPods fundamental purpose is academic research.
We are seeking 5 museums from around the world to participate in a series of podcast related surveys and a few phone interviews.
If your museum is interested in starting to podcast or currently podcasting and you would like to participate please contact
us to inquire.
Benefits of participating include: free advertising
space on MuseumPods.com for the museum, full publishing credits. |
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Buster Ratliff Operations Coordinator Panhandle-Plains
Historical Museum
There are many elements to a podcast that are important
to ensure its success. One of the most overlooked elements is the element of feedback. It is important to listen to your listeners.
Feedback can come from a variety of sources. A starting
point is your coworkers. Let them listen to the podcast and then you listen to what they have to say. Most coworkers represent
varying viewpoints and can give you helpful advice. If a coworker liked the podcast, listen to why they did, and just as important,
why they did not. You can then fine tune your podcast.
Another source of feedback is the public. I agree that
at times, public opinion is skewed and success is unattainable. However, the public can provide a great source of feedback.
They are after all, your audience. Public opinion is important enough to me that the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum’s
new website will include the downloadable podcast as well as a survey. The survey asks six questions: Did you enjoy the podcast?
Is the podcast pertinent to the exhibit? Which podcasts have you listened to? What did you like about the podcasts? What didn’t
you like about the podcast? What changes could be made to make your experience more enjoyable? From those questions I will
be able to get a feel for what the public thinks.
Feedback is not always fun and at times can be a bit
overwhelming. However, the goal with each podcast should be to give the public what it wants, enhance the mission of your
institution, and deliver a top quality product. |
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MuseumPods
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