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Joining the dots: Ozeculture conference, Melbourne June 2001 Lee Adendorff, Website Coordinator, Australian Museums OnLine Australian Museums OnLine (AMOL) is the national Internet gateway to Australian museums and galleries. The website, based at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, serves the museum community through a series of professional online resources and tools, and the general public through a comprehensive online guide to Australian museums and galleries. We develop and maintain several significant databases apart from the guide to Australian museums and galleries, such as the National Exhibition Venues database and the Resourcefinder of products and services for the museum sector. Discovernet™, AMOL's learning gateway to museums for the education sector, will be launched in July this year. We also publish online stories themed around collections from AMOL's Open Collections, a growing distributed national database of 81 collections from all over the country. These stories are essentially value-adding to data sets, but also offer the opportunity to display objects, places, events and people that might otherwise not be seen. The National Quilt Register (http://amol.org.au/nqr) for example, is one of the more recent virtual exhibitions AMOL has produced in conjunction with the Pioneer Women's Hut of Tumbarumba and other Australian cultural institutions. It includes a fully searchable database of quilts made from 1850 to 1965 with contextual histories recorded for each one as well as essays on quilts and interactive tools to examine and discuss the quilts. What I am going to look at in more detail today is another of our virtual exhibitions aimed specifically at cultural tourists, Art Trails through Victoria's Regional Galleries (http://amol.org.au/art_trails/).
'New ways with old things' reminds us that virtual exhibitions are very much informed by our love of, and interest in, precious and significant objects from our past. Although the web has certainly removed some physical barriers for our access to these 'old things' it has also raised a series of new questions about how people engage with such objects and their holding institutions in a virtual space. Certainly one of the most significant challenges for people working with new media and virtual exhibitions today is the intelligent fusion of intuition and cognitive thought, or 'old ways' if you like, with the excitement and creativity generated by the 'new ways' of showing. Art Trails was conceived on some levels as not only a chance to explore new ways of presenting regional art galleries but also to respond to a wider trend that directly affects these keepers of old things: online tourism. From humble beginnings only a few years ago with web sites that resembled electronic versions of printed brochures, online tourism has come a long way. Tourists can now book and pay for flights and accommodation, look up timetables, research destinations, plan itineraries and read travel guides and magazines online. Recent studies in the United States estimate online tourist spending in 2000 to have reached US$18.7 billion. (Hughes, 2000). State Tourist Commission websites in Australia alone have a huge volume of visitors - nearly 20,000 discrete users a day - with many offering online accommodation and tour booking services as well as information about local attractions. (AMOL, 2001) According to the Bureau of Tourism Research (BTR), around 2.4 million inbound visitors a year - or about 60 percent of international visitors - engage with at least one form of cultural activity during their stay. (BTR,1998) Add this to the domestic leisure tourists who spend around 144 million nights away from home (ABS,1999), and you have a huge visitor group to consider. The Internet will never replace the real thing of a museum or gallery visit for these people. But it is a powerful marketing tool. Commercial companies have been quick to realise the potential of this market and there are literally thousands of web sites promoting and selling tourism products online. Can virtual exhibitions or displays tap or be useful to institutions in these commercial markets? This is one of the questions we hoped to investigate with Art Trails, as it tests the potential of a virtual exhibition to deliver a real outcome in this market by enticing more people through the doors. Cultural and tourist trails have been around for a long time and the idea itself is nothing new. Several American institutions have developed online art trails, such as the Maine Art Museum Trail and the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail. These follow the classic electronic brochure format, where information produced in a printed brochure is reproduced on a web site with short and pithy text and images from collections. Where Art Trails departs somewhat from this convention is in the virtual reality tours that accompany a large sample set (up to 50 objects from each gallery) of actual objects from the galleries' collections. Virtual visitors to Art Trails can choose from six trails through the art galleries of regional Victoria that follow established natural traffic routes and tourist data from the Victorian Tourism Commission, such as the number of days visitors are likely to spend in a region. A short summary places the galleries on the trail in an historical or geographical context with interesting snippets of information about the area. On the goldfields trail for example, many of these art galleries were established in boom times when European taste and traditions overwhelmingly influenced acquisition practice. Many galleries over the years continued to collect artworks from or about their regions and the comparison of changing attitudes and practices through the collections can be as interesting as the works themselves. There is a printable itinerary and a list of local tourist information centres. The virtual tour of each gallery includes a virtual reality panorama where visitors can navigate internal and external gallery spaces, click on objects and get more information about the object and perhaps its relation to the area or gallery collection. No plug-ins are required to view these virtual tours, making the experience as seamless as possible for the user.
As well as the practical information - address, opening hours, and admission charges - there is a detailed description of the collection and featured artists or periods including interesting stories about the gallery and its relationship to the community or area. Five significant objects entice the user on. Up to 50 significant objects from the collection can be browsed in a separate interface. Like all online virtual exhibitions, the technology allows us to add several layers to the user experience that would not be possible in two dimensional formats such as brochures. Another valuable aspect to virtual exhibitions that the online environment can provide is the endless ability to be moulded and adapted in time. Much as the evaluation process affects the development of real exhibitions in museums, we hope to further develop Art Trails by conducting evaluative user surveys over the next twelve months. The resulting data will be available through the AMOL web site. REFERENCES AMOL conducted an informal survey of official tourist commission websites in early 2001. The results showed that the official Tourist Commission web sites of the ACT, Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania received on average around 20,000 users combined per day, although there was wide variation from day to day. Many tourist commissions reported anecdotally that print or television campaigns had a significant effect on the amount of visitors to their web sites, suggesting that many use these web sites as secondary and more detailed sources of information about their holiday destinations. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Use of information technology, 1998 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Increasing use of the internet and home computers, 2000 Australian Bureau of Statistics, International inbound tourism - characteristics, 1998 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Domestic Tourism (Australia Now: a profile), 1999 Bureau of Tourism Research Australia, Cultural tourism in Australia: Characteristics and motivations, Occasional Paper number 27, 1998 Hughes, C.J, Have Browser, will Travel, Forbes Best of the Web, May 22, 2000 Lynch, R. et al, Leisure and Change: implications for museums in the 21st Century, University of Technology, Sydney and Powerhouse Museum, 2000 Sarraf, Suzanne, 'A Survey of museums on the web: who uses museum web sites?' Curator 42/3, July 1999 Silberberg, Ted, Cultural Tourism and Business Opportunities for Museums and Heritage Sites, Tourism Management, August 1995. Wang, Jennifer, Museums without walls, Art Business News, September 2000 World Tourism Organization Business Council (WTOBC), Marketing Tourism Destinations Online, Madrid: World Tourism Organization, 1999 |
