 Hi. Thank you for being here and thank you for not leaving. WordPress is for blogs. This is something we have all heard many times. And we try to say, no wait, WordPress is for blogs, but it's also for CMS. It can be the back end of a mobile site. It can be many, many things, but it isn't just for blogs. In the museum world, there is a very different view of this. And let me tell you a little bit about museums first. This, by the way, is a picture of the Smithsonian Castle, for your encyclicalies are part of the Smithsonian, being built. So defining our world, what is a museum? A museum is a place where pieces of your history are stored. They can be animals, plants. They can be artists. They can be articles and photographs. It is a place that we have learned to think of as the primary source of good information. But recently over the years, that has begun to be challenged. And we are looking at museums not just to tell us what something means, but to help us give meaning to what we do. And we expect that in return, we can also share what it means to us with the museums. So what is usually inside of a museum? When you think of a museum, most of you probably think of a large museum in your town or your city. If you are in a major city, it's an enormous space. But most museums are actually rather small. 15% of the museums in the US hold 5,000 to 10,000 objects. That's it. 15% hold 50 to 500,000. What we're seeing here is that over 50% of museums hold less than 500,000 objects. Well, what does that mean? The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum complex. It has 19 facilities, including a zoo. It has 156 million objects just in those 19 museums. Now to get more crazy, 146 million of those objects are in natural history alone. Only 2% of that collection is ever on display at a given time. So most of those objects that we are keeping safe are not ever going to cross your path. And that's only if you are privileged enough to be able to travel to said museum to even see that 2%. So how do people visit these museums? Looking at the Met, 6.2 million people visited by walking through the door. But 29 million visited the website and were able to see the collections that they have put online. That's an enormous difference. We are talking about the difference between being able to afford not only to go to New York, but to go to the Met, which is rather expensive, versus being able to get to a computer with an internet collection and see what they have. You're probably wondering why should you care about this? This is a WordPress conference. This is not about museums or why we should be digitizing objects. Hold that thought for one second. I am going to finish putting my password in here and see if I can get the rest of the notes. Thank you, guys. All right. So why does this matter? This matters because museums need to put their content online if you are able to see it. If you want to be able to share it, if you want to make sure your friends around the world can share it. So what kind of tools do they have? Well, before we talk about CMS and museums, I should make one thing clear. If you leave this talk and you type in museum and CMS and you try to look into what they're using, you're not going to get a content management system. You're going to get a collections management system, which is a very, very different beast. So what kind of content management systems are museums using? Here is a graph from Arrowroot Media from 2013. They did an informal study of about 100 museums to look at what they use. Here it looks like, well, WordPress is clearly the winner in museum CMS. But unfortunately, what you see in this blog or this post is not what is the reality. Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine, and a variety of other content management systems, some of them homegrown, are what are running the front end of most of these museum sites. WordPress is for their blog. Once again, why do we care? When museums do not know that they have more choices than these three or four that you see, there is less competition and less likelihood that they are going to be able to do what it is that we want them to do, which is free the information. When talking to different design houses and here at the actual Canadian Heritage Information Network, this is their national network. And museums look to see what they can do with the hard earned money that they have to raise through donations and grants. What they are told is that WordPress is suited for blogs and Drupal is most powerful. I'm not saying that this is the end all be all. I'm not saying that it's sad that everyone's using Drupal. Drupal is fine. What I'm saying is that it's not creating a good network of resources for these museums to pull from. So here is another reason why we need to do this. Here's a slide from the Smithsonian. If you take the 154 million that we discussed earlier and you ask how many we've digitized, we've digitized 6% of that collection. Now, if we take out natural history, which we know is a monster, we've actually digitized 22% of the collection. That's a lot. When you think that if you went to the museum and went to every single one of the facilities in one day, you would only see 2%. The ability to see 22% is quite astounding. What does this mean for most museums, though? Well, most museums do not have the kind of budget the Smithsonian does. Most museums do not have the kind of budget we think of when we look at the Met, the Tate, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most museums have the entire budget of one medium-size department in one of these museums. That's for the entire year. 64% have less than 30 full-time staff. This is important when you're looking at how are you going to put all this information online? How are you going to have the staff to manage all of it? 30 full-time staff. You're probably wondering how many people are usually in a museum. Our museum, with 44,000 objects, has 100 staff, which is not very big, but not bad. We also have the central Smithsonian that takes care of all of our tech needs. And it doesn't include our guards, and it doesn't include our security managers for those guards. It doesn't include our facility managers. All of that is outsourced. So we actually have far more staff. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has 40 curators. That is 10 more than most museums have for their whole staff. So what is it that I'm asking from the WordPress community? I'm asking that you reach into your activist, open source, beautiful hearts, and think about how you can help this community and other communities see what other options there are out there. When I talked to a couple very well-known design houses for museum websites and apps, the first thing that upset them about WordPress and the first thing they said about why they are moving to Drupal, to Drupal from what you're probably wondering, usually from actually flat or from proprietary CMSs, was because of the need for deep taxonomies. Here is a very small subset of our taxonomies. Taxonomies are the terms that you use to mark your collection. We have 5,500 terms for our 40,000 object collection. I have no idea how many the Met has. It's probably astounding. So how do you deal with 5,500 terms? When these terms are just a subset of what you'd say if an object is damaged. So what do we need to do? We need to change the conversation. We need to help museums help themselves. Museums used to be the place where you went and passively listened, but museums are turning into a place where community can come. They can question ideas. They can question thoughts. They can engage people who are different than them. And more than ever, museums are a real necessity in our civilization. No one ever failed a museum. We want to make them more open. So what I need from you is to think about how adding competition will really help the museum world and help the WordPress world. If you are interested as a one-on-one sort of experience, there are so many places museums could use your help. Hackathons, editathons, museum professional events, answering questions on listservs. How does this have to do with WordPress? If someone on a museum listserv, and this happens all the time because you have one person who is their IT staff, who manages their computers, creates their websites, sometimes takes their photos because they're digital, they ask, all right, we need to redo things. What should we do? You can point to a project that has already happened. Museums are risk adverse. They are risk adverse because they have no staff and they have no money. We heard earlier from Topher about how WordPress allows people to do things when they have limited resources. It also allows people to do things when they have vast resources. Museums have a little bit of both. They will often have no money to run, but will be given a grant of 10,000, 50,000, 200,000 to redo their website. And because they only know of three different companies and one content management system, it gets them nearly nothing that they cannot manage themselves. So if you are a company, think about coming out and meeting the museums where they are. Not just you as one-on-one, but you as an entity. Here is a list of the different vendors that have been to these two different conferences. We have DrupalCon and WordCampUS, and we have Museum Computer Network and Museums in the Web Los Angeles. You'll notice that under DrupalCon and WordCampUS, we have nine hosting companies, nine companies that could tell museums how they could have their website on a server that does not cost them a small fortune. Eight companies that could show them how to use plugins that will give them an e-commerce store that does not charge them $10,000 a month. 20 development agencies that, though they have not worked with museums, are more than capable of doing so. In the museum world, we have augmented reality. We have audio tours. We have hardware. We have proprietary ticketing systems. What we have are a lot of pieces that do not always fit together. And what we don't have is the how to get there so that these tools are useful. It's one thing to go to a museum conference and talk about how to engage an audience. But what is often missing is how to make a website. After putting this talk together, I spoke with some people in both the museum world and in the WordPress world and asked what it was that made them either hesitant or what they thought about some of the concerns that the hesitant parties had. And it came down to what I had mentioned before, which is that it's hard to be brave when you don't have a lot of resources. A little side story from my museum. We just closed one of the two buildings and we're redoing all the galleries. One of the galleries, a curator had this great idea that we could show Mr. Freer's way of collecting. He was the original collection that came to the Smithsonian and that maybe we could show some of the images from his house and set up some cases and show the objects next to each other the way he showed them in his house, which was not always by genre, by culture, et cetera. And as we started looking for people who could do that, we realized that we didn't know how to have images on all the walls that were moving and still have cases and not have glare. There were a few companies who said they could do it, but they had no proof of concept. And so the museum declined. We now have a gallery with no objects. It's not because museums don't want to try. It's just really hard when those are all your resources and they are in one egg. You don't want to break it. So if you know of things that would fit museums, if you start reaching out into these different groups that I mentioned earlier, point out similarities. Hey, I know that you have all these objects and we've never done a collection before inside of my whatever, my framework, my plugin, but we do all of these store items or we've done books or we've done something. Or you could say, I know that you really struggle with making sure everything is properly annotated for scholars. You know, there's this whole new community now doing things with the academic world. Okay, well if I don't know it and I don't see it, I honestly can't spend time to deal with it and it's not that I don't want to, but I'm one person and I'm trying to photograph 10,000 objects, put them online and fix my boss's computer. So understand timing is everything. Help them build tools. Museums are deconstructing piece by piece the authoritarian model that presumes control of what people see, what they learn, and how they learn it. They are democratizing knowledge. We are democratizing publishing. It is a perfect fit. Thank you very much. I can take questions. I can take questions if there are any. Yes, sir. The question was, am I saying that museums need help from WordPress people? Yes. Most of the museums though that need help are your museums in small communities, your museums that are funded by charity groups, your museums that are funded by 10 people who really care about this one author who lived there. They are museums that don't even know that there is a WordPress community to reach out to. There are larger museums though, like us, even though we have a small collection, we're part of the Smithsonian and it makes us very public. And we're actually working with automatic right now to create a theme and a plugin that helps integrate collections like ours. But we're an art museum and that's not gonna work for everybody else and it may not work exactly for other museums. They may need to do some customization. They may need to do only like $5,000 worth of customization but they don't know where to even find that person to do it. It's not that they can't afford it but they're going to go out on their listservs and they're gonna say, hey, I saw this and it looks really cool and we can use it and it saves us a lot of money but who can do it? And I saw that happen to one of the groups at the Smithsonian who reached out and they got an intern who said that they knew WordPress. They knew WordPress.com and they only knew how to put information on it. They didn't actually know how to customize anything and so what they ended up with was a terrible mess and having funded an intern for three months and that's not their fault, they just didn't know. Hi, so I don't have a question so much as a brava. Thank you so much. I'm the executive director of WIC Historic House Garden and Farm in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. We have a little over 10,000 objects and I just started there in April. Thankfully I do know some WordPress thanks to my husband teaching me. Before I started they were spending way too much money paying somebody to update the website. It still does need help, I do know that. Getting to that but I just wanna say thank you because I've started reaching out to schools trying to get students to help me with some of the projects that you're talking about because I do have limited skills and very limited time. I'm the only full-time employee. So I am gonna start reaching out to the WordPress groups here and see if I could get some people interested in helping and then maybe as we move forward I could afford a small stipend. So I just wanna say thank you because I think this is something in talking and going into other meetings that I know there's a lot of museums just in Philadelphia alone, small museums that are really looking to do more online, digitizing objects, virtual tours without spending all the money that you have to pay somebody to do that and just making more of an online presence possible. So thank you so much. Oh, thank you. Hi, I have less of a technical question more about archiving and archival technology. You mentioned taxonomies in that you have over 5,500 different tags that are used to describe items in your collection. I'm wondering over what kind of process is that collection of tags and collection of keywords built up? We use something called TMS, the museum system. It's the collections management software that most art museums use and they have something in it called a thesaurus which is where we have all of our terms. We have about 13 main categories from which collection is it in because there are actual full collections. There's a freer collection, a Sackler collection and a study collection to what shape is it in which was that slide you saw earlier to what is shown in the piece. And though you have written narratives, you need specific terms. Often people use something called the Getty vocabulary. There are a couple other vocabularies by major museums that allow like-minded researchers to be able to match up. So you'll have perhaps a specific time a day in a Buddhist painting and you want to mark it with the right word for that time a day in a Buddhist painting because it actually means something. So because it's very hierarchical and it's not something that you see a lot of in the WordPress world. Okay, so instead of building the hierarchy and coming up with terms on your own as you go, you use a pre-existing vocabulary that is like 10,000 terms. Okay, thank you. Sure. Hi, I am that one person doing all of the computer things at the University of Pennsylvania Archives. Thank you. And yay. It's the oldest college in the country so we have a huge collection of objects and I'm currently transitioning our very large static website to WordPress and I know you're working with automatic to make custom plugins and things but have you found any existing tools that have been helpful specifically for museums and archives? Not that deals with the collection objects, though if you set up custom fields for the primary pieces of information that you want to have with those objects, you can pull them using like a PHP page. So as opposed to using like a WordPress template, you could pull them with a WordPress template. What we've been doing is actually just trying to get information out of TMS. It took us forever to get it from Microsoft SQL to MySQL. The Cooper Hewitt did it very quickly. We couldn't figure out why we were having so much trouble. We realized it was because we had like nine or 10 languages and they would just appear in random fields depending on what curator had written it in what century and it was killing us. So one of the 64 tables would error out every single time we ran it. We finally got it all out but once you have it in a more malleable space, it gets a little bit easier. And the content, content to go back to and kind of say what I was saying wasn't true, content is like a blog. So you can pull all that stuff over pretty easily. Okay, thank you. But give me a call. Yeah. Hello, I just wanted to echo to you and the WordPress community that everything that you're saying is absolutely true. I recently had the opportunity to start consulting for the Edison Papers Archive over at Rutgers University. Where they have 200,000 digital images with a custom vocabulary deep metadata. And we're just starting the strategy phase of trying to figure out what platforms we can move a 15 year old website to. And Drupal of course as a leading contender. So I'm interested in communicating and collaborating. It sounds like there's other people trying to deal with this. And it would be great if WordPress was an option. Currently it doesn't seem out of the box even with plugins like it is. It isn't out of the box but it is just as easy to have someone build most of the tools you need. We are building some very complex tools. And not because just because we need them all but actually because we're hoping that we'll make it more useful for other museums. And that's something that we are deeply indebted to automatic for like that they're spending that kind of time to do something that is perhaps not necessary for us but hopefully will be necessary for the whole community. But you can do a lot of it in WordPress. You just need someone who will build them. And the thing with Drupal is they're already built. But then the keep of Drupal is usually far larger than most museums need. And that has nothing to do with if you think Drupal is wonderful and WordPress is wonderful, still Drupal is enterprise only. And if you are 30 people and your budget is 2 million a year. And with that you wanna keep a building open, pay everybody and still acquire things from time to time. It's just not happening. Drupal's great if you're the met and you're talking in hundreds of millions. Yeah, I'll be in touch. Thank you. Before the next question, Ryan back there who's one of my coworkers, he has helped me set up a new listserv for WordPress and museums. And I am asking him now to tweet it out. So if you are interested, that's a good place to start putting some questions. So I love this talk. I've always been a museum geek and getting the chance to contribute to a museum would be awesome. My question is, you mentioned the Getty taxonomy or something. The vocabulary, yes. The vocabulary, okay. Is there a place where non-museum, people who aren't in the domain, can access, terms, needs, structures? Absolutely. Get on the listserv, ask a question and we're more than willing to share. And I don't know if all museums are willing to share. Some of them can't because of whatever the rules are. Museums have weird rules. It's how they got their objects. Like the freer, those objects aren't allowed to leave the building. Try redoing a building when your objects can't leave. That's a lot of fun. So, but some of us can, we can move our objects or we can share our taxonomies or we can share our taxonomies. I can give you the entire 146 page list if you want. Like that's not a problem. Okay, yeah, because I think, I mean, I don't know, maybe it isn't that simple, but listening to what you said, I feel like it would be pretty easy for us to build a general proper solution that works for everybody. And for that, I actually think that the work we're doing with automatic will be able to solve the initial problem for art museums. What we need then is people who are interested like you who can help expand that for the cultural, like specifically cultural museums or for natural history museums or to tweak it for the museum that has $500 to change it. And can you just give them an hour or three hours of your time and say, this is what you need to do to fix it and then input all the data and you'll be fine. Stick it in a spreadsheet. And sometimes it is that simple to help them. So get on the listserv, help us. I'd really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hi. So bravo on getting your big collection into WordPress. It seems like the next logical step would be to use the API project, open up your collection to classrooms, libraries, third party developers. Can you speak to any efforts that you're working on in that department? So as we're continuing to work on getting everything in with automatic, the agreement was not just that we would release the theme and release the plugin, but that we will continue to do what the freer has been doing at the Smithsonian since the beginning, which is trying to just give away everything we have. And so we're hoping to encourage people to do some interesting projects, but more than that, I would really like to see people take the art and make more art and take the ideas and invent things. I think building new tools to look at the information is fine, but let's go the next step and actually create more. Hi. I hope this question doesn't come across as crassly commercial after the noble things people have just said. I focus on working with mission-driven organizations and my secret plan is to narrow in more into cultural and historical and museum organizations because I love that stuff. And I was wondering if you have any tips for how to reach out to the right decision makers and what kind of events trigger the realization that they need to do this kind of project? And even like, is it politically cool to almost cold call these kind of organizations or will they ask when they need something? Museums get cold called all day long and it's the only reason we know most things exist. So it's okay. That list I showed you of companies that come to the different conferences, this is how we find the tools that we use. It's not bad that you want to focus on cultural institutions and it's definitely not bad, you wanna make money from them. There are tons of companies that wanna make money from cultural institutions, but they all do the same thing and they charge us, most of us, a fortune. Not always, larger institutions have more staff and they know what they're asking for and they get what they should get. But I see companies that are not the larger companies but some of the less well-known ones that work with small museums and charge them way too much and that's part of competition. The more of you that want to start working with cultural institutions, the more money you can make but also the less money they can spend or if they do spend the big money, if they get a $500,000 donation to redo their website, they can get $500,000 worth of work, not $10,000 worth of work except that they don't know what they're doing because it was a one-time donation and they've never dealt with the web. So yeah, join and start doing things, that would be wonderful. Sure, it doesn't have a name, we never named it. I will think about that. We will name it on our next weekly meeting, how's that? To naming it? No? Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, so once we have an initial set that works on our collection since it hasn't been done before, it's nice to see it. Like there are some ones, the Guggenheim did something but the way that they did it, they can't actually release it without getting in trouble from a very specific museum content or collections management system. So we're trying to build something that we can put out there that people can iterate off of and no one's gonna get sued. It's always nice when you don't have money to not get sued. All right, thank you very much.