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Should you tweet?
The February edition of News in Conservation carries an interview about Social Networking and its use in Conservation. We have summarised the interview below and welcome the conservation community to this discussion. To receive News in Conservation on a regular basis and for other benefits, join the IIC. Follow the Membership link, get involved and GetConnected!
There has been an explosion of social networking sites on the Internet, used for everything from arranging lunch dates to sharing the latest research. And it’s all being done, worldwide, in the closest thing we have to “real time”. IIC has asked Sagita Mirjam Sunara, Senior Teaching Assistant, Arts Academy of the University of Split, Croatia; Joyce Hill Stoner, Director of Preservation Studies at the University of Delaware, USA; Amber Kerr, conservator at the Smithsonian’s Lunder Center, USA; and Athanasios Velios a research fellow at the Ligatus Research Unit, University of the Arts London (and one of the web editors for the IIC website), to share their insights into what Social Networking (SN) has in store for the conservation/preservation community. You will see that they do not all agree.
Whether you tweet, blog, IM, e-mail or write letters on paper, IIC encourages you to join this discussion. Please add your insights and experiences.
Join the dialogue, post your comments
You can download a more full version of the interview which is summarised below.
IIC: What potential does Social Networking (SN) offer to the conservation professional?
- SN provides a venue where professionals at all levels can communicate with one another and share a wide range of information without publication deadlines or formality. It transcends national borders, politics, and professional status. Facebook, in particular, provides conservation news, outreach efforts and political issues that affect the arts. But because of SN’s virtual-online nature it has, for now, limited direct potential for conservation where manual skills are so essential.
IIC: It has been said that Social Networking shrinks the world. Do you think this is true? What are some of its drawbacks?
- It depends on the success of the network being used, who uses it, and how they use it. Instant communication applies to the Internet in general and can be particularly useful for conservators who work on objects of distant origin. The whole of the planet is not networked and arguably conservators who most need to contact other colleagues, are the ones who are unable to. Keeping up with the amount of information sharing and the number of social networking sites can be hard to manage, but it’s worth the investment. Sometimes things are sent too quickly and not appropriately edited.
IIC: Do you foresee dramatic changes in SN in a few years? How will those change the way conservation professionals communicate, do their work, learn from one another?
- Difficult to predict. More mechanisms for publishing structured content on SN websites would be welcomed, but this will depend on standardising conservation documentation. SN will be a key tool in promoting the profession and presenting conservation to a broader audience.
IIC: Do you think SN has the potential of broadening the resources used by conservation professionals?
- Free publications, countless reference sites, and professional opportunities all appear through SN. Ongoing news after a disaster, or getting immediate word of some specific way that support can be provide is now possible. However a resource should be permanent, easy to search and accessible, and at this moment SN fails here.
IIC: Describe the last time social networking provided an insight that was professionally valuable to you.
– The interviewees noted that after they posted news about their particular projects, helpful information was sent to them in responses. But at least one was not convinced that SN is either innovative or useful for conservation and could not site an example of information published on SN that could not find somewhere else.
IIC: What developments would you like to see in how conservation professionals use SN in the next decade and beyond?
- The more people who contribute their ideas, the more growth and development will occur. Increase of what is already happening, greater participation across generations. Fewer people feeling intimidated and just giving it a try. More open and free access to conservation information in a standardised format.
Thanks IIC, for publishing this summary online. It is great to hear that conservators and conservation educators are using social networking to share ideas and post their research.
As a art conservation student and a blogger, my blog has been key in at least one of my projects that required me to connect to conservators and people outside of the conservation field. That is the real strength of social networking, that other people outside of conservation can see my research and give me input and ideas I would not have considered. It also builds your network so when it is time to publish something finished you can better get that information to the people who need and want it.
It would be great to have more finished products online, and I believe many of the graduate programs in the United States are considering making their student’s research available online, The only conservation program that was publishing online was at the University of Texas at Austin which no longer has a conservation degree.
It is intimidating to begin facebook, twitter, and/or blogging, and it does take time to really know what to say and how to say it. My blog posts aren’t perfect grammatically and they don’t have to be, they are summaries and thoughts and adventures in art conservation, a field that excites me.
Clearly SN provides a great many opportunities for conservators to share professional information and individual observations. This forum, for example, is a way to make a larger resource known to a greater number o professionals and interested parties. But the most dynamic aspect is the feedback, the opinions and the comments which carry the discussion so much further than would otherwise be possible. Imagine the article being discussed over lunch or coffee in hundreds, thousands of places around the world. Now imagine that we are all at the same lunch and coffee together. That’s what we have a chance to do here, at that is the benefit of the SN community.
Just to emphasize how informal this media is…sorry about the two typos! Here is what it should have said if I could only type as fast as I want to….
For those of you interested in an alternative view of the web and social networking: “You Are Not A Gadget” by Jaron Lanier, who coined the term virtual reality. A good read and thought provoking.
I am looking forward to reading how others feel we can expand the use of the social network in conservation.
great to find this today. i’ve been trying to twitter for a while but didn’t know how to find collegues who like to post professional news, thoughts or links via this platform too. i’m not interested to twitter with friends for i believe the real potential of this social networks lies in the quick exchange of professional information. so lets build a network. my twitter name is kerstinkerstin and i have not been posting lots so far. looking forward to getting some input! and i promise to do so too :)
It seems that simply by having this discussion in this format all contributors are already tacitly confirming the increasing effectiveness of SN in the field : )
An increasing number of museums, galleries, other heritage institutions and conservation bodies seem to be using Twitter, and following their ‘tweets’ is a convenient and straightforward way of finding out what is going on the cultural heritage world if you lack the time to search though lots of websites. I’d very much like to see more conservators and conservation institutions represented. As Rose Daly has suggested, tweets flagging new research would also be welcome addition (some contributors are doing this already of course)
I am interested in where Social Networking fits in your work day. I am under the impression that in the US it is used in conncection with work more than in the UK. Does it fit under your job description to spend time on SN? Is it during a coffee break, commute or out of work hours?
As a researcher I necessarily feel under time pressure, is this a required additional one? I suppose it is a means of publicising research strands, but I see it as an ephemeral means. Do people build SN time into their research proposals? is it part of accepted work practise or professional development (should it be?)
Dear Eike: More and more museums have Facebook pages and someone within the museums needs to tend them during workdays. Public outreach on FB (which includes people you went to school with twenty years ago) helps increase interest in museums and exhibitions, AND if more people know about professional conservation they may be less likely to do harmful “do-it-yourself” treatments. So public outreach can certainly be seen as part of our jobs.
Yes many musems have FaceBook pages, the Press & Marketing department handle ours and they choose what Conservation related topics, if any, they post. I see Publicity and Conservation discussions as quite distinct things. I would not post a treatment method on an open forum, but I might on a Conservation-specific member-only discussion.
I would argue that posting Conservation related posts on an open forum is _more_ likely to encourage DIY treatments followed by litigation problems when the original poster is accused of giving bad advice.
Eike,
SN is certainly a part of my job and any projects I participate in at the Lunder Conservation Center. As an example, the Lunder Center is located in a remote section of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. So, to inform the public when the conservators are working on a project we use Twitter and Facebook to notify our follows, as well as our information desks. The staff at the desks inform the visitng public that there is a conservator working on view at the Center and volia…more people come up to see what is going on!
Our facebook page also lets the public see the progress of a treatment they may have seen in the labs when they visited – or to spark their interest if they want to visit.
SN is becoming a vital part of getting information out there for other professionals and the general public to see. I believe it can be a fun and creative tool to augment the more traditional ways of sharing information.
Amber
Interesting interviews. Thanks for posting them! I have to say, though, that I really preferred the long version of this publication because I could read who was saying what (voice matters!).
I’ve been fooling with Twitter for a while and have written my fair share of posts about a variety of topics on a variety of blogs, but recently I’ve begun to question the point of it all and considered shutting down some of my Twitter account. Despite the raw potential of blogs, facebook, and Twitter, I think the audience is mostly narrow and insular. I think we should be trying to bring our conversation to other groups and wider audiences rather than creating more conversations within our professional associations or personal SN accounts. I think our professional associations should be pushing us to be relevant in places beyond our professional associations.
In many ways my SN accounts are starting to feel a lot more like e-mail listserves–places where I get the news of the day and occasionally discuss timely, and often redundant topics. I want more. I want things that enable and cause us to build a grander architecture to store and collect information rather than just obsess with the right here and now. That feels like a funny thing to say, because I’m one who often obsesses over new technologies and applications. But I want projects that do more than just share information among insular communities–and occasionally reach out beyond. I want SN projects that *do* not just communicate and share information.
In the end, my question isn’t if we should “tweet,” but what can you do with your “tweet.”
Interesting you should bring this up Richard. Just last week the IIC had an evening event, open to all, which was a conversation between Anna Somers Cox (founder and chief editor of the Arts Newspaper) and Sam Jones (From Demos and co author of “It’s a Material World: Caring for the Public Realm”. It was about, among other things, making conservation more broadly relevant and raising awareness of its relevance outside of its own community. A very good discussion between the two of them and the audience. Watch the IIC site for a transcript coming in a few weeks. Of course “doing things” is also a matter of self motivation, finding a cause and exciting others about it. In many places SN is being used to not only share information but create it and use it. Something that might be quite useful at financially challenging times when heritage conservation is under threat.
This is a good point – indeed most of the functionality of twitter can be replicated using other technologies (e.g. RSS). The technical innovation will truly come when software will be able to follow tweets or RSS feeds to do the reading and sorting for the user and isolate the interesting stories. This is why I emphasised in the article the importance of standardising conservation documentation.
At the risk of sounding generalist, if not offensive (which obviously isn’t my intent), as a 20-something conservator, where social networking is concerned I’m to the manner born. I’m very fond of institutions like the Getty and British Museum who do, for example, tweet and have Facebook pages, and I tend to think it reflects on them as forward looking institutions which are keen to engage with the public. It surprises me that the conservators within them do not seem to take so much advantage. I have tweeted and posted about the work I do (“I am cleaning a 22nd Dynasty Egyptian barge model” is not something many people say in their working lives) and it generally creates interest.
I have to admit, I have never really considered the notion that social networking may be a form for professional discussion (a precedent, I would imagine, set by the ConsDistList, the value of which demonstrated by the steps taken to ensure its continuance recently). I do, however, feel there is a strong value in the use of social networking as a form of public engagement. It worries me that conservation often appears to be far more proficient at communicating within it’s own professional sphere than outside of it, and the use of social networking would be a convenient, easy and cheap way of ‘de-blackboxing’ conservation, the potential perceived obscurity of which may be seen to make it appear irrelevant. At a time where, certainly in the UK and I’m sure internationally, considerable government funding cuts pose a substantial threat to the heritage sector generally, anything which demonstrates the relevance, or simply the purpose, of conservation can surely only be a good thing?
I think Richard brings up a very good point in asking “what can you do with your tweet”?, as does Rob in discussing the value of social media to engage the public. I think social media can be used both for discussions with other professionals, as well as a way to engage the public with conservation. Since it is the way many people are now connecting and finding information, it has the potential to be used as a great resource for public outreach informing the public about conservation and provides ways for them to learn more about preserving art and hopefully inspiring them to get involved.
I have only had personal accounts on social media sites before, but have recently begun creating them for the conservation training program I work for which has a professional and public focus. It’s been a very different approach for me in the way I have been used to using the sites because I am now trying to provide information to a broader audience. It has certainly made me think a lot about what the purpose is of social media, what I am trying to convey and who I am trying to reach with this information. More diiscussions like this one on whether social media should be used, including discussions or suggestions on how to make make it a more effective way of would be very helpful to conservators looking into using these resources.
It’s great to see this input from IIC into the continuing discussions surrounding social media.
In regards to the overall question “should you tweet” it seems a little odd, partly because that horse bolted a long time ago, partly because those answering (and asking questions) do tweet, and partly because the question compares to this question: “should you use scalpels/saws/telephones/email/journals/solvents/language/hammers”. You’ll note that these are all tools, as such they have specific uses and so the answer is of course “yes, if it’s the right tool for the job at hand” and “no if it’s an inappropriate tool”. I am presuming of course the intention wasn’t to suggest a binary of twitter vs. the moral and philosophical discourse of neo-luddism/anti-civ critical theory?!
Overall, I think such discussions surrounding conservation and social media could benefit from more directly interacting with the larger body of scholarly work surrounding social media, a good place to start might be the various scholars at Harvard Uni’s ‘Berkman center for internet and society’ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ or New York Uni’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/
It was mentioned several time (in the interview and comments) that the coming Semantic web requires conservation to standardize, although there is some truth to this, I don’t think those statements are 100% accurate, and as a counterpoint I might suggest reading this excellent essay: http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
In regards to the question in the comments about SN and research, I have found it invaluable, through SN’s I have been sent advance information (prior to publication/submission) from researchers all over the world working in related fields (curators, historians, photographers, anthropologists, librarians, translators) but on the same/similar topics who I would never have come across without SN. Such interdisciplinary links are far less simple to create without social networking.
The real question to my mind is not “should we use these technologies” but “how do we effectively use them” and “to what ends”. Furthermore, not just how do we take on board the actual sites (twitter, facebook, you tube, flickr, wikipedia, etc) but moreover also take on the actual ethos… such as; collective content creation, peer-remixing (rather than peer review), non-hierarchical system design, experimentation, community control, mass-amateurization, etc.
Cheers,
Dan
Isn’t it odd that the IIC has launched a flurry of words into facebook and twitter but hasn’t updated its website index and abstracts of its own peer reviewed journal articles since sometime in 2007. The index provides a comment space for each article, ready for thoughtful debate and supplementary wisdom. That would be more durably interesting than rushing to join the fashionable self-exposure and info-recycling cults currently bloating the internet.
Thanks Tim, but I think “rushing off” is a mischaracterization. IIC entered the various forms of Social Networking to understand better what many in and out of the conservation field obviously think is useful. And providing this discussion, focused on a topic that encourages an exmaination of why SN is thought to be useful and how it can be made an even more effective tool, is part of that effort to understand. Obviously not everyone will agree. But that’s what forums are about…exploration.
Tim,
Tim,
I belive SN is tool for inviting individuals back to the IIC website so they will engage in other formats, such as commenting on articles on the website. It can be used to rouse interest and link them conviently to the article or broader exchange of professional ideas.
Optimistcally thinking, it could increase the very comments you are refering to and contibute to the growth and development of the site.
So then….social networking can be (is) a tool to “announce” and to direct to more complete and substantial information locations. To point and alert. I’ve just used it in hopes that colleagues from the recent Salzburg Global seminar will join this discussion on how SN fits into our field and how it can be most effectively used. And I would hope if IIC posts another discussion, on communicating the value of heritage conservation, SN would direct people toward the discussion and then serve as a conduit for communication beyond the IIC web site. I would assume it can also be used to exchange quick bits of information and encourage casual discussion. “Does anyone know…”, “Have you seen…”, “I hear that there is a new…” etc. But how is that then made more available and more interactive? All of these functions seem useful to me. How can international bodies, such as IIC, contribute to this or channel it to even more beneficial ends? And does anyone have an opinion about how, at least right now, professional communication is mixed with more mundane, sometimes rather personal, information? Facebook is a great tool, but a great deal of it is not professionally relevant. Is that an issue or is it a benefit? And finally..there have been a number of efforts on the part of quite a few professional bodies to provide a conduit for discussion, general or specific. But most struggle along and many such pages disappear. What are your thoughts on how IIC can provide a discussion board that is inviting and informative, but still informal and effective?
I think there is huge potential but I aso think the sheer number of different SN forums – and I have just learnt of yet another in the last 5 minutes – presents a challenge. Think Athanasios makes some very good points.
Re how all this fits into the work day, I know of a cultural institution (in Australia)that makes access to SN sites difficult and issues warnings about the cost of accessing sites. Some types of web searches are blocked. This obviously hinders professional exchange – seems there is not universal agreement on the benefits of such exchange – at least during work hours.
I think facebook and twitter’s (among other sites) being host to both social and professional activities can make SN difficult to pursue in working hours.
Are there any conservators working in the private sector out there who use SN? If so, how does it fit in with their working lives? Is SN something that only those training, working for an institution or engaged in research pursue? What about the private sector?
Good point. Some users at our Museum currently have access to Facebook and a number of other sites specifically blocked from work. It is a policy under review, but this does highlight an assumption that SN immediately connects you with a wider group.
In actual fact SN may be serving to create another Conservation faction for those with time and access to SN websites.
Any communication conduit that allows persons seeking information to interact with a professional conservator to help preserve cultural property is to be encouraged. We will all learn from the exchange of views and build new partnerships. Lets open as many doors as possible not slam them shut – we already have a reputation as the profession of “no” rather than encouraging sustainable low and high tech protection of moveable, immovable, tangible and intangible cultural assets world wide. We do not have all the answers and never will unless we listen and do more than preach perfection to solve every problem facing damaged art.
I have visited your posts before. The more I learn, the more I keep coming back!