Silvia Filippini Fantoni

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Museums with a personal touch A guide to
personalization in museums

• Silvia Filippini Fantoni
• Maastricht McLuhan Institute - International
  Institute of Infonomics

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Personalization what? (general)

• Personalization is about building customer
  loyalty by establishing a one to one relation by
  understanding the needs of each individual and
  helping satisfy a goal that efficiently and
  knowledgeably addresses them in a given context.
• Doug Rieken
• In Personalized view on Personalization

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Personalization and museums

• The necessity to take into consideration the
  specific interests of the final user is very
  popular also in the cultural sector, where it
  is progressively affirming as a new paradigm for
  providingknowledge

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Personalization in museums why?

• External factors
• The challenge of greater self-sufficiency pushed
  museums towards a more audience-oriented approach

• Internal factors
• The affirmation of constructivist theories has
  pitted the needs of the visitor against the
  tradition of the collection

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Who are the visitors and what do they want? I
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Who are the visitors and what do they want? II
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Technology provides the tools for
personalization, because it supports

• Different forms of presentation
• Different modes of access to the information
• Different layers of information
• Different interactive links between subjects

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Towards a personalized augmented museum
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HP Cooltown
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Beyond the museum the real, the remote, the
potential and the follow-up visitors
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Personalization How?

• CHOICE
• Give the visitors the freedom of choosing what
  they want to see and how they want to see it

• ADAPTIVITY
• Create software systems that automatically adapt
  the information content and presentation to the
  visitors needs and interests.

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Giving visitors choice on line

• Virtual Tours
• Digital Collections Compass, Microgallery, EMP
  Digital Collection
• http//www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/
• Robotic Avatars Tourbot
• http//www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/tourbot/index2.
  html

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British Museum digital collection
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TOURBOT
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Giving visitors choice on site IRandom-access
audio guides

• Antenna Audio
• Acoustiguide
• Tour-mate
• JVC Audio

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Giving visitors choice on-site II3rd generation
audio-guides

• MUSEpad
• Ansae Gnole
• SmARTour
• Minpaku Electronic guide
• E-Docent
• MEG tour guide
• iGo

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E-Docent
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Adaptivity giving visitors what they want
without them having to ask I

• Adaptability
• Systems that provide the end user with tools that
  make it possible to change the system
  characteristics according to the context of use
• Ex. Web site of the Marble Museum
• http//giove.cnuce.cnr.it/servlets/StartVisit

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Tourist-view
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Student-view
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Expert-view
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Personalized-view
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Adaptivity giving visitors what they want
without them having to ask II

• Adaptivity
• Systems that are able to change their own
  characteristics automatically according to the
  users model

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Adaptivity some examples

• ILEX
• Hyperaudio
• HIPS HIPPIE
• Museum Wearable
• Archeoguide
• GUIDE

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The importance of an efficient user model HIPS

• COMBINE
• Stereotypes
• Dynamic modeling

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At which levels can we personalize?
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View some examples

• Structure-based personalization
• Revealing Things
• http//www.si.edu/revealingthings/back_pages/

• Arrangement-based
• personalization
• Art Tales
• http//www.wildlifeart.org/ArtTales/

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Revealing Things
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Personalization an evaluation Does it really
work?

• Freedom and Flexibility
• Adaptivity and the problem of information
  overload
• Serendipity
• The social context
• Necessity for more studies!!!

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The future of personalization in museums

• Further exploitation of Context awareness through
  mobile devices Ex. CIMI-Handscape and
  HP-Cooltown
• Further blending of the physical and the
  information space Ex. PEACH
• Continuity (the persistency of a user profile)

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Personalization Ultimate consequence for museums
and visitors

• Personalizing means presenting alternative ways
  of conceiving the meaning of an object.
• Visitors start making sense on their own out of
  the realities they see and they might not get the
  content the way curators expected them to.

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Conclusions
By giving visitors the freedom to experience the
exhibition the way they want, a new mode of
interaction between visitors and museums is
formed

• Museums
• The perception of the museum as an institution
  changes from a withholder/controller to an open
  container of knowledge

• Visitors
• From passive spectators to living elements of the
  exhibition

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s.filippini_at_mmi.unimaas.nl