Beneath the surface

Some time ago, I was chatting with the digital manager of one of the largest French museums. “Our websites are content-rich and multilingual, our apps are clever and interactive,” he said. “In terms of innovation, what’s left to do?”

This man has indeed produced multi-language, geo-located apps for a museum whose collections have long been available online. As we know, museums built websites early on and have a voice on social networks. Today however, in order to thrive in a world of information overload and globalised cultural products and services, to attract new audiences and to widen their footprint — museums need to dive beneath the digital surface.

Let’s take a look at why and how the web works at its very depths — and how museums can benefit from taking the plunge.*

APIs

From a stock of countless websites, the web has been transformed into a giant platform of services, each using the other. From its depths emerge interactive maps, machine translation, peer-to-peer rental, train and plane tickets, public transport timetables, events information, payment services, cinema programmes, news and social interaction. Those services and contents are aggregated into mobile apps and webpages which we use to save us time and boost our efficiency, rarely asking ourselves how it all works.

Let’s have a look : to check up on someone’s career path we open the LinkedIn app and look at their profile. When we want to see a movie, we check shows on Rotten Tomatoes. Ditto when we open Wikipedia to look up a reference. Easy. But we also use services outside their specific domain (app or website URL) — outside their silo: users of Google Maps have got used to seeing the little Uber space at the bottom of the screen, which tells them how long it would take to get to the location they’re looking up with Uber, along with the location of the nearest cars. You hardly notice now when your Chrome browser offers to translate a page from a foreign language into your own. For several months now users of Adobe’s Creative Cloud have enjoyed integrated access to Getty Images content: from Photoshop a designer can search through millions of Getty images, add some to their graphic design and, once they’ve finished, buy them at the click of a button.

The appearance of Uber in Google Maps, browser translation options and Getty images in a graphic design software package is the result of activity beneath the surface formed by these widely available services. In fact, everything takes place on technical platforms where services such as Uber, Getty Images and Google Maps “speak” to each other and exchange services. This hidden layer is an active, technical and living world — the world of APIs — where the major challenges of the web are now played out.

With APIs content and service providers have ceased to confine themselves to their website URL or the scope of the mobile app they have developed. According to a now classic principle, digital players need to be where their audience or customers are and not just where they themselves happen to be. They need to be in two (or three, four, or a thousand…) places at once.

Conversely apps, websites and digital services are now building blocks made from elements created by others and made available to developers.

Ok… What about museums?

To enhance their cultural and political role in the wider community, to breathe new life into the ecosystem in which they operate, museums need to think about the way they too exist beneath the surface. They need to examine ways and means to distribute their cultural programmes, their ticketing services** and their content** to third parties who in turn will reuse them and share them with other digital spaces and new audiences.

Some of them — the most ambitious — will chose to develop their own APIs; other will turn to existing platforms which are both efficient and affordable. Whatever option they choose, no museum can afford to ignore what’s happening beneath the surface.

**Future articles

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