Good point, Josh, and thanks. Since we have a desk that’s being staffed in this exhibition, we’ll be able to see this behavior and, hopefully, account for it. Maybe not statistically, but we’ll get a general idea of what’s going on.

I am currently writing an essay looking at the application of QR codes in museums and art galleries as part of my MA at Manchester University; I am also evaluating a local museum’s experimental use of QR codes in their temporary exhibition space.
During this evaluation I combined scan statistics with in-gallery observations. One of the most interesting findings was that the number of scans did not necessarily equate with the number of people benefiting from the content behind the QR code. In fact most people observed scanning a code were in a group, and content was viewed by more than one person.
Whilst only 2.6% of visitors (approx.) scanned a code, those benefiting from the scan exceeded this percentage.
What I suggest, is bearing in mind the social aspect of a scan when considering the success of a QR project.

We have discussed other sources, but there are issues (as you know) with those sources being properly formatted for mobile devices. Generally, with this project we are specifically looking to see if Wikipedia is what causes use to increase for QR. If it does, we continue with strategy. If it doesn’t, we question QR’s overall usefulness (given our current metrics) and the point of other resources becomes moot in this context.

Thanks for the reply – I’ll keep an eye out for the results.

I do expect that visitors already access Wikipedia (and other sources) on their own devices when they can in the galleries in any case – and if they are using the museum’s own wifi you’d be able to know that.

I wonder if there may be less well-known and harder to find online resources on the same topics that you would have recommended over Wikipedia? (That visitors would have been unlikely to have been able to find on their own volition)

Or was the edit-ability of Wikipedia one of the key drawcards?

Yet we know, as you point out, if the whole museum were to be involved, it will be difficult to develop one-size-fits-all policies for all collecting areas of the museum. The Wikipedia emphasis on the “consensus view” makes it difficult to add “cutting-edge” interpretations. This might be a less difficult problem for Egyptology than it is, say, for femminist or contemporary art.
And stability would be an issue for us all. We will have to develop a reasonable method for tracking revisions to articles.

Once we think we have a method of accessing Wikipedia that visitors will use, we will continue to develop strategies to deal with these problems. Thanks for your comment.

This is a fascinating experiment.

I’m drawn to this core notion –

All of the articles linked to the Museum’s objects have been vetted by curators. When we read an article, we could see from the footnotes whether or not it was based on standard interpretations by professional, scientific scholars. Ancient Egyptian art is the object of interest for both scientific scholars and a wide variety of other researchers using non-scientific means. The Museum adheres to scientific standards, so curators insured that all the linked articles are part of our interpretive tradition.

I’d love you to expand a bit on the discussion around how this will work going forward given that these articles can and do often change. Did you have policies around the ‘stable-ness’ of an article that was being linked to? etc

I imagine that for some of the topics you have chosen the articles are going to be pretty static, however, if you were to scale this up to the museum as a whole, then other topics – for example relating to feminism or street art – might be far less stable, despite initially appearing to meet scholarly criteria.