As a curator I have always wanted our visitors to have access to more information about the collection than is usually available. I’ve long been frustrated that the 100-word label provides only the briefest introduction to an object. So when Shelley suggested that there was a way to bring in-depth information into the gallery for those who want it, I was happy to help find appropriate material. For example, the code on the label for the Museum’s statue of Senwosret III will take you to an article about the king’s reign. There you will find information on his building projects, his appointment of his son as co-regent—a sort of co-king-in-training—and his pyramid. All of this information is drawn from the latest scientific studies of the reign. The QR code with the faience shabti called “The Lady Sati” leads you to an article describing the process of making this material drawn from a basic Egyptology source—Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw’s Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology.

Senwosret III, on view in Egypt Reborn (now with QR code), was one of the most powerful kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

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.

QR code in the gallery links to Senwosret III's Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia’s reputation with scholars and teachers is a mixed bag. Many teachers forbid its use because students are not always ready to read the articles found there critically. I was also wary about linking the Museum’s objects to a source that varies greatly in quality. But with proper vetting, Wikipedia offers additional background about the Museum’s objects based on the best information. I hope that this experiment with QR codes will help enhance the visitor’s experience in visiting the Egyptian and Ancient Near East collections.

I had to wonder if the reason QR was getting good take up in Indy was its pairing with Wikipedia.  In our own experiments with putting Wikipedia in the galleries, we’ve seen a great deal of success.  You may remember WikiPop: the Wikipedia resource for Seductive Subversion?  As I reported in a subsequent post, WikiPop, was one of our most popular in-gallery interactives to date with 1/3 visitors to the exhibition spending ten minutes at a time looking at approximately 11 articles.  After all, we all know the power of Wikipedia’s statistics—in just a month, Wikipedia sees an extraordinary amount of traffic…482 million unique visitors, 18.1 billion pageviews.  Simply put, Wikipedia is a well-used resource and it’s likely something that visitors find incredibly familiar because of the daily presence in their lives. What we know of QR is almost the opposite.  QR is dominated by technical frustration, marketing interests, low scan rates and user confusion.  Could Wikipedia get visitors over QR code hump of technical hurdles and poor user experience?

WikiLink installed in Connecting Cultures on Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker.

Today we embark on a new trial project called WikiLink that pairs Wikipedia articles with QR codes on objects in two of our galleries—the new Connecting Cultures exhibition and the Egyptian and Near East galleries.  With WikiLink, curators have selected Wikipedia articles that are relevant to certain works of art and may be helpful to visitors as extended information.  After scanning a few codes, visitors are surveyed about the project on their mobile devices.

My hope is that by leveraging the most accessible platform for information (Wikipedia) that we see QR code use increase, but why do we care about this?  Well, as frankly as I can put this, we can spend a lot of time and money devising all the fancy location-aware apps we can muster, but the fact remains that QR is an incredibly lightweight and compelling way to get visitors more information.  For those institutions on limited budgets and staffing, this equation is one that we have to pay attention to and if we can increase use in general, then anything we put behind QR will benefit.  In this trial, we are going to be looking at metrics across all QR use in the building to see if we can  get these numbers up across the board.

WikiLink will be installed through the summer for a three to four month trial.  At the end of it, curators, technologists, and interpretive staff will be looking at the statistics and the visitor feedback we’ve received to determine if the project is worth continuing or expanding upon; stay tuned for our findings.  In the meantime, Ed Bleiberg, one of our Managing Curators and Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art will blog tomorrow about the complexities of selecting the Wikipedia articles for this project.