ArtBabble.org is a multi-institution collaborative portal for video about art. Launched in the spring of 2009, ArtBabble has explored ways in which niche content portals might impact the efforts of cultural organizations online. During the first 9 months of its launch, ArtBabble has been successful in growing an online audience of viewers, adding significantly to the number of partners collaborating in contributing content to the site, establishing an online brand, and in general understanding what it takes to run a large collaborative content platform. This paper will review the successes and failures encountered during the first year of ArtBabble in order to offer suggestions or examples for other domains wishing to explore similar content collaborations.

1. Robert Stein Chief Information Officer Indianapolis Museum of Art rstein@imamuseum.org http://www.imamuseum.org @rjstein

2. FINDING VIDEO ABOUT ART CAN BE TROUBLESOME Findability Authority Quality Photo courtesy of ~bulletsays

4. Photo credit ~Dean Forbes (Flickr) Viewers exist in Internet-Local Silos

5. What is Internet-Local? Museums seem to be leveraging audiences that already know and love them. Analytics show us that people find video via other Museum content. (i.e. blogs, webpages, enews, etc…)

6. Very Little Cross-Pollination Between Museums with Similar Content Credit ~da100fotos (Flickr)

8. Art-Bab-ble [ahrt-bab-uhl]noun; verb (used without object) -bled, -bling The free flowing conversation of art talk by a community of art enthusiasts. A place where everyone, regardless of background, is invited to join an open art discussion and have their voices heard.

9. An Inauspicious Start

10. An Early Mock-Up

11. And a Bit Later…

12. ArtBabble Today

13. An ArtBabble Timeline Collaborative Portal not Institutional Design & Development Invite-Only Beta Public Launch! Early 2008 April 7, 2009 January 2009 Summer 2008

14. The First Year During its first year ArtBabble grows to 23 partners A few mystery partners yet to be revealed 647 videos published 218 in the hopper 433 Artists Represented

15. Photo Credit ~warzauwynn (Flickr) Building ArtBabble

16. ArtBabble Features

26. Some Great Comments

28. DEMO

30. Viewer Stats About 4.73 pages per viewer About 7 min Avg Time on Site 156 countries 30% of videos viewed from outside US

31. Traffic Analysis Method Given 112 videos present on both YouTube and ArtBabble Normalize total view count by days online Compute the ratio of views/day to compare YouTube performance vs. ArtBabble Difference between Google Analytics and Straight View Counts Neglects Embedded Views (11%) and Deep Links (4%)

32. Traffic Analysis

33. Traffic Analysis

34. Photo Credit ~warzauwynn (Flickr) Building an Online Brand

35. Evolution of a Logo

36. Building Hype

37. Invite a Friend A Graph of Invites to the Private-Beta of ArtBabble

39. ENews Pushing it out!

40. Social Media Promotion

41. Social Media Promotion

45. Photo Credit ~warzauwynn (Flickr) Building a Collaboration

46. FREE

47. Legal Wrangling Photo Credit ~dennymont (Flickr)

48. Partner Contract

49. Terms of Use YOUR LICENSE TO USE THE CONTENT All of the content on the Website is the copyrighted property of the IMA or the IMA’s third party content providers (the “Partners”). Some videos have been made available on the Website under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, as designated on the Website. Some videos provided by the IMA’s Partners may be governed by the Partner’s license terms, which can be accessed by following the link next to the video. The download or embed features of these videos may be disabled. Except where provided otherwise on the Website, you may view and download (including embedding on your website), for personal, non-commercial, non-public use only, the video files that are posted on the Website. Unless it is expressly permitted on the Website, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, publish, upload, post, transmit, “frame” on another site, sell, broadcast/podcast, or distribute any content on the Website in any way. You must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices on any authorized reproductions of any material downloaded from the Website. Any third party trademarks and content appearing on the Website are the property of their respective owners. You are not permitted to use any of these third party trademarks or content without permission of the respective owner.

50. Terms of Use YOUR LICENSE TO USE THE CONTENT All of the content on the Website is the copyrighted property of the IMA or the IMA’s third party content providers (the “Partners”). Some videos have been made available on the Website under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, as designated on the Website. Some videos provided by the IMA’s Partners may be governed by the Partner’s license terms, which can be accessed by following the link next to the video. The download or embed features of these videos may be disabled. Except where provided otherwise on the Website, you may view and download (including embedding on your website), for personal, non-commercial, non-public use only, the video files that are posted on the Website. Unless it is expressly permitted on the Website, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, publish, upload, post, transmit, “frame” on another site, sell, broadcast/podcast, or distribute any content on the Website in any way. You must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices on any authorized reproductions of any material downloaded from the Website. Any third party trademarks and content appearing on the Website are the property of their respective owners. You are not permitted to use any of these third party trademarks or content without permission of the respective owner.

51. CollaborativeGovernance Making it Fly

52. The ArtBabble Steering Committee

53. Partner Feedback “ArtBabble has been an immensely positive experience for Art21 for a number of reasons. As a primarily media-based, internationally focused organization, it has been fruitful for Art21 to collaborate with local museums and libraries in a professional context, linking our virtual activities and audiences with partners who have a more on-the-ground focus. The clever and successful public relations campaign for the launch brought much needed energy and excitement to several of our own projects-in-progress. Post-launch, ArtBabble has continued to bring visibility and buzz to video-on-art as a meaningful form of arts content, enlivening both new and archival videos, and increasing interest in funding online video production.” -Art21

54. Partner Feedback “While the same content attracts more traffic on YouTube, we still view this project as a success, mostly because increased traffic wasn’t our primary motivation for participating. Instead, it was about being part of a collaborative project that makes art-specific content available to an audience that may not be on YouTube or may not want to weed through content in order to find substantive art-related videos.” -MoMA

55. Partner Feedback “[ArtBabble] has also offered American Art the ability to enhance the value of its video content through the Notes system. By adding links to related information and content online from specific points in our videos, we are able to offer viewers not just a high quality video viewing experience, but also depth of related content in a format that is incredibly easy to access so encourages viewers to ‘dig down’ and find out more about aspects that pique their interest.” -Smithsonian American Art Museum

56. Disappointments and Failures Creating Notes is Time Consuming Time Anchored Comments Full Text Transcriptions Scalability of Navigation Lack of HD content

57. What’s Next? Batter Up!

58. Move from 500 to 5,000 Videos on ArtBabble

59. BabbleBuilder Tool for Storytelling / Teaching

60. A Coherence of Babbles

61. Thank You! Come See Us! Friday April 16 Demonstrations III (3:30 – 5:00) Booth 54