Indianapolis Museum of Art: Transparency

This came the "dashboard" for the Indianapolis Museum of Art , an ongoing effort to measure various aspects of the Museum's performance.  According to the web site, the goal is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons.

The Web section offers a sampling of numbers only data.    What is interesting is how the web metrics include a mix of traditional web analytics and social media metrics, in this case number of friends on myspace (454) and views (see above) on its youtube channel.  What it doesn't show me is any trends over time or analysis based on gathering data from several types of resources.  I would like to see some context.

The dashboard is one feature in he Indianapolis Museum of Art's new Website which launched in September with lots of social media features.  According to a blog post at the site, at least one staff person thinks the dashboard is cool:

For more than 5 years, I didn't think another dashboard could rival my Passat's for coolness. And while it may not be exactly the same thing, I think the IMA's new dashboard might just do it. So what's so cool about our dashboard? We're really the first museum in the world to use technology like this. The public now has access to statistics about attendance, the art collection and even our budget. For instance, folks can check to see how much we have spent so far this year and how it relates to what we projected in our 2007 budget. Visitors can also check to see how many people have visited Roman Art from the Louvre or shopped in the IMA Shop. For better or for worse, the IMA's dashboard let's you see the IMA from the inside.

Jim Spadaccini from Ideum Blog notes that dashboards are not new, in fact, there's a book about Dashboard Design. However, "This a great example of a museum presenting basic information about the institution in a dynamic and unconventional way."

There is some question as to who would be interested in this type of information - a somewhat out of context random set of numbers.  More commentary here.  What do you think?

UPDATE:   The Giving Blog writes about the Dashboard here

Comments

[Juha van 't Zelfde]

Hi Beth,

the design is indeed an interesting attempt to show the hidden data of the museum. Perhaps it is addressing visitors in an 'American' way, just as sports in the US are very quantified with stats about anything. I tend to like it, although it is rather unfortunate it is not a real-time and flexible dashboard (and the other arguments aforementioned). Nevertheless, it is an elegant and intuitive strategy that stands out in the museum world.

Juha

[ThomasT]

Agree that some context would help, but disagree about the trends over time. You have to dig a little (and links are missing in some frustrating places), but check out:
The visitation numbers, with live graphs of the day's, week's and year's figures.

And time on Website, with numbers from the previous several months.

Follow the "More" links from data points on the Financial page, and you can see the intent to provide data over time, though there's currently only 2 months' data available.

Also, I think the flipside to absence of context is absence of spin, though there's some context/spin inherent in the selection of data points. But, for instance, while it's great that expenditures are 6% under budget, they're 10% under budget for revenue. Now the assumption I have to make, since they don't provide absolute budget data, is that their YTD revenue projections aren't evenly divided, and they have not only to meet more aggressive end-of-year targets in November & December, but make up some lost ground to avoid running a deficit this year.

[Rob]

Hi,

I'm the Chief Information Officer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and am happy that you generally like what we've done to date with the Dashboard!

Just wanted to let you know some of our plans for moving the Dashboard forward since we're certainly not finished quite yet ;)

Each Dashboard node is updated by staff of the museum according to a different update frequency as it makes sense... (i.e. our horticulture folks generally keep track of their planting activities on a quarterly basis, so you'll see the statistics related to planting changing only once every 3 or 4 months as we get new information)

We keep track and display the history of every node, so as we add new values and measurements, you'll be able to see a history of previous values. As we get more historical information for each statistic, we've design the software to be able to generate graphs and charts eventually... we just havn't been doing this long enough to have enough data.

We'd like to add more automation into some of these statistics where we can so that we can update them more frequently. This has proven to be more easy with our automated attendance than with other statistics. We also want to make sure that this information remains accurate, and so, want to encourage staff members to keep an eye on statistics they are responsible for.

We're also planning on fleshing out the content in the more sections a bit more over time. Hopefully, this can offer a layer of context to why we care about certain stats and what we hope to achieve by measuring them.

In addition to being a tool by which the public can keep track of what's going on here... we also plan to use this same information in tracking for ourselves our own performance over time!

If you have more questions or suggestions of things you'd like to see tracked... you can contact us at
web at imamuseum dot org

Thanks Again,

Rob