Re-thinking an Annotation Tool for Museum Community Generated Content

The key question of this paper is how to re- design a tool for deploying museum community content as a means to enhance the visit experience. During two exhibitions an annotation tool, ImaNote, was used to gather and share comments in the exhibition space. This user-centered study of ImaNote gives us the opportunity to understand the challenges and possibilities that map annotation tools can have for the museum community in the specific context of an exhibition. Along with developing an instance of ImaNote that would be easier for visitors to use, we created two “maps," as we called the compiled images based on the layout of the exhibition spaces. These maps worked as an interface between visitors, staff, designers and artists, and the displayed objects. The design of these images was developed according to the possibilities of the instance of ImaNote we were working with. User studies performed at the museum reaffirm that the concept of the map as interface was useful; these studies also raised other issues (questions related to the software, the maps and the installation at the museum) that constitute the core material of this paper. Although this article emphasizes identifying opportunities for the development of software, in the context of the museum many other issues influence the use and perception of software. In this study, the concept of the ecology of participation is a way to speak of software, installation and the exhibitions’ maps in their relation to the collaborative design process within the museum community in which they were conceived. We aim to design user-centered software that can motivate visitors and staff participation while acknowledging that ImaNote is only one piece of the ecology of participation.