Celebrating Museums Event 2020 — Live-streamed Edition
Traditionally museums look into the past, but we at York Museums Trust have been looking towards the future and setting the bar high in today’s digital age by working hard to maximise our potential through emerging technology. I’d like to take some time to document a short project that we’ve just completed here at YMT.
To give you a little context, a partner organisation of ours, Museums Development Yorkshire, in collaboration with Arts Council England, hold an annual event called Celebrating Museums, but due to the circumstances this year, it was cancelled. Now that’s something we were keen to overcome as a team that prides itself in inventive technology. We’d had very little experience with professional live-streaming before but that didn’t stop us from pulling off a greatly successful broadcast to a crowd bigger than the usual event, in less than 4 weeks!
Here’s how we did it.
We’ve found that despite lockdown being the cause for the closure of all our sites, it has also been a catalyst for positive change. It has given us the opportunity and space to experiment with ideas that we didn’t have time to exercise before. Within the first few days of lockdown, Jonathan our IT Manager, had put together remote desktops so staff could access their work from home and we opened up Microsoft browser based platforms too, both of which had been work scheduled for the future and as with many workplaces, meetings were being held over MS Teams and Zoom. The idea that you don’t have to be somewhere physically, was the inspiration behind running the live-streamed event with the venue’s doors firmly locked.
We had a Vimeo subscription already, so putting on a live-stream gave us the perfect opportunity to use Vimeo to its full potential. We utilised a piece of software that it offers, Livestream Studio, which is the mixing desk or control panel for orchestrating a live broadcast and we hosted the event on Vimeo, sending out the link to attendees.
I do think that putting on a live-stream, despite being cheaper and more accessible than a physical conference, can never equally replace an in-person event. It’s the atmosphere that you can never recreate, the walk through the Museum Gardens on the way there, the conversations and the exchange of business cards over coffee, so this was something we really wanted to be sympathetic too. On our opening title card as the live-stream begun, there was imagery of the Museum Gardens and we had birdsong audio playing too. We thought carefully about our graphics and we pre-created layouts and bottom thirds using Adobe software and finishing off with the Livestream Studio. We held a chat function at the side that a lot of viewers engaged with, posting questions and giving feedback to the panel, as well as talking amongst themselves. We kept the premise of the event the same; speakers from different museums each gave a talk on things they had done that year — little case studies and successes of new things they had tried.
We asked the speakers to compile these talks into 5-minute videos, so they were pre-recorded and edited. This worked well because there was music and imagery involved too, it also gave us the opportunity to filter and sort the content before we lined it up for the broadcast. A problem we encountered whilst we were requesting the videos was that we couldn’t pre-empt the quality of the videos we’d receive, we mitigated this by making a ‘how to’ guide for makers to follow, luckily the quality of the submissions was really good. We found this made a positive change because for a lot of these Museum Professionals this was a new way of working which they had adapted to quickly and they now have a new skill.
In between the blocks of submitted video there was in fact a live panel. Vimeo permits up to 5 live speakers so we had ACE and museum executives answering questions from the audience and a host who introduced and wrapped it all up. The live speakers were each sent a link and joined the broadcast much like a video call. The event was 2 hours in length which we had decided was enough to cover sufficient content, but also hold viewing numbers. In addition to this, the conversation carried on afterwards over Twitter at #MDY2020. A key component to the smooth-running of our event was having a timed story board, this was mainly for Theodore who was running the LS Studio so he knew what to queue up and for the host, so she knew what to introduce because communication between them was difficult, even if you use Whatsapp there is a slight delay of which there is no room for in this situation, giving that the live-stream actually broadcasts 20 seconds late.
We also experienced delay in another way. When we did the test event we found that our internet speed was just not up to scratch. Living in York means the Wi-Fi infrastructure is just not as good as other more metropolitan cities where there aren’t ancient archaeological sites every couple of yards, restricting you from digging cable trenches. So our final decision meant remoting into a mac at a data centre in Switzerland and using their servers (obvious choice I know). We’re glad we did a test event because we encountered a lot of problems that we needed to solve, and this meant we could populate our risk assessment properly and mitigate any potential issues.
Taking the project step by step and doing a test before the event helped us create the storyboard, risk assessment and prepare all the behind the scenes staff with their roles. We had people working on comms; running the comments, questions and Twitter, as well as people on the control panel/Vimeo side of things, so it was definitely a joint effort. We did it all in 4 weeks but we think a lot of the work we have done could actually be repurposed for the next event, reducing that time further.
