I see how all five of these examples allow for a new way to interact with the Digital connections and serendipitously discover new items. There is a clear need for this as 21% of museum website viewers want to engage in this way. I have found myself wanting to do that on museum website, and I became frustrated that wasn’t so easy.

In all of these examples, I wonder, “What next?” I see that Discover the Queenslander has a “your favorites” tab, so visitors can save pieces. In others, I’m not sure what the interfaces can do afford continued use. Throughout reading this, I found myself comparing to Pinterest a lot. I personally spend a lot of time scrolling through Pinterest, and a number of the pins they show me are artworks. Even though I rarely save pins, they are great at knowing what to show me next to keep me engaged. Can these interfaces use any of those algorithms? (And then, there is the debate about how much data they might want to collect on their visitors in this way…)

There is also the practical problem that these interfaces are inherently limited by the metadata of the museum. It looks like two of the three tested collections had fairly good metadata, but this would be a huge undertaking for a museum that does not have this yet.