What retailers can learn from the Smithsonian

What could a 169-year old federal institution responsible for millions of the country’s most important artifacts, history and information possibly teach the retail industry? Plenty it seems.

The connection between the Smithsonian and the retail industry stems from shared digital challenges and advances in technology which are impacting consumer expectations and behavior. Like any organization that interacts with consumers the Smithsonian Institution determined, just as retailers have, that to remain relevant to its core audience while growing its visibility, it had to engage consumers in new ways.

This is where some eerily similar parallels to the challenges faced by the retail industry emerge and solutions developed by the Smithsonian are insightful. For example, as with many other large organizations, some of the very things that have helped establish long-term success, can be challenges to the quick and agile responses needed in the digital age. In the case of the Smithsonian, it has been around longer than most retailers still operating (it was established in 1846, before Macy’s), and then look at the breadth of the Smithsonian’s operations. It is comprised of 19 Museums, nine Research Centers and the National Zoo, each with its own independent operations structure overseen by the same umbrella mission and objective.

More than 30 million people visit Smithsonian museums annually, and the Smithsonian has more than 137 million objects, artworks and specimens—SKUs, if you will—that must be individually tagged and digitally stored. The sheer number of objects, far more than the typical retailers’ online offering, also represents a massive challenge of how to keep, categorize and display these items for an audience that expects to connect digitally.

Currently less than 1% of these items—or roughly around one million objects at any given time—are on display in one of the Smithsonian’s physical locations, creating a massive opportunity to digitize more than 135 million additional objects for online “anytime access.” In 2014 there were 99 million unique visitors to Smithsonian online sites, so to maximize exposure and return rate, the priority for digitizing these objects is high.

The solution was to establish a digitization department devoted entirely to using cutting-edge technology to address the logistical and creative problems of properly and effectively utilizing the treasures it cares for. [pb]

Finding the right tech: Support your mission, know your audience

Gunter Waibel, Director of the Digitization Program Office, Smithsonian Institution, looks at the organization’s challenge in much the same way a retailer does. According to Waibel, “We have to be conscious that we don’t bring in technology, just for the sake of having technology. The tail can’t wag the dog. We introduce technology in a disciplined way to see what will be most efficient, make it profoundly easier to share our resources with the public, and impact the stories we are telling with our collections..”



Establishing benchmarks

An important benchmark for Waibel’s team is the public’s expectation of how an institution like the Smithsonian should interact with them, and in what forms data should be presented. Again, a situation not unlike that faced by retailers. The team is finding that the way kids experience movies, TV, and video games is directly shaping their expectations when they visit a museum. As most retailers and brands know, popular tools such as gamification are only as effective as their ability to remain on par with current standards. Certain marketing campaigns need to be interactive because consumers expect it. And while kids may not be the ones carrying the credit card, they are influencing the adult who is. The Smithsonian is choosing to embrace these expectations and create experiences that better engage their audience.

The mobile and the social component of on-site visits

One of the biggest challenges today is mobile and how it has effectively become an extension of the individual consumer. Museum visits—much like shopping mall visits—have a strong social component, so finding a synergy between the tech in hand, that doesn’t distract from the product in front, and is also social in nature is a delicate balance. As with most brands and retailers, triangulating a tech’s effectiveness, ease of use and consumer response remains one of the biggest opportunities still being explored. This is one of the reasons why digitizing all Smithsonian artifacts is urgently important.

The logistics of 137 million objects

One of the Digitization Office’s first undertaking was to prioritize the top 10% of digitization needs, narrowing their target object list to a more manageable, but still massive, list of 13 million. They did this by polling each institution for their highest priorities, which amounted to 10% of total collections across all Smithsonian museums.

With the goal of creating a master prototype, the team launched a series of modest scale prototypes, developing a high quality standard process that was both cost effective and could capture a vast majority of collection materials. This allowed them to evaluate progress on work flow and back end system integration, and fine tune a standard process that could be deployed at a much larger scale. Finally, they established a core standard master digitization, enabling an object to go from a warehouse shelf to an online published record within 24 hours. [pb]

The process revealed

Once an object is selected, it is taken to an imaging station and given an individualized barcode associated with the image file that becomes its online record. That image file is then sent to multiple online systems simultaneously, and correlated to each museum’s individual collections information system (yes—they’re all different). From there, the file travels to an enterprise-wide digital asset management system, and is subsequently connected to the consumer-facing online platform. It is of note that this process utilizes existing internal systems, some in place as long as 10 years. The Smithsonian also has a transcription center, where collections records can be fleshed out by the general public—whose input will become part of the item’s permanent record. While this process is 95% automated, in some instances, Smithsonian staffers do need to trigger programming code to move the process to the next stage.

In the short time since its establishment, the Digitization Program Office has taken a lengthy and laborious process that often took months, and automated it across existing information systems so that human input could be focused on what truly required expertise, optimizing the human value of their human resources. This process has proven so effective the team can now digitize entire museums. The result is an extremely cost effective pipeline with the capability to take on a 137-million-object challenge.

Creating an omnichannel experience

Omnichannel experiences aren’t exclusive to retail. In fact, an omnichannel atmosphere is the holy grail of what the Smithsonian’s Digitization Office is trying to achieve. The omnichannel strategy is to create the best possible experiences achievable in each given medium, rather than be concerned that one may cannibalize the other. “We don’t want to create a world where a digital object competes with our physical experience. We want to take our beautiful, thought-provoking onsite experiences and complement them by engaging visitors as they plan their trip, and make