IMA Dashboard

The Indianapolis Museum of Art created a dashboard in order to measure the museum's performance in a variety of areas. According to the site,
"The goal of the Dashboard is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers and to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons."

Well, we're museums studies specialists, colleagues and patrons (hopefully), and I don't know how interested I am in most of the areas they're reporting on. They're giving me stats; stats with graphics and pretty colours, but stats all the same. Click on "more" for any of the sections, and you get more stats. So why should I care? What is the museum doing with that information? I'm sure they'll write a paper on about the dashboard before they've actually done anything with the data (as people so often seem to love to do), but the mere presence of the dashboard seems to me an opportunity to engage the community in a discussion about the dynamics of the museum within the city (afterall, most of the stats are about those people to begin with).

In all that the applications of things like blogs and dashboards are supposed to provide different ways for visitors to engage with museum material, so many of them end up being very one-dimensional, like this one. Apparently it's a new addition to the website, so maybe time is needed to figure out how best for the museum to use it, but I've yet to see why people are so excited about it.