Whether you're rich, poor, British, foreign, young, old - you can enjoy the treasures of our museums and galleries.

Of course, while museums are funded by the state, they still rely on generating some external revenue - hence the ubiquitous gift shop and major corporate donations.

In the front of most museums, you'll find a vessel for collecting donations. Usually half full with pound coins, Euros, and Dollars. On entering the British Museum recently, I saw a new way to donate - QR codes!

Let's take a closer look at that code:

If you scan it, your QR reader should prompt you to send a Premium Rate SMS to 70070 - a charity donation service run by Just Giving.

Just about anyone with a UK SIM will be able to send a fiver - no messing about with passwords, logging in, credit card numbers - it comes straight off the phone bill.

Setting It Up

It's really very easy to use the SMS feature of QR codes. Assuming you've already got a number which can receive messages, you simply need to enter this text into your QR code:

SMSTO:07700900617:Hello

Which will appear as:

Scan it and you QR scanner should open up your SMS app, and you can choose whether to send or not.

So, there you go! A really simple way to turn QR codes into donations using the ubiquitous SMS.

Here's a great video showing off the exhibit:

You can jump straight to the two-minute mark if you're just interested in the QR action.

A guest blog by marianne@bamkin.org.uk

The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has QR codes in some places. Level 6 to be exact. This is the story of what happened when I tried to use those QR codes last week. The article in The Guardian gave explicit  instructions of how to access the information linked to the QR code. First you have to go on to the website “Tales of Things.com” to download an app that allows you to scan and read the codes. I did that quite successfully the night before the visit, and tested out the technology from a QR code on the screen on my son’s computer. Oh, did I mention? I was staying with my son and using his wi-fi. (this becomes relevant later). The result was an interesting link about the Hillman Imp with a video, and an advert from the 1950’s or 60’s, whenever the Imp was created. not that I am old enough to remember that. (Well, Ok I do remember that one of my school friend’s dad had a Hillman Imp.)

Anyway, it was with great anticipation that I went to the Museum in search of these strange 2D bar codes, feeling like a sleuth, or a big game hunter. I found a leaflet almost immediately, with QR codes printed on it. Actually they had a member of staff handing out sheets with a QR based puzzle on it). So I tested out their app. As I scanned the QR code, my phone told me that I needed to connect to a network. Now, I may not be the most advanced smart phone user, and I may be rather frugal with my pennies, but I am a student after all, but as I am on “pay-as-you-go” I tend to turn off data and roaming. “I need wi-fi” I thought, so I went to the guy at the “Free Audio Guides” desk. (He was giving out devices to foreign tourists -  see pic - its relevant later)

“Do you have wi-fi?” I asked, “and if so, how do you get on to it?” I am quite used to logging onto wi-fi in other museums.

His reply was, “Oh, I don’t know, go and ask at the enquiry desk, I am sure they can tell you there.” The nice, polite woman at the enquiry desk said something similar. I explained about the QR codes and showed her the leaflet. She did not know know much about it, but she kindly offered to get the duty manager, who she was certain could help me. The duty manager was charming and polite, read the leaflet and said “Lets go to the 6th floor, we don’t have wi-fi, except on some occasions when it is switched on in the 6th floor. When we got there we both had to hunt to find a QR code, and again I tested it, but the phone had the same response, because the wi-fi was not turned on. “Enable the data, Go onto G3” I hear you screaming at me, but I refuse to spend my downloading allowance on random downloads and videos about objects that I am seeing for free.

The duty manager was very interested in the predicament. He considered that the QR code team should have given him more information, and I think he went away realising that having wi-fi in the museum was a good idea. Apparently (and amazingly) I was the only person to have asked about it. Later, re-united with the rest of my family, and on the 6th floor again, I spotted a man with a smart phone who was scanning the QR codes and getting the downloads. I asked him about it and of course he had “a contract”, so did not mind using his download allowance. He found it useful to save the articles and read them at home.

The point is, what do the Tales of Things QR codes do to enhance my experience of the Museum? Having to download an app, albeit a free one, just for that museum, is a bit of a nuisance instead of using Google Goggles, or Quickmark, or other barcode reading apps that are available and have wider uses. Getting some background information on the exhibits is a bit of a novelty and does allow you to go into more depth for a particular object you may be interested in, but I am not sure that I personally care that much to load a specialist app. On the other hand, my other half thought that Frank Garrison (I found out his name later) was showing the appeal of QR codes. They are not just a lazy way of typing in a URL code. They are more like taking a multi-level tourist picture. Instead of taking a photo you can scan a code. That link will probably give you a picture (maybe several) and a description which you can read at your leisure. It tells you more than a picture because it includes history and context.

Anyway the other half showed Frank some QRpedia codes and although he didn’t see them load different languages he was impressed with the speed that they delivered relevant information from Wikipedia. In the photo you can see Frank taking the QRpedia test with someone smuggling in QRpedia codes for Frank to try.

This link to Flickr shows the pictures we took of their QR codes. I think Derby Museum would be surprised to see that this premier museum had also just added some extra codes and not redesigned their displays. Well done - they look like quite neat.  The Museum of Scotland has about seventy codes that allow you access via their dedicated app to additional material. Derby Museum has only about 40 codes but only requires a standard QR code app that delivers hundreds of articles if you count the different languages that are available. Oh and do you remember that man with the Audio Guides? He was offering six or seven languages. To be fair the Hillman Imp QRpedia code only links to six different languages - but they are all free and optimised for delivery to a mobile phone. Frank liked that.

As part of the Wikimedia Derby Backstage Pass a group of participants were invited around the mothballed Silk Mill Museum.

You can hear the full interview on the BBC iPlayer

As the iPlayer removes shows after a week, I've liberated the clip of me chatting away.

Thanks to Mark Ansell for performing the interview.

A couple of pictures of odd signs hidden away in the museum. More photos available on Richard Mackney's blog.

There are five key points to the success of such a scheme.

1. 100% of visitors will be scanning these codes on their mobile phones. The code must point to the mobile version of Wikipedia.
2. <100% of visitors will speak the language of the country where the museum is located (for example, 25% of visitors to the Science Museum are foreign. Pointing to just the English article is unacceptable.
3. The QR code should be simple enough to scan quickly. This mean using as short a URL as possible.
4. The URL presented must be human readable. The user must know to where they are being directed. The QR scanner may have a "history" option which will allow the user to see the codes they've scanned.
5. Statistics must be gathered showing how many people are using the QR codes to assess their effectiveness.

Mobile Redirection is Broken on Wikipedia

The current way that Wikipedia does mobile redirection is broken and should be considered harmful to users. At the moment, a mobile user-agent visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossetta_Stone has to load the entire HTML document, process the complex JavaScript, and only then is redirected to the mobile version of the site.

This means that a visitor incurs a significant wait before they are directed to the correct content. If the visitor is roaming in a foreign country, they may pay significant per-MB costs for this download.

The correct way is for Wikipedia's servers to detect the mobile user-agent and 302 redirect to the mobile version.

Language Detection

I don't know how Wikipedia detects the preferred language of its visitors. Ideally, it should look at the Accept-Language Header of the phone and / or use the IP address of the device (assuming the user isn't using the museum's WiFi).

Finally, the QR/mobile version of Wikipedia should allow a user to easily change the language of the page they are viewing.

Short URL, Human Readability, and Statistics

URL shortening services often produce a jumble of letters and number which, while short, mean nothing to the human user. For example http://bit.ly/fNXn1W. In addition, use of commercial URL shortening services is problematic should the company no longer maintain its service.

Using the "normal" URL gives us this

Using the "mobile" URL gives us this

Using a QR code specifically for QR use gives us this

Finally, there could be a separate short domain for Wikipedia accessed through QR codes. For example, the currently unregistered qrpedia.org Obviously, this has branding problems - would people recognise it as being from Wikipedia?

Conclusion

Ideally, we would use a URL like http://wikipedia.org/qr/Rossetta_Stone

When the use scanned the code and requested the URL, Wikipedia would then perform two actions

1. Detect the user's preferred language.
2. 302 redirect to the mobile version.

If the language detection was incorrect, the user could simply change it.

Wikipedia admins, museum staff, and anyone else, would be able to see which exhibits had the most scans.

Thoughts?