Museums, libraries, art institutes, and many other types of organizations need online exhibits - websites that mimic the experience of walking through a gallery discovering interesting and beautiful objects. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection recently completed a major website redesign, with Plone as their chosen CMS, and online exhibits are an important part of the new site. They wanted many features, but they also wanted online exhibits to be easy for content editors - even interns - to create. In this talk Sally Kleinfeldt and Alec Mitchell describe collective.exhibit the new open source Plone add-on for online exhibits that we have created for Dumbarton Oaks and for the Plone community. Sally will provide background about what Dumbarton Oaks wanted in their online exhibits. Alec will describe our implementation, covering our use of Dexterity content types, bulk content creation, and how we used templates to provide a rich feature set while still making it easy for inexperienced content editors to create exhibits.

1. Online Exhibits in Plone
A Project Sponsored By
Dumbarton Oaks
Sally Kleinfeldt and Alec Mitchell
Plone Conference
11 October 2012
Image of Byzantine seal ©2012 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, Trustees for Harvard University.
All Rights Reserved.

2. Online
Exhibits

3. Online Exhibits
• Mimic the experience of walking through a
gallery discovering interesting and beautiful
objects
• Used by museums, libraries, art institutes,
galleries, archives

4. Commercial
Exhibit Software
• Usually found in museum collections
management systems
• Features vary, can require extensive
customization
• Focused on the needs of larger museums

5. Open Source
Exhibit Software
• Choices proliferating, from simple to CMS-
like
• Omeka - www.omeka.org - Publish
collections with Dublin Core metadata,
exhibit plugin with predesigned templates
• Pachyderm - pachyderm.nmc.org -
Multimedia authoring with predesigned
templates

6. Open Source
Exhibit Software
• GLAM-Kit - glamkit.org - Django based
content publishing system for cultural
institutions
• OpenCollection www.collectiveaccess.org
CollectionSpace www.collectionspace.org -
Collection management
• Open Exhibits - www.openexhibits.org - Flash
based templates with multitouch interfaces

7. Dumbarton
Oaks

8. Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and
Collection
• An institute of Harvard University dedicated
to scholarship in Byzantine, Garden and
Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies
• Museum, gardens, fellowships, meetings,
publications and exhibits
• http://doaks.org

9. Dumbarton Oaks
Website
• Outgrew their static website
• Researched CMSes, chose Plone, did a major
website redesign
• Online exhibits are a high priority for the
new site, want to be able to create them in
Plone
• Had tried Omeka, want something better

10. Online Exhibits:
Requirements
• Pull from content already on the site and add
commentary
• Byzantine seals, rare books, images, ...
• Multiple styles
• Hierarchical vs. linear navigation
• Easy for content editors - even interns - to
create

11. Make It Open Source!
• Create a general purpose, open source Plone
package for easy to create online exhibits
• Benefit the whole community and make
Plone more attractive to museums
• Thank you Dumbarton Oaks!

12. Examples

13. Examples
• Dumbarton Oaks staff explored online
exhibits from other institutions
• Provided a set of examples they liked
• “Make it work like this”

14. www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Beauty

15. http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/
John_Carter_Brown_Library/drugs/

16. http://www.lib.umd.edu/RARE/SpecialCollection/
nancy/

17. http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/
johnson/

18. www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Men

19. collective.exhibit

20. Implementation
• Custom Dexterity-based content types
• Central template repository
• Automatic creation of exhibit structure
• Bulk creation of exhibit items using existing CMS content
• Specialized exhibit navigation

21. Content Structure
Page
Exhibit Page
Page
Section Section
Item Item Item Item
Referenced
content

22. Why Dexterity?
• Simple lightweight UUID references
• Fast content creation; critical when creating content in bulk
• Training available at conferences and symposia for Dumbarton
Oaks staff
• Clear, comprehensive and current documentation

23. Central "Template" Repository
• Simple folder at Plone site root
• Contains a variety of user-editable content that can be used to
initially populate an exhibit
• Pre-formatted Pages (Introduction, Acknowledgements,
References, ...), pre-configured Collection with faceted
navigation
• Trivial to implement and provides familiar UI for content
editors
• Exhibit front page content a good potential use case for Deco

24. Live Demo
Creating an exhibit and
populating a section with
content

25. Dumbarton Oaks Features
• Image panning and zooming overlays (using a proprietary
jQuery library)
• Products.Maps integration
• Exhibit-only Diazo theme modifications using a helper view to
determine when content is part of an exhibit

26. Live Demo
Published Dumbarton Oaks
Exhibit
(if WIFI is working)

27. Published Examples
• http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/library/
the-ancient-future-mesoamerican-and-
andean-timekeeping/
• http://www.doaks.org/resources/seals/gods-
regents-on-earth-a-thousand-years-of-
byzantine-imperial-seals

28. To Do

29. For Initial Release
• Tests
• Documentation
• Integrate features from Dumbarton Oaks
packages (Map support, theme helper view)

30. For the Future
• Deco integration for exhibit front page and
section templates
• Non-proprietary image zooming support -
perhaps using Seadragon for very large
images and/or maps
• Timeline visualization
• Variations on exhibit navigation (linear, nested
sections, ...)

31. Questions?