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. Commercial museum collections management systems often provide this, but they are expensive and their features are often limited or require extensive customization. Open source exhibit software has proliferated in recent years, and some of these systems now provide features that approach CMS functionality. But what if you are starting with Plone, which is already a full-featured CMS? Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection is engaged in a major website redesign, and they have selected Plone as their CMS. Online exhibits will be an important part of their new website. They envisioned many features, such as image panning and zooming, timelines, favorites, and object comparison, and they also envisioned that online exhibits would be easy for content editors - even interns - to assemble. In this talk I will describe the online exhibit package that we have created for Dumbarton Oaks, and our incremental approach to defining and implementing it.

1. Online Exhibits in Plone
A Project Sponsored By
Dumbarton Oaks
Sally Kleinfeldt, Jazkarta
Plone Symposium East
May, 23 2012
Image of Byzantine seal ©2012 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, Trustees for Harvard University.
All Rights Reserved.

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

3. Commercial
Exhibit Software
• Usually found in museum collections
management systems - expensive
• Features can be limited or require extensive
customization

4. Open Source
Exhibit Software
• Choices proliferating
• From simple to CMS-like

5. Open Source
Exhibit Software
• Omeka - www.omeka.org - Publish
collections with Dublin Core metadata,
exhibit plugin with predesigned templates
• Pachyderm - pachyderm.nmc.org -
Multimedia authoring with predesigned
templates
• Open Exhibits - www.openexhibits.org - Flash
based templates with multitouch interfaces

6. Open Source
Exhibit Software
• GLAM-Kit - glamkit.org - Django based
content publishing system for cultural
institutions
• OpenCollection - www.collectiveaccess.org/ -
Collection management
• CollectionSpace - www.collectionspace.org -
Collection management

7. Exhibit Management vs.
Content Management
• Simple online exhibit systems like GLAMkit
add features over time
• They begin to seem like a content
management system...

8. Exhibits in Plone
• If you are starting with Plone, a full-featured
CMS, what do you need to make exhibits?

9. Exhibits in Plone
• Nothing - sort of
• Features needed are there already
• But it takes a skilled content editor and time

10. Dumbarton Oaks

11. Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and
Collection
• An institute of Harvard University dedicated
to supporting scholarship in Byzantine,
Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian
studies
• Museum, gardens, fellowships, meetings,
publications and exhibits
• Located in Georgetown

12. Dumbarton Oaks
• Outgrew their static website
• Researched CMSes and chose Plone
• Partnered with Jazkarta to do a major
website redesign and reimplementation
• Migrated content with funnelweb, new theme
designed by Might & Main, new navigation,
new content, custom types for rare books,
Byzantine seals, images

13. Before

14. After

15. Dumbarton Oaks
Exhibits
• Online exhibits will be an important part of
the new site
• Have tried Omeka, want something better
• Want to be able to create exhibits in Plone
• Must be easy for content editors - even
interns - to create
• Many ideas for features - image panning and
zooming, timelines, favorites, comments

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

17. The Team
• Kathy Sparkes, Dumbarton Oaks
Director of Publications and Project
Owner
• Prathmesh Mengane, Michael Sohn, and
Lisa Wainwright, Dumbarton Oaks web
development team
• Sally Kleinfeldt, Project Manager
• Carlos de la Guardia and Alec Mitchell,
Developers
• Kevin Brooks and Arielle Walrath of
Might & Main, UI/UX Design

18. Development Process

19. Development Process
• Agile, iterative development process
• Described here: http://blog.jazkarta.com/
2012/01/20/agile-development-with-plone-
revisited/
• Exhibit requirements were fuzzy, we knew
getting this right would require multiple
passes

20. Discovery
• Brainstorming and discussions with
stakeholders
• Focused on examples of online exhibits they
like
• Users had been experimenting with Omeka -
lots of thoughts about what they liked and
did not like

21. Inspirational Examples
• http://www.americanantiquarian.org/
Exhibitions/Men/ and /Beauty/
• http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/
John_Carter_Brown_Library/drugs/
• http://www.lib.umd.edu/RARE/
SpecialCollection/nancy/

22. Inspirational Examples
• http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/
exhibits/johnson/
• http://icfa.doaks.org/collections/artamonoff/
• http://robertandmonnoyer.omeka.net/

23. Take 1
• Exhibit - folderish type containing pages, a
media folder, and exhibit items
• Exhibit Items - reference other content
items, provide a place for commentary on the
item in the context of the exhibit

24. Feedback on Take 1
• The “Exhibit” thing is like an exhibit section,
there will be more than one of them in an
exhibit - need another level of hierarchy
• It is too clunky and time consuming to create
everything one at a time

25. Take 2
• Three levels: exhibit, section, item
• Batch create of sections when creating an
exhibit
• Section edit provides batch create of items
from content references
• Mechanism for creating template pages
• UI/UX design

26. Feedback on Take 2
• This week!

27. Take 3
• Implement views shown in wireframes
• Additional requested features, tweaks
• CSS styling

28. collective.exhibit

29. collective.exhibit
• https://github.com/jazkarta/collective.exhibit
• 3 Dexterity content types
• Custom views
• Custom portlet
• Control panel

30. Exhibit Item
• References a content item
• Provides exhibit-specific commentary via
override fields for title, description, body
text, image
• View allows navigation among a section’s
items
• Checks schema of referenced item looking
for an image field, prompts for image upload if
not

32. Exhibit Section
• Groups related Exhibit Items
• Can be used standalone for simple exhibits

34. Exhibit
• Contains sections, pages, and other content
items determined by site customization
• Functionality for choosing from site template
pages
• Provides exhibit navigation via a portlet

35. Template Pages
• In addition to sections, exhibits typically
provide other background information
• Make it easy to create new exhibits by
providing site specific templates for these
informational pages
• Package provides a few generic template
pages to start with (About, Further Reading)

36. Template Pages
• On package install, a folder is created at site
root containing generic template pages
• Site admins can modify and add to items in
templates folder
• Any type of content can be added
• Collections with eea.facetednavigation,
Simile timelines via eea.daviz, ...

37. Template Pages
• Why a folder at site root to hold template
pages?
• It’s a bit ugly to affect site content
• Possible alternative: persistent storage
inside a local utility
• Quick and easy solution
• Editing normal content is a familiar tool for
site admins

38. Template Homepages
• Exhibit have a rich text field that serves as
the homepage
• Eliminates need to set a default page
• Site template folder allows admins to provide
a selection of homepage styles (single image,
slider, image map, etc.)

40. Control Panel
• Choose what content types can be
referenced by exhibit items
• Choose what content types can be added to
exhibits
• Other ideas?

41. Image Panning and
Zooming
• Ability to closely examine a high res image is
important to DOaks site and part of exhibit
functionality
• We licensed "Smooth Zoom Pan - jQuery
Image Viewer" from codecanyon.net
• http://codecanyon.net/item/smooth-zoom-
pan-jquery-image-viewer/511142

42. Image Panning and
Zooming
• This commercial software is not in the
exhibit package
• Some exhibits may require ultra-high
resolution tiled image zooming (like
Seadragon)
• May be best to not make an explicit
implementation choice in the package

43. Status of
collective.exhibit
• Take 3 will happen May 28th to June 15th
• Adding portlet, wireframe views, homepage
templates, control panel, styling
• Release to pypi soon after

44. Sprint?
• We’d love to experiment with using Deco
tiles as a way to customize exhibit layouts
• Other potential topics:
• User commenting
• User favorites (reuse code from GLAM-
kit?)

45. Questions, Discussion