The Sarjeant Gallery's online collection site makes careful use of staff time and computer vision tools to provide multiple ways for visitors to explore their collection. The slides are a joint presentation from Paul Rowe and Jennifer Taylor Moore.
The document summarizes the National Museums Online Learning Project, a 3-year digital learning project funded by the UK Treasury and involving 9 UK national museums. The project aims to increase use of the museums' digital collections through resources like WebQuests and Creative Journeys for schools and lifelong learners. It also includes a federated search across the 9 museum collections to provide a better user experience when exploring the learning resources. Key challenges include building engaged online communities and balancing curatorial control with more open user-generated content.
Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challengesMia
Lecture on social media and museums, libraries and archives given to the The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling) in Oslo, December 2009.
Digital library services and the changing environmentJohn MacColl
The document discusses the changing environment for digital library services. It argues that libraries need to both concentrate their resources at a network level and diffuse their data and services through open sharing on the web. This will allow libraries to better expose their collections to users where they search online. The document also advocates for mass digitization of collections and putting materials online at "web scale" to make previously undiscovered resources accessible.
Website Re-Design On A Dime: Gathering User Input on a Budgetidatig
The document summarizes a project conducted by librarians at Mary Baldwin College to gather student input on redesigning the library website on a low budget. They conducted focus groups, think-aloud exercises, discussions, and an online survey to understand how students use and perceive the current website. Key findings included confusion over terminology, a desire for a more modern and visually appealing design, and redundancy in links. Insights from these low-cost methods will be provided to the graphic design team assisting with the college-wide website redesign.
Online exhibitions can:
- Provide access to collections for people who cannot visit in person by giving glimpses of real world exhibitions online.
- Reach new audiences and provide marketing and engagement benefits.
- Showcase items not normally on display and reveal hidden treasures in intimate new ways for people to interact with collections.
Evaluating Social Media: American Association of Museums (AAM) 2010Dana Allen-Greil
This document discusses evaluating social media use in museums. It provides tips for developing a social media strategy, including listening to conversations, benchmarking against peers, setting goals, measuring engagement, and creating actionable reports. Challenges discussed include transparency, convincing skeptics of the value, and integrating social media practices. The presentation provides many resources and tools for social media evaluation.
This document summarizes a presentation given by Jamie Kohler and Stephen Marvin on promoting small museum content through digital social networking media. The presentation introduced Kohler from West Chester University's Special Collections and Archives and Marvin from the Sanderson Museum. It provided highlights about the Sanderson Museum collection and West Chester University's Special Collections. The presentation discussed potential partnerships between small museums and university collections, including sharing content online through sites like Facebook, blogs, and YouTube. It addressed issues like copyright and evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships. The goal was to explore how social networking technologies could help small museums and libraries reach wider audiences.
The document summarizes the National Museums Online Learning Project, a 3-year digital learning project funded by the UK Treasury and involving 9 UK national museums. The project aims to increase use of the museums' digital collections through resources like WebQuests and Creative Journeys for schools and lifelong learners. It also includes a federated search across the 9 museum collections to provide a better user experience when exploring the learning resources. Key challenges include building engaged online communities and balancing curatorial control with more open user-generated content.
Social Media in the ABM (MLA) Sector: opportunities and challengesMia
Lecture on social media and museums, libraries and archives given to the The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling) in Oslo, December 2009.
Digital library services and the changing environmentJohn MacColl
The document discusses the changing environment for digital library services. It argues that libraries need to both concentrate their resources at a network level and diffuse their data and services through open sharing on the web. This will allow libraries to better expose their collections to users where they search online. The document also advocates for mass digitization of collections and putting materials online at "web scale" to make previously undiscovered resources accessible.
Website Re-Design On A Dime: Gathering User Input on a Budgetidatig
The document summarizes a project conducted by librarians at Mary Baldwin College to gather student input on redesigning the library website on a low budget. They conducted focus groups, think-aloud exercises, discussions, and an online survey to understand how students use and perceive the current website. Key findings included confusion over terminology, a desire for a more modern and visually appealing design, and redundancy in links. Insights from these low-cost methods will be provided to the graphic design team assisting with the college-wide website redesign.
Online exhibitions can:
- Provide access to collections for people who cannot visit in person by giving glimpses of real world exhibitions online.
- Reach new audiences and provide marketing and engagement benefits.
- Showcase items not normally on display and reveal hidden treasures in intimate new ways for people to interact with collections.
Evaluating Social Media: American Association of Museums (AAM) 2010Dana Allen-Greil
This document discusses evaluating social media use in museums. It provides tips for developing a social media strategy, including listening to conversations, benchmarking against peers, setting goals, measuring engagement, and creating actionable reports. Challenges discussed include transparency, convincing skeptics of the value, and integrating social media practices. The presentation provides many resources and tools for social media evaluation.
This document summarizes a presentation given by Jamie Kohler and Stephen Marvin on promoting small museum content through digital social networking media. The presentation introduced Kohler from West Chester University's Special Collections and Archives and Marvin from the Sanderson Museum. It provided highlights about the Sanderson Museum collection and West Chester University's Special Collections. The presentation discussed potential partnerships between small museums and university collections, including sharing content online through sites like Facebook, blogs, and YouTube. It addressed issues like copyright and evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships. The goal was to explore how social networking technologies could help small museums and libraries reach wider audiences.
MCN2017 | From Research to Action: Translating User Feedback into Digital Pro...Susan Wigodner
As museums and cultural institutions work to create more user-friendly products, we conduct research that sometimes ends up buried as we talk more about what was created. Whether it’s prototyping and testing along the way, or a summative evaluation of one project leading to changes for the next one, how do we learn from these findings?
Desi Gonzalez, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Wellcome Collection, London
Susan Wigodner, The Field Museum, Chicago
MCN2017 | From Research to Action: Translating User Feedback into Digital Pro...Susan Wigodner
As museums and cultural institutions work to create more user-friendly products, we conduct research that sometimes ends up buried as we talk more about what was created. Whether it’s prototyping and testing along the way, or a summative evaluation of one project leading to changes for the next one, how do we learn from these findings?
Desi Gonzalez, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Wellcome Collection, London
Susan Wigodner, The Field Museum, Chicago
Using a Wiki to Revolutionize Your MuseumWest Muse
Want to use technology as a driving force for community outreach? Staff members of the Chandler Museum discuss how embracing the wiki, a simple yet popular web technology, has revolutionized their operations. The wiki increases accessibility to the museums education, collections, and exhibits and has become the museums leading community outreach endeavor. ChandlerpediA, the website produced by this small, local history museum, is a model that any institution can adopt regardless of budget or technological know-how.
Increasing the findability of digital heritage documents by using Search Engi...Andrea Hrckova
Mass digitization of cultural heritage and the growing amount of born digital heritage documents enabled the availability of these documents to everyone. Nevertheless, in the age of big data, the availability of content is not sufficient, if it means to be discovered and reached by the public. Nowadays, Google processes on average 40,000 search queries per second, therefore this medium cannot be ignored by any subject, striving to be discovered on the Internet. Still we face an underestimation in the field of findability of digital cultural heritage. The position of a content in search engine ranking page (SERP) might be influenced by the utilization of search engine optimization (SEO) methods that are rarely used in cultural sphere. These methods include among others the appropriate user research, semantic markup according to Schema vocabulary or microformats and sufficient number of links and mentions outside the website. In this contribution, the case studies of Slovak digital heritage portals using (consciously or unconsciously) SEO methods are presented and the possibilities for further development and research are suggested. The question is, whether these methods are able not just to increase the visibility of the documents of cultural institutions, but also to contribute to the decrease of disinformation and low quality content findability on the Internet.
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Do You Know Who Your Users Are? The Role of Research in Redesigning sfmoma.orgAutodesk
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art conducted user research to redesign their website, which was over 10 years old. They used both quantitative and qualitative research methods including think tanks, interviews, surveys and heuristic evaluations. Their research revealed that most users did not understand the difference between exhibitions and the permanent collection and just wanted to find out "what's going on" to plan a visit. It also found that users were not aware of the breadth of programs and content offered. The research insights inspired new design ideas like creating a combined "Exhibitions + Events" section and adding more cross-linking and layers of information to showcase their offerings. The redesign aims to better serve the museum's diverse audiences.
Each year, a panel of museum professionals recognises the Best of the Web, choosing sites from those nominated by the community.
These slides are from the presentation at Museums and the Web 2011 (MW2011) in Philadelphia.
For details see http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/best/
This presentation was presented at the ARLIS/NA + VRA 2016 in Seattle, United States. It shared about the concept of openness of digital images and how it applied in museums, discussed the opportunities to art librarianship and suggested some future explorations to improve the openness in digital images.
The document summarizes notes from the Computers in Libraries 2012 conference. It discusses keynotes on creating innovative libraries and strategic planning goals. Notes cover trends in library services like meeting users wherever they are, enriching campus programs, and ensuring equitable access to knowledge. The conference reinforced ideas like using technology initiatives, capturing ideas, and providing opportunities for users to create content.
Designing a Thesaurus-based Comparison Search Interface for Linked Cultural H...Alia Amin
This document summarizes research on designing a thesaurus-based search interface to support comparison searches across multiple cultural heritage sources. Key findings from preliminary studies with cultural heritage experts showed that comparison searches are used for tasks like exhibition planning but are challenging due to issues like name aliases and searching in multiple languages and sources. The designed interface, called LISA, integrates thesauri and allows guided search, selection of multiple artworks, and comparison of properties in tables, charts and scatterplots. An evaluation study found LISA improved the time and ease of searching for and comparing artworks compared to a baseline system. User feedback suggested the interface was unfamiliar at first but visualizations provided different perspectives in comparisons.
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1. Managing digital collections presents new challenges for libraries as collections become more hybrid in nature, incorporating both physical and born-digital materials.
2. The Bodleian Library's futureArch project aims to transform its capacity for managing hybrid archives over three years by establishing new workflows, training staff, and developing infrastructure like a digital archive system.
3. Personal digital collections are an emerging issue as individuals increasingly capture their lives digitally; the Bodleian must adapt to maintain its role as a repository and establish trust with creators of these collections.
Folksonomies allow users to personally classify and tag online content using their own vocabulary, rather than relying on a controlled taxonomy. While this provides flexibility, it can also introduce inconsistencies. Researchers are exploring ontological approaches to mapping related tags to concepts to improve search and recommendations. Sites like Flickr, Tumblr, and LibraryThing employ folksonomies, allowing users to tag items to make them easier for others to find.
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The document discusses conducting a feasibility study for creating a discovery facility that provides integrated access to national museum collections and builds learning resources and tools using those collections. It outlines scoping the project, learning from past initiatives, and how best to deliver such a facility. It also summarizes feedback from stakeholders, including the need for audience research, addressing copyright, data standards, and other technical and organizational challenges.
Bots are automated pieces of software that carry out a set of operations with some degree of independence, often with behaviour mimicking a person. They’re becoming increasingly sophisticated and have been adopted for a range of purposes within the museum sector such as sharing random collection items and helping to answer visitors’ questions.
R2-D2 analysed your collection images and here's what he foundPaul Rowe
Techniques for the automated review of images continue to improve. Analysis of colours and patterns within your collection images can provide new connections between collection items. Artificial intelligence can work out the subject of an image with increasing accuracy, sometimes rivalling the descriptions created manually by cataloguers. This presentation looks at some of the emerging tools in this field and how they might be applied to your image collections.
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how to approach commercial galleries and non-profit galleries
being represented at an international level
understanding open submissions
promotion of artistic career
insights into gallery/curatorial practice from the management side and from the artists point of view
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This document discusses strategies for increasing awareness and use of digital collections. It recommends getting digitization programs and projects included in the library's strategic plan and educating staff. It also advocates publicizing projects through various marketing channels like newsletters, websites, social media and events. The document describes a case study of a successful oral history project at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that saw increased visibility through a targeted publicity campaign with multiple print and online promotions. It emphasizes experimenting with different marketing ideas and forming collaborations to extend the reach of digital collections.
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Each year, a panel of museum professionals recognises the Best of the Web, choosing sites from those nominated by the community.
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One year on, this presentation provides an overview of how the New Zealand Museums website has evolved. New museums continue to join NZMuseums and new collection records and images are published on the site daily. The demonstration will cover how museums can use the NZMuseums website, changes made to the web site over the last year (particularly the integration with public events from NZLive.com), and further development plans.
The document summarizes New Zealand's efforts to digitize content from its museums through several initiatives. The National Digital Forum and DigitalNZ work with museums to make their collections available online through the NZMuseums website. Small museums benefit from having a web presence without much funds or expertise. The website uses an eHive collection management system and shares data through APIs and harvesting to integrate with other sites and allow different presentations of museum content. Copyright and rights issues must be addressed to allow legal reuse of digitized materials.
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Serendipity and readability - Building an engaging online collection site with limited resources
1. Serendipity and Readability:
Building an Engaging Online Collection
Site with Limited Resources
Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems, @armchair_caver
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Museums and the Web, Apr 2018
12. Considering visitor types
Explorers Facilitators
• Website should be easy to browse
• Simple options to filter the
collection
• Explore options: colour, image
orientation, time, subject,
object type
• Highlight works on
display at the Gallery
• Connect ‘visit planning’
pages where relevant
Experience Seekers Rechargers
• Explore by colour
• Connect works by keywords
• Provide highlight sets to
showcase groups of works
• Provide a clean,
uncluttered website where
the artworks are the
focus
Professional/Hobbyist
• Provide advanced search options
42. What’s next: Monitoring
with Google Analytics
Page views by explore option:
35% via a curated highlight set
23% via an object type link
12% via a colour swatch
43. What’s next
rights clearance
interpretive descriptions
regular changes to home page content
44. What’s next
quantitative displays of data (acquisitions by
decade for example)
better highlighting of works on display
Peoples’ Choice series
47. Related links
Blog posts
Looking at the Sarjeant Gallery’s collection through robot eyes:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/looking-at-sarjeant-gallerys-
collection-through-robot-eyes-c7fd0281814e
Building an accessible online collection for Sarjeant Gallery:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/building-an-accessible-online-
collection-for-sarjeant-gallery-48cbcac4fdb6
Websites
Cogapp image tagging test site: http://labs.cogapp.com/iiif-ml/
Sarjeant Gallery: https://collection.sarjeant.org.nz
Tools
Color Thief: http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/
Google Cloud Vision API: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/
48. Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Thank you!
Editor's Notes
Kia ora, I’m Jennifer Taylor Moore, the Curator of Collections at the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui – and I’m Paul Rowe, the CEO of Vernon Systems. We’re here to tell you about how we made the most of our online collection project with limited resources.
The Sarjeant Gallery is located in a regional centre in the lower North Island of New Zealand.
The Gallery has a small team of about 11 staff with no in-house IT or design staff.
The Gallery building which opened in 1919 is a Category I listed heritage building.
The Sarjeant Gallery’s nationally significant collection comprises of over 8,000 artworks and archival items spanning four centuries of European and New Zealand art history and is one of the country’s most comprehensive surveys of NZ art history in a regional centre.
In 2014 the Gallery’s heritage building was identified as an ‘earthquake-prone’ building and closed to the public.
We relocated to a smaller temporary site, called Sarjeant on the Quay, to maintain public programs during fundraising for earthquake strengthening of the heritage building.
During this time there was an urgent need for online access to the collection as the temporary exhibition space is significantly restricted.
We had a goal of launching a website for the online collection within four months of the start of the project, with a budget of USD$15,000. We were keen to build a website that provided open access to the collection and offered a variety of options for visitors to explore the collection online.
The Gallery’s operating budget is very modest and any large funds that might have been available for this project had already been channelled towards fundraising for the redevelopment.
The budget constraints meant that there were not enough resources to spend hours retrospectively inputting relevant data and keywords into the collection records, so we had to look for ways to quickly clean up the data and prioritise copyright clearance with the artists.
Our collection was already catalogued in Vernon Systems’ collection management database and Vernon Systems offered to work in partnership with us to develop the new website. Vernon Systems’ provided the software and development resources we needed.
We made the decision to put the entire collection online, including records where the image was not yet available. The full collection provided many more records to connect and online access is now helping us spot data that can be improved. The online access is also helping us reach copyright holders that we weren’t previously able to contact.
The images have been put online even if they’re not perfect, as in this example where the image will be cropped when we have time to do so. We’ve allowed re-use of the images wherever possible and clearly mark images for which there are no known copyright restrictions.
Search results can also be filtered by the current rights for each artwork, making it easy to find images for re-use. Here you can see our main rights categories.
The site uses responsive templates to provide layouts for mobile, tablet, and desktop screens. For example, on smaller screens we display smaller image sizes. This also helps with speed over slower connections.
We used John Falk’s research on museum visitor types as one way to assess our potential features. For example, we wanted to allow users to browse the collection by attributes such as colour or subject tags and this best fitted the ‘Explorer’ type visitors, but we still planned an advanced search screen to meet the needs of ‘Professionals’ researching the collection.
We made a commitment to using computer vision, software that can automatically analyse images and adds more detailed information. We used a couple of products: Google Cloud Vision and Color Thief.
We looked at what we could do quickly with the limited staff time that was available. With only an hour of work, we filled in the nationalities for the 40 countries of birth recorded in the system. We were able to display nationality as a search option for the majority of the artists in the collection. For example, if the birth place was Japan, then we display Japanese in the Nationality field.
Many of the works did not have a description in the catalogue. By combining the object type, production place and date metadata we were able to generate natural sounding sentences. The website automatically checks how many other works there are online of the same type, giving the user a sense of scale within the online collection. The sentence also provides links to jump to other works with the same production place or object type. In this example we see a typical generated sentence. “This is one of 1,832 photographs in our collection. It was made in Whanganui circa 1907”.
Two hours were spent matching the most common artists in the Gallery’s collection to Wikipedia and Te Ara (the encyclopaedia of New Zealand). About one third of the collection now connects to these additional resources. We felt it was essential that the online collection was not isolated from the rest of the web.
We’ve also added links from Wikipedia back to the artist pages in cases where the Gallery has significant holdings. Again, by concentrating on the collection’s most important artists, this was a quick process. As time permits the Gallery will also add Wikipedia pages where they are missing for prominent artists.
We made the decision to keep the online collection separate from the main website. This allowed us to build upon an existing working online collection product rather than trying to fit within the Gallery’s content management system. (WordPress). Online collections are complex to develop, so building from scratch was certainly not an option for us.
The key disadvantages of a separate site are that you can’t search the collection from the main site and there’s a separate user interface for the visitor to understand. However, the site layout can focus on how best to present the collection, and we were able to incorporate many features that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible within the budget. The online collection site is also less likely to be affected by changes to the design of the main site in the future.
Prototyping potential features was an essential step in deciding whether features were viable and how they could be best implemented. We started with an unbranded version of our online collection product and this became a working wireframe where we could test out ideas on layout and use of the data. Here for example we tried showing colour swatches in circles to evoke an artist’s palette. Some users didn’t realise that these were swatches they could click on to navigate to other artworks, and so the design was altered.
The colour analysis took many iterations. For example, we were initially looking at the hue of the original colour and finding the closest matching colour from our smaller palette. Through the prototype we realised we needed to consider colour brightness and saturation to avoid cases like the false greens in this screenshot using test data in an early prototype.
Even on a tight budget, user testing is essential in development projects. We made use of staff at Vernon Systems and Sarjeant Gallery who were not otherwise involved in the project, and asked for volunteers from people outside of our organisation. Our testers covered a range of ages and interests and they helped us spot problems and potential design improvements.
The user testing helped us find areas where we could use plainer language, such on the terms of use page that is linked from wherever the image rights are displayed. We introduced the open and closed padlock icon to make it clearer which rights types allowed open access.
The website includes several options for exploring the collection. In the testing we found users sometimes missed these options, so we added shortcuts at the top of the home page and in the menu so that these options are always above the fold.
Through the prototype we also explored what we could do with the data we had, rather than data we wished we had. For example, the object type data was consistent, so we’ve used this on the home page as an explore option and we display counts for each category to again give the visitor a sense of scale within the online collection. We can immediately see for example that there are 1800 drawings in the collection.
Similarly, we use data on the artwork page to avoid dead-ends, by always providing options to jump to related records, such as other artworks that depict the same subject or include the same colour.
In the prototyping we looked at how features might serve more than one purpose. For example, we added an option to get a simple listing of all artists represented in the collection and this also provided search engines with links to get to every artist and artwork page on the website.
The last part of the project looked at what computer generated data we could use. We could easily determine the image orientation from the file (landscape, portrait or square), so we’ve provided orientation as one option for filtering search results. For example, here are all of the Gretchen Albrecht works in landscape orientation.
We used Google Cloud Vision to automatically add subject tags. Image analysis isn’t easy, and we do see examples of problematic keywords. We had to build tools for staff to manage the tags – either deleting a tag for a single record or deleting it across the whole site. For example, many of the photographs were tagged by Google as “Stock Photography” which wouldn’t have gone down well with the artists, so this tag was completely removed.
But the automated tags don’t have to be perfect to create interesting results. All of these works have been tagged as ‘circle’. Most of them aren’t strictly circles, but the tags provide new connections to other works with similar shapes and lines.
We used an open source tool called Color Thief to extract the most dominant colours from the original 16 million colour palette in the image. However, unless your collection is enormous, hardly any images will share the same exact colour with such a huge palette.
These original colours needed to be matched to a smaller palette – in our case we used the 140 named web colours. With a smaller palette, more images share the same matching colour. However, as the palette gets smaller the colours you are displaying are gradually getting further away from the original precise image colours.
Because we’re using named colours, all of the colours we detect can be added to the text search index. We index the colour name, such as crimson, along with the colour group, such as red. This allows people to type in a text search that includes colour words not referenced in the original cataloguing.
We’ve also considered how the site can meet accessibility guidelines, making sure it works on different devices, adding alternative text for images, considering contrast levels, and allowing for zooming within a browser to easily change the size of the content.
During the prototyping there were some features we decided not to go ahead with, and I’ll give a few examples of this. We considered automatically changing the background colour on the page to match the artwork as we can see on this page.
However, for some artworks the background colour became distracting and it was hard to write generic enough rules to avoid this becoming a problem. In this screenshot you can also see mockup text for the generated description (on the right), as at this stage in the prototype we hadn’t yet written the code to do it for real.
We also looked at showing how the dominant colours in collection changed over time. We pulled out the most popular colours for each production decade, but we were disappointed to find we ended up with fifty shades of beige. This concept may still be worth revisiting if we first remove the neutral colours from the palette in this display.
We also considered generating a full sentence caption. However, this is particularly complex and I think it’s the weakest element in the computer vision tools available to us. We looked at a prototype that the web development company Cogapp made public and decided from this that full sentence captions were too variable in quality to use at this stage.
With the finished website we have embraced the concept of Create once, publish everywhere. Gallery staff are using the online collection to engage the public in different ways, such as this example where the Gallery shared a set of works featuring moustaches as part of the Movember event. This was grouping of works was possible because of the Google subject tags.
We’ve developed a Collection Focus series highlighting works by a featured artist from the collection. This is accompanied by a physical exhibition and the website provides digital access to the selected works.
We have also included simple options for visitors to share a page on common social media platforms. This is done using the Open Graph metadata standard, which ensures the correct title, description and image from the page are carried over into the user’s social media post.
We’re now planning what we can do next. Google Analytics is a valuable tool for assessing use of the website. We can see we’re reaching a much wider audience, with only 5% of visits coming from New Zealand. We can also see what parts of the site are the most used. For example, what options for exploring the site are people accessing.
Gallery staff are currently working steadily through requesting copyright permission from artists and copyright holders to increase the number of images that can be displayed on the site. Every artist approached so far has responded positively. We’re also adding more interpretive descriptions to the catalogue and adding more carefully curated sets as another path into the collection.
We had some ideas that didn’t make it to the prototype stage, such as presenting more visual displays of the breakdown of the collection. This is a concept we hope to look at further in a second development phase. We can also see that we need to better highlight on the artwork page when an artwork is on display in the gallery.
We’re also developing a monthly series to be launched next year called My Choice where members of the public, using social media, can make collection selections from which we will choose a few to highlight on the website as virtual exhibitions.
There has been very positive feedback from the artists and the visitors. We were fortunate to win the New Zealand cultural heritage sector’s annual award for the best new digital exhibition or collection.
I’ll finish with one final example of what we have achieved. Visitors can search on several elements together, such as keywords, colour names, and image orientation. Here’s a search on “house AND white AND landscape” where all of these results were missing at least one of these descriptive elements in the original catalogue record.
We’ve added a slide with references to related blog posts, websites and tools and the slides will be uploaded to SlideShare.
We’ve focused our staff time on a few areas where data could be improved with minimal effort, and on the larger task of rights clearance. By carefully selecting and testing potential features we’ve completed the project on time and within budget. The current state of image analysis isn’t perfect, but computer vision has made it easier to discover the images and has opened up new connections within the collection.
Thank you!