Online Exhibits in PloneA Project Sponsored By

Dumbarton Oaks

Sally Kleinfeldt, JazkartaPlone Symposium East

May, 23 2012

Image of Byzantine seal ©2012 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, Trustees for Harvard University. All Rights Reserved.

Online Exhibits

• Mimic the experience of walking through a gallery discovering interesting and beautiful objects

• Used by museums, libraries, art institutes, galleries, archives

Commercial Exhibit Software

• Usually found in museum collections management systems - expensive

• Features can be limited or require extensive customization

Open Source Exhibit Software

• Choices proliferating

• From simple to CMS-like

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

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

Exhibit Management vs. Content Management

• Simple online exhibit systems like GLAMkit add features over time

• They begin to seem like a content management system...

Exhibits in Plone

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

Exhibits in Plone

• Nothing - sort of

• Features needed are there already

• But it takes a skilled content editor and time

Dumbarton Oaks

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

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

Before

After

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

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!

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

Development Process

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

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

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/

Inspirational Examples

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

• http://icfa.doaks.org/collections/artamonoff/

• http://robertandmonnoyer.omeka.net/

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

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

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

Feedback on Take 2

• This week!

Take 3

• Implement views shown in wireframes

• Additional requested features, tweaks

• CSS styling

collective.exhibit

collective.exhibit

• https://github.com/jazkarta/collective.exhibit

• 3 Dexterity content types

• Custom views

• Custom portlet

• Control panel

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

Exhibit Section

• Groups related Exhibit Items

• Can be used standalone for simple exhibits

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

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)

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, ...

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

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.)

Control Panel

• Choose what content types can be referenced by exhibit items

• Choose what content types can be added to exhibits

• Other ideas?

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

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

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

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?)

Questions, Discussion