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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