The Purposeful Techie

Awhile back, I posted about ways to create online exhibits.  There are some new entries, and I have some additional comments, so it’s time for an update.

One new option is Open Museum. Right now, curating exhibits there is free, although that should change when they reach their beta phase.  (See the business faq.)  In the meantime, this seems like a nice option, particularly for small museums without the confidence to try some of the options with more technical requirements, or for those who like the idea of having a more social aspect to online collections.  While if it became a commonly-known portal for online museum exhibits, I think that might make it more valuable.  I’m not sure what Open Museum provides right now though that is not built into Flickr.

There may be some other options available, depending on where you are.  In Arizona, for instance, there is the Arizona Memory Project, which brings some similar online exhibits options, although with some of the same drawbacks of Flickr or Open Museum (i.e., few options for configuring into a more creative exhibit).

Before I talked about Pacyderm. The new release of Pacyderm (via Pachyforge) is “slated for release in Fall 2009.”  Granted, Fall 2009 hasn’t passed yet, but there seems to be very little going on.  That could be because they’re working hard on the new release, or because not much is going on.

Both Open Exhibits and Collection Space are still pending.  Open Exhibits has released some interesting survey results.  The numbers themselves are interesting, as are some of the responses to the open-ended questions.

Larry Cebula at Northwest History has recently posted about different Collections Management software options.  There are some good contenders, and some overlap with the ability to create online exhibits (for instance, CollectiveAccess seems like it does a great job of putting collections online, although perhaps not so much as “exhbits”).

Right now, I think CollectiveAccess and Omeka are my picks for the win – assuming a museum has someone who can install (and maintain) them.  I haven’t yet tried installing CollectiveAccess, but I have installed and configured Omeka, and, at least on Dreamhost, it was super fast and easy.

Are there online exhibits options I’ve missed?

This is a bit beyond basic, but I came across a great article on open source software from the NAME Journal, and couldn’t resist adding my two cents:

If you’re hoping to build an online exhibit, there are two stand-by methods for doing this:  coding the thing in HTML as you would anything else on the website, or programming it in flash. Both methods have their drawbacks.  If you’re going the HTML route, things can quickly get involved.  Say you would like to have an exhibit with 20 pieces (each being a chunk of the exhibit, including a photo and the “label.”).  That’s 20 pages to code.  Now, if you’re doing this by hand, the old fashioned way (i.e., in notepad), this is a significant project.  If you’re using Dreamweaver, it isn’t such a big deal, as you can set up a template.  You do still have to set up the navigation, assign urls to each page, check all the links, etc.

Flash has all sorts of drawbacks.  For one, a lot of web users still just don’t get flash.  Either they’re one of the three people in the U.S. still using dial-up, or they don’t have the flash plug-in, and aren’t quite sure how to change that.  It’s also more diffiult to create (Adobe/Macromedia Flash has been the standard (expensive) tool for doing so, although there are now other cheaper, easier options.

As is the case in web design in general, there is a definite movement toward both open-source and content management systems, and this can only be a good thing.  As Jim Spadaccini notes, there are a few possibilities coming along for building online, interactive exhibitions.

One is Pachyderm.  I have not yet been able to get a good feel for Pachyderm, as it is difficult to install, and not really compatible with my server.  The first issue is supposed to be resolved soon, with the next stable release (sometime before the end of the year).  I’m not sure about the second issue.  Here’s hoping!  There is also a hosted option, which is $99 a year.

Another is Omeka.  Omeka comes to us from the Center for History and New Media,*  and seems to be farther along than Pachyderm, but also seems more suited to a framework to upload collections, and allow visitors to create their own exhibit.  It also seems to work well for archives based exhibits, and I’m not completely sold on it being perfect for a artifact/art exhibit.  It was super easy to install and get running, however.

Exhibit Screenshot

Both Open Exhibits and CollectionSpace sound like they have good potential.  I’ll be waiting!

Yet another possibility is Drupal, with the Exhibit module.  I haven’t used this yet — it seems infinitely more suited to yet another build-your-own-exhibit scenario for site visitors, based on a largish database of images/data.

What other possibilities are there?

*If you’re not familiar with the Center for History and New Media, they have all sorts of wonderful tools and resources.  For anything related to digital humanities, they are a fantastic resource.