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?
Thanks for the mention of Open Museum! I wanted to correct one thing–we are committed to keeping Open Museum free for both visitors and museums. Our FAQs were a little outdated, but are now revised to reflect that change. Also, we are actually quite different from Flickr in that we allow people to create what we call “thick” objects–objects that can have several different kinds of information about them, including video, audio, slideshows, still images, and text. Curators can add to or edit those objects at any time, making their objects thicker and more interesting as more information about them becomes available. In addition, Open Museum encourages discussion between visitors and curators, so that real dialogue can happen between all museum stakeholders.
So rather than simply offering a site where people can display single images (like Flickr), Open Museum provides museums and visitors with ways to interact with each other on an ongoing basis–an extended conversation, if you will.
Hi Lauri,
Thanks for chiming in with the updated information. Much of my exploration of Open Museum was several months ago, and perhaps the collections I browsed weren’t making full use of the capabilities.
-K
Our company, Vernon Systems, have been develop collection management systems since 1985. Last year we released the world’s first CMS built solely as software as a service. It called eHive ( http://ehive.com ) and has a free account for up to 5,000 records. Annual fees are based on the storage used.
Public access functions are built in. e.g. Tagging, commenting, different options for searching and exploring the collections. We’re working on APIs at present to allow the content to be rebranded on other websites. We’ve already done this for the NZMuseums portal – a portal for the 400 museums in New Zealand.