Hi everyone,
Here are my notes from our meeting yesterday with David, Matt, and
Jennifer from the Detroit Institute of Arts. They're by no means
comprehensive, but hopefully they'll be useful.
Colin
Detroit Institute of Arts and Fluid Engage
• completely reworking and reinstalling all of their exhibits at the
gallery
• a shift from presenting works in strictly art historical terms, and
towards more inclusive or thematic approaches to organizing works
• for example, moving from chronological to "day in the life"
presentations of works
• they have great content: how can we give people technology and tools
so they can take what they've done in the gallery and extend it?
teachers, visitors, etc.
• they've had some success in using technology in the gallery, but
it's all one-offs, and very expensive to create
- electronic books
- Rivera Court: handhelds using video and other materials, but the
first generation of equipment was really difficult to use
- rich collection of documentation of these Diego Rivera murals:
photos, etc.
- created AcoustaGuide: company in NYC who traditionally build audio
tours; this was their first attempt at building handheld-based tour
- details are shown on the PDA; you can click through to find things
you're interested in
- can get commentary from local experts, poets, etc.
- still fairly tour-based
- people wear headphones and use a Nokia 800
- really wanted to allow visitors to add their own commentary
- see Fluid Engage as a way to build the next generation, and
something they can build upon
• TMS for collections database
• our own interpretive database using FileMaker Pro
• Through African Eyes, their next big exhibit in the pipeline
• generally have six or seven exhibits in various stages of development
- the length of development time is a pain point for them
- 12-16 months to do the design/development part, where you're
organizing the way the show is going to lay out in the gallery, the
text, educational material, etc.
• open slot in Fall 2011: that's a tight period for conceiving of a
new exhibit
• DIA was an early user of TMS
- there are portions they don't use: conservation and exhibitions
portions
- large collection: 60,000 objects with lots of fields and descriptions
- reporting is very limited: requires Crystal Reports
- good from a registrarial point of view, but not very useful in
terms of developing interpretive materials because of the limitations
of the fields
- exhibits module: limited ability to group objects and attach text,
but not useful enough, especially for large collections
• wanted a tool to do exhibit planning
• TMS keeps object information
• FileMaker lets them import data from TMS and then group them together:
- which objects go together in which gallery?
- different sections of objects in a gallery: more groupings
- even information about proximity within space
- information about look and feel
- interpretive material can be attached at any level: the gallery,
the section or the object
• they have a digital asset management system where graphic designers
build the actual labels
- their design team is off-site; contractors
- this company gives them online access to content, letting them make
changes to designs, etc.
• really interested in visitor participation:
- low-tech so far
- stations where people write postcards, etc.
- experimented a little with their website (Monet to Dali), where
they asked visitors to write their own labels for works of art
- planning to do so on several new exhibits
• web site:
- changes and innovation are very expensive, because they have to go
to outside contractors to change the website
- site has some basic ability to extract data from TMS, but again,
every upgrade costs
- contractor is M6
- they're frustrated, feel limited by the way they manage their website
- one of the attractions of Fluid Engage is having more control and
flexibility about how they deal with their website
- their contractor isn't a partner who helps them think through the
best ways to implement experiences on the Web
- website run by the marketing and PR department
- they've been doing some strategic planning about how to expand and
improve their website
---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org
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