Attendees:
- Adrian Turner, CDL
- Alexandra Dolan-Mescal, UCR
- Audra Eagle Yun, UCI
- Brian Tingle, CDL
- Cristela Garcia-Spitz, UCSD
- Emily Lin, UCM
- Eric Milenkiewicz, UCR
- Gabriela Montoya, UCSD
- Jerrold Shiroma, UCM
- Kelly Spring, UCI
- Kelsi Evans, UCSF
- Robin Katz, UCR
- Roger Smith, UCSD
- Sara Fitzgerald, UCR
Hosted by: Sherri Berger and Amy Wieliczka, CDL
Contributor round-robin:
"Tell us a little about your experience with digital exhibitions. What have you done/are you doing? What tools are you using? What do you hope to do? etc."
UCI:
- UCISpace: not necessarily curated
- The whole library uses this so there's a whole mix of stuff in there - e.g. data sets
- Southeast Asian Archives collection, built on the previous Calisphere infrastructure
- Currently working on photograph collections - legacy projects in the middle of production
- Interested in inter-institution projects
- "Totally invested in Calisphere as public interface"
- Haven't talked about audience in detail - excited about the idea of grouping content by topic
UCM:
- Recently demo'ed an Omeka site - drawing together an exhibition of materials
- Some oral histories recorded by a faculty member, re: history of a Japanese American community in the San Joaquin valley
- Hope to do more of this - ethnic groups that have settled here and would like to present their histories - using Omeka
- They'd like to pull in materials available on Calisphere
- They did some early on connecting with the Nuxeo connector
- Related: when they launched the Ramicova costume design collection on Calisphere, Jerrold created a separate website to feature the works because there isn't currently a way to pull together works by production
Riverside:
- They're using Omeka for digital exhibits (vanilla - no customization)
- 2 online in that system, plus a few HTML based legacy ones floating around, which they'd like to migrate forward in some kind of system
- They've committed to Nuxeo and they're going to look towards the UC Santa Cruz plugin
- Way down the line: goal is looking into an instance of Drupal for exhibits, since their new library website will be Drupal based
- They're also interested in what Calisphere is doing - they want something easy to use that's tailored to different formats
- Multimedia is very important
- They launched a digital exhibits committee - thinking through all this
- Another use case is digital exhibits that complement a physical exhibit
San Diego:
- They've had a number of custom-coded web page exhibits - collections of distinction in special collections
- Focus on Dr. Seuss, spanish civil war, local history, Baja CA; point to objects that reside in their local DAMS (hydra/blacklight)
- Doesn't always point to their DAMS instance of an object - some of it is locally digitized
- Additionally: 3 standalone sites - California Explores the Ocean (aggregation/presentation of a theme); Farmworker Movement website (purchased from a curator); San Diego technology archive (mostly oral history interviews and transcripts) - they'd love to look at other tools for how they could better manage and preserve these
- They're looking at Spotlight - hoping they can develop a narrative or use case that covers this and looks forward at supporting these initiatives; dovetails with digital humanities
- Finally, they also have exhibit-like spaces inside their DAMS, ways of grouping content
San Francisco:
- Different types of exhibits - they do about 2 a year in the library, in the physical space; they'd like to present them digitally as well
- They did a quick and dirty version of this in Omeka for their campus's 150th anniversary
- Now they've shifted to Nuxeo and Calisphere as primary-facing web presence
- They installed the plugin and are toying with that
- Radiologic imagery will has a LOT of stuff on Calisphere, but want to create a bit of a subspace
- They'd like to have everything streamlined on one site so they are holding for now
- They also have something called "projects" e.g. AIDS history project - many different collections that fit under one umbrella - pull them together in a curated space
Design walkthrough:
- Do those 12 items at the top change or are they always the same?
- If order of the objects is important (is it?), then they will need to stay the same - envisioned as the first 12
- Would we limit the number of items in a set?
- Probably not, depends on the story you're trying to tell
- It's image-centric - what about multimedia and different objects?
- We'll support all content types that are in Calisphere, but we should think through how this looks for audio, in particular, and make sure it is still engaging.
- UCSD has experimented with a lightbox and run into challenges
- Found it was great for highlighting an image but not necessarily multimedia
- Didn't help with groups of images, the way the UC San Diego History site works
- What about grouping objects? i.e. maybe sets of a few of them at a time?
- Example: UCM oral histories, they'd want to pull together audio recordings, oral histories, etc.
- Would this support just your one campus, or could you pull everything?
- Everything!
- Anything on Calisphere - even harvested content
- I noticed with the old themed collections, once i drilled down in, I couldn't see where this material originated from. Will this be better?
- Yes, we think so. Part of the idea of the lightbox is allowing users to see the object without leaving the exhibition; some metadata will be supplied there. Plus when the user goes to the new object page, that information is more prominent than it was before.
- We are open to hearing more about what kind of metadata appears here.
- What's the timeline for this?
- April/May
- What's the backend interface? will it be in Nuxeo, or something different?
- Something different - this is in the Calisphere back-end, which is based in Django. It won't look nice at first.
- Would this work for you?
- UCSD: an extension of what we're doing locally; refining the way grouped collections are expressed
- UCR: we'd want to do more with timelines, geocoding, etc
Sherri's takeaways:
- "Exhibition" has a lot of different meanings, takes a lot of different forms depending on campus, content, etc.
- There is some interest in a Calisphere exhibitions builder like this, especially if a campus wants to:
- Keep all their permutations of content together on Calisphere (e.g. UCSF could envision a more curated subset of a big collection)
- Work with other institutions and grab other objects from across Calisphere to make the exhibition
- UX feedback / blockers heard so far:
- Must support (and be optimized for) other types of media, not just images
- Grouping objects within exhibitions is important - e.g. for oral history recordings + transcripts, or dividing by format
- Timelines and maps are other features that are desirable
- Lightbox affect presented challenges for UCSD - follow-up for more info
- Good to make clear the contributing institution and collection - there's more context here than in old themed collections
- There are also use cases for having exhibitions - or fully customized sites - locally
- Calisphere API is a tool for this
- But maybe there is more CDL could do to support next-gen "skin and slice" (local incarnations / special websites that pull from Calisphere content) - Exhibit data API? Spotlight as potential tool?
- We should also think about how we can link to these through Calisphere, so users can find these exhibitions even if they aren't hosted on the site
- Possibly related to exhibitions: there's a need to group content in different ways
- making finer distinctions within collections (e.g. productions for UCM Ramicova)
- grouping collections into broader themes (e.g. AIDS history for UCSF collections)
- We need more conversations about this - other features and ways we can support these use cases beyond "exhibitions" per se
