Foot in the Door
http://www.artsmia.org/foot-in-the-door/
Foot in the Door was a open exhibition where any artist in Minnesota could bring in a work less than one cubic foot in size and have it shown in the museum. We brought in over 1,700 works of art and built a quick data capture rig with a consumer digital camera and site to quickly capture each work of art for the site.
What worked
This project was a huge success for a number of reasons. I wrote a quick application that would allow for immediate photography and data entry so the images and data were captured as soon as the works were brought in. We also entered the gallery location as we put things up, so in the end, the site became the most useful way to find a specific work. This site had tremendous success. Knowing that people would like to show all their friends that they had a work in the museum, I wrote an e-mail postcard function into the site. Huge traffic resulted from the egos of 1,700+ artists.
What I’d do differently
Not much I’d change with this application. If we were doing this today, I’d send the emails as html instead of the links we sent out previously, but the time, it wouldn’t have reached as many users had we done that. It would have been fun to add commenting and rating to try to make even more of a popularity contest of the site. This would be the perfect activity to move the museum into the social applications world.