http://www.artsmia.org/

I wrote the php content management system that drives this site as we were preparing to open the new addition to the museum. It brings together basic content management with a few other database projects I previously wrote to support a calendaring system and a collection viewer.

What works

The biggest success of this project is that it really got us to where the majority of the site was able to be edited by non-technical users. Why make the nerds the gatekeepers of information? It only irritates us. The integration of an existing calendar system lowered the amount of training necessary during an amazingly busy and stressful time. I expanded the collection area to add some really cool personalization features.

What I’d do differently

Though I like the system we ended up with, it probably would have been better in the long term to have written extensions to an open source content management system to serve our needs. By doing so, we could have taken advantage of the countless open source plug-ins out there and even collaborated with other museums to write museum specialized ones. Maybe one day, I’ll get to that.

http://www.artsconnected.org/

I wrote the bulk of this site that combines the assets of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center into a single education gateway. It’s been a few years since we wrote it and traffic has skyrocketed leading to some poor response times on aging hardware. Be patient, we’re rewriting it for Web 2.0 on modern hardware.

What works

This is the third iteration of this site. The collection features were really advanced at the time. No museum site offered the ability to collect and comment on works of art and I’m happy to have written one that’s really taken off. I wrote some really complex heavy database lifting that happens behind the scenes to get data out of the proprietary collections management system into a web accessible datasource.

What I’d do differently

This site has sat untouched for quite some time. We are taking the time to rewrite it for Web 2.0, but it would have been nice to have a site that could have scaled better. For a while, we were really suffering from success. It would have been nice to plan for the integration of other museums’ resources.

http://www.steve.museum/

Steve.museum is the product of a number of museums that came together to explore the use of tagging in museum collections. The Steve tagger is an open source web application that we created to allow museums to quickly add works of art to their sites and collect tags. I work with the development team in user experience and testing. I also created and maintain the project’s informational web site.

What worked

This project really highlights what can happen when museums come together to partner on open source applications. The development team is spread out across the world and we used agile methods to collaborate on a complex project.

What I’d Do Differently

The open source tagger has a few very particular dependencies. I’d love to see the software refactored to be simpler to implement and simpler to tie into existing systems.

http://www.musetechcentral.org/

MuseTech Central is a project of the Museum Computer Network. A small group of MCN members came together to specify and build a registry to share the projects museums have been working on. The hope is that by providing a directory of projects, museum professionals can find colleagues that have some experience and insight into projects that they may be going into. I was asked to provide the information architecture and provide insight into the user experience.

What Worked

The MuseTech central site is a wonderful illustration of a great idea pulled together on a shoestring. It’s a great start.

What I’d Do Differently

This site would have been far easier to implement and customize if we had used a stronger framework. Quite a few features included in the sepcifications were left out due to restrictions in the framework.

http://www.artsmia.org/prints-drawings/

This collection viewer is an application that drives a number of programs on the museum web site as well as in the museum. The application draws from a complex database transformation and export from the collections management system. By using different assets and css, we are able to present several different interfaces to the collection

What Worked

The collection viewer allows the museum to quickly present different slices of the collection as deep pools of information. Since it is easily skinned with new images and css, it allows the museum to quickly create subject specific programs for the site and the galleries.

What I’d Do Differently

Several of sections in artsmia.org draw on their own programming to do the same thing. Ideally, converting these sections to use the collection viewer would better serve the museum in keeping those applications up to date.

http://www.cityoflakesloppet.com/

The City of Lakes Loppet is the biggest urban ski race in America. Some of my former colleagues are skiers and had been trying to convince me to join them, so I learned to ski and became a volunteer for the race a few years ago. When the opportunity arose to rework their Web site, we volunteered to do it on our own time.

What worked

The site is a huge improvement for the organization. It is fresher and far more attractive. Since we used a content management system, the organizers and volunteers of the race are able to keep it incredibly up to date. We also used CiviCRM to manage volunteer registration, streamlining a large part of the volunteer coordinator’s effort. I was able to work with some former colleagues of mine on this project and it was a real joy to work with a team that worked well together. It’s sometimes easy to forget how much of a difference that makes. (Thanks guys!)

What I’d do differently

We’re still working with the organization on a few other sites, and we’ll come back to this one when it comes closer to race day, but the biggest thing is that we need to put more time into training. The content management system is a great tool, but it’s only useful if we can keep it up to date.

The CiviCRM software continues to mature and we’re hoping to be able to manage the race registrations through our site and cut out the costs of active.com. We’d also like to move the organization into using CiviCRM for all their constituent management.

http://www2.artsmia.org/wiki/

The Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program (MAEP) exhibits the work of living Minnesota artists in the museum. Run by a panel of artists elected by anyone who shows up professing to be an artist, it seemed fitting to create the program’s online archive using a wiki.

What worked

I’ve always been a big fan of the direction this project took. When we were planning this project, I threw out the wiki idea to really  challenge some people on the team to push their boundaries and let go of control. The site is built on MediaWiki, the php/mySQL application that runs wikipedia.

What I’d do differently

I’ve always wished that more people took to the wiki as a way to collaborate on creating a shared history. It really never panned out as such as most artists and panelist have never really taken to it. I don’t think it’s a matter of software, but more a matter of interest. It may have been worthwhile to work closely with the panel to add more voices to the wiki.

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.