Case Studies

The initial project was tightly deadline driven, to coincide with the broadcast of an important documentary on PBS television. We found a way to get an initial subset of 1000 works, pre-approved by the curators, and with illustrators, online in time for this deadline.

In five years since then we have expanded the scope, to include some 40,000 works (currently approx 40% illustrated) and 7,000 artists; and added numerous features including personal collections, zoom images, associated videos, audio clips, and navigable object movies; added treatments of composite objects, multiple images, and multiple didactic texts; facilities to send e-cards, request reproductions and suggest keywords; and new ways of searching. Behind the scenes we have used COBOAT to create a one-button publishing system for updating the content of the online collection from the museum's propietary collections management database; created a custom system for formatting, uploading, and managing the image library that supports the online collection; and created a custom tool for editing rich text within the system.

The Results