By Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems, New Zealand, Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, New Zealand
Published paper: Serendipity and readability: Building an engaging online collection site with limited resources
The Sarjeant Gallery is a small regional gallery in Whanganui, New Zealand. The Gallery does not have its own Web development or IT staff. The Gallery looked for engaging ways for visitors to browse their collection without assuming a prior knowledge of the collection contents. How could the collection be presented so that general visitors could make the most use of it?
What interfaces could be used without requiring the Gallery staff to spend significant time reworking the existing cataloguing records and images? What areas were worth focusing on with the limited time and budget available? With the new website, the Gallery had three broad aims: introduce innovative features, make the site as accessible as possible, and meet current technical best practice.
The Sarjeant Gallery staff were open to prototyping and experimentation and worked closely with Vernon Systems to see what might be possible with their collection data. Key fields of basic collection metadata are combined to create natural sounding sentences that are easier to read. Automated analysis of the collection images provided us with further options. The Gallery has received many positive responses to the site. Visitors are delighted by new discoveries as they browse artworks of similar colors and explore based on the subject keywords added by Google’s Cloud Vision tool. Interesting connections between works from different artists and periods are emerging based on the colors, shapes, and image orientations detected by the computer vision tools employed on the website.
MW18 Presentation: Serendipity and Readability: Building an Engaging Online Collection Site with Limited Resources
1. Serendipity and Readability:
Building an Engaging Online Collection
Site with Limited Resources
Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems, @armchair_caver
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Museums and the Web, Apr 2018
12. Considering visitor types
Explorers Facilitators
• Website should be easy to browse
• Simple options to filter the
collection
• Explore options: colour, image
orientation, time, subject,
object type
• Highlight works on
display at the Gallery
• Connect ‘visit planning’
pages where relevant
Experience Seekers Rechargers
• Explore by colour
• Connect works by keywords
• Provide highlight sets to
showcase groups of works
• Provide a clean,
uncluttered website where
the artworks are the
focus
Professional/Hobbyist
• Provide advanced search options
42. What’s next: Monitoring
with Google Analytics
Page views by explore option:
35% via a curated highlight set
23% via an object type link
12% via a colour swatch
43. What’s next
rights clearance
interpretive descriptions
regular changes to home page content
44. What’s next
quantitative displays of data (acquisitions by
decade for example)
better highlighting of works on display
Peoples’ Choice series
47. Related links
Blog posts
Looking at the Sarjeant Gallery’s collection through robot eyes:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/looking-at-sarjeant-gallerys-
collection-through-robot-eyes-c7fd0281814e
Building an accessible online collection for Sarjeant Gallery:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/building-an-accessible-online-
collection-for-sarjeant-gallery-48cbcac4fdb6
Websites
Cogapp image tagging test site: http://labs.cogapp.com/iiif-ml/
Sarjeant Gallery: https://collection.sarjeant.org.nz
Tools
Color Thief: http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/
Google Cloud Vision API: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/
48. Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Thank you!