Perspectives on Open Source for Museums’ Digital Projects

Open-source software has transformed the technology industry, and the movement's goals of community and access align closely with our museums' missions. So why do our open-source projects so often fail to succeed? Three experienced panelists offer three different perspectives and discuss topics such as the role of community and how to foster it, the importance of maintenance and maintainers, Not-Invented-Here, reputation capital, alignment issues with grant-funded projects, business models for open-source projects, and long-term sustainability.

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Digital humanities

Duane Degler

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

If you’ve ever sat in on a discussion between a curator and an archivist, then you understand the breadth and richness of stories hidden in collections. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library and historic home collections. Collections Online is a vital shared resource for the Museum and the public. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.
Hello, Meet Hola! Design for Mixed-language Interfaces

A global online user population necessitates the exchange of content from different sources, and the ability to aggregate multilingual content is a critical requirement within many research and business contexts. To effectively reach a global audience and provide access to content in multiple languages, we must structure mixed-language content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration. In this interactive session, we provide real-world examples for doing just that.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Website

In this demonstration of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's collection browse website, launched as a beta in September 2019, Duane Degler and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's Rana Chan discuss the project background, linked data architecture approach, and the O'Keeffe team's thoughts on the future. This webinar was presented to the Museum interest group of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community.
Archives Strengthening Historical Narrative: Sharing Digital And Linked Data Resources For Broader Reach And Sustainability

In their MW2018 panel presentation, Duane Degler joins Mark Coffey and Alan Watts, both from the Texas Coastal Bend Collection, to provide insights into ways oral history and images can be used to assemble flexible topic-based narrative structures. This session provides insight into technical and curatorial approaches, so others don’t have to “start from scratch.”
Going Global: The Intersection of IA and UX in a Multilingual Environment

In their IA Summit talk, Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, and Janette Shew discuss how to structure multilingual content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and how to provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration of that content.
Linked Collections and an Enhancement Ecosystem

In their ARLIS/NA poster, Duane Degler and Kate Blanch offer key steps in the theory and practice of managing collection data as linked data, a framework that supports ongoing enhancement of digital resources, and ways to discuss your approach toward digital scholarship.
Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

In this Data Harmony User Group 2018 session, Duane Degler outlines approaches for increasing taxonomy integration into search and browse, thus drawing the greatest value from your taxonomies for your users.
Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

In this MCN2017 session, Duane Degler moderates a panel discussing how institutions and projects are using linked data and modern technologies to achieve long-term outcomes for themselves and others.
User Experience Design Considerations for Multi-Museum Online Collaborations

In this MCN2016 session, Duane Degler and Lesley Humphreys share human-centered user experience considerations and requirements that pertain specifically to the challenges faced by collaborations among multiple collections, sites, and institutions.
Creating Personal Profiles Across Time and Distance

Personal data capture and algorithmic modeling of user preferences and interests is maturing. In this talk, Duane Degler explores some of the considerations for longitudinal preference management, how adaptive interfaces might play a role, and how users could interact with a model at a particular time in an application.
Emerging Tastes: Considering How Preferences Evolve

Experiencing cultural heritage is a voyage of discovery and learning, where emerging insights and serendipity play a significant role. The experience also happens in a blended personal and social context. At the broader level, engagement is longitudinal – what we learn from modern cultural experiences (daily life in our surroundings) can provide clues to analogous interests in cultural materials, and vice versa. This paper addresses richness of personal experience poses challenges and opportunities for capturing preferences in ways that support a user’s experience with cultural heritage across institutions and over time, both in the digital realm and where digital interaction blends with a physical space.
Perspectives and Considerations for Linked Open Data in Cultural Heritage

An overview of considerations for creating, publishing, managing, and using linked data in a cultural heritage context.
Blowing Up the Book: Design Challenges for Online Cultural Heritage Information

In 2009, The Getty Foundation issued a challenge to eight art museums: translate a scholarly catalog rich with cultural heritage data, images, and interpretation into an online resource that strives to reach beyond the limitations of print in creative and useful ways. "Systematic catalogs" are a time-honored and resource-intensive method of publishing the core art historical data and art research associated with the cultural objects that these institutions hold in public trust. And so the Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI) was begun with the goal of "blowing up the book"... not to eliminate or destroy, but rather to expand the utility and audience of these important resources.
Design Concepts and Lessons from Linked Data for Digital Humanities

Projects in LOD-LAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums) give us a perspective on creating rich, relevant, usable applications for heterogeneous linked data. This presentation shows examples and describes our design approach.
Now What? Creating Innovative LODLAM Sites and Apps

With the rapid evolution of a semantic web, it is no surprise that many cultural institutions, large and small, are exploring Linked Open Data (LOD) as a means of connecting distributed data across the Web and across internal repositories. This presentation explores the questions, practicalities, and implications related to designing sites and applications for linked open data.
Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous)

The tide of available information continues to rise. The opportunities that come from open access, linked data, sharing resources with other institutions, and standards-based data are enticing - and perhaps overwhelming? In this talk, we discuss the role of design to help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects. We share experiences from projects and research that help you think about Information Objects and the emerging drivers for user experience, including Getty and Mellon-funded systems where we’re beginning to test ideas about how to support a broad set of goals for interaction in complex information spaces we're facing today.
Designing for Information Objects: The Library, Archive & Museum (LAM) Information Ecosystem for Now and for the Future

Museums, libraries and archives hold physical objects that people interact with every day. Just as there is a physical object, there is an “Information Object” that people use, and authoritative institutions curate that information for now and the future. This talk is about designing the Information Object, and the role of shareable, structured information.
Layered, Adaptive Results: Interaction Concepts for Large, Heterogeneous Data Sets

Some data environments are not well served by current styles of search results presentation. One example of this is large-scale archival, library or museum collections. The range of user goals and interaction needs can be quite broad, and the information itself is highly structured yet very heterogeneous — it spans many subject areas, information types, and presentation/media. Based on the use of semantic web formats for metadata, in this paper we explore how to leverage the semantic relationships to drive aspects of results presentation — to change elements of the UI itself in response to the results data.