Create a case study, write a review
April 29th, 2008 by Wendy PollockExhibitFiles members can post case studies of exhibits or exhibitions they’ve worked on and write reviews of exhibits (and exhibitions) they’ve visited. Consider contributing your experiences and reflections to this growing resource for the museum field.
You don’t have to complete your post all at once. It’s easy to work a little at a time, save a draft, and go back to it (you’ll find your drafts in your Profile—they’re visible only to you). You can email a draft to a friend. When you’re finished, click on Publish. Even then, you can go back in to make changes (choose the Edit link). Here’s some advice about how to get started:
Gather materials
Include images, a description, list of partners and people who worked on the exhibition, opening date, evaluation report, final project report, links to websites, and NSF grant award number if applicable. Important, too, are your reflections about what you learned and what would be valuable for your colleagues to know about.
Prepare your images
You can upload as many as 25 images. Organize them in the order you want to post them; it’s not yet possible to reorder them once they’re uploaded, and if you add later, that may shuffle the order. When displayed in a Case Study or Review, images are automatically sized (up or down) to 480 by 360 pixels. These images are then “clickable” allowing visitors to view them in their original size.
Start your draft
Log in, click on the “Add” tab, and choose to:
*Create a case study of an exhibition you’ve worked on—or of an exhibit (a single component or part of an exhibition)
*Write a review of an exhibition (or a single exhibit) you’ve seen in person
You’ll now see the entry form with prompts for creating your post.
Draft your post
For a case study of an exhibition, here’s what the form asks. For some items, there are drop-down boxes. * means the item is required.
Exhibition name*
Topic
Subtopic
Museum/organization name*
Museum focus
Exhibition opened in (yyyy)*
Month
Exhibition still open (Y/N)
Traveling exhibition? (Y/N)
City
Country (and for U.S., state)
Exhibition description and goals*
Development process and challenges*
Lessons learned, mistakes we made (and what we did about them)*
Collaborating organization(s) and role (s)
People who worked on this exhibit (or exhibition) Choose “add” for additional text boxes for more than one person
What was your role?
NSF grant number
Other funding source(s)
Estimated cost (less than 100,000 to over 3 million)
Size of exhibition (less than 1,000 sq-feet to over 10,000 sq-feet)
Website(s)
Upload image(s) Click “browse” to find the location of the images on your computer. Up to 25 images can be uploaded. Images should be uploaded in the order you want them to appear. Click on “+caption,” and a text box will appear where you can add a caption for each image.
You can also upload other media files (pdf, doc, mpg, mp3, mp4, mov, swf), evaluation and visitor research reports, and other associated files. If reports are posted on InformalScience.org (or another site), you can link to them.
A review follows a similar, but briefer, pattern, asking where and when you visited the exhibition and what your thoughts were. Check out other reviews to get ideas.
Tip:
In some places you can add multiple items (e.g., names of people who worked on an exhibition, images, associated files). Fill in the box, then click on “add” to open another for your next entry (a new box will appear). Click on the “trash can” icon to delete entries.
We’ve just added some new features to the ExhibitFiles site. You can now tag any case study or review. The tags are then added to the list of available keywords for each entry. This simple addition will help with search functionality. It also provides a new way to browse the growing contributions of ExhibitFiles members–users can now browse by tag on the redesigned Browse page.