Word of mouth: That’s how most members found out about ExhibitFiles.  Others stumbled upon it while searching the web. That’s by design: the site uses a number of strategies to make it likely profiles and posts will show up high on search results.

Once people have joined, why do they come back? For inspiration and help with a new project are two big reasons. But email from the site is number one – a reminder to come back and see what’s new.

That’s why we’ll be relaunching the newsletter soon. We’re looking forward to seeing members come back often, and contributing more.

These findings are based on a study carried out earlier this year by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting, St. Louis, Missouri.

Who belongs to ExhibitFiles? About 1,600 people from around the world have joined the site since its April 2007 opening – including our newest members, from the Chicago area and Kuala Lumpur, who joined in the last week.

When we asked earlier this year, most ExhibitFiles members said they were experienced (54.7%) or senior (25.0%) professionals. Another 14.7% considered themselves “entry level,” and some (4.7%) were students. (Fewer than one percent called themselves “retired.”) Members are involved with exhibitions in a wide variety of ways. Most listed as their primary responsibility exhibition development (33.5%) or exhibition management (13.0%), but we also have members who work primarily in new media, visitor studies, and fabrication and maintenance. (See right.)

Science centers and museums are the type of organization or context in which the largest single group of members work. That’s not surprising, because the site was started by ASTC with funding from the National Science Foundation. But from the beginning, the site has been open to everyone in the museum exhibition community, including independent firms and consultants, the next largest group (17.2%). (See left.)

These findings are based on a study carried out earlier this year by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting, St. Louis, Missouri. Methods included a February 2010 survey of ExhibitFiles members (N=286, a response rate of 22.2%); in-depth interviews with users with high, medium, and low levels of participation (N=15); and analysis of the ExhibitFiles member database. We’ll be reporting more findings in future posts – and letting you know more about the changes we’re making in response.

We’ve listened to you. With your valuable feedback, we’ve been working on a new and improved version of ExhibitFiles, which opens today. Here are some of the features you may notice:

• Bits – Those short posts we added a few months ago are now visible on the home page.

• Profiles – We’ve added a tabbed section and place for you to pull in info from other social networking sites like LinkedIn.

• Members page - We’ve added a sorting feature that highlights top contributors. Users without full names are no longer prioritized.

• Search – Improvements include more targeted search and more result relevance.

• Other improvements – We’ve improved browser compatibility and boosted speed.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the results of the recent evaluation that helped us plan these and other changes still ahead. For now, many thanks to James Kassemi, Jim Spadaccini, and other members of the Ideum team; to Carey Tisdal, evaluator; and to our funder, the National Science Foundation.

ExhibitFiles contributors are among the 450 people who’ve gathered in Washington, D.C., this week for the biennial ISE Summit, organized by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) with support from the National Science Foundation.

NSF’s ISE program has funded a number of projects – CAISE, InformalScience.org, and ExhibitFiles among them – that together are building what some have called an “improvement infrastructure” for the informal science education field. The 240+ case studies and reviews, and the growing number of Bits, contributed by ExhibitFiles members are an important part of the collective memory that’s supporting good work i our field.

Always meant to post a case study or review but haven’t quite gotten around to it? We still hope you will – but meanwhile, there’s another way to share even a small bit of information or experience. It’s easy to upload an image, or link to our Flickr images or videos on YouTube and add a quick observation or question. You can respond to other Bits with your own images, too.

Along with Bits there are other enhancements to the site that will make it easier to use. Icons in the Comments feed on the main page help you quickly find the newest Bits, with their associated media files.

Let us know what you think. Many thanks to Ideum and to the National Science Foundation for the funding that enabled us to add this feature and keep this site commercial free.

We celebrated the solstice by reaching a milestone: There are now 1,000+ members of ExhibitFiles. Welcome to all of our newest members!

Since the site opened at the end of April last year, word has spread, and the community’s grown – and with it, the collection of shared memories and experiences posted here.

There are other ways to share, from the more traditional channels like journal articles to personal blogs. But by contributing to ExhibitFiles, we’re building a collective resource that’s easily accessible, everywhere in the world. We’re glad to see that museum studies students have begun to use the site to post reviews and hope to see more; you’re acting as eyes and ears for the rest of us. And for those who haven’t yet shared your stories, we’ll all look forward to reading about them in the new year. For now, thanks to all for your contributions, and best wishes for 2009.

Wendy

If you’re a member of ExhibitFiles, and you haven’t yet “favorited” a case study or review, this would be a good time to start. Just a year and a half after the site initially opened, 69 members have taken time to post 137 case studies and reviews, helping to build a common resource for all of us who work with exhibitions.

But many other members are helping, too, by adding tags and comments, and by marking “favorites.” Over time, “favorites” help site users to browse by “popularity.”

We’ll be recognizing some contributions (and contributors) during the ExhibitFiles brunch at the ASTC conference coming up in Philadelphia. Hope to see some of you there.

Wendy

ExhibitFiles members will be participating in the ISE PI Summit 2008 , July 25-26, when leaders of informal science education projects supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) gather here in Washington, D.C. More than 180 projects will be represented at the Summit, including not only exhibitions, but a range of media, from youth and community programs to broadcast media and online games.

NSF has been supporting the development of ExhibitFiles, so the site can serve as a resource for the science exhibition field. Exhibits people typically rely on personal memories and social networks to fill in the gaps; but the high level of turnover in the field, and retirement and passing of older colleagues, mean much of the history is being lost. By building a collaborative community site with a rich and growing set of exhibition records at its core, it is our hope that together we will preserve this history and support development of a culture of critique. Many NSF-funded exhibition projects, old and new, have already posted case studies, and we look forward to seeing more. Kathy McLean and Wendy Hancock of the ExhibitFiles team will be at the Summit later this week to help anyone who hasn’t yet registered.

The gathering is organized by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), founded in 2007 with NSF support, which is housed at ASTC. CAISE partner organizations include Oregon State University (OSU), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), and Visitor Studies Association (VSA).

ExhibitFiles 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.

For those new to ExhibitFiles, you may be wondering what you can do now that you’ve set up an account. Here are a few ideas:Add a photo to your profile—Log in, click on the Profile tab, and look for “update thumbnail.” Choose “upload a new image” and browse your computer to locate an image of yourself. Mark the part you want as your thumbnail by clicking and dragging the box. Choose “edit profile” to add blog and Flickr feeds.Comment on a case study or review—When you comment, the person who posted the case study or review gets a message and knows someone’s been reading and thinking about the post.Favorite a post—As more material is added to the site, being able to browse by “popularity” helps users find their way around, and the more often a post is favorited, the higher its “popularity” ranking.Contact another member—If you want to get directly in touch with another registered ExhibitFiles member, you can usually contact them through a link in their profile (“contact this member”). To allow other members to contact you, check off a box you’ll find when you edit your profile.Create a case study, write a review—You can work on a draft, email it to someone else, and even after you publish your case study or review, you can still edit it.Tag—Actually, you don’t even have to be logged in to add a tag to a case study or review. This helps make the browse page more useful to everyone.And another tip:Use Firefox—If you don’t have this browser, you can download it free here.