As Wendy mentioned, this week we will be rolling out an update to the ExhibitFiles software. There are a few bug fixes, some changes in terminology, improved help, and a series new features. Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs or suggested changes. Many of your suggestions have found their way into the new version of the site.

These are the major improvements and changes that you’ll find in the ExhibitFiles last this week:

Search - We’ve added the ability to search all of the site content (case studies, reviews, and member profiles). In addition, keywords, author names, and museum names will be clickable–allowing users to see all of the records that relate to those terms. This a major improvement over our temporary Google co-op search engine.

Comments - The ability to edit comments for up to 15 minutes after posting will be added. Web addresses that are in comments will be clickable.

Profiles - We’ve added the ability to embed RSS feeds from your blog or a favorite one. In addition, you can now add thumbnails of your latest photos from flickr automatically. (See the image above.) Also, you will be able to add co-authors to your list of publications and presentations.

Contacts - When you add someone to your contact list, they will receive an email letting them know that you’ve added them.

Favorites - Case studies and reviews will now display icons and links to the profiles of those members who have “favorited” an exhibit.

We’re still testing these new features, but we’ll send along a message once these enhancements are in place. See you on the ExhibitFiles.

As June begins, the ExhibitFiles community has grown to more than 200 members—from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, throughout Europe, and across the United States—and it’s getting bigger every day. We were at the American Association of Museums meeting in Chicago in mid-May, beginning to spread the word in collaboration with the National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME). Karina White of the Huntington has posted a case study of Plants Are Up to Something, which just won AAM’s Excellence in Exhibition Competition for 2007; we hope to see other entrants soon.

Meanwhile, other ExhibitFiles members have been generously sharing their experiences and perspectives and helping us identify ways to improve the site. A number of fixes and new features will be rolled out in the next few days. You may see odd profiles and case studies showing up as we test the new system. Watch for details soon from Jim.

Two weeks after its launch there are more than 100 members of the ExhibitFiles. While some members have added extensive information about themselves, other profiles are nearly blank. With the addition of new features in profiles (some added in just the last week!) I thought it might worthwhile to explain these more in depth. We’ll likely summarize these in an e-mail to members but for those of you who read blog, here goes.

Once you’ve joined and have logged in, you can edit your profile and update your thumbnail. We’ve developed a custom “thumbnailer” application in Flash that makes this easy. Just select “Upload a new image and create a custom thumbnail” and the image will be loaded into the program. You can then re-size and re-position the highlight square to make a selection.

In your profile, you can add links to “Recent publications & presentations.” It’s there that you can also select the option to “Accept Members Email Messages” allowing other ExhibitFiles members to contact you through e-mail. As you may already know, it’s also through your profile that you view and edit “drafts” of case studies and reviews.

As you browse the ExhibitFiles site, and view published case studies, reviews, and other member’s profiles, you can add them to your “Favorites” or “Contacts.” It is our hope that profiles will become a resource in their own right. As other visitors view your profile, they can see your contacts and favorites, and this becomes yet another way to discover reviews, case studies, and other members profiles.

Finally, if you have a profile you might want to try “Googling” yourself. I did and I was surprised to find my ExhibitFiles profile on page one. Our “pretty URLs” which include full names (www.exhibitfiles.org/jim_spadaccini), proper title tags, and the fact that the ExhibitFiles blog has been around a year helps with Google ranking. Having a case study or review published also helps–since there is a link from multiple pages on the ExhibitFiles site to the profile. As you can imagine, the case studies and reviews which have the same “Google-ready” qualities, are well ranked too.
As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

There have been quite a few posts about ExhibitFiles in the last two weeks. It’s really nice to see interest in the site from around the world. Here’s a listing of some of the posts…

Fresh + New (Powerhouse Museum) - Exhibit Files - social networking for museum pros?
Museum 2.0 - ExhibitFiles: Interviews with Initiators Jim Spadaccini and Wendy Pollock
Designers who Blog - ExhibitFile Blog
Kulturelle Welten (in German) - ExhibitFiles ist online
Audience Research - ExhibitFiles Website
elearnspace - Vaporized knowledge…
[PUBLIC]_currating - (repost from Ideum blog) ExhibitFiles / the exhibit and exhibition development process

Thanks to Ideum and our team of beta testers, we’re now officially open, and the community is already beginning to grow! We invite all of our museum colleagues and friends to join up, contribute, and help build ExhibitFiles into a rich, collective resource. The blog will remain open for now, and we look forward to hearing users’ perspectives. Many thanks to Jim Spadaccini, James Kassemi, Geoff Escandon, Kemper Barkhurst, Chris Gerber, and all the others at Ideum who’ve been responsible for design and software development–and to the National Science Foundation for their support.

We’ve set the date. On April 23rd the ExhibitFiles website will be publicly available. Over the last nine months, we’ve shared part of the process with you via this blog. Now, in a month, you’ll be able to see (and participate in) ExhibitFiles for yourself. We appreciate all of the comments and suggestions we’ve received during this process; they have helped us improve the site’s design and functionality. Randi Korn & Associates will be carrying out a formal evaluation of the site during the summer, but meanwhile we hope you’ll continue to send your comments.
Once ExhibitFiles launches, we’ll continue to publish news here for the first few months as we consider whether and how to continue the blog. Meanwhile, we look forward to seeing you online in April!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything on the blog, but we wanted to bring you up-to-date on our design process. In mid-February, we met at ASTC headquarters in Washington for a day-long meeting to review the ALPHA site.

Our core team has been working with the ALPHA build for the last few weeks, and their comments have helped us fine tune the structure of the site as work toward BETA. (The latest site diagram above is available as a PDF.) One of our main concerns has been to make this site as responsive to the needs and ways of working of exhibit practitioners — including time constraints. So we’ve been simplying and clarifying while working out bugs. Work has begun on the final phase which will lead to a BETA release. We’ll be publishing that release date soon.

We’ve been hard at work building out some of the major features of the site. However, there’s not much we can share during this part of the process, so we haven’t been blogging.

We have made great progress, we have functional forms and a database that is collecting information. We’ll soon be adding the ability to comment and we’re still, of course, squashing bugs. The ALPHA site will be available in early January. We will post a message, and at that time, you can email us for access to try the site out.

Ruby on Rails (the framework that we are using to build the site) presented some challenges at first, but we are becoming increasingly confortable in the environment. Overall, it does some things really well, while other tasks have been made more difficult. The rails community online has been helpful, posts like Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing in Rails have helped us work through some unexpected problems.

The ALPHA site will run for the entire month of January. During that month we’ll be working on finalizing design details and looking at how to best present, search, and sort the information in the collection. In our next post, we’ll invite you to check out the ALPHA.

In looking to collect materials about the exhibit/exhibition design process we found ourselves focusing on case studies and reviews. Case studies will be descriptions of projects that a contributor worked on, while reviews are descriptions of exhibits/exhibitions that a contributor observed.

This idea originated in the design workshop in Berkeley in June, and it has stuck with us ever since. There was some discussion that reviews might seem too formal, but given the changing nature of the term it seems appropriate. Afterall, anyone can write a review on Amazon or similar sites.

The use of the terms exhibit and exhibition was also discussed. Exhibit for some, can mean an entire exhibition. To be clear, our use of the term exhibit denotes an individual exhibition component, while the term exhibition refers to a collection of exhibits. For the ExhibitFiles site, we’re looking to collect case studies and reviews on both exhibits and larger exhibitions.

We’ve outlined the following “path” members would use as they begin the process of adding content to the ExhibitFiles site….
—

What would you like to add to
ExhibitFiles?

A case study
of an individual exhibit
or an entire exhibition
that I worked on.

A review
of an individual exhibit
or an entire exhibition
that I saw in person.

By making a selection, a member would then go to the appropriate form. We’ve tried to make the language as clear as possible. Case studies are to be authored by someone involved in the development process. Reviews should be authored by individuals who have actually seen the exhibit or exhibition (not just those who’ve read the case study).

Below check out the PDF that includes details of the basic mockups of the forms. This is a working document, these are not final designs. We’d appreciate any comments that you might have.

Case Studies and Reviews v.6 (PDF 260k)

We’re grateful to all of the collaborators (PDF) who are helping to build the ExhibitFiles site and shape its development, and we welcome comments and contributions from other colleagues.