ExhibitFiles reaches a milestone April 23 with the first anniversary of the site’s opening. Started with the support of a committed core group of exhibits people, the site has grown to include more than 650 members from around the world, who have generously shared their experiences and reflections in more than 100 case studies and reviews.

Over the past few months, we’ve fixed some bugs, added open tagging, and built a new browse page that lets users search and sort in a variety of ways. Based on feedback from members, we’re improving image uploading and making plans for a way to post media files with short notes as a quick alternative to longer case studies and reviews.

We also plan to start using this blog to highlight themes that have begun to emerge across a number of case studies and reviews. There’s been encouragement to take on issues that may seem like “downers,” advice about how to work with artists in science centers, the observation “that solid exhibit tradecraft… can make even the silliest subject engaging,” and much more. There’s a lot of experience and wisdom gathered here.

We’re grateful to all who’ve contributed, and to the National Science Foundation for its support. And we look forward to the next year, and beyond.

Wendy

ExhibitFiles is winner of the Best of the Web award for museum professional sites, annnounced today during the Museums & the Web conference in Montreal. The award recognizes achievement in web design for sites that support distributed activity and innovative work among museum professionals.

Congratulations and many thanks to the 636 members who’ve joined up, contributed content, and helped to critique the site, and especially to the core group that’s guided our work. And many thanks to all of the developers and designers at Ideum who’ve been working with us to conceive and build the site.

Wendy

Jim Spadaccini and I are in Montreal at Museums & the Web this week, looking forward to demonstrating the site on Saturday morning. If you’re here, please stop by and give us your ideas as we plan next steps.Wendy

As 2007 comes to an end, the ExhibitFiles community numbers 513 members from around the world. Since the site opened at the end of April, we’ve collectively contributed 86 case studies and reviews on topics ranging from toasters to tenements, aging to Antarctica, memories to Matisse. It’s always a delight to open the site and find a new contribution.

In recent weeks, we’ve also been identifying ways to make ExhibitFiles better and more useful and are at work on changes in both design and ways to use the site. You’ll be hearing more soon.

For now, many thanks to all who’ve joined, contributed, and advised over the past eight months—and best wishes for the coming year.

ExhibitFiles has grown since May to more than 380 members and 70+ case studies and reviews. We’ve seen everything from Chagall to Second Life, with some classics like the Discovery Room in between.

Now it’s time for another round of improvements to the site, and we’d like your help. To make it easier for members to share their ideas, we’ve moved the blog to a more prominent location, with a tab near the top of the main page. We’ve been keeping track of the bug reports (and killing some bugs along the way). But we’d like to know more.

Please let us know your ideas for how the site could be improved by leaving comments here.

We’ll also be at the ASTC Annual Conference, which is coming up in LA in the middle of October, and hope to talk with ExhibitFiles members there. More on that soon.

Recent redesign of the ASTC website means more exposure for ExhibitFiles content. Feeds are now drawn directly into a tabbed area of the ASTC main page, highlighting the three newest ExhibitFiles case studies and reviews.

Together with a variety of other strategies, these feeds are helping to increase visibility of ExhibitFiles members’ contributions.

Latest is Judy White’s extensive case study about the development of the Smithsonian Institution’s first discovery room more than 30 years ago. There are now 39 case studies, 25 reviews, and more than 350 members.

Join up and share your experiences and perspectives with the growing community. And please let us know your ideas for site improvements. We’ll be making another round of changes soon.

Those of you who use the Mac OS might be interested in a Apple Dashboard Widget that displays the latest updates from the ExhibitFiles right on your Mac Desktop.
Download the widget (Mac OS X users only):
exhibitfiles.wdgt.zip

In future versions, we’d like to add recent comments. We’re also interested in possibly exploring other widget types such as Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, and others. This is version 1.0, so your feedback is appreciated.

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.