Over the last 18 months, we’ve received a lot of suggestions for new features for the ExhibitFiles site. One recurring request is to allow members to post not just full Case Studies or Reviews of exhibits and exhibitions, but short message or media elements. In other words, members could share one image (or video) or just an idea or a question. We’ve been thinking about how best to incorporate this potential new feature.

We want to make it easy to add media so we are envisioning a system that would allow for direct uploads to the ExhibitFiles server or links to images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, along with other services.

Here’s a few mock-ups of how it might work. The first one shows the “Add” page, where members are asked what they would like to contribute to the ExhibitFiles site.

The next screen shows how the ‘Bits main page might look. (Obviously, the gray thumbnails would be populated with images.)

Finally, here’s a mock-up of an individual ‘Bits page. We’re hoping to add the ability to make comments that have associated media files. Notice there is an integrated media-player. This improvement would also be added to Case Studies and Reviews.

This is all preliminary and we’re still working through the details. I didn’t post the proposed form for adding ‘Bits, as this has many layers due to the multiple choices.  (There are lot’s of options for that screen, since we are allowing members to include images and video that already exists on external social media platforms).

We’re open to any comments or questions you might have about ‘Bits. We’ll let you know how this all progresses.

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.

Other additions to the Browse page include a new thumbnail viewer as well as improved “sort” capabilities in the columns toward the bottom of the page. Case studies and reviews can now be displayed by Popularity, along with Title and Date. All of these changes should make it easier for members and visitors find entries of interest in the ExhibitFiles collection.

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.

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.

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.

This site diagram (site diagram v2 PDF) illustrates the relationship between the various components of the proposed ExhibitFiles site. Since one of the key functions of the site is to “include shared records of exhibition descriptions,” the ability to add, browse, and search these records is a major part of the site structure. So far the design process has focused on the elements that make up these individual records. (See blog posts, “Personal Profiles” and “Case Studies and Reviews“).

Beyond the specifics, our discussions have focused on what is the “right amount” of information. Too much and users won’t want to add case studies or reviews, too little and we might be omitting important information. Obviously, we need to meet the needs of the members of the ExhibitFiles site. A major and ongoing concern has been how can we best encourage active participation.

Wendy’s last post, Tapping the wisdom of the crowd, explained in detail the concept of drawing ISEN-ASTC-L messages directly into the ExhibitFiles site. This is not the only place that ExhibitFiles members will have opportunities to converse. Comments (and ratings) can be added to any case study or review. Trying to anticipate conversation in a complex social site is difficult, so we intend to see how things go and make some adjustments as the site is launched and these conversations begin.

In our Berkeley design meeting, the issue of “ratings” was discussed and, for the most part, participants were concerned that employing such a system could trivialize contributions to the site. It was agreed that rating systems such as the starred Yahoo! ratings for news stories would not be appropriate in this environment.

As an alternative, we looked to favorites as way to sort reviews, case studies, and other content on the ExhibitFiles site. As members add items to their own favorites, a record of that addition will be associated with that item, so reviews or case studies that are favorited by many users could be presented in some way (e.g., most favorited). Also, each member’s list of favorites can be useful for others, in the same way the del.icio.us bookmarks can be made available to all members.

As our discussion progressed, we revisited the concept of “ratings.” This was due in part to addition of the ISEN-ASTC-L component. Having a way for ExhibitFiles members to help sort the messages that are most relevant to the site is essential, since not all of the messages on the Listserv are directly related to exhibit design. The example of Digg in which visitors give a simple thumbs up or thumbs down to content items as way to sort was discussed, as was Amazon’s Was this review helpful to you? Yes or No feature.

We’re looking to add a similar feature: “Did you find this useful? Yes or No.” This simple Yes/No rating along with favorites will help “score” the Listserv messages as well as case studies and reviews. While ratings won’t be the only way to browse (and search?) the ExhibitFiles content, having some methods for letting the community decide what information is most useful is important. We hope to have a large collection of records and conversations about exhibit design, so community members will need various methods to find the materials that are important to them.

After months of discussion and review we’re finally getting to the point of building out components of the ExhibitFiles site. While the pace will pick up dramatically over the next few weeks, we’re still very interested in your comments and ideas. The current push is for our first build to be ready in January 2007. We will be taking a look at the site again in late spring once the first members begin to contribute and use the site. As we design and develop elements for the ExhibitFiles, we’ll be posting page grids and other diagrams on this blog. As always, we welcome your comments and questions.

Earlier discussion about the relationship between ExhibitFiles and the ISEN-ASTC-L list got us thinking. Paul Orselli notes that topics recur and wonders whether we could create an FAQ or resource drawn from the list archive. Like Paul, we wondered whether there is a way to integrate ExhibitFiles and the list, with its well-established community of 1,370+ members. And then: Is there a way to tap the collective wisdom of the exhibit community to add value to the discussions already happening on the list? We’ve come up with these ideas:

• Draw ISEN-ASTC-L messages directly into the ExhibitFiles site, identifying threads and perhaps adding photos for registered ExhibitFiles users. (We would notify ISEN-ASTC-L subscribers, of course, and also encourage them to register as ExhibitFiles users.)
• Add a simple rating system: “Did you find this message useful? Yes or No“
• Enable registered ExhibitFiles users to add messages (and threads) to a list of “favorites” within their profiles

These ratings would then help sift out what’s of most lasting interest and make it available for others.

Andrea Bandelli (drawing on James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds) has reflected elsewhere about the qualities that make a crowd “smart.” “It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinion into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.”

We hope that the design approach we envision will help us, collectively, tap the wisdom of the exhibit “crowd.”