First up, collections search.

Search is available on every page on the site.

We created rich menus for the navigation of the website.  Under the “Art” menu item you’ll find we’ve added a collections search box.  This makes the collections available from every single page on the website.

Overview of the collections search page.

Upon visiting the collections search page itself, you’ll be presented with a random selection of works of art that are currently on view in the galleries.

Hovering a result gives detailed information.

In the picture above, I did a search for “landscape“. Hovering the results presents you with some more information and options for each work. You can quickly see if the work is currently on view and how relevant it is to your search. You can also click the magnifying glass to zoom the image or click on several other places to visit the works web page.

We're talking serious zoom.

Results can be filtered by creator.

We can see from search logs that most people are actually searching by artist names. In response to this we have added the ability to filter your search results by creator. In the screenshot above I have filtered my “landscape” search to only show works by John Ottis Adams.

User supplied tags make works easier to find.

Sometimes you might be looking for a work in a non-standard way. User-supplied tags can make it easier to find works that may not have the words in the tombstone that you are looking for. Case in point: a recent Super Bowl bet in which we now have to lend a specific work to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

You can select custom creation date ranges.

Finally we wanted to make it easy to search works by their creation and accession dates. We added some simple sliders to the advanced section of the form that let you do exactly this. In the example above I am viewing works from our Asian department that were created during the Edo period. You can ask some reason specific questions using the search. In the example below I am looking for paintings acquired since the beginning of 2009.

You can also select custom accession date ranges.

We always love feedback, good or bad. Let us know what works and what doesn’t.

I’m going to let the images do most the talking, but please note that none of the design or content is completely finalized below.

A view of a user dashboard

Each user has a customizable dashboard with a personalized view into their projects and activity.  I might be considered an average user with 27 projects.  Some users have more than 100! The project order is customizable so you have quick access to your most frequent projects.

The project listing widget on the dashboard.

Below is a peek inside a project.  Each project can enable and disable features such as file sharing, an image gallery, tasks, etc.. You can also see recent activity on just the project you are viewing.

A view inside a project.

We wanted a way to engage users in the system and promote fast adoption.  Our solution was a built in gaming module. Users earn a small amount of points for every action they perform in Athena. — This feature can be turned off with the flick of a switch for those without a sense of joy in life. — As users earn more points they unlock new features. The features include themes and helpful widgets for their dashboard (e.g. a todo list).  Additionally, users are assigned a certain rank based on their points. Users must work hard to be promoted from “Newbie” to “Tom Brady” to “Intern” and so on.

An elite Athena user am I.

Below you can see an example of when a user earns a new feature.

You earned a new level.

Additional motivation is given by a ranking dashboard widget. Users can see other users right around them and track how to they move relative to others.

I will get you Daniel.

In the spirit of transparency, here is a few of the statistics we monitor. Of interest is that we have more external users than IMA staff users. Any staff member can invite any e-mail address to a project.  That external user gets their own dashboard and rank. In just 18 months we have accumulated over 11,000 files weighing in at 22GB of office documents. All these documents are indexed and their contents are searchable, so they are actually very easy to locate.

Athena statistics so far.

Moving ahead we would be interested in releasing Athena for others to use. It’s always a work in progress. We’re also keeping our eye out for better solutions that could come along.

Yes, I was just in Washington DC, but this post isn’t going to be about national politics. A few of us recently returned from the Museum Computer Network conference – four days of workshops, presentations, and case studies on topics ranging from virtual machines to the semantic web. Since I totally forgot about having to blog upon our return, I’ll just share some of the bits I found interesting.

First off, Rob and I ran a workshop on building an exhibition site with Drupal. Anyone interested can download the slides on Slideshare. We gave a quick overview of the sites that we have built with Drupal so far, and then went through the process from installation to end product using the To Live Forever website as an example. We received very good feedback, and hopefully the particiants will go forth and create great websites.

Koven Smith of the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave a great talk on the inner workings of Semantic Web technology. I have heard a lot about the semantic web, but now I feel like I actually understand how it works. After this session my curiosity led me to pop in on the end of a discussion about copyright issues in virtual worlds… I’ll just say that the semantic web is more straightforward to me at the moment.

Youngjin Yoo, associate professor of Management Information Systems at Temple University, gave a great presentation making the case that innovation is a collaborative experience. In contrast to “change management”, in which a product is developed and a community is subsequently persuaded to use it, he argued that products must be designed with users in the loop. This is definitely part of good software engineering practice, where well informed use cases drive design.

We were also given an introduction to Ohana (the intranet system used by the Smithsonian) by Erin Weinman. Having created our own internal project management system, it was interesting to see how Ohana was designed to make use of MediaWiki. In fact, we have found that some Wiki-style form of document creation would be a great addition to our system, so we will be investigating this further.

Of course, there was much more that went on at the conference, but these are just a few of the things that stuck in my mind (as well as the half-day excursion I took to experience the National Mall for the first time.. my feet were killing me). Reading over my list, it is rather software development oriented, isn’t it? Well, keep your eyes peeled and I’m sure you’ll find other blogs covering MCN from another point of view. Or if you were there too, leave some comments!