The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum ("the O'Keeffe") wanted a single, user-friendly point of access to its extensive collection of fine art, photography, personal effects, and archival documents. The goal was to create a holistic view of Georgia O'Keeffe – her artistic practice, her materials and techniques, her deep relationship with New Mexico, and her engagement with artists, collaborators, and friends. Design for Context was selected to lead the project, which included technical and data infrastructure and the design of a new website to house the online collection. This demonstration of the site was recorded during a presentation to the Museum Community Group of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a standards project addressing flexible, open source models and tools for sharing and using high resolution images across cultural heritage institutions.
Demonstration
In this demonstration, Duane Degler shows how the website encourages users to discover new things in O'Keeffe's rich and varied collection. The over-arching design principle is to create an immersive browsing experience that moves through the collection as an inter-connected whole. Relationship exploration and serendipity are the key features, enabled by the rich data created across various aspects of the collection by the O'Keeffe cataloguing team. The availability of deep zoom based on IIIF is an important feature for exploring the artwork and archival images, as well as managing all the derivative images throughout the site. (19:50)
What's Valuable, and What's Next?
Rana Chan, the O'Keeffe's Digital Assets and Rights Coordinator, provides feedback on the value of the site from staff and grant funders. She describes the impact that the linked data capabilities have already had at the O'Keeffe and outlines the museum's thoughts for future capabilities, as well as how they imagine the uses of the linked data architecture broadly across the museum. (9:25)
Behind the Scenes
As part of the webinar, Duane and Charlie Butcosk, our platform developer, summarize the project background and the O'Keeffe's motivations for undertaking a linked data approach. The high-level architecture is described, to help understand the role of linked data, IIIF, and the modular approach that is building on, and extending, the emerging Linked.Art standards for museum information. (12:30)
The initial linked data Digital Infrastructure ("DigIn") project, supporting the integration of their core collections systems, was funded by IMLS.
For the data-minded, you can retrieve the full data set for your own explorations. Let us know here at DfC and the O'Keeffe, if you integrate the data or build anything interesting. We're happy to talk further.