Miscellaneous
Take a moment and think about all of the materials that go into an exhibition. It’s a lot, right? Objects, documents, essays, labels, not to mention the installation itself. And your museum can only fit so much of that into its physical space. What about all of the other stories that end up on the cutting room floor? The outtakes? What about the stories that get generated during and after the exhibition? With your museum’s website, the only limitations to the stories you can share are time and resources. And those are real. But with a little bit of planning, you can come up with a strategy for enhancing your collections and exhibitions online. And that’s exactly what the Hammer Museum has done. Today I’m talking with Philip Leers, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Hammer Museum, about telling a museum’s stories online. **FULL TRANSCRIPT** NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber. Today I’m talking with Philip Leers, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Hammer Museum, about telling a museum’s stories online. Now… Take a moment and think about all of the materials that go into an exhibition. It’s a lot, right? Objects, documents, essays, labels, not to mention the installation itself. And your museum can only fit so much of that into its physical space. What about all of the other stories that end up on the cutting room floor? The outtakes? What about the stories that get generated during and after the exhibition? With your museum’s website, the only limitations to the stories you can share are time and resources. And those are real. But with a little bit of planning, you can come up with a strategy for enhancing your collections and exhibitions online. And that’s exactly what the Hammer Museum has done. The Hammer’s digital archives are a fantastic example of using technology to illuminate a museum’s hidden treasures and augmenting those on view. If you haven’t seen what we’re talking about, I’d encourage you to head over to hammer.ucla.edu and click on “Exhibitions.” You’ll find the Expanded Digital Archives on the right-hand side. So, I spoke with the Hammer’s Philip Leers over Skype and asked him to talk about the work that goes into these projects. We talked about planning, collaborating, and the value of creating goals for individual projects. First, I wanted to know who exactly worked on the Digital Archives, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. PHILIP: For some of the Digital Archives -- that's the term we use for the projects -- we've done two that were for exhibitions, so the websites are built around all of the materials that go around planning the exhibition and that came out of the exhibition. So, essays for the catalog, and label text, and images of the installation, and any material we could get our hands on. So the material is coming from curatorial, but, in terms of the building, this is part of our website, which falls under our communications team, so I work really closely with them. Our IT, our registrars, everybody comes into contact with the project at some point. NICK: Got it. And so, you said you're building it out of all of the materials that go into the exhibition, are there also things that don't make it into the exhibition that, because you're using a digital platform, that you're able to bring online? PHILIP: Yeah, absolutely, and that was one of the big things we talked about. We didn't want to just recreate the catalog, we didn't want to do a virtual exhibition. We wanted to include things from both the exhibition and the catalog, but we also figured we're making these after the fact, we're doing them on a platform that offers us all new capabilities. So some of the things that we included, we could only do because we're doing it kind of retrospectively. So we could include press reviews of the show, we can include images of the shows and other materials if it traveled to different venues...