Tools we use: how the CMA builds web features for Special Exhibitions
Holly Witchey, The Cleveland Museum of Art, USA
http://www.clevelandart.org

Demonstration: Demonstrations 1

Last year, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) commissioned a new tool to support the frequent production of features on its web sites supporting Special Exhibitions.

Because the CMA has an ambitious programme of major special exhibitions, supporting these with appropriately sophisticated features was a considerable drain on the New Media department's resources. The museum therefore commissioned Cognitive Applications to create a new master design that could be reused with changes for all exhibition web features, and a content editing and management tool to support the process.

The potential of the tool quickly became apparent as it proved possible to use the first prototypes to develop and publish a comprehensive content rich special exhibition web site in record time. The tool was refined and extended in the course of being used to create a large number of such features, as well as other sub-sites within the main site. It is now in constant use for protoyping as well as for creating final versions of many features within our site.

Creating such features is a common requirement for many museum web sites. In this demonstration, we will

- show how our tool works,

- show how we use it,

- analyse the factors that have made it so succesful for us,

- and discuss how other museums could build on this work.