Designing Tools to Extend and Leverage an On-line Collection Project

Allegra Burnette, The Museum of Modern Art, USA
http://www.moma.org

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 1

In parallel with The Museum of Modern Art's recent renovation and expansion and the reinstallation of the most extensive display of the museum's collection ever, an online collection project was developed for the museum's Web site, MoMA.org, to give visitors greater access to MoMA's collection. The project explored the challenges of using collection management systems for content management, and tools were developed for retrofitting metadata and rich text to an existing collection management system.

In the course of working on the system, the team developed some ancillary projects that provided immediate benefits to colleagues in several different departments, including Curatorial, Graphics, and Publications, and which helped to further integrate the Collection and Exhibitions Management System into their work.

In this demonstration, the collection project will be shown and discussed, with a particular focus on the related projects that were developed along the way, and the relationship between the technical developments and working processes within the museum.