Helen Page

Multimedia Manager
National Gallery of Victoria
Multimedia Department
180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne VIC
3004 Australia
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Helen Page has been delivering ICT enabled solutions in museum, library, academic and education environments since 1986, including image databases, content and copyright management systems, enterprise wide electronic publishing (in Sanskrit and Arabic), enterprise web sites and interactive learning environments. She has now been involved in several museum / library building redevelopments incorporating strategies for ICT enablement of content and services to the public. In 1997 she was employed by the National Gallery of Victoria to develop and then implement a multimedia strategy as part of the building redevelopment programs that would "establish a reputation for excellence in the development of multimedia both as an art form and as a means of facilitating access to information". Outcomes include backend systems of content and presentation management on a distributed network infrastructure to support over 100 screen environments of varying types (videowalls, projectors, LCDs, plasmas) spread around the buildings' public spaces, delivering 17 different types of multimedia content, including 180 interactive stories providing 4200 pages of rich content containing 7500 images of art and artists, and 48 digital video environments and a web site that provides not only content, but also customer services such as schedules of exhibitions and events, membership subscriptions and online shopping. A digitising strategy was established by 1999 which converted the photographic services department to high quality digital capture. In parallel she has established an internal Multimedia Department of ten whose work incorporates content development supporting over 46 exhibitions per year, new media art installations and multimedia interpretive content support for exhbitions, as well as extending the value chain for the digital assets into developing in-house cinema ads, broadcast quality new media press releases and DVD product from these. She has a strong interest in developing the NGV's e-learning capacity as the next stage. To this end, given the increasing demands and expectations from the organisation for multimedia but the likelihood of no further resources, she is actively pursuing the concepts of knowledge management as a necessary organisational practice that will facilitate the NGV's ability to derive increased value from its intangible assets represented in its content delivery - covering processes from content management through to e-learning.

Helen will demonstrate National Gallery of Victoria Multimedia: On-site and On-line.