MCN 2024

What is Digital Content? How do we create policy and strategy for digital without common definitions and a shared framework for managing digital content? How do we prioritize and resource digital content to support our institution’s mission and strategic goals?

To help answer those questions, cross-departmental teams at the Smithsonian set out to research and inventory digital content types, connected systems, and workflows. The project differentiates between digital content and digital assets, emphasizing that not all digital content holds long-term institutional value. Digital assets are specifically identified for their ongoing usefulness and significance to the SI. The project involved extensive stakeholder engagement, including interviews and surveys with 102 staff members across 32 units, covering diverse roles such as collections, conservation, research, content production, and data analysis.

The gap analysis section addresses the challenges in harmonizing collections data, managing born-digital collections, and ensuring effective digital stewardship. Recommendations include developing systems for aggregate collections data, providing sustained funding for essential digital systems, and creating tools and training for content transfer and management.

This session will highlight how we went about researching and communicating findings, as well as prompt attendees to consider the types of content they engage with in their day-to-day work, ensuring that valuable digital assets are effectively preserved, accessed, and utilized across one’s organization.

30min: presentation
Background on the project, process, and findings.
Links of resources, final report, and supplemental materials will be made available to attendees.
15min: group exercise and Q+A
We will invite users to contribute questions and add their own digital content types via QR code form to display real-time submissions.
We may also invite guests into our Systems Diagram Miro board.

With the approaching end-of-life of Drupal 7, our ongoing challenges of managing separate websites for museum visitors and online collections, the construction of a new physical museum, and an impending rebranding, it was clear that we needed to reevaluate the overall architecture of Gilcrease's online ecosystem. In this session, we will present a case study and share the lessons we've learned from the decoupled migration of the Gilcrease Museums Online Collections.

You might be wondering, what exactly is a decoupled website? What benefits, drawbacks, and compromises did we encounter during the transition to a new website architecture? What are our plans post-launch? We will address these questions and many more.

We'll share relatable experiences and obstacles that small to medium-sized museums often face, demonstrating the strategies we used to “lift and shift” the website migration while balancing innovation with budget constraints and timelines. Throughout this process, we aimed to minimize technical debt and adhere to a reasonable timeline, despite the temptation to add new features. Sometimes, we resisted; other times, we had to compromise.

We will also share key technical highlights such as:
- A brief high-level overview of the Gilcrease collections systems architecture including TMS, Library, and ArchivesSpace custom integration with DAMS and collections website.
- Overview of the Piction to Drupal integration and delta sync.
- Building, serving, and presenting IIIF manifests with Drupal and Clover IIIF.
- Enhancing performance and SEO with decoupled architecture.

This session will introduce brand new preservation guidance for new media art/digital media art/time-based media art/variable media art and facilitate exercises from “Maintenance Culture: Sustaining Access to Digital Creative Works,” a Myriad project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Maintenance Culture aims to provide practical, realistic guidelines to support small to mid-sized art museums, history museums, museums at academic institutions, and other cultural heritage institutions who steward complex, born-digital, creative works.

The session will introduce participants to the structure and content of the Maintenance Culture guidelines, including describing some specific examples to illustrate the types of works this project addresses (digital design, time-based media art, augmented reality, and net art) and their common preservation challenges. Facilitators will provide structure for the small group work within the session, with the goal of connecting participants to each other and encouraging the growth of communities of practice around preserving digital creative works.

Presenter will facilitate exercises from the Maintenance Culture workbook (to be published July 2024), including:
• Identifying institutional strengths that support maintaining long-term access to born-digital, creative works
• Naming challenges to collecting and preserving complex, born-digital creative works and connecting with others experiencing similar challenges
• Taking steps towards drafting workflows for collecting and maintaining complex, born-digital works

For the first time The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens is able to present its rich and varied collections in a single unified interface. We will discuss how over a 5 month period we were able to iterate our way to a high-fidelity collections prototype laying the groundwork for a production-ready online collection. This singular view on our holdings affords our audience a window into the various disciplines within our organisation and helps forward our transition to a more coherent, less siloed public presentation.