Transcript
Unknown Speaker 10:09
Thank you everyone for coming today. We are very excited to be sharing this lightning round of low to no budget projects. I'm Kate Meyers Emery, I'm a 30 Something woman with brown shoulder length hair and I'm wearing a blue denim shirt, and I have lots of bright colorful things in the wall behind me, I'm got a record on the wall and some other fun things. My pronouns are she, her, and today I'm speaking at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, which is located on the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the Hoda nashoni, specifically the Seneca Nation. Jessica, do you want to do a quick introduction.
Unknown Speaker 10:48
Everyone, I'm Jessica Brody Frank, I use the pronouns she her. I am also 30 Something woman with brown shoulder length hair. I'm wearing a nice striped blazer to try and look somewhat appropriate while working from home. I am located on the traditional unseeded homelands of the Council of the three fires, which include the Ojibwe Odawa and Potawatomi nations, though I am in Chicago so we have MANY nations here as well. And I think we can kick off now because we have quite a few projects to get in, in a little bit of time. So, let me see here.
Unknown Speaker 11:30
Alright, so this kind of began is me just throwing out a prompt, and that was when MC ended the call for papers. I shared that I was really interested in hearing about projects that were not well funded I wanted to know about all of those low to no budget scrappy digital things that people had done using like a handful of toothpicks and old iPhone and like scraps of paper that they gathered around the house, like I wanted to know about those things that were wins but didn't require like grand funding or partnering with other people or having amazing donors like I want to know what like the lone technologists like me were out there doing. And it was great because Jessica almost immediately responded and we got a lot of other people saying either yes, This is what I do all the time or hey, I would love to hear what these projects are like. So we decided to pull together a great group of people.
Unknown Speaker 12:37
So, low to no budget is something that we really wanted to emphasize right now especially because you know there are a lot of museums out there that have a loan digital person, or they might have no digital person, and you're kind of taking on a lot of other roles. MANY museums have no or low projects to do digital, but these same museums want to find ways to educate to engage to get people excited, especially now that we're looking at kind of this hybrid world where people expect some of that digital content. So we wanted this to be that space to share these projects that were not well funded and to connect all of us together so that we can start talking and sharing and just be open about these types of projects and so we encourage that left as part of this presentation, so please, steal these ideas borrow these ideas change them replicate them talk to us. I would be delighted to share all the things that we did, but we're hoping that this will serve as inspiration, a way to connect with other people so that we can just keep building up all these scrappy projects.
Unknown Speaker 13:46
Yeah, and because we're sharing projects for museums where there isn't a lot of funding for digital, it ranges from some of our smaller institutions to even some of the biggest museums in the country and around the world, MANY of our colleagues are not able to attend MC N due to the fees. So that is partially why we've had these recordings of three to four minute lightning talks that we'll be sharing as a part of this presentation in videos so those who could not attend, we're still able to have their stories and projects documented and shared at the end we'll be offering some summaries as well of what we've learned from these and kind of some takeaways we're hoping to really improve things for all these loan technologists moving forward, we're going to start by looking at some examples of gamified experiences, and then look at two different examples of virtual exhibitions, a YouTube video series, a foray into Tik Tok, An internal resource, as well as then two open access data projects, some community based engagement and then how the low to no budget projects can help get grant funding, but can also come with a cost. So these are all of our amazing people who will be represented today. And we're gonna kick it off with
Unknown Speaker 15:04
Kelsey.
Unknown Speaker 15:10
Hi everyone I'm going to be talking today about how to build a choose your own adventure game using Survey Monkey, or really any other survey platform for a quick intro, my name is Kelsy Edgerton My pronouns are she, her, and my reservations assistant with visitor services at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, located on treaty six territory. I also get to work with our programs team, especially during the pandemic when everyone pivoted. Just a quick caveat on this, we do have a Paid Survey Monkey plan, since we've had this plan for quite a while for the purposes of surveying visitors, creating this game was not an additional cost for us but you do need a paid plan to access the survey logic. We wanted to create a resource to support learning about our democratic process and one this resource to be accessible to teachers and students on their own time, without requiring them to book a program with us. It also have to be engaging and fun. Ultimately we decided to create a choose your own adventure game, and after some research we built using Survey Monkey. This is a bird's eye view of the game with each column representing a step in the game, because we are using it to teach a specific concept that requires everyone to pass a law at the end. The narrative is quite linear however we used a bunch of survey logic techniques to make each experience unique. The choices you make in each step impact both the narrative, and your future choices. In fact there are 2,329,067,520 paths through the game. First we introduced the players to this scenario for us it's that they are an elected official with an idea that they want to make into a law, all narrative is written in the second person which helps to insert the player into the game. We also use videos to introduce each new stage of the game, they work to break up the text and add humor, and they add accessibility for different learning styles. I just want to show this first question here because it's a great example of a basic question with no logic applied to it. As you can see we do often use a narrative component before the question because it's a game and we don't want it to feel like a quiz or a survey where you just go through and answer a bunch of questions in a row. Two types of survey logic used are shown here in question 12 The answers typed in by players, we validate that answer to ensure that it's a whole number between 202 199 It's out of those parameters they get an error message and question 13 Use Question and Answer piping. This allows you to take a previous answer and insert it into a future question or answer here the number chosen in question 12 by the player is inserted where it says Q 12 in the answers, skip logic is where depending on the answer chosen the player will be directed to a specific page of your choosing. We use it to branch out from the main narrative as illustrated by pink triangles page skipped logic skips the player to a specific page after they complete the current one, regardless of answers or even if there's a question on the page, we use this to bring the players back to the main narrative as shown with the blue triangles. This is the final outcome of the game as viewed on the back end by us, you can see lots of question and answer piping here, and MANY of the answer options would have been based on previous choices the player made, there are a lot of potential outcomes, nearly 1.8 million. We're going to flash this up here fairly quickly. This is an example of the final result that a player might see without any of our placeholders. Although the game is fairly straightforward. It can be played over and over again with different results which was important to us. We've gotten really positive feedback from both students and teachers, the best part has been being able to see the game being played in the evening after class did it, students are actually playing this on their own time. I encourage you to try the game to see what can be done, and imagine something similar for your own site, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Twitter or shooting me an email if you have any questions or want to chat. Thank you so much for your time and enjoy the rest of the session and the conference. Hi everyone I'm going to be talking today about how to
Unknown Speaker 19:01
sorry everyone. Bill the children event.
Unknown Speaker 19:06
This is going really well. I'm so sorry.
Unknown Speaker 19:15
Hi everyone I'm going to be talking I
Unknown Speaker 19:17
know you think you're really good at technology until you have 70 people watching you try to advance a slideshow. Alright,
Unknown Speaker 19:25
let's try that again.
Unknown Speaker 19:34
Hello, I'm Amy a PhD candidate at Nasim Trent University in the United Kingdom, and I researching the intersection of museums video games and interpretation, exploring how video games, respond to MANY ways in which interpretive practices developing, as well as exploring how to overcome barriers and encourage museums to become game makers. As part of my research, I've recently undertaken a six month placement at the National justice Museum in Nottingham. Working in collaboration with museums, the brief was to to design and develop a short video game in creative response to objects from their collection for an upcoming exhibition around the theme of ingenuity, as well as this, I wanted to test my research by utilizing a selection of game mechanics and affordances that meld well with interpretive theory and practice. For the game in titled hard craft, we used a free online open source software called Time, which is designed for beginners and used to create interactive stories and simple gains, I must preface this with the mission that I did have some previous training and experience in using the software from my master's degree, but also the client has a great MANY detailed guides and tutorials available online for free. Indeed, as part of my placement I created a guide to using planning for the museum staff and around practical training and the software toyed around in HTML, which is the same language used by the Internet. In order to use twine, you only need an internet browser, and all completed twine projects will play in any internet browser. No need for additional software or platforms. And although it certainly have some benefits and then the basics of HTML in order to build more complex experiences, the default one format, which is called Harlow, has recently been updated to include a toolbar which, with a few clicks, will do most if not all of the coding work for you. It's entirely possible to make a short payment time without typing a single line of code yourself. In fact, at its simplest level, the basis of all time games are hyperlinks, like Wikipedia, which link passages or pages to build interactive branching narratives. And of course with a little research into the other functions of the software, you'll find that twine is also capable of much more. Additionally, the twine community was incredibly friendly and helpful whenever I had problems all I had to do was head to the twine forums and someone who actually understands code was usually able to point out right or wrong, Hopcroft also relied in a different way upon the generosity of the twine community. He says a bit of code written and published to the public domain for free, but it's why for a musical chapel, created the hollow Audio Library, which allowed us to properly implement a soundtrack within the game. What's the majority of the game was created solely on the twine software, because twine is HTML based, it can pull media from anywhere on the internet and use in the game, which adds further customization options. This includes things like fonts, photos, videos and audio, MANY which we used. Basically, if it exists on the internet you can use it in a twine game and phone can also use local storage or file stored on your computer. So offline media can also be included as such for Hopcroft which was designed to be non commercial, we used a mixture of Creative Commons images and sounds, alongside objects and photos from the National justice Museum's own collection. The images are drawn from a couple of sources, mainly unsplash.com, which is a site specifically for artists, upload images under fair use license, those logos are made on Canva, again using Creative Commons imaging for audio, the sound effects and music tracks included in the game are primarily from South platte.com, which are free to use with attribution to the website, and therefore the only cost we actually incurred in the creation of the game was the soundscape. It was made on ambient mixer.com, a community driven project where you can build up your own soundscape using user submitted sounds and download loot files for a small fee, we ended up using a 15 minute loop which cost us $5 Hopcroft is intended for use as part of an upcoming exhibition project currently planned for 2023, along with the twine training, the museum has also given the guides publishing twine games on each door to a free online indie game publishing platform, which once again reduces and voids costs. Unfortunately, as the exhibition is still in the planning stages you don't yet have extensive information on the outcomes of the game or any feedback on how it was received by visitors and planes that we hope to do so in future. Thanks very much for listening and I hope this quick presentation has encouraged you to consider trying gate making yourselves.
Unknown Speaker 23:39
Hello, I'm Amy a
Unknown Speaker 23:41
PhD candidate.
Unknown Speaker 23:48
Hi, I'm Jenny, I'm a freelance museum educator digital specialist and open source advocate. I work with smaller organizations to help them develop their digital learning and interactive content on a budget. These are my three tips for making games and interactives, one, get a handle on the why. Start with a solid pedagogical or practical reason for developing your interactive and everything else will come so much easier afterwards. Focus on what concrete outcomes you want to gain from using attractive or refine those into your core aim. If you can't express it in 10 words or less, it's too complicated. I work with clients revamp the games use facilitate their volunteer lead handling sessions that core aim, Corrine made mechanical and gameplay choices like introducing a secret gesture or adding soft fail states which encouraged object based learning behaviors, obvious choices. To keep it simple. You don't have to make the next Doom or Stardew Valley. What you make doesn't have to be complicated to be effective. So give yourself permission to keep it simple, both graphically and mechanically. When designing games we tend to think in loops, see thing do thing, get thing, etc. These loops can be very simple and still obsessively satisfying. Recently, I worked with Metacam airfield Visitor Center to develop a game about bomber crews who flew from their base, aiming to engage visitors especially young visitors and their stories. We settled on a very simple gameplay loop, choose an action, face the consequences of ending. Choose a route. Every consequence and every ending happened to a real crew, and through the vector of choosing their fate players became invested in their cruise stories, All with only three steps, and seven press rights. Don't fear simple three. Don't be scared to DIY. Use your own artworks, your own pictures of your own objects, there's no prescribed look for making games or interactives, so use what you've got. Creative Commons forward sources like Unsplash Pexels and open game art.org can top of any assets you're short on at no cost. Don't think you need to use expensive software or have a lot of expertise to pull this off either. There are amazing free open source projects like wick editor twine, and others that provide drag and drop solutions to the code you'll need to get your project working, and you'll find 1000s of videos forums, and how to guides to help you get started. The only thing developing a game or an interactive needs to cost you is time. So those are my three tips for making digital projects. You can find me and right on my previous projects, including a how to for a Raspberry Pi interactive on my website. And if you have any questions, feel free to find me on social.
Unknown Speaker 27:03
Hi. Hi.
Unknown Speaker 27:10
Hello, my name is James Scott and I'm the education assistant for the Westerville winter transportation Museum, which is part of the University of Alabama museums department for my low to no budget exhibit the exhibit which was planned for summer 2020 had been forced to move to a digital platform instead of a physical exhibition. The summer exhibit was a partnership with the Alabama Museum of Natural History, which usually hosts an exhibit on insects for the event called Bammo bug fest. In 2019, we were able to have a live in person event, which featured both live insects for the public to view on the day of the event, and a photo exhibit featured throughout the summer with 2020s for shutdown. I was prompted with the task of finding a way, sharing the exhibit portion of the event, knowing that it was not going to be a physical exhibit. I brainstorm and created a digital exhibit highlighting the work of the University of Alabama's blunt Scholars Program from Spring 2020, in which the students were to take between 50 and 100 photos of insects and layer them in a photo stacking post production style to create extremely detailed images. The result. This resulted in the exhibit details unseen. The hidden secret of bugs, which are showcased by, By using Adobe Spark in less than three months, using Spark was rather easy as everything can be done online. And I believe for free if you, if you don't have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. By taking the students final, final project photos description of their bug, along with why they chose it for their school project. The exhibit just needed to be created. The biggest hurdle came from designing the exhibit. Having never used spark. Luckily, it is all rather straightforward in a drag and drop configuration, but it's still pretty limited in how creative you want it to be. Some things can go here but not there, you're kind of limited to the size of photos that are put in versus being able to control it, the way that you want it to be done. But because Adobe is a web based platform. It has a web based platform for Spark. It didn't require the public to download anything. To view the exhibit and I saw that as a benefit for getting the exhibit seen by the public. Amidst lockdown. This resulted in over 600 views. For the exhibit, and the success of the digital exhibit, and the move to a virtual engagement has resulted in a permanent website dedicated to the AMA bug fest, to the event called Bama blogfest.org. And I believe that's all. So I want to thank you for your time to present my no budget exhibit. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 30:20
Hello, my name
Unknown Speaker 30:21
is James.
Unknown Speaker 30:28
Hello, my name is Casey Wooster, and I am the collections assistant at Governor's House Library in St Augustine, Florida. I'm here today to share with you my low to no budget project. The Making of historic St Augustine governor's house libraries first online exhibit. Governor's House Library, preserve some provides access to historical resources that enhance our understanding and appreciation of St Augustine spelled heritage, but library holds papers from the former state agency historic St Augustine preservation board from 1959 to 1997, the preservation board research excavated restored reconstructed and interpreted buildings from the city's Spanish colonial past their decades of work in archaeology historic preservation and public history transformed the city's streetscapes and lays the foundation for how we see St Augustine's past and present. Yet MANY visitors and locals alike today do not know the story behind the agency's re imagination of the colonial Presidio, to bring this tale, out of the boxes and to the public. Governor's House Library published the making of historic St Augustine, which reconstructs the preservation board's narrative through their archival legacy. Utilizing as three ArcGIS story maps we highlighted digitize primary resources available through the University of Florida digital collections. This allows visitors to not only see the preservation board story play out in newspapers and internal reports, but to also reflect on the evolving practice of archaeology historic preservation and interpretation and the city. Next we told the preservation board story by connecting stories hyperlink center we've been MANY people events and objects tied to the preservation boards 40 year tenure that cross linking abilities, a digital platforms like ArcGIS story maps, creates new opportunities for nonlinear storytelling and discovery. We use this as a chance to bring our digital initiatives together from across platforms such as WordPress and UX digital collections. This practice of digital layering offers room for expansion and a myriad of tools and telling the multifaceted tale of the historic preservation board. It also encourages visitors to uncover history. With each new CLICK fostering an active learning experience. We concluded the making of historic St Augustine with an interactive map illustrating the preservation board's lasting impact on the city's built landscape. Visitors travel through the streets today and 1764 with the overlaying of one Alexio della pointers map. The maps pins bridge the centuries, while providing snapshots into each site stratified past it business up project that interests you. Here are a few of that advantages I uncovered along the way. The fact that ArcGIS Online is free and offers MANY tutorials, the ability to connect via hyperlinking existing digital work and primary resources, room to customize and experiment with embedding images, videos, maps and much more. As for challenges ArcGIS Online does not do everything moving forward Governor's House Library intends to continue to engage our community and beyond through digital storytelling, make sure to follow along at guff house dot UFL i need.ufl.edu, and on Facebook and Instagram at the house, library, thank you for your time. We hope you enjoyed our project.
Unknown Speaker 34:31
Hello. Hello.
Unknown Speaker 34:39
If you're using your YouTube channel as a dumping ground for press conferences from 15 years ago, you're losing money every day since the pandemic began, we have been posting daily videos on our YouTube channel, of just wandering around with a staff member. Look at this thing, isn't it neat, isn't it cool, with a cell phone, and eventually a tripod, and not much else. All right,
Unknown Speaker 35:08
I'm Ryan Smith ski curator for Battleship New Jersey Museum of memorial. Today, we're going to do another walkthrough of another deep, dark place in the ship to climb all the way down into the chain locker. Today, we are shipyards 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two, but just wanted to show you what happens when one of these that's already spent gets dropped in water. Now we're standing on top of the armored conning tower, and today we're on a postcard Qatar Taney division hardhat, as far as I wouldn't recommend using this anymore. We have a crank answering MANY of the questions you guys have asked in the comment section down below.
Unknown Speaker 35:56
One of the easiest things about YouTube is that it's okay. It doesn't have to be polished. It's just about sharing your content, whatever that is, we don't script our videos. We don't rehearse them. We vaguely plan them. We usually do it all in one take. And for a long time we edited them on the app on a cell phone does not need to be complicated. But despite those bare bones requirements to do it. We're gonna make six figures and ad revenue this year, sponsorships, sales in our online store, and guests come to the museum because they saw our YouTube channel, because at the core of it, it's marketing educational marketing, despite being a small museum with on a good year, about 80,000 guests. We've got a reach of about 300 million on our YouTube channel, because it allows us to reach that international audience that had no idea we were here. We're not famous, but now we can be. We have had school groups cause they show our videos in their classes. And every day, our main presenter gets stopped in the galleries, by someone saying you're that guy from YouTube. It accomplishes our mission to educate and to share this story, absolutely worth doing, and requires very little of you.
Unknown Speaker 37:41
If you, if you're
Unknown Speaker 37:42
using your.
Unknown Speaker 37:50
Hello I'm Siemer brown Deputy Director and Chief Experience Officer the app and art museum and before you listen to me, download tick tock and immediately follow the Akron Art Museum, that's what I'm talking about today. I'm telling you about how we did it. What happened and what we learned. So we wanted to go on to Tech Talk, when to talk him out, we thought, hey, new place we're gonna go there and you know, rule, or whatever. We had planned ready shot videos produced right for the pandemic, and then we stopped, and I am so glad we stopped because the biggest outcome for us as an organization was that we had originally wanted to solve tic toc as an organization, the way we had solved everything else, which was to tell you about art and expect that from that digital engagement you might want to come to the building. And when the pandemic happened we had just finished a digital strategy and one of us and two points of our digital strategy was we wanted to seize on the opportunity of being a small to medium sized modern and contemporary museum, not in a tourist city Akron is 45 minutes south of Cleveland, and we decided that's the opportunity that we can do things that are different. So tick tock, was our chance in the end when we finally implemented it in the spring of 2021. When we finally really implemented doing tick tock, we decided, well, we don't have to do what we always do and instead we spend most of our time re mixing content that other people did to do kind of art history appreciation or art appreciation 101 And our goal was that people would like us gain awareness, and they would like art, a little bit more, which was so essential to what our digital strategy was. Now, how much did this cost us, well it was free in terms of money we used our phones and our brains, but it was really quite expensive in terms of time. My day job is to administrate the organization, but I was the person who knew the social media the best, and I was the person who was willing as an administrator to figure out how long this took, and for us it took a long time because we have to watch a lot of tech talks to find the right ones to remix. And then we also had to take a lot of time because we had to understand the paradigms and the norms of tech talk that took a lot of time. Sometimes it took like an hour of watching Tic TOCs a day. The other thing that took a lot of time was the energy the watching the videos, making sure that we're you know, checking everybody's videos replying to comments, all of that stuff. And then there was sort of the stress of it because when we got really popular with tick tock, we were felt like we were just constantly beating the machine. So the final thing we learned and an important outcome is to say, uncle, we decided that we would take a digital sabbatical and we took a month off and tick tock, it certainly put a huge thing in our numbers, but we had already done really well in three months we had more than 3 million views. So we felt like it was worth it for our sanity and you will see if you, if you watch your Tech Talk soon, that we will have MANY more phases, not just mine, and I as administrator now ready to really train people to understand how much is worth it for us and how much is it. So in the end biggest outcome, free isn't free time and staff energy are worth more than any dollars and cents, and it's worth really thinking out how much you use them. So, watch our TED Talks.
Unknown Speaker 41:29
Hi, my name is Meredith Whitfield I'm an exhibit developer at The Field Museum in Chicago, and I'm here to share with you these $0 Only staff time project that really changed if not just our development division, truly our whole department. So as the title suggests, this is about our developers wiki so this is a project that I started back in 2018 has been ongoing since. So, What was the problem. When this process began, I was relatively new exhibit developer coming to terms with the interviews and writing that exhibition development normally entails but also all the little business game processes that you need to know in order to do your job at The Field Museum, so I've listed a couple, a couple of those here. On top of that, exhibits, take a really long time, so it might be a full year before you repeat a certain task, to their credit, MANY developers before me had made efforts to write this information down, but it was decentralized, we had resources on our server on Google Drive, handwritten and locks, still in developers brains, because you know you have an experience that doesn't exactly rise to the importance of getting out your document and typing it up for posterity. And then, you know, that information might be lost, especially if you're trying to share it asynchronously, or somebody has an experience in 2004 that's going to be relevant again in 2024 How do you Capture that. So what does this wiki look like real quick tour. Here's our homepage, with a terrific tweet up here in the corner. Basic how to what it is information here some quick links for developers I have Google Analytics, So I know what our most frequently used pages are. There's a guide on how to edit the wiki and a punch list for if you see that something needs attention but you don't have the resources you need to edit it yourself. And then the meat and potatoes the content of the wiki is divided up into sections about writing, which cross links document guides research and our style guide exhibit process which steps through all of our phases, and includes deliverables, and meeting prep notes for everything involved in each step of the process. Everything else, so all of the non job stuff that you need to do your job. And then an FAQ glossary and tips we've found that this organization keeps everything kind of in a predictable place and it's worked pretty well for us so far. How is this done. The first point here our interns are happier we are fortunate to have a very robust cycle of interns in the summer and in the fall at The Field Museum we have at least one every season. And although Marie and her coordinator responsibilities lie with her does a great job at teaching interns what it is to be a developer, It's great for them to have a resource to refer back to. And that kind of format of reference has permeated other projects in our department so our email guide Murray same person has put together a resource guide on sites for people to keep up to date with email, it has how tos, but it also has the latest information from our museum wide email Working Group community collaboration guide it's similar in format on Google sites for community groups that we're working with to get field museum exhibits one on one. And then, because our department follows a process kind of step by step from idea to opening. It's great to have that in a place where it can be easily editable so our directors group decide something changes about the exhibits process, it's reflected right away, and very easy to share. So if you need a place for a lot of very technical sometimes changing information to live. I encourage you to think about setting up a wiki or a shared resource on a website format for your group. If you have questions about how this has gone, or want a little additional support, please feel free to reach out my email and my social media has been in the bottom of this presentation,
Unknown Speaker 46:23
everyone, my name is Colin Brooks and I'm the Senior Developer at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and I'm going to be talking to you today about open access. So if you're unfamiliar, open access is the sharing of collections data or other information held by glam institutions to the public, with limited to no restrictions for the purposes of explorations scholarship or other creative endeavors. What this often means in practice, especially for art museums, is dataset releases on GitHub, online where you can drop and download some of these files and get a bunch of information on artists or artworks in these institutions collections. Here is the normal one just for example on artwork so you can see it really is just a bunch of columns and a bunch of data. So what was our project, it was really to start exporting these CSV spreadsheets on a weekly or other regular basis. It was to write a script, so that we could add them to GitHub, so people could download these files in a place that they would expect. And it was to publicize the existence of this kind of stuff a bit on our website. So it was the project really, it was getting curators featured staff and legal on board, all of whom had different levels of technical competency understanding of what open access is and why you would want to do something like this. So, things that helped those conversations. One is just that our peers have done this, there are so MANY institutions around the world who have released data who have opened API's who have done riskier stuff like release a bunch of images, and being able to say that this is kind of Keeping Up with the Joneses thing and our audience and on some level expects this of large institutions is a big help, especially at a place that really does look to our peers as models for where we should be. Another thing that helped was the limited initial scope of this release we were not including images we are not doing anything particularly tricky, and we were not releasing information that wasn't already online in some form on our online collection this is very much just repackaging stuff that we have already done in a new form. This is also a big appeal to our mission and values. This is probably true for MANY institutions, talking about things like educating diverse publics or being experimental and responsive or leading with expertise, all this stuff really feeds into it makes sense to release data in new forms, and new places, so new people can engage with it in different ways. And lastly, and one of the biggest ones, there weren't resources that were acquired from other departments, this was a pretty small technical lift on our digital development team and didn't really require anything of anyone else. So related to that future challenges would be, we have limited resources to do this kind of work, and similarly limited buy in for anything with risk or costs like potentially releasing images as much as. That's the thing that I would really like to do. So what does this all look like, well we've released two initial datasets, on our GitHub page online. We have also written about this on medium. I encourage you to check those things out at windy night org slash open access. Thanks, everyone.
Unknown Speaker 49:45
Alright, sorry everybody I know we only have like two minutes left but nickeil Do you want to do a little bit of a quick discussion on the open API, at the artist shoot.
Unknown Speaker 49:56
Yeah, sure thing. I will speak for two minutes. So just, you know, taking note of all the other previous examples, I started Institute, we're not loan technologists who built the API we're dedicated we were a team of two dedicated developers, situated within a team of designers and producers. Part of the experience signed apartment, but we did have the luxury of a little bit of time. We were in between two in between major projects we had about 11 months to dedicate towards one big thing, which is a rare thing, especially in context where we're often wearing multiple hats at the same time. So over the course of 11 months we developed a system that aggregated all the museum's public data into one place. Made it searchable and made access to that data uniform across about seven or eight different systems as it turned out. The intention was to have this data service our main website but also serve as our mobile apps, and in gallery interactive and from the get go we envision this as being the future of our public of a public API for a museum, which we launched just January of this year, which you can find more at API that arctic WVU news, it's part of a larger open part of larger open initiatives at the museum. We have over 50,000 public domain images that are downloadable on our website. Much of the code that our team develops is open sourced and then of course our API provides open data, then echoing, You know the part of the work that is educating leaders ship and other staff to gain buy in on projects like this. And similarly to noting that other institutions have done similar things we also noted that organizations much bigger than us and with much more sensitive data concerns than us, are participating in open data and open source movements like the NSA, for example, and hospitals which are bound by HIPAA which we are not Linux, of course the, you know, 30 year old 40 year old operating system that MANY of us use devices and computers today. Two minutes. Great. So that was our project.
Unknown Speaker 52:20
Thanks so much and thank you to everyone who was able to share these projects. This, this was an exciting way to be kind of showcasing a lot of different things and I'm just gonna I clearly had a lot of slides that we did not get to that were kind of sharing some of the projects we were doing. But I just wanna say, you know, what we really wanted to focus on is we kind of said tongue in cheek, like, all it takes a staff time. But staff time is a really, really important. And that is something that we can't be taking for granted. So none of these projects are free, they just might not hit the, the budget. I think it's also good to iterate like you don't have to do big projects, It's okay to do things scrappy, I know at Eastern New Museum, a lot of our scrappy projects actually led to us getting a grant, so we were able to upgrade everything, but our number one video is still like a scrappy video somebody made in their bedroom, showing how to turn a room to a camera obscura. So sometimes these casual videos actually have more human interaction and people like them more so it's okay to do things this way and people like that kind of interaction.
Unknown Speaker 53:35
Yeah, and we'll definitely make sure we share these slides we also have a PDF to share that has contact information for everybody whose projects were presented today. And to echo, what's been said here we wanted to show these scrappier projects because usually at a conference we see the big polished project, and that's maybe 10% of the work that most of us are doing. So we're really excited to share these with you but also really want to nail home that that was a joke. Our staff time is important, it is not just about our fiscal budgets, it's also about our emotional and capacity budgets, so please everybody. Take a breath. Take steel use these ideas but also know when to say, I don't want to touch that. For me my line in the sand with tick tock, so like, love to SEMA. But that was the one where I let somebody else take that on and so that is hopefully what we've helped shared today, and we will make sure all of this gets shared out on Slack as well so thank you.
Unknown Speaker 54:37
Thank you everyone.