 I'm Mel Choice. I'm a design engineer at Automatic. And as so nicely said, I'm Courtney O'Callaghan, the chief digital officer at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which are the Smithsonian's Asian Art Museums. So here's a little history about the Freer and Sackler online, which happened long, long before I arrived. They embarked upon their web journey in the mid-2000s. We would add about 300 objects every month to our website in a section we called Collections Online. These images were usually about 300 pixels on the longest side and were not always the best images. So at the end of 2013, when I was hired into the new position of chief digital officer, I was tasked with digitizing our entire collection. This meant that we would have images of every single object within our museum, both the display objects and every single item in our storage. We would then put these images up online in standard resolution. But we decided that digitizing and revealing our collection on the website wasn't really enough. We wanted to democratize our collection and democratize art by increasing the access our visitors had with the object information. So in January 2015, we released our collection of over 41,000 objects. But we released each of these objects with as much information as we were allowed to put from our curatorial database. We also put a link to download the highest resolution of these files that we had for each object. We opened these images up as free for non-commercial use, which was the most liberal copyright that the Smithsonian would allow us to use. This led us to really look at the rest of our website, asia.si.edu, and not just our collections online. Our site was not responsive. The updates were time-consuming and difficult. Organic growth of the site over the past 15 years had created a very, very disorganized information architecture. The website also needed a visual refresh to reflect the more modern, clean design that was the aesthetic of our actual museum. So we needed to choose a content management system. We wanted one that challenged the idea that content was separate from our collection. Due to technical constraints, most museums have ended up having two separate systems for their museum information and their collections. Though they may look the same, they are often very separate databases, sites, all together. We wanted to link together both our collection and our museum content so that we could take advantage of cross-linking and forging organic pathways so that people could search on China and get everything that we had written or created about China. Or if someone searched on elephants, they would get our exhibitions on elephants, the papers on elephants, and the elephants within our art itself. So when I came in, I was told that the biggest issue we had was that we didn't have a CMS. But a CMS is a solution to a problem that they had yet to define. The museum was planning on using Drupal. I wasn't against this choice, but I wanted to know the reasons why and how they had actually come to this decision. What we really needed to do was take a step back and define our actual needs. So looking at everything, we did have problems. We couldn't update, maintainability, lack of organization, everything that we mentioned earlier. And we needed a solution. Everybody had a list of what they had heard a CMS could do, from organizing our content to watering our plants. After we gathered everybody's needs, we had to pare down what we actually needed versus what we thought we wanted, which brought us to usability. Our problem was the siloing of our content that summed it up in three words. We couldn't update or add new content easily. We couldn't update our site structure easily. We couldn't connect our content in intelligent ways easily. There was no room for easy growth. The website was one big bottleneck. So it came down to these following questions. Is it easy to set up? Will it be easy to change? Is it expensive? Is there a community? And can our staff learn to use it within less than three months of training? And this led us to WordPress. Unsurprisingly. Unsurprisingly. About three months before we were going to release this entire collection, I attended last year's community summit. One of the conversations I had was with a dot-com themeer about the way that our museum images might be useful to automatic and how we might be able to expose people to art who had not seen these type of objects before. He connected us with another team at automatic who could partner with us and help us spread WordPress to the cultural institution space where it is still relatively unused. We talked about some of the obstacles that we faced as a museum, and we realized that there was a way to combine all of our museum's research and data, exhibition content, and collections, and allow those who could never come to our museum to actually experience it. So I was a member of a team at automatic who focused on outreach and WordPress evangelizing. So our goal was to spread WordPress to 51% of the internet. And we're at 25, so we're almost halfway there. So we saw a partnership with Freer & Sackler as a really great way to spread WordPress into an entirely new space. Museums, cultural institutions, which it really isn't yet. So we agreed to join up and guide through them through their site redesign and give them our resources as well. So to kick off the project, I went down to DC to actually meet with the Freer & Sackler team in person. It was a super good trip. It was the only part of the process that we actually did in person. The rest was totally online. So this is normal for automatic. We're a distributed company, but it wasn't really normal for the Freer & Sackler team. So it gave me a chance to get a feel for their team dynamics, their opinions on design, and most importantly, get a sense for the physical space of the museum. So Courtney gave me a walkthrough. It was super pretty. I loved it. It was really, really good museums. And so I got to see how the items were displayed and the overall aesthetic of the museum. So while I was there, we also did two design activities. So a card sorting exercise using a selection of pages from the existing site and a 30-second gut check. The first activity was a homepage-focused card sorting exercise. So I created a set of index cards made up of major sections of the site, and then I had the team organize them in order of how important each section was for the homepage. I focused on the homepage because it seems like an easier activity that we could do in an hour together, and then we could do more later. So I said that they could merge, discard or add any cards that they saw fit. So this is what we ended up with. We just sat down at a table and organized some cards. So it's fun to look at, especially because you can physically see the difference between the two. So the person on the left ended up with only a few really high priority items, a bunch of things in the middle and then just a few things at the end. While the person on the right really clustered a lot of the important things at the top and they had a much longer tail of lower priority items. So they also discarded a lot of cards, which was really great because it kept the homepage really focused on their most important content, which is helping people plan their visit, current and upcoming exhibits, upcoming events, and highlighting their super awesome online collection. The 30 second design gut check was the next activity that we did. So it was really fun for me. So prior to the visit, I looked over the competitive landscape to see what other museums were like and spoiler alert. A lot of them were very outdated. And after that, I broadened my search to things that were tangentially related, art magazines, online stores, anything that displayed collections, products or events. So designs that were relevant to the museum. From that review, I was able to put together about a dozen design options to show the team. So how this works is that I would put a design example up on a projector. I would scroll through it and they would have 30 seconds to look at it, jot down some notes and then rate it on a scale of one to five. After 30 seconds, I would move on to the next design. So here's an example of one of the sites that I showed them. This is the Whitney Museum. So their comments included, boring, boxes, no explosion, no expressiveness. Love the minimal header and footer. Kind of cluttered, too much information. Black and white layout lets the art shine through though. They gave it about a two, a 2.17. So here's the Rijks Museum. Comments included. Looks okay. Larger images are good, but descriptions are not imaginative. Looks like everybody else's site, boring. Nice header, looks elegant and clean. They rated it about a three. We didn't really rate anything very high. So the last example was one I chose because it was so totally different from anything else I'd shown them. They had some really great comments. Effort to break up info, but no sense of what this institution's purpose is. And if you look, it's really hard to tell what it actually is, so it's super valid criticism. It's also surprising organization of content. Colors made it really easy to focus on very specific parts of the site, but too busy. Fills deliberately quirky, but not in a good way. So this was also about a three. So this exercise was really valuable. A, because we got to do it together. We had an hour. We just did it and it was cool. And it allowed me to quickly gauge what design patterns the team did and didn't like along with how they felt about more traditional layouts versus experimental layouts. And so after we did this, we stepped back, looked and analyzed the results, and we found that the team was really interested in having a strong grid based design. So they love sites where the stories really showed through where you could look at something and it just told a story to you. They loved it when the photos could also shine. They have a lot of photos. And the rest of the site kind of like bled into the background. So, you know, thinking back on it, if I could redo this particular exercise, I would probably focus on one kind of page. So one thing I did was I showed home pages, collection pages, pretty much anything. And if I did this again, I would just focus on one of those because I think it would have kept the exercise more focused. So additionally, while I was at the museum, I was able to start auditing their existing design materials and their overall aesthetic. During my walkthrough, I took photos of how collection items and their labels were displayed within the museum. So I also took home and reviewed print catalog that they had. So I got to see like how they actually worked with design in a printed space. And then I looked at all their digital projects. They had been doing more and more digital projects that were unconnected to the website just because it was so hard to update. So this helped me get a sense for how they did things like use space, use colors and use typography. After the kickoff meeting, we went back and we started getting our shared spaces set up. So at Automatic, we care a lot about transparency and open communication. The idea that communication is oxygen leaks into everything we do. And so this project wasn't any different. We wanted to make sure the entire process was open, transparent, and to that end, we chose our tools accordingly. These might be familiar tools for many of you. So before this project, I'd never used GitHub collaboratively with a partner outside of Automatic. So we use it internal for everything. I mean, if you've looked at Calypso, that's kind of been our lives the past year and a half. But outside partnerships are usually taken care of over phone and email. Because this project had to be so collaborative to succeed, it was integral for us to work together like we were the same team. So I pitched the idea of putting together all the designs on GitHub, which even then I feel like it's still a little bit radical. The Freer and Sackler team agreed. And so we did all of our planning, wireframe and mockups in GitHub issues. And then we also used Slack to tie everything together and have some real-time communication in there. For us, it felt much more organic to be able to comment and work in the same space that we were keeping the designs. It allowed a very seamless and iterative workspace approach, even though we weren't working physically together. And though that's the norm for Mel's company, as she mentioned, at our museum, we're used to working and designing in the same physical space. So for us to have something that felt similar was very important. Mel's ability to give us real-time iterations of designs that were being put up did two things for us. It shortened the time it took to get through those awkward spaces that always happen when you're designing something. And it continued the feeling of shared ownership between both of us on the project. So it worked out because it ended up feeling like we were together in the same space. I could put up a design, we could immediately iterate on it and I could post up another design. We did the same thing with their designer. So sometimes she would print out designs, mark them up, and then come back to me with feedback. We passed Photoshop files back and forth and collaborated on designs directly together. So that way, for instance, when we were looking at a color palette, she was able to take it, change it in person, show it around, and then come back to me with feedback and it worked really well. So we did a lot of this kind of back and forth together. We integrated GitHub into our FreeSackler Slack instance and we made a really natural feedback loop between the two services that helped us continue to keep the momentum going. So having everything together in this one place also kept us very organized, much, much better than like combing through emails. Ah, where was this decision made? I don't remember. So we took full advantage of native GitHub features like task lists and cross-linking between issues. That way, if we ever referenced another design, we could just reference it and have it immediately link. We also used labels liberally to mark out which issues were like where they are were within the design process. So we could be like, oh, this one needs feedback. Oh, this one needs a new design iteration and it was a really good way of keeping ourselves on track. Having this much back and forth real-time communication also built a lot of camaraderie between our two teams. We did a lot of joking and used a lot of emoji. We like the emoji. So by the end of the design process, we'd formed a pretty cohesive team that functioned very differently from other client services relationships. So outside of our initial introduction email, we just ditched email entirely. We used it if we had to, but we really didn't have to with Slack. So we also did Google Hangouts, whenever we felt like we needed to clarify something face to face. And I think Google better than using like a phone call because then we could see each other and like not interrupt each other as much, so. Our two teams were mutually invested in the goal of spreading WordPress into the community of cultural institutions and open sourcing knowledge. We were interested in history, culture, and knowledge being available to everybody around the world that came from our museum. We shared a love of the visual beauty of our objects and a passion for open source that wove its way through the partnership. By the end of the design phase, we created a visual language and a set of templates that covered all of our major layout and use cases. Ranging from objects to scholarly essays, we took into account our initial goal to create a unified site experience that accommodates everyone from our elephant enthusiasts to Gorio Buddha scholars. So now that the design process is complete for now, there's always room for iteration, what's next? Well, the first item is actually to build the site, but this will also include reusable templates for our online scholarly catalogs, linking together WordPress with our collections management system, relating our collections, our research, and our content with shared taxonomies from within those systems, open sourcing any plugins that we write and releasing them on GitHub and exploring the WP API using hardware within our physical space. So we hope to launch the new Freer Encyclocyte by the middle of next year and it's gonna be super cool so you should keep an eye out. And that took a lot less time than it had when we went through it. So we have plenty of time for questions. So thank you, thanks everyone. We would love to answer any of your questions. Even if they're about elephants. Although I don't know that I can help with elephants. Hello, hello, thank you both. That was really awesome to hear. I did have a question. I do have some experience working with some of the Smithsonian organizations and know that the collection management usually happens in sort of these sealed off systems like TMS or MIMS-E. How is that currently implemented? You mentioned that being on the roadmap for like down the line. So how, for what you're currently building right now, how are those systems related, if at all? TMS for everyone. So we are using TMS and it is a very highly structured, very proprietary system and it's really made exclusively for curators. So it does not play well with anything other than itself. You know those. And so we have worked to move it out into a MySQL database and it automatically updates twice a week which for a museum is like every 30 seconds for anywhere else. And we will be using that to create the relationships between WordPress and TMS. Our goal is to make it so any museum using the museum system can use this to put their content into WordPress too. That's like the overall goal for that part of the project. Absolutely. Okay, so, and just a quick follow-up then. Is the idea that curatorial would still use TMS as their primary entry point and then that information is just like synced over into the WordPress? Absolutely. We do not want to upset the curators. This kind of ties off of not upsetting the curators. I was wondering how big your digital team is at the museum and also how you've managed stakeholder management to make sure that the curators and everyone else at the museum is bought into the new designs and ideas. Well, compared to most of the museums in the United States and the world, we have an enormous team. Compared to places like the Met, we are an ant on top of like an elephant. So we have a strictly digital team of about 13 people. Three of them are web and backend. We have a video person. We have a photography department, rights and reproduction and AV and equipment within the exhibitions. So it's not huge. Met is 70 people, but it's sizable and that really helps. When it comes to thinking about how the curators fit in, there was a lot of talk about what content could legally go online and how we felt about putting up information that may not be correct. And everybody has their own opinion and if you've ever worked in an art museum, you will know that these opinions are very, very loud, but we're working through it. And I think everyone's starting to understand that we all know that research is ongoing and we all know that information's imperfect and it doesn't mean that you're not the expert on this topic, but we have 41,000 objects online. Nobody can fact check all of those and be one curator, but crowdsourcing and people who are specialists who maybe have this object so that they've studied their entire lives but they're not with the Smithsonian might be able to help. Thank you. Are there opportunities for other museums to either get involved or at least follow along the progress of these tools that you might be building? As we finish building them, we will put them up and we are creating a lab blog to just highlight as we move through these different steps. It is all iterative and it will never be done. So hopefully people though can use them. Maybe they'll create things. There may be things out there that don't fit in right now but would fit into our system a little bit later and we're hoping that the community within cultural institutions can start to better mimic the community around news services and shopping services in these places where everyone is giving all of this wonderful feedback and using their resources to create amazing plugins and actually have that available to a group that has very little money and often very, very, very limited digital resources. A little shorter. Okay, hi. Hi. I enjoyed your talk. Thank you very much. Thanks. I work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we are working on upgrading our ticketing presence online. So I have two questions for you. One would be about the e-commerce or the ticketing element of your site and how you've looked at that and whether or not you plan to use WordPress to interact with that at all. And then my second question would be very curious about how you're using GitHub and if that's publicly available. Okay. Ticketing right now is about as manual as you can get. We order them from Ticketmaster and then we hand sort them and then we hand them out to people when they get there and then we ask for them back at the door so that we can count them. They feel very special. Very special. It's like a super amazing high tech system. Yeah. Okay. The Cooper Hewitt's using Tessitura and we are looking at a couple other different systems but it needs to tie into our CRM. Yep. So we're not sure what's going to happen with that. It would be nice if in the future we can help the people who are buying tickets be able to see what they've got and have that integrated with our site but right now our biggest issue is trying to make sure that the collections information is actually linked with the research which strangely it's not on any site anymore. Understood. And then how would that, are you also looking at any of the WordPress e-commerce platforms so? No. We're not. We haven't looked at those yet at all. Okay. We don't have a store because we're Smithsonian and so there is another space that actually sells items but it's not our museum. Okay. And could you speak a little more to the GitHub part of your talk? We have a GitHub repository and I think there's one item in it right now but if you watch more we'll show up. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hey. Hi. As a designer developer who likes to build WordPress sites and likes to work with museums and other cultural institutions is there a way I can get involved in this initiative or like help it or I don't know be collegial in some useful way? I actually think that's going to become a very important part of this once the initial portion is launched. So we need to make sure that the structure is very set and we know where we're going since we're not seeing anyone else doing this. We know there's gonna be a lot of missteps but once we get in there and we have this environment fully set we're hoping to have art and IT enthusiasts come and help us iterate off of this and make something really amazing. Cool. Actually, no Annie so we can get in touch. Yes. Any other questions? Thank you. Thanks.