 Hi, my name is Alexandra and I am a production manager at art finder, which is a UK based company Do not let the accent fool you Now our funders actually started by a group of people that have Very different backgrounds. They have two things in common one. We're all extremely passionate about art and two We've identified that art is actually not very well served by the web. There's really no one focus point on Online that you can experience art in and if you think about other sectors like music and fashion and movies All of them sort of have an online Destination so what we are trying to do at our finder is really creating this home for art online where you can find and discover more art where you can Get more information actually retain that information and we're going to start sort of creating your own art profile and share it with Your friends and and other people now in order to do this We really have four basic components that we built the first one is Goes into content and cataloging and we have Started creating a database that has over 12,000 artists over half a million works of art and we're still growing and working with our partners to really try to accumulate enough information that is both relevant and Accessible and this is about individual works of art about artists, but also where you can experience this art live So really work with our partners try to drive that kind of traffic back to them as well The other thing we really want to do is build a community and in in order to enable that we give people tools to collect art share it really sort of start making art a part of your own identity and also enabling You to recommend the kind of things that you like to your friends and learn from them what kind of things they like now we've Also identified that art is a particularly hard thing to search for Because the traditional keyword search doesn't really work with art. It's a visual thing So, you know recommendations help with that, but we're also using technology to try to identify how you can use image base search To look for things that you like and and also to be able to find new things that includes image recognition and Other discovery tools that we have online oops and And all of that really is you know we're sort of building these tools to help you find the kind of art that you like and Once you have that information to also try to help you to experience this live And it's you know about looking at the stuff on on web but really tying it back to our partners and and helping people understand where they can actually find The kind of art that they're looking for Now the last part is about How you consume art and that's you know, there's the traditional ways of course, but we're also exploring new ways of tying you back to our partners of enabling Things you know all these things online But also exploring new technologies and one of the things we're really excited about is actually tablets reason for it is that they're quintessentially a visual tool and They're accessible worldwide or I should say the content will be accessible worldwide and they're mobile They're easy to carry around and we really think that there's potential for for tablets to Open up an entire new world of how people consume art how the information comes to you and and actually how you can enhance your life experience so In order to really explore this potential to its maximum we decided to develop a Apps production system which we call fountain and it's a web-based system and it's it's online But it's secured by password and you get your username and everything and it takes you through a step-by-step quick easy and cost-effective way of developing apps It's it's text-based for the kind of content you want to inform about your collection And and then it also creates a gallery space where you basically just upload images and upload spreadsheets with the kind of data that our partners already have Now this is a template System, but we also understand that partners have a brand and a visual image that it's unique to them in order to facilitate Them to be able to help them be able to expose that we've created a home page If you like a cover page for our apps, which are all image-based So this is where we're really recognizing, you know, people need to be able to identify themselves through these apps that they're creating with our system What you get is an app that has at its heart images and All the kind of information I have in it including text documents, which are generally already Developed for exhibition collections, etc Visitor information that includes maps links back to our partners again This whole idea that we're working together and really want to enhance the experience of live art and also images that have basic metadata But also we have enabled all these aspects of sharing and community through Facebook and emailing and really you know the point here is that our Tablets or our tablet apps are an integrated part of this entire system that includes websites and our relationships with our partners And what we're really trying to do is build a community that Can have art at its heart? I am gonna now pass you to the able and hands of Priscilla and she'll talk to you a little bit about how grants have Helped and enabled our work Thanks, Alex. So I think a lot of us or a lot of everyone here is Trying to navigate the grants process and understand how how a project like this can go through it So this section I'm going to try to give some information on it So we applied for a grant about six to eight months ago And this is what we produced what Alex just kind of went through very quickly So let's go through it again. There was a website with about half a million pieces of art and about two and a half thousand galleries Online as well as 12,000 artists. We did some customized data cleaning tools That helped us with content and I'm pretty passionate about content because I head up content at art finder as well as recommendations Recommendations engine we produced as part of that website image recognition technology and the iPad and smartphone apps So we talked about so there was a lot of deliverables. I got to tell you I was a bit at first worried about the project scope But that is what we did and applied for for a particular grant But why did we do this? This is kind of our key objectives We wanted to establish some synergy synergies with our with our collaborative partners where we can increase public access similar to nest is kind of Objective of engagement audience engagement as well as widening The public access for the entire sector so you can see you want to increase public access drive a lot of traffic and Footfall back to the museums and galleries our partners and we wanted to also Allow access to to images. No one else gets to see or artworks that are in the digital stacks So that's one of the objectives as well as exploring new ways that we can again establish business models We talked a little bit about print on demand the apps new channels basically across platform so when we talk about digital technologies, we're talking the web as well as applications and Again going back to the out of print catalogs Who did we collaborate with well? We had a partner called paul poberton publishing now He runs a publishing company that helps actually produce these catalogs in book form so he knew about Curatoral of the the the publishing background that we needed he had the art history background He knew content and that is definitely key because we wanted to represent the works and the content the best way possible For the museums galleries or picture libraries Intro analytics wasn't a technology partner We had which help with our recommendations engine and that's all the algorithms behind What makes our magic tour magical and allows you to kind of give you a customized tour of what works? You would like or your friends would like and then not Last but not certainly not least is the many museums and galleries that we partnered with and again very very tight timelines, but we went out there and we talked to a lot of these galleries and got their content on board and We're still in discussions with many more as you can see here challenges I Definitely think there are the devils are definitely in the details, but not to get bogged down by them So for us content Managing managing the standards and the guidelines was tricky because every museum or arts and cultural organization has different ways of Dealing with their content and it's very key that we best represent that without Again making things inefficient, so we drive efficiency by keeping in mind that we need to make sure we respect how that content needs to appear So being flexible delivering on the wide scope that I've listed off meant making sure we dedicated technical resources, so we made it very clear who's on the project who's on the team What are their roles and responsibilities? Who's the dedicated project management resource to help coordinate all that we had something called sprints Which told us exactly what we're delivering every two weeks, which is good kept us on track and on time and User testing and feedback so things don't work. We have to adapt pretty quickly and that's part of that audience engagement aspect Finally managing the costs required to digitize content I mean something that we definitely don't want to take for granted and making sure that we make the right technology choices So we're not always fixed on what we think we're going to do Sometimes we have to see what the problem is before we can adjust so that was fairly important and the learning and impact Again, I talked about content structuring it make sure we have guidelines that are flexible The partnerships have to be strong. We were lucky enough to partner with people. We knew fairly well We knew how they worked we met very frequently and I was one of the project managers for this Grant process so I can say communication was Pivotal because we had so many stakeholders and we had to make sure that we we adhered to their needs as well as what are they getting out Of the project. What are their exploitation benefits? So that was very important. I've tried to go through that very quickly I would say that please definitely approach us if you are looking for Partnering and you like some of the technologies we offer as well as we have some iPad apps that we can dazzle you with the the actual product Here so hope that was helpful