 Hello, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this session today. My name is Catherine Barrow, and I'm the lead user experience architect at Pixel Fusion based in Auckland. I'll be presenting today with Fiona Moorhead, who's the collections registrar for Auckland Art Gallery. What we'd like to talk to you about today is the work that we did to design and develop the Auckland Art Gallery's new website. I'll be focusing on the challenges that the project presented, the solution that we created, and its implications for the future of digital at the gallery. And then Fiona is going to take you through the project to digitize the gallery's archives and the value that this has brought to the gallery's online presence. When we were initially approached by the gallery, they had some very clear goals that they hoped to achieve through their new website. Their existing website was not an accurate reflection of the brand, nor did it really encompass the spirit and experience of the physical gallery itself. More than a digital catalog of information, the new website needed to be an extension of the gallery itself, mirroring its atmosphere and nuances. The ultimate challenge then was to create a website that was welcoming and inspiring, and it helped users grow and connect with Auckland Art Gallery's amazing collection. At the same time, we needed to lay a strong foundation for the future, allowing the gallery to grow and embrace new technologies with ease. So as part of our research and discovery phase, we reviewed the Auckland Art Gallery's personas, we reviewed their annual visitor reports, and we spoke to a wide variety of stakeholders to ensure that we knew exactly what experience we were trying to create. Based on the insights that we gathered from this process, we created a set of design principles to inform our thinking and shape the gallery experience. As you can see, we created five core principles. But for the purposes of this talk, I'd like to dig into the first three in a little bit more detail. Auckland Art Gallery prides itself on creating a welcoming experience for people from all walks of life, and with a range of artistic insight and engagement. They set out to uproot old perceptions of galleries as intimidating or elite by encouraging people to view the gallery, not as a temple of art, but as a home. A primary goal for the new website was to extend the sense of home and inclusiveness into the new site by creating an inviting and engaging experience. As part of our research and discovery, we reviewed the annual visitor reports that are created by Morris Hargreaves Macintyre every year for the gallery, which paint a very clear picture of visitors to the gallery. In particular, we were interested in the differing levels of engagement that users displayed. In order for the gallery site to help users build emotional and spiritual connections with art, it needed to represent art in a way that was accessible and relatable for novice users, while at the same time catering to the deeper, more specialized needs of the experts. The gallery's incredible physical space is designed to encourage people to explore and linger, and the new website needed to do the same. In order to achieve this, the new site needed to accomplish two things. Firstly, it needed to provide really clear prompts to help users begin their journey of exploration, and secondly, it needed to hold their attention and make sure that that journey continued. So in exploring ways to make this vision a reality, we considered a variety of approaches. Of course, as part of this project, we completely overhauled the search functionality, adding far more advanced search fields and filtering functionality. And while this was incredibly valuable, we felt that perhaps it wasn't going to encourage the kind of engagement that we were hoping to create. Faced with an empty search box, would a novice user really know where to start? We also considered displaying personalized collections based on users' browsing history or preferences. And while we feel that this might be potentially valuable in the future, we were concerned that as a core part of the functionality on the site, we might risk creating an artistic echo chamber, preventing users from challenging themselves and exploring new ideas. In his TED Talk titled Weaving Narratives in Museum Galleries, Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, puts forward a very compelling argument for the value and relevance of the curated museum experience. For him, the power of the curator is in connecting people with authenticity, authentic objects and authentic stories. In a world of ubiquitous information and, as he put it, just add water expertise, the role of the curator is to construct a narrative and to move beyond technical classifications and jargon. It is in the realms of human story and insight that art and history become truly relatable. His contention was that as the digital world becomes more and more impersonal, predictable and automated, our basic human love of stories will drive us into spaces like museums and galleries where we can experience the culmination of knowledge and storytelling that is the curated exhibition. Curators are at their core storytellers. They present content with intent, selecting artworks and crafting compelling narratives that add emotional depth and context, making artworks that may have previously seemed intimidating, accessible and relatable. So similarly to Mr. Campbell, our ultimate conclusion when it came to the website, the Auckland Art Gallery's new website, was that we needed to take inspiration from the role the curation plays in the physical gallery space. Rather than relying on automation to predict what users would want to see or leaving them unguided to find their own way, we decided to empower the gallery to tell stories, share knowledge and create experiences that would engage and educate their users. Stories help build empathy through insight. They help us build strong emotional and spiritual connections with people and worlds diverse from our own. By architecting the gallery's new website around the concept of storytelling, we laid the foundations for an experience that would make art accessible. So I've talked about the abstract of what we wanted to create in terms of the design principles and I've talked about the inspiration and theory behind our concept of storytelling. But what do these ideas look like in practice? Let's take a look at some of the ways that we began to lay the foundations and build the tools to enable rich and engaging storytelling. For the first phase of the new website, we focused on three main areas of functionality. Provide context. So to help Auckland Art Gallery provide context in their collection, the site had two new features. The first, which Fiona will cover in a lot of detail, was the initially unplanned edition of archive collections to the website. Archives are an incredible source of background information and provide a frame of reference through which to empathize and understand artworks. Having these archives easily accessible adds rich meaning and texture to each artwork's story and is certainly one of the great triumphs of the new website. In addition to the archives, we provided improved functionality for searching and displaying the Auckland Art Gallery's vast library of resources. Publications, blog posts, audio and video are all now at users' fingertips. Bug. At the very core of the new experience we created for the gallery was the concept of content sets. Sorry, he's obviously very interested in what we were doing. A content set is a collection of content from across the gallery and can include things like artists' artworks, archive collections. Although incredibly simple conceptually, content sets in practice provide an enormous amount of value. Firstly, using content sets to present smaller themed collections of artworks provides users with an easily digestible bite-sized introduction to the collection. Secondly, the content sets allow the gallery to curate and create narratives on their website in much the same way that they do in the gallery itself. And lastly, the simplicity of creating these content sets means that the process of contributing content to the online presence has been democratised. So people from across the gallery have participated in creating content for the website, resulting in them sharing a wide variety of perspectives and ensuring that the website remains fresh and engaging over time. Lastly, we focused on exploration. We really wanted to inspire users to strike out on their own and see where the collection would take them. When we integrated with Vernon, we were able to pull through a variety of tags that were used to organise the collection. We surfaced these tags on each artworks page, allowing users to easily browse the collection using artistic themes, subject matter and more. Our goal here was to encourage casual, meandering exploration. Browsing the collection in this way surfaced as incredible cross-sections of the collection, hidden gems and unexpected juxtapositions. So the New Auckland Art Gallery website went live in December last year. As the initial phase of the gallery's ongoing digital evolution, it has provided a powerful and flexible foundation for future growth. Over the past year, the gallery has settled into their digital home and has started using those new tools to create a really compelling online experience. At the same time, together with Pixel Fusion, they're constantly coming up with new and exciting features and functionality to be released in future phases. So looking forward for the gallery, there are really two main areas where I feel the most innovation and exploration is going to be happening. The first is in telling more stories. So as the Auckland Art Gallery's digital presence matures, it's likely that the opportunity to contribute content to the website will be extended beyond the Auckland Art Gallery team. For example, the gallery could work directly with artists to create their own online collections using their artworks, archive materials and stories to add insight to their work. Another idea is that of allowing users to directly contribute to the website by creating their own online collections. Engaging with users in this way will allow the gallery to present a far richer and more textured tapestry of human insight and experience. At the same time, these online collections generated by users provide really important insight into the kind of themes and artworks that resonate with users and may even inspire exhibitions in the future. In addition to telling more stories, as the digital world evolves, there are always newer and exciting ways to tell richer stories. The new gallery site with its open source platform and API means that the gallery is perfectly poised to take advantage of emerging technology. So 3D visual augment... Sorry. Very distracting. 3D virtual reality, augmented reality, all of these have the ability to add rich meaning and context to the stories that the gallery is telling. Imagine being able to explore an installation in 3D, perhaps using that nifty HoloLens that Dave was showing us yesterday. Imagine being able to explore an artist's studio in virtual reality, being able to browse users' collections, not only see the artworks that they've collected, but listen to or watch a video of them explaining the significance of those artworks from their own unique perspective. As technology becomes more immersive, sensory and ubiquitous, the gallery is going to have constant opportunities to enrich the stories that they're telling, and this new website has provided them with a very powerful foundation to do that. So to summarize, the foundational first phase of the new website was designed to lay the groundwork for future innovation and growth. As a last note, working with the gallery was incredibly rewarding. The team is very knowledgeable and passionate, and we learned so much from them over the past two years. They've really inspired a passion for the glam sector within the Pixel Fusion team. What's more, one of the most refreshing parts of working with the gallery was their willingness to go on the journey with us and really immerse themselves in the iterative and agile processes that we put in place. And so it really was, in the end, a collaborative project. And now I'm going to hand over to one of those collaborators, Fiona, who's going to take you through the work that we did to bring the archives into the online presence. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name's Fiona Morehead, and I'm the collections registrar at Auckland Art Gallery. In my talk, I'll be providing a case study of bringing our archives collections into our main collection online site and some of the lessons that we learned from this project. To set the scene, Auckland Art Gallery is part of Regional Facilities Auckland, an Auckland Council, Council-controlled organisation. In 2015, our parent organisation, RFA, approved a redevelopment of the Auckland Art Gallery website. The goal of this project was to have a single website content management system across all RFA sites. We were told by RFA that it was unlikely that we would have any major new functionality as part of this first phase of our website redevelopment, but that we would have input into the parameters of the project so we could prioritise the development that was most important to us. There are a number of huge advantages for us getting a new site, including having a modern responsive site and also to have an API to allow better use of our website content for other digital projects. The Auckland Art Gallery team consisted of Sarah Laver, the gallery's head of marketing and communications, Nick Moore, our online coordinator, Bex Cato from RFA as project manager and me with advice from other gallery staff for different parts of the site. And so my role was to provide expertise with our collection database, Vernon CMS, and also to provide input into the collection online section of the website. And so as you've seen already, we worked with Pixel Fusion to design and build the site. And what I really found from this project was how important it is to work with a company who is excited about what you do and also who are willing to learn all the quirks and lingo required to build a museum website. And I mean, you sense that from what Kat spoke about just before, but Pixel Fusion were really great at understanding what was important to us and importantly for the collection online, they were willing to work through the integration with data from Vernon, our collection management system. So when I was considering the state of our collection online, I knew that we had lots of room for improvement, but luckily we had some really good data. So 98% of our collection was already available online and we do have images available for 85% of our collection. Always room for improvement, but pretty good. And as Kat mentioned, we used Agile for the planning and development of this website project. We found this really helpful to allow us to prioritize ideas and to keep on track with the project. So what I kind of did was I had the ability to think about small improvements and also big improvements. So some of the small things that I really wanted to see improved in the collection online were things like, with an artwork, can I see if it's on display or not on display? Can I see beautiful images of the artworks and having an interface that doesn't have a lot of in between or kind of ugliness around our beautiful artworks? And also I want to see more artwork images when available. So these have been implemented on our live site and totally untested, but let's see if I can make some of this work. No, anyway. So we also had some ideas for bigger improvements and so this includes things like allowing downloads of high resolution images for art of copyright images, creative commons copyright statements, the ability for the public to create sets of artworks on the site, as Kat mentioned, and also to use Vernon data instead of duplicating data entry on the website CMS. And so in the end, we were able to get some way down the track with some of these ideas but they're not implemented on our live site at the moment but we do have plans for development in the future. It was really fun working with Pixel Fusion. They were so excited about building a website for an art museum and they came up with lots of suggestions by looking around the world at other museums and what awesome things they were doing and so one example we talked about initially was that of adding search by colour functionality on our website and so this example is from the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum at the Smithsonian and we didn't quite get there with search by colour but I really do live in hope because I think it's a really great tool for allowing serendipitous connections to happen. So I also thought about a lot about whether there was something more we could squeeze into this project for our collection online and so immediately I thought that this would be a perfect time to bring our archives collection onto the website. Our archives collections are held within the gallery's EH McCormick Research Library and this collection is managed by our wonderful archivist Caroline McBride and in 2012 I worked with Caroline on a project to import the archives collection data into Vernon, our collection database. The end goal for this project was to make the archives collections more visible and usable by gallery staff and members of the public so presenting this information online was a key part of the project. So just to take a slight sideways step I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the archives collections just so you understand the significance of these materials and how they're used. The archives collections are really important for the gallery and include a hugely diverse range of materials so they may relate to the gallery and artist practice, particular artworks or other arts institutions around New Zealand. They're a valuable resource for gallery staff for use in exhibitions as contextual information and by members of the public who use this material for research. The archives collections include historic materials relating to our collection so here's two of the visitors books from Mr. Partridge's Lindauer Art Gallery which is the original home of our Lindauer portraits. You can see a version of the visitors book in English and in Māori. So here you can see some of the signatures and comments inside the visitors book. And incidentally if you visit the gallery's Māori portraits exhibition that's on at the moment you can sign a new visitors book which will also become part of the research library's collection. Archives collections also relate to Auckland Art Gallery's exhibition so here's an archive of items related to Kate Newby's installation on our sculpture terrace when the gallery reopened in 2011. So here are some coloured concrete and rope samples that were used to identify the preferred materials for the finished artwork. And this is the finished artwork on our sculpture terrace. The archives collection also represents ongoing relationships with living artists. So here's some items from photographer Greg Semu's archive which is a long-term loan to the gallery. And this shows the commitment that the gallery has to help artists to look after their archives. So this image shows items from the archive on display in our smallest gallery space which is a display case outside the research library doors. And so this is one of the ways in which archives materials are used within the gallery. As well as being used by researchers our archives collections are often used in exhibitions. So as an example we have an archive of Tony Fommerson's studio papers. These include letters, ephemera, sketches and source material gathered and created by the artist Tony Fommerson. Here are some items from the archive on display at Auckland Art Gallery in 2013 for an exhibition titled Tony Fommerson, Artist and Archivist, which investigated his process of collecting and organising source material which often formed the basis of artworks he created. So this shows you another way that we use archives within the gallery. And here you can see one of the absolute delights of this archive. So you can see on the left a photograph from a book which was actually the source material or the inspiration for the painting on the right which is held by Auckland Art Gallery. Archival collections are also proving to be very important for exhibitions of contemporary art where there may not be a finished artwork or if there is it may not have been kept or collected by a museum. So this was apparent in an exhibition at Tate Britain this year called Conceptual Art in Britain which relied heavily on archival materials. And sorry that was a borrowed internet image so the quality is not great. So previously in our old website there had been some information about archives on the website but it was in a separate section of the site and it wasn't easily accessible or findable. On our new website archives are presented in a separate tab under the search results so you can always find archives materials regardless of whether you are explicitly searching for them or not. So for instance if you're searching for artworks by Francis Hodgkins you can view the artwork tab which shows you 107 artworks by Francis Hodgkins but you can also see that there's eight results under archives. So if you take a look at that you can see that this includes photographs, letters and research material towards the catalogue raiser name. And so if the researcher or member of the public would like to find out more about these materials they can click through and view the records and then they could come into the research library or contact the library directly for further assistance. So as another example let's look at Harvey Binge's photo books. So when we're viewing this archive we can see details about the collection that it's an archive containing many photo books by the photographer Harvey Binge. So we can also see some of the items that are within this archive. So one of the differences between the archives and the artworks on our website is that archives have a hierarchical relationship. So we have archive collections which are the parent records and we have the archive items which are the child records. So when you're viewing these archives collections or archives items on the website you can always see that relationship so you can see the parent records and the child records at all times. So you never lose context of what you're looking at. So we're looking here at one of the photo books within Harvey Binge's archive and we can always see that it's part of the larger archive so on the right hand side there you can see that it's part of Harvey Binge photo books and we can also see all the other child records within this collection. So we're still assessing the effects of publishing these archives online. So according to Google Analytics the most popular archives within our collections are the Harvey Binge photo books, Fiona Connor archive and also the Test Strip archive. All three of these archives are about living artists and all three have also recently been displayed in the research library's display case. So I'm not entirely certain whether the popularity is due to these being living artists or the fact that there's been exhibitions about them recently. So we're going to continue to assess this and also our research librarians are going to continue to ask members of the public who come into the research library how they heard about the archives collections. Running short on time, let's talk faster. So we have lots of plans for what we want to do next including adding finding aids and audio to archives collections. We are going to be cataloging more things down to item level and also I really hope that we're able to add more high resolution images to enable better research happening by people at home. This takes me to a slight different angle. For me, one of the most interesting outcomes of this project was to realize the possibility that website projects have to change or remove institutional distinctions or hierarchies. So previous to the digitization of the archives collections, they were really invisible within the gallery. They were not searchable, they were not easily visible to staff or the public. Access was made manually in person through the research library. So digitizing these collections and making them available online has made them much more accessible and much more visible to the public in the same manner as artworks. And so this means that they're much more likely to be used in exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery or elsewhere, accessed by gallery staff members or researchers which adds to art historical discourse. And it was also really interesting for me to consider that while within Auckland Art Gallery we have a distinction between artworks and archives. Artists don't have the same distinction. We have a lot of artworks in our collections that you could easily call archived. So here's an example of one of those artworks. It's an artwork by Daniel Malone called Black Market Next to My Name which consists of everything, everything he owned. Books, clothes, tonal, clipping collection. So it's an artwork, but it's also an archive. And next photo is terrible quality, sorry. We also recently acquired an artwork which is an archive by Rosanna Raymond. It's called the Island Archive which is an archive of the Pacific Sisters Collective between 1989 and 2014. So the work that we did to bring the archive's collections onto the main Auckland Art Gallery site has been a really interesting process. It has demonstrated to me how your digital presence can reflect how your institution operates, but it also has the ability to shape how your institution operates. It's also really important to think beyond what you might consider to be your main collection. So what else might benefit from being digitized and brought into your database or onto your website? We found that using Agile was vital to the success of our project, to prioritise development and ensure the project was delivered on time. And it would definitely be interesting to see Agile in use beyond website development in museums. Lastly, we found it vital to consider digital projects and ongoing investment of time and resources. This also has the benefit of delivering a constantly evolving website. So look forward to seeing more changes on our website soon. Thank you. Thank you.