In June 2024, Enriching Exhibition Stories held a Quire use case workshop with our partners at Getty alongside associated activities at the Getty Villa and IIIF conference.
Hosted by our project partners at Getty, the workshop brought together the full project team from the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Yale University, and the Getty Quire development team. The voice of current and potential Quire users was represented by colleagues from the Ashmolean Museum, Getty Villa, the Quire community manager, and invited experts from the Wildenstein Plattner Institute and Design for Context.
During the first half of the workshop, researcher Dr. Tyler Bonnet demonstrated his work so far on the project, in which he’s added Linked Art pre-processing capabilities to Quire. This functionality was illustrated through a Quire publication by Dr. Andrew Shapland based on the Ashmolean Labyrinth exhibition, which he curated in 2023.
The second half of the workshop focussed on identifying ‘use cases’ which will inform development for the rest of the project. Each was sketched from the perspective of a new Quire user, mindful of their role, institution (or not), and resourcing. The workshop prioritised exploration of use cases beyond those currently encountered in the Quire community, and which can give voice to those who might not usually interact with museum data. After characterising which new functionalities would be necessary to support each scenario, a long-list of 17 specific use cases was consolidated and prioritised down to three (see below).
A few days later the project team visited the Getty Villa, where Dr. Shapland led a staff symposium describing his work on the Labyrinth exhibition and the associated research within the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project (for which Enriching Exhibition Stories is the ‘follow on’ project).
Rounding off the week, US and UK principal investigators Dr. Rob Sanderson and Dr. Kevin Page co-organised a well attended half-day discussion session on Connecting IIIF and Semantic Cultural Heritage Metadata for Discovery at the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference.
Enriching Exhibition Stories prioritised use cases
1. Internally authored using internally accessible content
Rich additional content, created for an exhibition, was added during preparations to the internal Collections Management System. After the exhibition this can be repurposed for e.g. educational resources, standing gallery guides. Sometimes this will also include content from a third-party institution.
2. Publicly authored using (only) publicly accessible content
An author external to the collecting institution wishes to create Quire content based upon the collection items discovered through the museum’s online collections site. Examples of users include educational professionals, charities widening access, teachers creating lesson plans, students writing term papers. Sometimes this will be prompted by a physical visit to the museum.
3. ‘Traditional’ Quire Digital Publications (internally authored with internal content)
The creation of e.g. exhibition catalogues is usually undertaken by an internal curator-editor-digital-publications team. With small adaptations to their workflow, the Linked Art Quire extension can provide time and labour-saving benefits.