Creating a Winning Online Exhibition. A Guide for Libraries, Archives and Museums

Citation

Mason, D. (2003), "Creating a Winning Online Exhibition. A Guide for Libraries, Archives and Museums", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 211-211. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310481445

This book aims to be a practical guide to creating a professional, stylish online exhibition of part of a museum or library collection. Kalfatovic is the digital projects librarian for the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and has been responsible for many outstanding Internet exhibitions. The book is illustrated with examples of his and others’ successful work. Based on his experience, the book outlines an eight‐step method developed for taking an exhibition idea from concept to conclusion. The structure of the book takes the reader through each stage of the process and deals with refining the idea, preparing a proposal, selecting the objects, writing the script, digitising the objects, creating the Web pages and going live. Each chapter is clearly laid out, logically organised and includes extensive reading guides to material cited and URLs of all online exhibitions featured. There is an extensive separate bibliography of exhibition literature.

The coverage of the chapters is uneven. All are well written, but some are discursive essays, for example on the nature of exhibitions online or otherwise, and the difference between museums, libraries and archives. Others are little more than annotated lists of topics. The chapter entitled “Ideas”, for example, suggests looking for anniversaries, using themes within collections, etc. with no systematic guidance as to how to evaluate the idea or test its acceptability. Fortunately, other chapters are detailed, lengthy and technical, e.g. on digital file formats. Issues such as the actual programming and creation of the Web site are treated in headline fashion – there is a mention of more or less every technical term likely to be met but just a paragraph describing them and their role.

The book is obviously based on sound experience, and for the totally uninitiated it provides a useful overview and checklist of what is involved in the project management of an online exhibition. However, some of the examples in the appendices are so skimpy as to be little value. The “timeline for contracted exhibitions”, for example, has a total of four project steps, supposed to be enough to control the creation and delivery of your exhibition by outside programmers. The suggested database record format is inadequate for anything but the most trivial use. The overall impression given by the material is that it is expanded notes from a lecture to absolute beginners, mentioning all the steps they have to take along the way and digressing into particular issues where hidden problems might lie waiting for the unwary.

As a new work in the rather scarce literature on online exhibitions, this is a very welcome addition.