Wistfully Waiting No More: An Open Source, Exhibition Building Case Study

Abstract

The promise of virtual exhibitions has been attractive to faculty and staff at the University of Virginia (UVa1) for well over a decade.The use of Virtual Exhibitions is threefold: (i) ‘Exhibitions’ is a useful metaphor for publishing; (ii) ‘Exhibitions’ suggests curated collections and mixed media; and (iii) ‘Virtual’ suggests that this new form of publication is accomplished online. This case explores the current ways faculty and graduate students at UVa are meeting their needs as well as an earlier development effort of the Virtual Exhibition Tool (VET). Development on the VET continued for more than a year as part of UVa’s response to the appeal of virtual exhibitions. At UVa, a large part of this need is now met using Omeka VisualEyes and WordPress.Several other solutions are also in use currently at UVa. All these solutions are being recommended by SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities and Arts Network of Technological Initiatives), a faculty-led center at UVa. Omeka is an open source tool for building online exhibitions. At UVa, Omeka is chosen to meet this need for online virtual exhibitions rather than to continue development of the VET. There are at least two other solutions being used for online exhibitions building at UVa that are also briefly analysed here. This paper explores these current solutions in use at UVa and outlines the lessons learned from them and from the earlier development effort on the VET.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/djlit.33.4605