Love and Yearning Interview, Part 2 · 1287 words posted 10/15/2004 12:33 PM
In the fall of 2003, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery exhibited Love & Yearning, a collection of illustrated Persian manuscripts. John Gordy, Head of Digital Media, and Jacqueline Bullock, Web Producer, designed a kiosk and website around one of the manuscripts, “Haft Awrang,” (or “Seven Thrones”).
Last summer they gave me a tour of the galleries and talked about their production processes. In the first part of the interview, we discussed the planning, storytelling, and goals of the exhibit. In the second part, below, we talk about the choice of technologies. Many thanks to John, Jacqueline, and the rest of the staff at the Freer and Sackler for their time.
Databases
The Freer and Sackler galleries use The Museum System (TMS) database to track their collections. I asked John about using a database for the Love & Yearning exhibit.
John Gordy: We didn’t use a database for Love & Yearning; it’s only 28 pages. For some online collections, we do an extract from TMS, which has 50,000 to 60,000 records. We only want the few of those that have been approved for public access. We’ll do an extract that pulls a few thousand records and puts everything in a flat Access table. That way, when I have the Access table I can work with it on my desktop. We may bump it up to SQL Server, but it still will be one flat table.
Our museum tends to be more about interpretation rather than presenting mass quantities of information. So in the same way it just wouldn’t make any sense to invite a visitor in and let them roam around the collection storage—they wouldn’t have any idea of what they were really looking at—we want to encapsulate the stuff we’ve got and put it in groups. It’s thematic, it’s got narrative text with it, and that contextualizes it. So that leads us away from doing large scale database projects.
Working with Flash
Love & Yearning uses Zoomify to magnify Flash images at a very high resolution. I asked John and Jacqueline how they selected their technogies.
John Gordy: We originally started looking at Zoomify when it was using Java. It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t giving us imaging gratification, so it wasn’t something we wanted to use. But the first Flash version was interesting, and the second Flash version was up to speed and really worked. When I saw the first demo at a FlashForward in San Francisco, at the same time I was thinking about what Massumeh [Dr. Massumeh Farhad, Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art], had said: “I really want to get into the details.” It was a perfect fit, and perfect timing.
So the choice of technology changes depending on the exhibit. Each curator will present me with a challenge, depending on what they’re interested in, and I will look in the bag of tools and come up with whatever I think might work.
since1968: Stepping back from Zoomify for the moment, let’s talk about the choices of Flash, Java, or—let’s be crazy—SVG, it’s an option. David Rumsey does Japanese maps for UC Berkeley that are breathtaking. He uses a proprietary Java applet called “insight” that lets you zoom in on the images. There’s another viewer called MrSID from LizardTech that many libraries use to show Fire Insurance Maps in great detail. How did you choose Flash?
John Gordy: Part of the reason for using Flash is I’ve been using it for so long that I feel comfortable with it. It’s also nice to have so many developers out there working in something. The reason I didn’t use those other two products is I’d just never heard of them, whereas Zoomify, everybody uses it.
The nice thing about so many people using a tool is there’s always code out there, and so when I wanted to create custom buttons and tools, it was pretty easy. ActionScript is easy to read in a way that Java is not, and the code behind Zoomify is very easy to use. 
And also, I have to say, the guy who runs it, David Urbanic, he’s just so nice. I would email him, and the first time I emailed him I had been banging my head against the wall trying to do something. He said “try this,” and sent me code. He’s just super friendly, and ever since then, when I’m working on a project I’ll show him things as I develop it and he’ll suggest ways to do it.
So that’s the reason for Flash. I’m sure other tools have their own communities.
I’m very conscious of the fact that we’re part of the Smithsonian, and I want to make sure a good number of people can see what we’re showing. In fact, we talk about using Flash all the time, but 99% of our site is HTML: straight HTML, very accessible using CSS, making sure it’s easy for people to read it with any sort of reader they may have. I wouldn’t put vital information like dates, times, and directions in Flash.
A few years ago there was a lot of QuickTime on the site. There’s less and less now. But now, if you want to present video it makes more sense if you want to do it in Flash.
since1968: You used the same code base for both the kiosk and the web site, but did you have to use a different wrapper for each?
Jacqueline Bullock: Most of it was redesign because we lost physical space on the web.
John Gordy: Yeah, we had to design the layout a bit differently. We had put in scroll bars to accommodate the text, which of course you don’t really want to do on a touch screen. But the time it took for the webification was a week or less.
We started out with the kiosk version. The code already worked, the zoomify was already written. I did have to go in and slightly tweak each coordinate for the web.
Jacqueline Bullock: The kiosk resolution was 1600×1200. It was so nice designing for that.
since1968: Is there a Smithsonian design standard? Every site under the Smithsonian banner must follow a certain set of design guidelines?
John Gordy: Think of it as a garden of wildflowers. You want them all to have their own personality.
Jacqueline Bullock: Air and Space is not going to have the same flowers as we are. There aren’t too many restrictions: you have to have the privacy act; you must link to the main Smithsonian site; and there are restrictions on how you can use the logo.
John Gordy: These are not big restrictions. That being said, if I were to redo our entire site in Flash 7 player that would be a problem. But before it would ever cause an issue on an institutional level, there would be an issue in house.
since1968: Will you be able to use code from this interactive in future projects?
Jacqueline Bullock: The hope is that this would be a prototype for other manuscripts. We really wanted to see if this is a model that we could then put in other manuscripts and use, to have a library in our own format.
since1968: So the hope is you’ll have a website and kiosk already built, and drop in a different set of graphics and text. Is it that level of templating?
Jacqueline Bullock: It never really is for us; we’re always trying to reach a higher level of quality. More than templates, this project added another tool to our repertoire.
We want the Flash interactives to be able to stand beyond the exhibition. When the exhibition goes offline, we want to make sure the interactives are still pertinent and interesting.
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