Despite the constant advances in online technologies, software frameworks, and platforms, creating compelling digital experiences around museum collections is still difficult and expensive. The tools intended to facilitate the creation of content — digitization, data standards, and automated software platforms — are also the barriers of complexity that limit our success.

The Balboa Park Online Commons will be presented as a case study demonstrating an accessible and sharable framework that was built from the ground up to support multiple collections. While the collections range in size from the hundreds to tens of thousands of objects, many with varying amounts of metadata, the Commons platform offers a scalable experience for both collection aggregation and display. At the core of the Commons is a robust digital asset management system allowing for future growth and flexibility.

The presentation will cover the highlights of the Commons platform and will demonstrate the ease of scalability and use by museum staff throughout the organization. The approaches and techniques used by the Commons platform gives museum staff the experience and capabilities they need to integrate the creation of digital publications into museum culture.

Biography

Christina DePaolo is Director of New Media at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) where she is heading up the Balboa Park Commons, a large-scale project to put the digital collections of the park museums in one online library. At BPOC she works on strategic digital media projects collaborating with museum, university and corporate partners to implement cost-effective technology solutions into the museum space. Christina is finishing up her final term as a Board Director and President of the Museum Computer Network.