Paper title: Museums without Walls: Using Web Applications to Showcase Outdoor Collections and Engage the Community

Presenter: Deborah Boyer (Project Manager, Azavea)

Condensed Abstract:

Web applications provide new opportunities for organizations to showcase their outdoor collections and engage with the community. Using GIS technology and a variety of interactive user features, these online digital collections draw together geographically separated assets and introduce them to new users. Through the context of Muralfarm.org, a database featuring murals from the collection of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, this session will examine the use of GIS and digital collections for assets located beyond museum walls. 

Abstract:

While digital collections projects often focus on items physically located in a museum, providing online information about collections located outside the institution is also valuable for increasing access to museum information and building community between an organization and the public. Many museums have outdoor sculpture collections, ornamental gardens or similar exhibits spread across a wide geographic area that could be documented and introduced to new audiences via online digital collections. Such collections can further museum initiatives to use web-based applications to attract more visitors (both online and to the physical institution), provide educational and community benefits, highlight new exhibits, and even raise revenue through the sale of exhibit-based products. The Mural Arts Program is an excellent example of a non-profit organization leveraging web-based technology to catalog its vast collection of outdoor artwork and present it to the public in an innovative way. The Mural Arts Program began in 1984 as part of an anti-graffiti campaign in the City of Philadelphia. The goal of the program was to provide local youth with a more constructive outlet for their artistic energies through architectural mural painting, and ultimately to engage them in the ongoing care and beautification of their own communities. Today, the Mural Arts Program works with over 100 communities and 300 artists each year to create architectural murals that reflect the culture and beauty of Philadelphia’s diverse neighborhoods. The Muralfarm.org website (www.muralfarm.org) is a unique celebration of the program’s success. Muralfarm.org uses GIS technology to organize photographs and data for more than 1,500 murals based on their geographic locations, providing community members with greater access to information about the artwork that is a vibrant part of their neighborhoods. Users can locate their favorite murals using geographic criteria such as a map, neighborhood, or address search as well as by artist, theme, partners, and other criteria. Users can also tag photographs for future reference, save search criteria, receive notifications when new murals are added, and even reference 360-degree street level imagery of a mural’s location using Google Street View. To encourage the public to interact with the collection, users can submit reports on errors in the metadata, request new photos of murals, and share murals via email. At the same time, authorized Mural Arts Program staff members can efficiently manage the mural data, receive and respond to requests for new murals, and add to the site as the collection grows. This paper will outline how MuralFarm.org was conceived and developed, and how it can be used as a model by any museum to engage community members and more effectively manage an outdoor collection using web-based GIS applications.

Session Info

• Type: Individual Paper
• Keywords: GIS, outdoor collections, community engagement, digital collections, geography, web-based collections management, virtual collections
• Relevance: This proposal will provide museum administrators, information technology professionals, collections managers, and anyone with an interest in digital collections or GIS with a model for how web applications can increase public access to and administrative management of geographically diverse outdoor collections. Creating such digital collections can help organizations increase public awareness of what may be some of their lesser known collections.

Speaker Bio

Deborah Boyer

Deborah Boyer is a Project Manager at Azavea, a Philadelphia-based GIS software development firm, where she works on client implementations, promotion, and product development of Sajara, Azavea's web-based geographic digital asset management system. Azavea utilized Sajara to build Muralfarm.org for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. She also serves as the Project Manager for PhillyHistory.org, the Philadelphia Department of Records website that includes over 87,000 historic photographs and maps from five local organizations. Deb has her Master’s Degree in public history from Loyola University Chicago and has previously worked in several cultural institutions on a variety of educational, curatorial, and exhibit design projects.