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Museums and Drupal

Page history last edited by Laura Mann 13 years, 8 months ago

 

Abstract:

The content management system Drupal is experiencing growing popularity and adoption in the museum field. Drupal offers significant benefits to museums: it’s powerful, widely-supported and open source. Our paper will explore the use of Drupal within the museum community.

 

Our paper will present the results of a survey of a wide range of museums (art, science, history, large and small) that are currently using Drupal. We will examine the primary benefits and challenges of the system for museums.

Has Drupal met the museum’s expectations? What unexpected issues did the museum encounter in adopting Drupal? Were they technical challenge or issues of workflow and change management?

 

What are the most commonly deployed Drupal modules? Are administrative users limited to the webmaster or web team or does staff from across the institution update their own sections of the site? Has Drupal been a challenge for non-technical museum staff? Does Drupal scale to support the needs to the largest, most heavily trafficked sites? Is there an impact on hosting requirements when an institution adopts Drupal?

 

One of the concerns about using open source technologies is the absence of a product vendor to provide service and support. How do museums handle ongoing service and support issues for Drupal-powered sites? Has the lack of a conventional product vendor (and the presence of a large community of independent Drupal developers) proven to be a burden or an opportunity for museums?

 

One of the greatest strengths of Drupal is its extensive and rapidly growing library of community-contributed modules. Our paper will explore Drupal modules that have been developed by museums (some of which have been contributed back to the community) and modules that address issues of particular concern to museums including:

 

• Integration of external data sources such as data from Collections Management Systems and Digital Asset Management Systems such as the online collections of the Art Institute of Chicago
• CRM tools such as CiviCRM
• E-commerce modules such as Ubercart
• Calendar module being developed by Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• Calendar and TAP mobile platform developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art

 

Finally we’ll look at the some of opportunities offered by the upcoming release of Drupal 7.

 

 

Session Info 

  • Keywords: Drupal, open source, content management systems
  • Relevance: Our session is designed for museums currently using Drupal and those considering their content management system options. The session will be relevant for IT and web staff at a range of large and small museums.

 

Speaker Bios 

 

Ethan Wilde

Ethan is Founder and Managing Principal at Mediatrope Interactive. Mediatrope designs and builds interactive solutions, including Web sites, kiosks, and exhibits, for clients in the arts, business, and education. Mediatrope clients include International Museum of Women, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Indian and Statens Museum for Kunst, the Danish national gallery. Mediatrope was founded in 1996 in San Francisco.

 

Ethan is the author of AppleScript for Internet, AppleScript for Applications, and Scripting Adobe Illustrator. He studied computer science and mathematics at UC Santa Cruz where he earned his B.A. in Architectural History. Ethan also holds an M.Arch in Architecture from UC Berkeley, He currently teaches web development at regional seminars and at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. 

 

 

 



 

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