The Menil Collection

Previously, the only info on the Menil’s website was basic info such as address, hours, and what exhibit was currently up. The museum wanted to begin digital initiatives in earnest, and although it did not have enough resources to do so, 2-3 new staff members were hired to help publish as much content as possible.

Although the museum was always free of charge to visit, its elitist reputation made potential visitors uncomfortable, thus making some people avoid visiting altogether. And with so many other museums putting their collections online, it became clear that The Menil could no longer ignore bringing access to its collections online without being seen to prove its perceived elitist reputation.

We started off identifying the basic functions of a Collections page with thumbnails included.

Everyone loves to make new websites from scratch but don’t realize there’s a lot of planning involved in making sure you have content. Some of the biggest obstacles for The Menil was that it was still using old film transparencies because not everything had been re-photographed with digital cameras. The museum also did not have an on-staff photographer so farming out freelance photographers was quite expensive and was only done as needed, and this made digitization quite slow.

When I was brought on, I developed a 5-year plan to digitize the entire art collection - upwards of 10,000 works.

Most of the staff had no idea what metadata was and why it was needed. I then did a presentation for senior staff so that they could understand what it is, its importance, and how much effort goes into creating and managing it.

The Museum System is a collections management system that many medium to large museums use to store every little detail about their art collections. Some museums allow users from different departments to access TMS and will adjust permissions according to how risk averse they are to employees possibly messing up vital information. The Menil was extremely averse to employee goof-ups so this required me to get creative and have to use other software solutions.

I worked closely with the Head of IT and the TMS administrator to devise a framework for implementing new software solutions and making them to play nicely with each other. Unfortunately, after exhaustive research into digital asset management software, I realized no DAM would work well with TMS as well as the proprietary CMS from the website agency. We also realized that TMS would not work with the CMS directly either, so we implemented eMuseum, a web-publishing toolkit as middleware between the two systems.

This all meant that to avoid a house of cards, TMS would have to work double duty as a defacto DAM as well as a collections management system.

We then developed a workflow chart for how our team would go about delivering new images and their respective copyright metadata to be ingested into TMS.

Orchestrating these different systems and workflows was quite complicated and would inevitably be slow-going, and there was more and more pressure from our users to put the collection online.

In the meantime, internal staff members were also clamoring for images since they were siloed from other departments’ media assets and were shut out from TMS. To solve this problem, I decided to implement Shared Shelf, a media management system that was now fully developed by Artstor. (I had been involved with usability testing of the pilot version of Shared Shelf when I worked for Artstor.) It was also very inexpensive which was important in convincing the museum to adopt it.

Working across departments, I developed different custom cataloguing screens, mapped fields, and set permissions for each department to upload and enter metadata. I also used Asana with the membership department to project manage their bi-weekly email campaigns.

We were spending quite a lot of time, effort, and precious money on digitizing the collections. Although we used a project management app called Redbooth, my small department was also spending a lot of time and effort fulfilling external image requests from book publishers, retail licensors, scholars, students, art fans, the press - you name it. Apparently everyone wants images of Menil artwork. Traditionally, museums charge for images in an effort to recoup some of their digitization investment, which can get quite expensive!

After researching and interviewing staff at other museums, it became clear that most museums will never make enough money to make handling requests in-house worth it. Small overworked staff are stretched too thin and have no means to market this revenue stream. However, I opted to go with 3rd party licensing companies who handle all external image requests for you and can market our images for us as well.

The Menil’s conservation department had struck up a partnership with a former art history professor at the University of Houston who was now working with data scientists at the Center for Advanced Computing and Data Science at UH. The CACDS team wanted to pilot a new 3D scanning and 3D modeling service with our museum. They would scan ancient artifacts from our collection and provide us with the models free of charge.

Having been to several Museum Computer Network conferences where I spoke to Google Art Project reps and hearing a lot about VR in the developer realm, I saw an opportunity. Why not use our new 3D models to create a mobile app to be used with Google cardboard and ViewMaster goggles?! We could also create additional conservation content for our website.

The data scientists at CACDS gave my staff training on ParaView, a multi-platform open source data analysis and visualization app so that we could create derivative files for the app and the website.

People love the excitement of constructing a new building. The Menil and its donors are no exception. The museum had hired an architecture firm to design an additional building to our campus that would be specifically for our drawing collection. The architects delivered a beautiful design for a building that had the public spaces on the ground floor and the staff workspace and art storage spaces underground.

Now it was time to start outfitting the basement. Unfortunately, during the design phases, no one had asked for input from the staff that would be moving artwork in and out of the building. At this point, it was too late to redesign the basement level to be more functioning so we did what we could.

Using a combination of Sketchup and paper mockups, we created an architectural plan to outfit the spaces on the basement level.

The flex space would be used by the Imaging Services, Conservation, and Art Services departments. So I created paper mockups of the room along with scaled down furniture we had determined we would need in the space. This exercise was revisited multiple times as more data was gathered about the limitations of the building’s infrastructure.

Once we were able to determine traffic flows (of art handlers with precious artwork), furniture, and lighting, we were finally able to make purchases or have Art Services create something that was customized.