Creating Exhibitions

I wrote this...

I wrote this on my daughter's laptop, away from a network connection. I see from your blog Colm that you're not overly interested in the whole area of curatorial tools. The kurator.org project that you mention is doing interesting work there and I'll be looking at more closely when I get time.

My own feeling is that there might be a disconnect between visitors to exhibitions and curators and that that is something we can examine. Anyway here's the original blog entry.

The Curator needs a simple tool which can be used to gather works, catalogue them, select some for exhibiting and create an exhibition.

This tool will need:

• a drag-and-drop interface so that thumbnails of items can be moved around. This would probably be quite similar to the slides view which PowerPoint provides.
• An easy way of interacting with URLs so that Curators don't have to spend lots of time thinking about paths to files etc.
• Ways of working with local files, URLS and remote servers. Ultimately it might benefit from seamless integration with FTP servers.

Most of the work will happen within the drag-and-drop screen. Users ought to be able to select works and add both cataloging information and other annotations. Once a thumbnail is selected its properties need to be available for editing. Curators might want to describe the work or add biographical information about the artist or even provide
hyperlinks to supporting Web sites.

This whole thing is not really a typical Web interface. It sounds more like a conventional desktop application. Having previously rejected the XUL approach I now feel it has some merit. We can use XUL components plus XHTML and CSS to do nearly all of these things. If we use XML data structures then we can also add in some AJAX so that as the state of the client changes so the server is automatically and (nearly) concurrently updated.

One difficulty that users might encounter is in finding such a rich interface within a Web application. Web apps usually have very simple interfaces with the browser providing much of the supporting infrastructure. A very rich client interface starts to break that model. In a way this is one of the davantages of XUL: nobody expects Thunderbird to work like a Web page. Everyone who uses it expects it to be like any other email/newsgroup client.

The next phase for this application is to mock up some screens and show them to Colm and to some artists to see what they think.