Phil Getchell from the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston gave a talk about leveraging online collections more effectively. The MFA is another museum in the middle of an expansion project, and they have a lot of new initiatives revolving around their online collection. It sounds like most (or all) of their online projects are in collaboration with Mediatrope, a San Francisco design company. They are using a CMS called SiteBots to manage their content including the collection. The online collection has 300,000 objects about a third of them have some sort of media (usually an image). Getchell pointed out several times that most of the MFA’s initiatives were not in a finished state but they are public, and he outlined the direction they are getting developed.
My MFA
My MFA is a personalized collection tool. Apparently it has about 400 active users right now but it hasn’t been advertised or marketed yet. They are working towards a few interesting things with this. Customized maps, meaning a visitor defines their own tour of the MFA and prints out a map to help them follow it, or they can send their tour to a friend in effect playing the role of curator. They are building a Flash tour too so visitors can curate their own “on-line exhibition” of works in the collections.
Selling
Print-on-Demand is a big thing for them. Currently they are selling high quality archival reproductions of artwork (going for about $75 unframed). In the future they may sell Print-on-Demand books and periodicals.
The MFA is working to add store links to related merchandise in their collections and making image licensing more obvious. Currently the MFA is using Yahoo for their shop, Getchell didn’t mention the software or if they are planning something else in the future.
thanks for the mention, here. we are about to redesign and enhance the Yahoo!-powered shop platform. We have felt Yahoo! Merchant Solutions to be a good fit for us, and very affordable and capable. but, we have never spent significant time or money to make it look professional. Also, we want to add more back-end integration and automation to connect with our existing retail inventory system and customer database, and order processing workflow.
that’s what on tap.
the print-on-demand thing is quite complicated. there are basically three factors in-play - product mix, price-point, and site of sale.
product mix might be the easiest to consider, (just start with yoru highlights OR whatever you have good-enough digital images of) but the scalibility of the mix is hindered when stakeholders insist that adding images means calibrating equipment by-hand with match prints. (the enlightened view is probably to rely more-havily on color profiles, once you have a trusted printing partner)
Price-point is probably easy for retail minds to tackle. basically, our archival prints are well worth the significant price tag - these are all of the highest quality, and each one is printed individually, by our professional photographer staff. but, how can we best provide notecards and more-affordable “poster-quality” prints for the rest of us? and, what should these cost?
wholesale costs, and costs of business are still a bit hard to measure. notecards might wind-up costing around a buck a piece, 11×17 posters might be several dollars, in materials. it’s the harder-to-measure costs of production and fulfillment that could prove difficult.
and when we think about on-site vs. on-line sales, and the alignment of these, expecially within the context of special exhibition shops - short runs, complicated licensing issues - it gets unwieldy.
we’ll see how well the MFA does at getting SOMETHING up to pilot in time for the holiday season!
MyMFA is still on the backburner.
and we are still fixing many small search, update and rendering bugs within the online collections - but we are super-proud it is all up there for the world to read. we feel strongly that this represents more than just a database. it is, to us, a huge, dynamic electronic publication of important collecitons related images and scholarship. as imperfect and unwieldy as it is, we are dedicated to improving and enhancing it over the coming years.
thanks again,
Phil
Comment by phil getchell — 4/12/2006 @ 9:39 am