It was an exciting week at the BPOC last week!
Last Wednesday the Advisory Board approved the following projects for the year:
- Knowledge Expansion – We will be investing in member training, seminars, conference attendance, and professional development in order to build a wide museum technology knowledge base within the park.
- Baseline Study – We will be conducting a thorough technology audit of each institution and, if necessary, helping members create detailed technology strategic plans to ensure their future success as a part of the BPOC project.
- Content Management System (CMS) – We will be building several members’ museum websites on a common CMS platform (see below).
- Networking and Wireless – We will be evaluating and implementing ways to network member institutions together, allowing for shared internet connections and other shared infrastructure projects such as automated offsite backup and public wireless.
- Collections Management Systems – We will help a number of members evaluate, select, purchase and implement a common collections management solution.
- Collection and Archive Digitization – We will be seeking to leverage the collaborative use of existing digitization studios and existing and new equipment to increase the digital conversion of collections in member institutions.
- Driving Museum Visits through Interactive Gaming – We will be working with a sub-committee of the Balboa Park Educators’ Council to develop and deploy an interactive gaming project to drive multiple-museum visitation.
- Social Media – We will be supporting training and workshops in social media and working to help members identify their ideal level of involvement in this area.
- Funding Opportunities – We will be using successes in these initial projects to seek additional funding for future collaborative projects.
Last Thursday, the CMS working group approved Drupal as the CMS of choice for the park. This decision is crucial to the progress of the BPOC and will allow us to move ahead on a number of projects including:
- Implementation of a cloud based (Amazon Web Services) multi-server Drupal environment with production, testing and development servers for each website
- A Drupal based framework for a museum website calendaring systems that will allow members to easily aggregate park wide event- and program-based calendar items as well as import park wide events into individual site calendars
- A Drupal based system for the registration of event and program attendees
In the first phase of Drupal based web redevelopment in the park, we will be targeting a small number of member institutions, including the Museum of Man, the Japanese Friendship Garden, and the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership’s public site as well as a private intranet.
Other areas that we will focus on in the future are Drupal based, museum specific implementations of:
- Email lists/marketing
- Ticketing
- Retail
- Online collection access
- Video integration
- Blogs
- Community tools
Check back here for updates as we move forward.