By Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems, New Zealand, Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, New Zealand Published paper: Serendipity and readability: Building an engaging online collection site with limited resources The Sarjeant Gallery is a small regional gallery in Whanganui, New Zealand. The Gallery does not have its own Web development or IT staff. The Gallery looked for engaging ways for visitors to browse their collection without assuming a prior knowledge of the collection contents. How could the collection be presented so that general visitors could make the most use of it? What interfaces could be used without requiring the Gallery staff to spend significant time reworking the existing cataloguing records and images? What areas were worth focusing on with the limited time and budget available? With the new website, the Gallery had three broad aims: introduce innovative features, make the site as accessible as possible, and meet current technical best practice. The Sarjeant Gallery staff were open to prototyping and experimentation and worked closely with Vernon Systems to see what might be possible with their collection data. Key fields of basic collection metadata are combined to create natural sounding sentences that are easier to read. Automated analysis of the collection images provided us with further options. The Gallery has received many positive responses to the site. Visitors are delighted by new discoveries as they browse artworks of similar colors and explore based on the subject keywords added by Google’s Cloud Vision tool. Interesting connections between works from different artists and periods are emerging based on the colors, shapes, and image orientations detected by the computer vision tools employed on the website.

1. Serendipity and Readability:
Building an Engaging Online Collection
Site with Limited Resources
Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems, @armchair_caver
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Museums and the Web, Apr 2018

2. Sarjeant Gallery
Te Whare o Rehua
Whanganui, New Zealand

3. The main collection store

4. Temporary premises

5. Small budget ($US15,000)
and timeframe

6. Did not have time for any major
rework of the collection data

7. Partnering with
Vernon Systems

8. Open access: Publishing the
whole collection

9. Open access: allowing re-use
wherever possible

10. Open access: filtering by
image rights

11. Open
access:
Using a
responsive
mobile-
friendly
design

12. Considering visitor types
Explorers Facilitators
• Website should be easy to browse
• Simple options to filter the
collection
• Explore options: colour, image
orientation, time, subject,
object type
• Highlight works on
display at the Gallery
• Connect ‘visit planning’
pages where relevant
Experience Seekers Rechargers
• Explore by colour
• Connect works by keywords
• Provide highlight sets to
showcase groups of works
• Provide a clean,
uncluttered website where
the artworks are the
focus
Professional/Hobbyist
• Provide advanced search options

13. Computer vision: Creating new
data

14. Quick wins: adding nationality

15. Generating natural sentences based on
object type, production place and date

16. Adding links to related
Wikipedia and Te Ara pages

17. Referencing significant sub-
collections from Wikipedia

18. Separate microsite for the
online collection

19. Microsite: lower cost and
more flexible design

20. Prototyping: used an unbranded
“working wireframe” as the
starting point

21. Prototyping: features in action

22. User testing: worthwhile
even at a small scale

23. Using plain language

24. Adding shortcuts for exploring
the collection

25. Making the
best use of
the data we
had

26. Avoiding
dead-ends

27. Ensuring search engines
can get to every page

28. Automatic data: image
orientation

29. Google Cloud Vision subject tags

30. Unexpected new connections

31. Colour Analysis: extracting the
raw colours was the easy part

32. Mapping to a smaller palette was
hard

33. Indexing the colour names

34. Accessibility compliance
 Alternative text for images
 Responsive design for different devices
 Support for browser zooming to resize content

35. Prototype ideas not implemented:
Changing background colour based
on each artwork image

36. … but the background colours
didn’t always work

37. Prototype ideas not implemented:
Most popular colours by decade

38. Nationalmuseum, Sweden: Painting
Madonna with child
Prototype ideas not implemented:
Full sentence captions

39. Create once, publish everywhere (COPE)

40. Collection Focus: Digital/Physical Parallels

41. Options for
sharing on
social media

42. What’s next: Monitoring
with Google Analytics
Page views by explore option:
 35% via a curated highlight set
 23% via an object type link
 12% via a colour swatch

43. What’s next
 rights clearance
 interpretive descriptions
 regular changes to home page content

44. What’s next
 quantitative displays of data (acquisitions by
decade for example)
 better highlighting of works on display
 Peoples’ Choice series

45. National award and praise
from visitors

46. Combine it all and find “house
AND white AND landscape”

47. Related links
Blog posts
Looking at the Sarjeant Gallery’s collection through robot eyes:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/looking-at-sarjeant-gallerys-
collection-through-robot-eyes-c7fd0281814e
Building an accessible online collection for Sarjeant Gallery:
https://medium.com/@armchair_caver/building-an-accessible-online-
collection-for-sarjeant-gallery-48cbcac4fdb6
Websites
Cogapp image tagging test site: http://labs.cogapp.com/iiif-ml/
Sarjeant Gallery: https://collection.sarjeant.org.nz
Tools
Color Thief: http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/
Google Cloud Vision API: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/

48. Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems
Jennifer Taylor Moore, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
Thank you!