Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

A brief search around my workplace for sources of inspiration yielded nothing but a set of guides about art works permanently on display in the library.  Oh no, I thought. Copyright problems!

And so the online exhibit I created for this Thing reworks a legal size single sheet illustrated handout. The original item is meant to provide new undergraduate students an overview of the library, but I think it leans too much toward an employee's view. About a quarter of the page is dedicated to departments (Special Collections and Government Documents) most of our students will never use, and photos bearing no relation to the adjacent content. The text includes undefined jargon like "periodicals" and "depository." Finally, there's information--perhaps included because of campus politics--utterly irrelevant to students. What student cares that we have a "new" (actually a couple of years old) classroom, and that it's shared with another unit on campus? My aim for "Exhibit Thing" was to try to speak more directly to the concerns and interests of students beginning their first semester at my university.

Planning the exhibit moved rapidly once I settled on an item to reinterpret. What I envisioned was a conventional website with few frills; a suite of pages, each briefly addressing one topic. To save time I re-used photographs from my own instructional presentations.

As for the visuals, I wanted a minimalist design that would look good on mobile phones, the devices our students use most often. I took the liberty of using my institutionally mandated branding toolbox as a starting point rather than a final set of rules. Official colors appear in the exhibit, but I expanded the palate slightly beyond white, black, and two shades of blue. Instead of Frutiger or Open Sans (neither one offered by Blogger) I selected Arial as an easy-to-read sans serif font. Since the exhibit is not meant for official distribution, I replaced a mandatory nondiscrimination statement with a placeholder.

I departed significantly from the original by adding a section titled “Eat.” American public university students pay tuition and fees, and many must work to meet these fiscal demands. For some, balancing education and employment means consuming meals (or snacks) while commuting, during class, and of course while studying or completing assignments. My library bans food consumption in most of the building, so I wanted to acknowledge students’ need for nourishment while also upholding our policy.

And then it was time for hands-on and the challenges began to mount. I had a rocky start, many ups and downs, and finally threw up my hands in resignation. First, it took some hunting around to find a technique for creating a redirect page that would serve as a stable homepage for the exhibit. Then the first template I tried seemed to make some of my content pages vanish--they literally didn’t show on the menu. I switched to the Notable template, which temporarily solved the problem...until the next day, when again pages vanished. I finally discovered they were unchecked on the page list, even though I could swear I hadn’t unchecked them after using the Select all option. The List Order function appeared to move pages in one direction only, not permitting full drag and drop. The More... menu on my phone displayed a background the same color as the menu links. “Black” (hex code #000000) text displayed as a low contrast grey instead, forcing me to switch to a dark blue for readability. Drop caps and accent (differently colored first line) effects disappeared when I added images. The only small relief I experienced was discovering that "gadgets" in the template code are labeled by comments, which enabled me to find and remove items a complete HTML coding novice would need to accept (Report Abuse, Search, and the "hamburger" sidebar).

My takeaways from the experience are:

• Use a familiar platform, use an experienced designer/coder, or prepare for a steep learning curve
• Allow plenty of time for creating an online exhibit. 

If you are interested in seeing my previous exhibit work, have a look at two LibGuides I created to complement temporary small display case exhibits about beer and the planet Saturn.