Introduction and Background
Digital archives— collections of multimedia objects — are ideal for preserving and valourising cultural heritage. Web portals allow these collections of cultural heritage artefacts, digitised in the form of images, videos, audio, etc., to be accessed worldwide where previously this would not have been physically possible. In a South African context, projects like the Bleek and Lloyd collection and the Five Hundred Year Archive allow academics and the general public to browse artefacts related to the language, culture and history of indigenous people in Southern Africa. Existing exhibition tools are numerous and make use of varied technology. For example, 3D graphics technology has become popular amongst some galleries and museums as a way to create faithful replicas of physical exhibitions. However, this is overkill for the student user group, which we have found gravitates to tools such as PowerPoint and Google Slides for their ease of use and collaborative features. There is a need for a tool simple enough for those with limited IT expertise to use that at the same time adheres to metadata standards for use by cultural heritage experts to display archive content. The solution is a direct-manipulation tool that outputs exhibitions of collection content in widely used and understood formats such as PDF files and HTML pages.
Problem Statement
Although they contain rich cultural heritage information, many archives do not provide an accessible way to interpret these contents, and often provide only searchable lists of contents as presentation to the public. Digital exhibitions address this by allowing an exhibition creator to define a narrative or logical order to organise a collection of items. However, we have found that current software tools do not cater to wide user bases: tools which faithfully recreate physical exhibitions are difficult to use and overkill for most educational purposes. Tools popular in the school system, such as PowerPoint and Google Slides, offer useful collaborative features but are more suited to working with Web and user resources than collection items and are generally not built with galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the GLAM sector) in mind. Most notably, those wishing to incoporate digitised cultural heritage artefacts into their presentations must either copy-paste or download and embed these objects, wasting time and losing the metadata associated with these artefacts.
Project Goals and Significance
The aim of this project was to design and implement a software tool that can be used by those with limited or basic IT expertise to create exhibitions of cultural heritage artefacts from existing collections and relevant Web materials. Seamless integration of these digital cultural heritage artefacts was a key consideration, as well as fleasible and easy-to-use styling options for the exhibitions. Such a tool allows those of all levels of technical experience and experience with archival material to interact with digitised cultural heritage artefacts, furthering cultural heritage awareness.
Solution Design
EXHIBIT is a dynamic Web application built using the Common Gateway Interface. JavaScript and HTML were used for client-side scripting, while Python programs carried out server tasks. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) calls facilitate communication with the server. JSON files were used to store template and exhibit content and metadata.
Project Breakdown and Outcomes
Based on the main aims stated above, two phases were developed for the full process of exhibition creation. The first phase is template creation, which is then followed by exhibition population. To introduce some flexibility, default templates can be populated in place of creating one's own template first. Finally, we created a browse page where templates and exhibitions can be viewed, downloaded and commented on by any user.
The main components of our system are listed in the navigation bar, namely Template Creation, Population and Browsing. Please visit those pages for more detail, and team member pages to see work allocation and further information.
Project Evaluation
We evaluated our system mainly via user testing. Heuristic evaluations by fellow UCT students assisted us in identifying usability problems and their severity, most of which centred around incoporating more user assistance features and on an aesthetic level, more icons for buttons, features, etc. We then conducted a usability study via Google Forms, which included the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. We received 12 responses, a mixture of students and those involved in the archive projects mentioned in the introduction. Our system received above average scores on this questionnaire, with the archival professionals stating that they see strong potential for such a tool in their work and all respondents saying the system required little technical experience to operate. Raw scores of the SUS portion of the questionnaire can be found on the downloads page, along with a copy of the entire study. Finally, we conducted follow-up video-conferencing interviews with a subset of these cultural heritage professionals, to receive more open-ended feedback.
Software testing included evaluations of the browser compatability of our website using the online tool LambdaTest. Load testing was conducted using Dareboost, but these non-functional requirements were not a priority for our system and results were only used to optimise where possible.
Project Team
