Ideum and the Association of Science-Technology Centers are looking for feedback on "a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate three open source software templates that will allow museum professionals’ to assemble electronic exhibits for the museum floor."
They've put together a survey "to gain insight into the state of electronic exhibits at a variety of museums, to gauge interest in the Open Exhibits software templates, and to better understand museums’ technical expertise and constraints". You can read more at their original blog post or go straight to their survey.
They don't really define an 'electronic exhibit' but perhaps that's part of the exercise. They also say they'll share the results with everyone who took part, which is nice.
Mia,
Thanks for the post about the Open Exhibits project. We're looking at developing three templates: a timeline, an image viewer (with pan+zoom and an annotation layer), and an RSS/Current events template. These are all Flash (and Flex) based and they will be designed for the museum floor (not the Web).
They will have options to show and hide the cursor (touch screen or trackball) and designed for full screen "playback" for 4×3 and widescreen displays.
The idea for Open Exhibits came from the work we've doing with science museums over the last 7 years. We've found many common elements (image viewer, timeline, RSS, video & audio playback, etc.). Now, finally the technology (ActionScript 3, XML, and Flex) has gotten to the point where this is possible.
We've gotten around a dozen responses to the survey so far, hopefully more to come.
Best.
Jim
Thanks Jim.
How would the templates relate to projects like the Simile project's timeline, or the Zoomify image viewer?