The Art Institute of Chicago

www.artic.edu

On the fast-moving Web, sometimes the cart needs to go before the horse. Before the Art Institute of Chicago was able to complete its search for a new content management system (CMS) for its Museum and School, it needed an entirely new look for its Museum Web site, whose design hadn’t changed in almost a decade. Palantir, in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, introduced color to the Museum site, beefed up the use of photography, and streamlined and better organized the content.

During the pre-CMS transition period, Palantir built the site using static HTML templates to ease maintenance tasks and prep components for conversion. After the Art Institute made its CMS selection — Serena Collage, a powerful platform used by many higher education institutions — Palantir assisted the Museum with the CMS implementation by integrating the static site into Collage.

On the new site, rotating images from the Museum’s collection grace the department pages and a robust search interface allows visitors to explore the Museum’s entire collection by keyword or artist. Type “Magritte” in the Collection search box and up come three works by the 20th-century Belgian artist.

The old site displayed about 100 images of Museum holdings. The new site, which contained 700 works at launch, is now up to 33,000 images — and counting — pulled directly from the Museum's backend digital asset management system into Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs the site's Collections section. The Museum’s ultimate goal is to display nearly every image from its vast collection — a treasure trove accessible to art lovers worldwide.

Through the "My Collections" feature, users are able to to flag artwork they like and build their own custom collection that can be printed off, annotated, or forwarded to someone else; a great tool for students or educators to provide their own "online tours" of selected works.

Another feature of the Museum's site provided by Drupal is integrated micro-sites for temporary exhibitions. This functionality allows the Art Institute to quickly and easily create a new site for an exhibition that has its own design layout and colors, yet is still consistent with the Museum's overall branding. In addition to displaying information about the works included in the exhibition (which may or may not be in the Art Institute's own collection), each site includes the ability to display the locations where various works were created in Google Maps.

Given the elegance, functionality, and freshness of the new Museum site, one would assume a large army is constantly at work behind the scenes. Instead, the site is updated just a few times a quarter by a handful of staff using clever, customized tools that work seamlessly with both Drupal and Collage. The impact of the Museum site is far out of proportion to the effort involved — an artistic triumph of a different sort.

A detailed technical writeup of the Drupal integration work on this project can be found at Drupal.org.