Our Client

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is one of the world’s premier art museums, best-known for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. In addition to housing famous paintings such as Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles and Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the Museum also has world-class collections of photography, arms and armor, ceramic figures, portrait sculptures, miniatures, and galleries of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including the mummy of Paankhenamun.

What They Needed

AIC’s existing site only showed a few hundred items from their vast collection of several hundred thousand works. The Museum wanted to be able to increase that number by integrating their site with their backend digital asset management system, as well as provide additional educational resources associated with specific works and allow visitors to create their own “personal collections”. AIC also wanted to be able to quickly and easily create micro-sites to promote exhibitions, which had previously been built as custom standalone sites.

How We Helped

Palantir used the open source content management platform Drupal to build a new Collections section for the AIC Web site that integrated seamlessly with the look and feel of the rest of the site, which uses a different CMS. Content is pulled directly from the Museum’s backend digital asset management system into Drupal, allowing the Museum to greatly expand the number of works displayed on the site. Through the “My Collections” feature, users are able 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 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.

The Upshot

Within the first year, over 33,000 images were added to the site, and the Museum’s ultimate goal is to display nearly every image from its collection — a treasure trove now accessible to art lovers worldwide. Traffic in the Collections area of the site more than doubled within the first few months of launch, and now counts for a majority of all of the Museum site’s page views. The elegance, functionality, and freshness of the new Museum site belies the amount effort it takes to maintain it, as it is updated just a few times a quarter by a handful of staff using clever, customized tools — an artistic triumph of a different sort.

A detailed technical write-up of the Drupal integration work on this project can be found at Drupal. org: http://drupal.org/node/279485