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Balboa Park Online Collaborative Blog

Last week, the Museum of Photographic Arts launched its new website. For years I’ve felt that MOPA’s previous website didn’t capture the essence of the museum: a place that is known for its emphasis on community engagement, interactivity, and—of course— its incredible collection of photography.

My BPOC colleagues have been working on the Drupal-based backend of the site and I know that they and MOPA’s staff were very excited to make the new site available to the public. It has a much stronger emphasis on visitor engagement with features like a museum blog and MY MOPA, a section of the site that allows visitors to keep track of their favorite exhibitions and events and share their own photos with the MOPA community.

MOPA

I asked Kristine Page, MOPA’s marketing & communications manager, to answer a few questions about the process of launching the new site and how it fits into MOPA’s overall vision.

Have you ever been part of a site redesign before? What was the biggest challenge? This was my first site redesign. I really enjoyed the process and learned so much along the way. The biggest challenge from my perspective was making decisions about how to best organize content...

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Authored with Rich Cherry

At the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, most of our projects share one key objective: leveraging resources. For websites we standardized the CMS platform and deployed 20 websites in 2 years with 3 developers.  For digitization we created shared studios and digitized 160,000 images, videos, films and slides in 18 months. And for shared resources we ran fiber to 14 buildings, sharing a 50 mb pipe to the Internet and a digital asset management system. 

So as we pursue mobile projects that showcase the great variety of attractions within the Park (80+ destinations and 50+ events each day), that objective translated into the re-use and re-purposing of content becomes critical.  After all we want to solve the common problems that visitors face (like getting lost!) using a low-cost approach.

The first app that we created was the Balboa Park iPhone app, a branded app that works on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. By featuring content fed directly from the Balboa Park website via RSS feeds (organization listings, locations data, event instances, etc.) we spend very little time maintaining the app. If it’s right on the website, it’s right on the app, and we know we’re providing visitors with up-to-date info at their fingertips.  We are also launching some kiosks around the park that use the same feed.

While we had a great response to our first iPhone app—about 25,000 downloads in the first year—...

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At the end of February, 2011, we began the process of selecting a digital asset management system (DAMS). With a team of staff from 3 museums we organized a two-month of review of three different DAM systems. We decided to go with Piction, a system being used by many non-profit and government organizations, including the Queensland Government, the Cleveland Art Museum, and also recently selected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We signed the contract on April 5th, and immediately ordered the hardware and implemented the system. As of today, there are 84,238 images and 111 videos for the San Diego Air and Space Museum in Piction. Within the next three weeks, we will add an additional 13,000 images for Museum of Photographic Arts and San Diego Natural History Museum. By April of 2012, a minimum of 70,000 more images and videos will be loaded for Mingei International Museum,...

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We're looking for people to fill two positions: Lead Interactive Developer and Senior Network Engineer. Work in beautiful Balboa Park, collaborate with fantastic coworkers, and enjoy Southern California on your days off.

Lead Interactive Developer

BPOC is seeking a creative self-motivated Lead Interactive Software Developer to join its team to support innovative technology projects serving 26 cultural institutions in Balboa Park. Learn a new definition of ROI as you work alongside experienced museum technology implementers, educators, curators, exhibition designers, and other park staff to conceptualize, design and develop online and in-gallery visitor focused technology projects and support web and kiosk projects that improve public access to the collections and content from multiple museums including history, art, science, transportation, military and sports. 

Senior Network Engineer

BPOC is seeking a dedicated, analytical, proactive Network Engineer with strong interpersonal and project management skills. The network engineer will be responsible for overseeing the design, installation, configuration and maintenance of large-scale wireless network infrastructure. Responsibilities will also include assisting in the maintenance of existing network infrastructure in Balboa Park.

Learn more on our Employment page.

 

 

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Nathan Hughes has made more than 77,000 contributions to Wikipedia. The 24-year–old graduate of San Diego State University has authored important pieces of historically and culturally significant articles about the Enron scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the film "Forrest Gump." Google any of those topics and the corresponding Wikipedia article will be one of the first three links in the search results— and among the most accurate.

Nathan's current mission is to expand the content about local people, places, and history, with a specific focus on Balboa Park. After we launched the Balboa Park GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Wikipedia project at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, I interviewed Nathan about how he got started, his passion for information, and what he finds motivating about being a Wikipedia volunteer.

From left: Nathan, known on Wikipedia as Nehrams2020, with fellow Wikipedian RightCowLeftCoast at the Air & Space Museum

What was the first article you edited, and why? The first article was the film “Pulp Fiction”, where I added some trivia. I had just heard about Wikipedia and was curious how it worked. The addition...

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