Collections Online as Storytelling Elements

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachel Christine Woody. My name is Bradley and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled Collections Online as Storytelling Elements.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions, as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include Sydney, Presto, Argus, ArchivEra, and Eloquent and CuadraSTAR.

Now I would like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management system. Take it away, Rachel.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley. Thank you to the Lucidea for hosting us today, and, of course, thank you for joining us.

Today, we’re gonna dive into storytelling performance types, covering a bit of, like, the foundational elements. So we all are using a similar language for today. And then seeing how those traditional storytelling elements translate in their use of digital items, So digital assets that you have in your collections management system and how they can be used in different tools or, widgets, whatever sort of system you’re using to allow some dynamic performance with those items.

We’ll take a look at, CMS, collections management system, storytelling display tools.

Some of the most common ones that tend to be available is the ability for zoom function, and we’ll talk about deep zoom, slideshows and flipbooks, which typically have a dynamic, sort of interaction and mimicking of a sort of a book and flipping motion for the flipbooks.

And then we’ll take a look at multimedia players and their incorporation of multimedia, meaning different digital file types presented together as a transformed and sort of smash up of your digital items to make a new dynamic player. And then we will wrap up.

So storytelling performance types at their most basic tend to be oral written and visual. So in oral tradition, for example, this is oration. This is storytelling vocally, you know making up bedtime stories with your children, all based on the oral and then auditory reception of the story.

The next most in a basic form foundational element is written. This is perhaps the one that is most produced and most consumed by us written forms of story, of course are books and novels, but also translate to magazine signs.

Manga comics like anything that has written elements to convey a story.

And then the last traditional element is visual.

So for us, we don’t necessarily need to have an oral or written combination with our visual storytelling. It is possible to view a story that is entirely visual.

For some people their interaction with paintings the painting itself as a visual can tell a story.

But then of course with technology today we are most familiar with visual storytelling that include oral and written components in terms of, we are listening to people having a conversation, for example, while we’re watching them do it. So, visual can be purely visual or, of course, incorporate the other two elements.

So with that sort of foundation in mind, I want us to review digital items as performance elements. So digital items for you that would most traditionally be uploaded into your collections management system, as a representative of your collection.

The most traditional, at least for museums, tends to be artifacts, which at its most essential is a three-dimensional item. We can, of course, have in collections and especially if there’s an archives involved journals and correspondence, which can lend rich written elements. And speaking of written newspapers, newspapers are sort of a collective for any sort of more mass produced print.

Then there’s architectural and location based items, so could be, architectural schematics, could be, topographical mapping, providing visual and perhaps unwritten elements in those items that you have.

Photographs, another great usually entirely visual medium that are present in museum collections and also very much so in archive collections.

We then have oral histories and or interviews depending on the the format and intention of a interaction or capturing if somebody’s speaking.

Oral histories, especially now with technology, can be both visual and auditory.

And, of course, with closed captioning, you can also have written elements. But, at their core, having that oral history or interview in your collection is one more of those items.

And then, of course, music. So music could be, like professionally composed song type music. It could be, intangible cultural heritage music that is of significance and meaning to a particular community group.

Recordings of those tend to be auditory based, but may also, of course, come with visuals, especially as the capturing of these media become more and more modern.

So with those in mind, those types of artifacts that we can play with when we are attempting to tell a digital story is then using the CMS storytelling display tools. So pretty much every collections management system should have some sort of options for how different digital file types are displayed or provided or played depending on what type of medium they are or if it is a mixture of medium. The three most common tend to be offering a zoom functionality.

With this we want to take a look at certain tools that are available and some additional specifications as to how zoom can be used as a very dynamic tool and not just purely for zoom. We want zoom for storytelling.

We’ll take a look at the concept of slideshows and flipbooks.

These are, sometimes offered when you have some sort of manuscript. There may be a tool where you can have it displayed in some sort of flipbook style.

Otherwise, slideshows and flipbooks, that technology seems to be mostly deployed for the act of storytelling versus the more traditional display of the item within the item record.

And then the last one multimedia players. And so as with the other two, we want to make sure we’re looking at tools that are for storytelling execution.

So we’re not just talking about the ability to play a video or to watch an oral history interview. We are taking a look at how people have combined multiple forms of media into players that can show and display those multiple media forms as part of that storytelling execution.

So the key here is that even though we are looking at CMS story display tools, we are looking at the ones beyond just the traditional display of whatever that object record is and moving more towards focusing on how these have been used to help execute storytelling.

First one up is Zoom. And, again, not just like zoom in, zoom out, though, of course, that is is fun and a future that is fairly basic for most collections management systems to offer. I do wanna point out a couple things here as to how how, this particular Zoom tool is being executed as part of a storytelling element.

So you see my mouse here. We’ve got this reference image in this top right corner.

That reference image is the entirety of the painting.

It is pretty important not just from, like, accessibility perspective in terms of showing the viewer where they are within the painting, especially if they’ve zoomed in. But it also helps to provide that overall context as we start zooming in. So you’ll see the the much bigger picture in this particular screenshot is a zoomed in portion where we are taking a look at the artist signature. For example, in the bottom left, we can see in much more detail the richness of greens and reds being introduced in here that may not otherwise be as easily picked up on by our brains when it’s in the much larger zoomed out image.

thing I wanna point out is on this left hand side, you’ve got the plus minus, which is the basic zoom stuff in terms of zoom in, zoom out. You’ve got the home button there, which is important in order to have users from a nice usability perspective be able to immediately go back to home image, which is the fuller picture, in full size. You have the ability to navigate if there was more than one image present in this particular display. You can move back and forth to the different images, and this particular player also allows for download as well as IIIF viewing and, of course, any sort of messaging like usage conditions apply. So we’ve got some additional abilities to engage with this image.

The most important being the takeaway for what many storytelling platforms call deep zoom. Deep zoom when in the broader context of the story you’re telling is bringing attention to and allows the technical ability for the users to dive deeper into these particular items. And so if you were looking at the larger story that was being told there would usually be additional accompanying text that points out details within the different more detailed areas of in this case the painting and having the viewer be able to explore in that rich detail by themselves this particular ability to view the detail to have this additional functionality to make it more than just the display and more than just the zoom in and zoom out of the item lends to that performance element for our storytelling focus.

The next one up is slide shows. This tends to be used when there’s a few different images most traditionally that are being used to help display and talk about an element within the story. So there could be, in this case we’ve got artifacts and some more manuscript or visual archive materials blended together in this particular slideshow.

We have a sense of where we are in the slideshow with the dots down here. We can see that there are five images total and which particular dot is in the middle. We also have the ability to see the name of the item. We have the ability to navigate back and forth between the items as well as have a number count for where we are on the items. So similar to the Zoom, it’s really important for us to have frame of reference for where we are in this particular display element.

And bringing these together in the slideshow format makes it a more of a performance type as a visual example versus the more traditional here’s the object record here’s the representative image of that object record which is important and foundational to our work but when we’re thinking about storytelling with our digital collections having mechanisms like the slideshow help us to bring those storytelling performance types to the audience in a dynamic way.

Next one up the concept of the flip book. And so of the different tools we’ve looked at this one can be more available when you’re in that object record view and that particular object happens to be a manuscript or magazine or newspaper, something where flipping as a function would make sense.

In terms of of it being used and deployed as a storytelling tool, this tends to be for more manuscript or perhaps archives based collections where I’ve seen it used more effectively or most effectively.

But similar to the tools we’ve looked at so far, it’s incredibly important to have the, the context of where we were at. So in this bottom right hand corner, we’ve got several different abilities and tools in addition to seeing, like, the different layouts as well as the different page numbers. So, for example, we’re on page two of almost fifteen hundred pages and being able to navigate with the arrows or even with mouse clicks, In addition to changing the type of view, this particular player also offers the ability to have it be read to you. For this particular example, it is sort of an AI reading of it versus somebody, a human reading it as a recording, but still a very cool ability to help provide in a couple different of those oral written visual performance types as well as offering this dynamic view for a storytelling performance type in a more dynamic way.

And then for this next one I’m gonna play this video for you in a minute but I want to talk about the multimedia players.

Specifically for this as a storytelling performance type we are looking at the ability of people bringing together multiple forms of media.

And so it’s beyond just the ability to play media. So we have these for oral history interviews, for example, in a traditional object record for an oral history interview, you would then also have perhaps, if it was video recorded, a video player to watch and listen to that oral history interview.

This is the next step or is perhaps different because we are using it as a storytelling performance type for a particular story we’re telling. And so as we watch this, I want you to take a look at the different media types that are being incorporated as we are listening to the story. You’re gonna see not just photographs, but also different, interview clips taken from people having the video and audio for that, as well as getting the context of the story as a whole. So in keeping with our our other items, the elements present with context is key. In this particular one, we’re combining multiple different types of media into a very dynamic performance type and then we’re getting that overall execution of that storytelling.

So let me hit the play button for you and we’ll watch about a minute of this so you can see all of those examples.

Welcome to this secret place.

Veterans, please come forward.

Why do I choose to serve?

I want to do the right thing.

I chose to serve to follow my dad’s footsteps.

We grew up poor.

We had no money.

I had the opportunity to choose who’s deserved. Not everyone had that choice.

We have a long history of ending veterans more than any other people.

We are the first nation, and we will defend our land no matter what.

No red stripes on that flag that America so boldly flies.

Those high axioms they call equal justice, treaties.

Well, our ancestors fought for that standard of law. They fought for that standard of belief.

We’re used to serving our tribe, serving our people.

We would wanna be recognized not just as somebody who deserves, but who we are.

Alright. So in that brief clip, which I encourage you to watch all of it because it’s, so engaging and so well done, you saw the elements of, video with the audio, story setting happening as we’re meeting the members.

You have the several different photographs.

Some of them quite old. Some of them are more modern, and hearing slash seeing some of the different interviews or quotes, as you are watching either the still photographs or as you are watching action shots, getting a real sense for context of the story as well as seeing the story unfold with those multiple different forms of media. So, in terms of a storytelling element, this is of course perhaps the most engaging especially for humans who love to have both video and audio elements combined together as their story.

So in conclusion, we took a look at storytelling performance types, so oral, written, visual as the the basic foundation for performance.

We then took a look at the digital items that tend to be available in our collections both museum and archival and how those can be ingredients for a storytelling performance execution.

We then took a look at the collections management system and took a look at story display tools. So moving beyond just a typical display within an object record and looking at those tools in an execution for an overall story. So taking a look at zoom and the concept of deep zoom as part of your story exploration taking a look at slideshows and flip book to sort of widget display tools and how those can help tell part of the story or offer engaging points into the story performance.

And then we just took a look at multimedia players and again moving beyond just the we’re playing an oral history interview as part of an object record. We are looking at their incorporation of multiple media forms and pulling those together as yet another dynamic presentation or performance of a story.

So with that, we are done for today.

I do wanna mention that demystifying data preparation for a new CMS is available courtesy of Lucidea Press. You can go get your free ecopy.

And I will hand it back to you, Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

And if you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are on the screen here, and please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thank you.