We have a long term passion for building tools that help museums tell their unique and compelling stories. CultureObject – an open source tool we’ve built to get museum object records online – has been around for a while, and our next phase aimed to expand this into what we’ve given the lazy working title “CultureStory”. The basic idea is that museum objects are only so interesting online – what really makes them amazing is the knitting together of narratives around them. We envisaged a tool which would enable museums to ingest their object metadata, then drop these records into a narrative structure.
When we got chatting to Bristol Museums about their aspirations to get exhibition content online, we realised that our two aims were broadly aligned and this project was born.
The end result is a flexible WordPress theme which allows the content team at the museum to create visually rich online exhibitions. They can import sub-sets of object data for each one, and then use the interface to add timelines, maps, object galleries and so on.
We’re at the beginning of the process working with the museum and hope to roll out further improvements and modules over time, making the narrative creation process even more visual. Ultimately, we’d like this to become a stand-alone product by turning it into a plugin, much like CultureObject.
We are generating a huge amount of rich multimedia and narrative which we wanted to publish online to complement our exhibitions programme. User research has shown that our audiences engage better with longer form content rather than just a database front-end. Thirty8 Digital developed a stunning, flexible theme which allows us to rapidly develop narrative content in a way which is complementary to the exhibition development process.
As a small charity with limited resources (both time and money), choosing a website designer for a complete overhaul and modernisation of our website was a daunting task – we didn’t have much breathing room. This was also the first time I’d lead on a project with this much impact and I was pretty nervous but after our first online meeting, I knew both I and the project would be in safe hands with Thirty8 thanks to Mike’s honesty and his friendly approach....
Project: acta website
We are generating a huge amount of rich multimedia and narrative which we wanted to publish online to complement our exhibitions programme. User research has shown that our audiences engage better with longer form content rather than just a database front-end. Thirty8 Digital developed a stunning, flexible theme which allows us to rapidly develop narrative content in a way which is complementary to the exhibition development process....
Project: Bristol Museums storytelling
We had lots of ideas about what we wanted to do, but not about the specific steps required to make anything a reality – we use digital in our daily lives and learn most things on the job in the best way we can. Working with Mike at Thirty8Digital helped us crystallise what we wanted to achieve, why and how we would do it....
© 2023 thirty8 digital Company registered in England 07646144