Bristol Museums storytelling

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.