Middlebury College Museum of Art

Stakeholder: Doug Perkins
Current: http://museum.middlebury.edu/
WebRedo Contact: Mike Roy

General: The Middlebury College Museum of Art is an AAM-accredited museum serving the students, faculty, and staff of Middlebury College as well as local and regional residents of and visitors to Addison County and the Champlain Valley. The museum preserves and displays the college’s permanent collection and offers 5-7 traveling loan exhibits each year to as many as 18,000-20,000 visitors. We serve as a visual resource for a broad spectrum of courses across the college’s curriculum, most notably the departments of History of Art and Architecture and Studio Art, though in any given year we are likely to work with courses in religion, languages, music, philosophy, anthropology, American studies, classical studies, English and American literature, environmental studies, theater, and teacher education. In addition, we welcome nearly 1,000 local K-12 school students to the museum each year through the Museum Assistants Program, a volunteer docent program that offers Middlebury College students a chance to learn about the museum and to lead tours. The museum also oversees and maintains a collection of 20 works of public art displayed around the Middlebury campus, and the museum director chairs the Committee on Art in Public Places.

Requirements:

Needs
* flexibility with respect to aesthetics and typography
* have a portion of the museum home page that shows the next several upcoming museum events
* ability to create email lists to allow patrons to subscribe to relevant lists
* offer RSS feeds for museum press release pages
* maintain the majority of the current site’s look
* participate in brand mapping exercises and discussions related to the college’s brand and sub brands
* online credit card membership form
* e-commerce capability for museum bookstore directly through museum site
* flash banners
* rotating home page image with a click through
* ability to allow people to control font size easily (for accessibility/readability) with one click
* alt text balloons that follow the cursor so that image captions are noticeable (e.g.
http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=fr_FR

* online forms for teacher workshop and school group registration

* video-taped lectures for podcasts and vodcasts linked to exhibits (e.g. Art in Public Places iPod tour)

* ability to link to press published electronically on the campus newspaper site as well as other news sites (Addison Independent, BFP, Seven Days, e.g.) and maybe have those stories pulled into a sidebar

* ability to zoom in on images as well as 360 degree image rotation

* online searchable database of the museum collection that is linked to the library’s online catalogue search function so that when students search for books or other media related to objects in the museum collection they will be alerted that the museum holds works that are relevant to their subject

Wants
* be involved in focus groups and usability as design process begins
* create a ‘museum module’ that users could choose to put on their customizable middlebury.edu home page that would allow pushing of info about exhibits, events, and other museum news to users’ customizable home page
* liquid layout, or at least a wider fixed width (950 pixels)
* enable comments on exhibit pages to allow visitors to leave their thoughts about exhibits and related events
* offer virtual audio and video tours either streaming through the site or for download
* allow museum Friends to RSVP on-line for members-only events
* distribute 8.5×11 .pdfs of posters (for printing and distributing at schools, etc.)
* high-quality videos of classroom discussions about art
* tagging
* facebook site (fans of the museum) to reach people through facebook
* ability to create online versions of exhibits with unique appearance (i.e. NOT within existing templates)
* updated design treatment for the Committee on Art in Public Places (CAPP) website that creates a visual link between CAPP and the museum

Nice-to-Haves

* allow students to create their own online exhibits from items in the museum collection (e.g. like what the pachyderm project might allow)

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