Digital Systems – Exhibit.SO

I opted to complete this assignment by making a digital exhibit on Exhibit.so, which you can view here. My initial impression of this website was that I loved how sleek, uncluttered, and simple it appears, but this thought was quickly dulled with the feeling of “but what do I do??” While it was simple enough for me to get a feel for once I started poking around, I think that this program could really use for an optional tutorial video or pop-up instructions that can easily be avoided for those who are already familiar with the system. After my first frustrating deletion of an annotation while trying to add my next photo(didn’t know I had to save, yet), I finally felt that I had a full grasp on Exhibit.so and enjoyed the remainder of my time creating this exhibit. While I didn’t make use of the 3D image rendering or the embedded exhibit feature, I appreciate both of these options and think that they are both key features to creating a useful virtual exhibit system. While at first I was put-off by not being able to create an account to save my exhibits under, I believe that the ability to share editing privileges just by using the unique link would allow multiple people to co-work on an exhibit (without sharing login credentials) is super useful and encourages co-creation and information sharing.

Another difficulty I had was with sourcing the content I would use for this exhibit. While starting with a list of museums that use IIIF for their digital collections was super helpful, I still came into this project with a few key subjects I wanted to create my exhibit about. Even when using museum collections with robust search filtering options, I was still finding myself so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of results at some of the larger collections and found that I couldn’t easily locate the items I went into this experience hoping to exhibit. However, I think this would be a null point for most individuals creating one of these exhibits for their own exhibits, as they likely already have the subject matter, and content, set from the start.

I did grow to appreciate the simplistic features of Exhibit.so, despite still feeling that it would benefit from more tutorial options. I find that it’s not easy to become overwhelmed by the options, as there are limited options for format layouts and not any customization in the transition slides. The overall formatting is bare bones and does just enough – bold, underline, italics, some options for heading sizes, and external link embedding is really all that you need. It means that the exhibits come out polished and fairly uniform. Creators know what to expect when creating a new exhibit, and once you’ve become accustomed to the interface and the few different layout options (i.e. Slides, scroll, quiz) then you can quickly and easily identify which option will be the most fitting for your particular exhibit.

Wide-spread adoption of Exhibit.so would make for really standardized virtual exhibit experiences. I think it would make co-creating between different museums smoother and easier. It would likely make the adoption of IIIF open standards even more widespread, which would snowball into more co-creating and sharing of other collections, increasing access, and so on. I think it would also lower the point of entry to have digital exhibits significantly. This digital system makes it super straightforward to create a digital exhibit in the first place, and creators wouldn’t need to be trained on certain style guides for individual museums or archives to be able to create an exhibit that meets their visual standards. The formatting tools are sufficient but straightforward and leave virtually no room for error. There isn’t any coding or design, just plug and play photos, add annotations, choose your format, and go. The simplicity of the interface could make digital collections more accessible to audiences who find more complex digital collections overwhelming to navigate, and by annotating the exhibit to link out to relevant articles and other resources, library, archives, and museum professionals can increase engagement with various resources, collections, and share the effort and engagement by sharing out to other libraries, archives, or museums. Further, the ability to embed the exhibit into your website can increase engagement and the editing link makes the co-creation of a digital exhibit simple and accessible.

Some of the key traits that make this system have such a low barrier of entry I worry could also drive away some of the users who are expecting a more sophisticated digital exhibit experience. If there is widespread adoption of Exhibit.so, some people may become bored with interacting with digital exhibits, as they experience multiple that have the same sort of appearance and navigation. Exhibit.so also seems to be missing some accessibility features that would be necessary for this to be a widely used digital system. For example, I was never able to upload image descriptions, and there wasn’t any sort of functionality to remind creators about best practices for creating digital exhibits with accessibility in mind. My last point about this not being the best system for widespread adoption does lean more on the technical side of things, but I think is relevant and important – as we demonstrated in class when trying to all bootup and practice using Exhibit.so together, the website simply cannot support the demand of even just our class using it simultaneously, and so that alone makes it seem wholly unrealistic to see this as a digital system that could support widespread use for digital exhibit creation and hosting. 

All in all, I think Exhibit.so is a fun and useful digital system to create basic digital exhibits at no cost and with little practical experience with digital exhibit making, or digital systems as a whole. I think it encourages the sharing of resources between many different LAM resources, supports co-creation between different information professionals, and all-around makes the creation of a digital system far more accessible than I expected it to be.