State of Minnesota IAIA Grant
Interim Report for July 1, 1998 – September 30, 1998
Submitted by
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center
Summary of IAIA Project
The primary goals of the Integrated Arts Information Access (IAIA) Project are to:
1. develop a user-friendly interface to a standards-based information framework which
will give remote audiences access to the Walker Art Center’s and The Minneapolis
Institute of Arts’ permanent collections, archives, and libraries; and
2. to create synthetic educational modules based on these resources for use in the
K-12 classroom.
Core resources available through this common porthole will include media (images,
audio, video, software, etc.) and related information (label copy, curriculum, manuscripts,
calendar/programming, external links, publications, etc.). In addition, links between the
resources will be provided and new guides created, from distance learning curriculum to
online exhibitions. There is no other project in the United States and only a few in the
world where two art museums are collaborating in such depth to create a single point of
access to their multiple resources.
The project managers are Robin Dowden, Integrated Information Resources Manager at
the Walker Art Center (WAC), and Scott Sayre, Director of Media and Technology at
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). Fourth quarter project activities are described
below in the areas of infrastructure development, resource digitization, intellectual access,
and new content creation.
I. Planning/Infrastructure
The first component of the IAIA project involves the research, identification, and
development of robust information standards, data structures, and technical infrastructure
which will support the overall system.
In the last interim report, submitted in July 1998, the IAIA project managers reported the
launch of ArtsConnectEd at http://www.artsconnected.org. ArtsConnectEd is the
Internet-based gateway that allows teachers, students, and parents to access the combined
educational resources of the Walker Art Center and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and
selected other resources on the Internet. Please refer to the attached ArtsConnectEd
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for more information on ArtsConnectEd and its
relationship to IAIA.
IAIA Interim Report
page 2
Fine-tuning the Inquery search engine and developing the Web pages that access the MIA
and Walker resources was a dominant body of work during the project's fourth quarter.
As previously reported, Inquery is an innovative, flexible search engine that is being used
by several other large Internet resource projects such as the Library of Congress American
Memory Project and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Learning Center. Its
particular strengths include the ability to handle free text as well as database records, so
that the user can search across all of an institution's information resources without the
institution having to mark it all up in advance. Template pages to display query responses
were completed for each type of information resource, i.e., artworks and related images,
audio and video assets, education materials, library records, texts, and Web documents.
Our initial page designs and query strategies were reviewed and changed as a result of
user testing conducted in the Dayton Hudson Corporation (DHC) Usability Laboratory (a
detailed description of the DHC evaluation is included below under section IV).
On September 1, Jim Blackaby, previously the Senior Systems Developer for the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was hired as the IAIA System Analyst. Over the
next year, Blackaby will be responsible for further development of the project's Inquery
databases and search functionality. A noted authority on cultural heritage information
resource management, Blackaby's move to Minneapolis is viewed as a significant
addition to an already impressive project team.
In September, the MIA and Walker IAIA project teams began defining the next cycle of
product and process objectives, constraints, and alternatives. Project goals for year two
include:
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refining and documenting content conversion procedures, i.e., developing scaleable
procedures for moving MIA and Walker collections information from local
management applications to publicly-accessible Internet resources;
resource promotion and evaluation with user communities, notably K-12 educators
and students;
resource expansion (see attached matrix of resource conversion goals); and
interface development, including the refinement of information access methods and
movement toward accommodating disabled Web users.
II. Digitization
The second component of the IAIA project involves the digital conversion of assets from
both institution’s collections, archives, libraries, and programming.
To date, over 1,000 images of artworks from the collections of the MIA and Walker are
available through ArtsConnectEd. Each object image is available in four sizes: small (72
x 72 pixels) and large (160 x 120) thumbnails, quarter-screen images (320 x 240), and
zoomable details of images up to 16x magnification. For a complete inventory of
currently available assets and digitization goals to be achieved by June 30, 1999, see the
attached matrix of IAIA Online Resources.
IAIA Interim Report
page 3
III. Intellectual Access
The third component of the IAIA project is the “markup” of the digitized assets so that
they can be easily found and used according to multiple criteria.
During this period, both the MIA and Walker stepped-up their participation in national
and international initiatives engaged with networking cultural resources. On behalf of the
IAIA project, Robin Dowden attended meetings of the Consortium for the Computer
Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) Dublin Core Metadata Working Testbed
Project in Halifax, Nova Scotia (June 1998) and Santa Monica, California (September
1998). Dowden contributed over 8,000 Walker collection records in Dublin Core (DC)
format to the testbed repository. This project is evaluating the feasibility of DC for the
museum community by examining assumptions related to generating records; provides a
forum for understanding and resolving issues concerning the operational aspects,
technical infrastructure, intellectual challenges, and economics of DC record creation;
and promotes international consensus on DC practices in the museum and cultural
heritage community.
In August, Walker Art Center Archivist, Jill Vetter, attended the first membership
meeting of Conceptual & Intermedia Arts Online (Project CIAO). CIAO is a
collaborative project between seven institutions to create networked access to educational
and scholarly
material on the broad theme of conceptual art. The testing and development of standards
and guidelines for implementing standards for collection access are key pieces of the
CIAO project. Two primary technical standards will be used in the CIAO project; XML
and EAD. XML, Extensible Markup Language, is an international standard approved by
the W3C, and ensures that conforming documents will be readable/interoperable across
diverse computer platforms and networks such as the Internet. This also makes them
relatively long-lived in today's dynamic electronic environment. The EAD, Encoded
Archival Description, is a specific implementation of XML -- a set of elements (tags) for
describing cultural/archival collections. EAD is also an international standard, maintained
by the Library of Congress and the Society of American Archivists. While XML provides
a durable, portable format for our collections information, the EAD provides an accepted
structure enabling complex searching and direct interoperability with the larger
information universe such as university, library, and archive databases.
The standards being adopted by CIAO are of interest to IAIA for the following reasons.
As museums begin to provide general public access to collections information, they are
finding that the item-level records contained in their collections databases are enough for
internal management, but that more context is needed for meaningful access and learning
purposes. Conceptual art in particular requires this additional context and relation to be
accessed meaningfully. The EAD allows museums to create collection-level records that
can contain fuller narrative descriptions such as interpretive or scholarly texts. These
collection-level records can then include groups of objects or documents organized
hierarchically to convey historical or other relationships, and these groups can contain
detailed item-level records, usually taken from the collection management database.
Several recent museum community projects have cited the need for a collection-level
IAIA Interim Report
page 4
record standard for museums, as the whole sometimes lends meaning to any one object,
or it may be the only feasible level at which detailed subject cataloging is feasible. Many
museum Web sites provide item-level records in detailed databases, but collection-level
records as static unrelated text documents. CIAO will test the use of EAD as a way to
integrate these resources.
In September, MIA and Walker staff attended the membership meeting of the Art
Museum Image Consortium (AMICO). This group -- now comprising twenty-five art
collecting institutions in North America -- has assembled a digital library of about
20,000 works for educational use. The beta AMICO library is now being used in a
University Testbed Project, by eighteen campuses, and made available through the
Research Library Group. Testbed projects are addressing a research agenda that
identified questions around the definition of critical mass and integration of digital
resources into art and humanities teaching. A thumbnail catalogue and other background
about AMICO can be found at http://www.amico.net.
IV. Creating New Content
The fourth component of the IAIA project requires the development of original, “added
value,” educational, and exhibition-related content.
This quarter, both institutions have added new mechanisms for accessing the educational
materials available through ArtsConnectEd. The MIA and Walker have indexed their
educational resources, including online activities, slide sets and curriculum materials.
Teachers and parents can now easily access available curricula by grade level, Minnesota
Graduation Standards, institution, and those having online activities. The indexes have
been integrated into the Inquery database, which means that every time a user requests the
information, a new list is generated. This approach will keep the indexes up-to-date as
new materials are added.
Other educational features include the nearly completed first module of the Walker's
unique audience-driven tour Through Your Eyes and MIA's World Ceramics, an online
curriculum set. While both of these features are still in development, some fine-tuning
will make these offerings innovative ways to learn about the museums' collections and
programs. In addition, MIA made the catalogue Teaching the Arts available as part of the
IAIA database. Within ArtsConnectEd, teachers are able to search the entire catalog,
which includes slide sets, films and tours, and obtain ordering information. The
technology and programs that would allow teachers to order materials and schedule tours
online is being investigated.
IAIA team member Paulette Jones demonstrated the World Ceramics curriculum unit and
the ArtsConnectEd site to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Teachers Advisory Group to
elicit feedback and discuss strategies for conforming to the State of Minnesota’s Profile
of Learning. Mary Lillesve, Manager of Systems Services Division at the Minnesota
Department of Children, Families and Learning, also attended this meeting and discussed
the many ways IAIA’s educational content could be integrated into the Minnesota
Electronic Curriculum Repository which should come online later this fall.
IAIA Interim Report
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In early August, the ArtsConnectEd site was the subject of a user evaluation study
conducted at the Dayton Hudson Corporation (DHC) Usability Lab. The DHC lab
provided a unique and sophisticated environment for user testing that included access to
DHC personnel experienced in software evaluation and access to technology for
observing and recording test results.
Working with DHC staff, IAIA project members developed ten scenarios for user testing
and identified three IAIA test groups. The testing scenarios prescribed circumstances for
resource discovery ranging from a hypothetical Internet service provider's "hot pick of the
day" to an Internet-based classroom assignment. In the DHC lab, each user "group" -composed of one or two individuals -- was asked to answer a series of questions using the
IAIA resource. Meanwhile the IAIA project staff observed the users' interaction with and
responses to the interface from behind a one-way mirror. Each session was taped and
comments were logged. At the conclusion of the interviews, we reviewed user questions
and compiled a list of findings and solutions. While the DHC testing was invaluable in
the development of the current user interface, evaluation of the site has only begun. In
year two of the project, we plan to evaluate the site in the areas of Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA) site compliance, usability, and content analysis.
In September, IAIA project members went to Santa Monica to attend the Annual Meeting
of the Museum Computer Network. This theme of this year's conference -- Knowledge
Creation, Sharing and Preservation -- was particularly relevant to IAIA project goals and
included several sessions on museum educational resources for K-12 schools and
Internet-based integrated information access projects. In a session entitled "MuseumTeacher Collaborations Using the Web and CD-ROMs" Scott Sayre discussed ways in
which The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center are strategically using
the Internet to connect with teachers and students throughout the state of Minnesota. As a
part of the presentation, Scott demonstrated educational applications of IAIA database as
well as a number of online activities and curriculum units that were developed through
the IAIA project. The presentation also touched on the wide variety of publicity and
marketing strategies that both institutions will be using to market these extensive new
resources.