Re: Subject categories for museum website

[Matt Morgan]

For a more fun/less academic approach you could use something like the questions that Komar and Melamid used in their "Most Wanted Painting" project, where they created desirable paintings based on responses to survey questions like

• What's your favorite color?
• What's your second favorite color?
• Do you prefer wild or domestic animals?
• What size painting do you like?

etc.  See http://www.diacenter.org/km/ for links to the actual survey questions and images of the resulting paintings.  Of course the paintings all ended up sort of funny, which was the point, but it would make a fun web project, to tie the questions to an actual collection.  Or you could do it without the tongue-in-cheekness, although that might be harder.

At 11:15 AM 3/25/2003 -0800, you wrote:

Hi everyone,
At SFMOMA we are continuing to work on getting our collections information on-line.  In the past, in addition to searchable label information in-house, we have used only the most basic keywords to identify objects, like painting, drawing, photograph.  But we want to give visitors other ways into the collections and we could use some advice. 

Do you have broad categories that you use at the top level of your website's collections hierarchy?  The ones that always come to mind are things like landscape, portrait, abstract; or religious art, historical scenes, etc.; but surely there's more creative thinking out there.  Any comments or ideas are welcome, including ideas of other websites we might visit.  thanks!

Marla Misunas
Manager, Collections Database
Collections Information and Access
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
415 357 4186 voice
415 947 1186 fax
http://www.sfmoma.org
Board Member, Museum Computer Network
Conference Chair, Las Vegas, 2003
http://www.mcn.edu



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