25 Sep Explore the Collection – an award winning online portal
Sarjeant Gallery director Greg Anderson and Curator of Collections Jennifer Taylor Moore with David Kamper from MAGIQ software, sponsors of the award at the recent ALGIM Spring Conference Awards.
The Sarjeant’s Explore the Collection site gets more national recognition
Explore the Collection was launched in November 2018 and has garnered national and international attention for its originality and ingenuity
Whanganui District Council and the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui were runners-up for the Best Digital Service Award at the recent ALGIM Spring Conference in Auckland for the Gallery’s new online digital portal ‘Explore the Collection’. The judges expressed how impressed they were with the project outcomes and stated it was a very close race between winner and runner up.
Greg Anderson (Gallery Director) and Jennifer Taylor Moore (Curator of Collections) travelled to the conference in Auckland to give a presentation about the Gallery’s online collection, after being announced as a finalist earlier this year.
‘Explore the Collection’ enables public to access the Gallery’s entire collection online and was developed in partnership between the Sarjeant Gallery and Vernon Systems Ltd, who also supply the Gallery’s computerised collection management system.
This project was completed to an international standard using a limited budget within a four month period through the clever use of existing tools to automatically analyse data that would otherwise have required countless hours of staff time to input. It also introduced features that are not present in other online collections in New Zealand, such as browsing by the dominant colours present in the artworks.
‘Explore the Collection’ has been attracting attention nationally and internationally since its launch late last year: In April this year Jennifer and a representative from Vernon Systems were invited to co-present at the North American Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver; and in November 2018 the Sarjeant was named winner of the Best New Digital Collection or Exhibition Award at the cultural sector’s National Digital Forum in Wellington.
Take a browse through the collection at https://collection.sarjeant.org.nz/explore
To learn more about ALGIM: https://algim.org.nz/
For any further information or to arrange an interview about this exhibition please contact Relationships Officer at the Sarjeant, Jaki Arthur on 027 577 4923 or jaki.arthur@sarjeant.org.nz