Open Exhibits is a suite of open source multitouch-enabled exhibit modules and templates that seeks to transform the way in which museum professionals and informal educators create computer-based exhibits for use in museums and on the Web.
In November 2010, Ideum launched the Open Exhibits website, a feature-rich community portal designed for organic expansion in sync with the community growth. The site is built around a custom social networking system that promotes user contribution. The widget-based homepage offers an overview of the multi-faceted project, with links to a user-contributed blog, professional research, software resources, tutorials, documentation, and external Open Exhibits social networking accounts.
The Open Exhibits site also features a custom software contribution and version control system, with a distributed issue tracker. Users can download, modify, author and support open source software project files or contribute to existing projects.
Members can add their blog, Twitter feeds, and LinkedIn information to their profile page. Users can sort members by community contributions, join date or name, and search for other users by email address, organization, or the organizational role.
Each site contribution has integrated share functionality, allowing users to share Open Exhibits content to their social networks or email links to friends. A custom analytics engine allows project managers and independent evaluators to analyze detailed statistics of site and software usage.
Ideum developed and maintains the Open Exhibits site using Drupal, Javascript and custom PHP. Open Exhibits Core software is based on Ideum’s commercial multitouch SDK, GestureWorks.
You can visit the Open Exhibits site at openexhibits.org and learn more about using the site in this Research and Development blog post. The Open Exhibits project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
