This week we’ve launched an extension to the online collection website of Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui. The new feature is called Sarjeant Mosaic and it provides an instant view of all of the publicly accessible images of the collection. Visitors can click on an individual image to zoom in on more details, and then on to the full artwork record if they wish.
A new way to explore the collection
The mosaic can be sorted by artist or production date, both of which provide nice visual cues on clusters within the collection. When sorting by artist it’s easy to spot groups of works by artists with distinctive styles, such as the vivid hemisphere shapes of Gretchen Albretch on the third row in this sample view. When sorting by production date the overall tone of the collection at the start is primarily neutral colours and black and white images, with brighter colours becoming dominant in the most recently created works.
The mosaic builds upon the existing work on the online collection website, so it relies on Sarjeant Gallery’s early decision to publish all works on the website. The mosaic provides another route into other methods for browsing the collection such as by colour and automated subject tags.
The mosaic has been inspired by projects we’ve seen in the past, particularly SFMOMA’s Artscope (no longer available) and a New York Public Library project within the NYPL Labs team.
Touch screen access: Bringing the collection into the physical gallery
One of the primary motivations for the new view was for use within Sarjeant Gallery’s temporary exhibition space — Sarjeant on the Quay. The Gallery has moved out of their historic building while the building is redeveloped. The Sarjeant Mosaic feature has been developed to provide better access to the collection, particularly while the Gallery operates from their smaller exhibition space.
The Gallery will be installing a 65" touch screen in a kiosk cabinet. We’ve made use of Google Chrome kiosk features to reset the touch screen back to the mosaic view every couple of minutes, and restrict access within the web browser to only the Sarjeant Gallery website.
For minimal cost this has provided a way for the Gallery to make more use of it’s online collection.
Technical considerations
By default the Sarjeant Mosaic page recognises the screen size and only loads content within the visible page. This avoids users burning through their internet bandwidth. We’ve also put in a huge amount of work in optimising the page. The web page for the entire collection, plus embedded links for zooming in on one image, comes in at only 9 MB. Lastly, we speed up the site by making using of caching on the server, Amazon Content Delivery Network for the images, and local browser caching.
However, within the physical gallery we want to always display the whole collection, and the touch screen is big enough to display this all at once (the artwork images are about 20mm x 20mm on the touch screen). We’ve added an administrator option that sets a particular device into ‘kiosk mode’, using a cookie to record that fact that this device should always load all the images in the collection. With the built-in caching the load time is still pretty snappy.
The mosaic feature has been built as a generic feature in our Vernon Browser online public access module where we are calling it the “Bird’s Eye View”. Other clients will now also be able to make use of this feature to showcase their collections.
You can see it all in action on the Sarjeant Gallery website.
Postscript: The touch screen was installed in the public gallery in March 2019. There has been a lot of interest from visitors, particularly people interested in a specific work that is not on display. In the past these visitors have left disappointed, while now they are able to view a large image of the work and can read additional information.
