SMK Open Year One: The first 12 months of SMK’s online collection
The online collection of SMK — Statens Museum for Kunst has just turned one. Time flies, I know. But what happened? How did users react? And what did we learn?
In late November 2019 — in what seems like a different era– we enthusiastically launched SMK’s new online collection open.smk.dk with a bang.
Friends, what fun we had. There was light, there was beer, there was last-minute scrambling with servers, and I did manage to jot down some thoughts on the whole thing.
In this post, I’ll dig into usage numbers, explain the changes we’ve made and briefly discuss our momentous, hybris-like plans for the digital future.
The numbers
The online collection is part of a grander scheme, but on its own it’s really just meant to be used — by students, scholars and the general art-interested public. That is to say, reach (in the form of visits or “sessions”) is not an unreasonable metric of success. Let’s see how many stopped by, what we know about them and what they were looking for.
First of all, this chart shows total sessions of which there were an average of 337 per day of 2020.
In all likelihood this chart would have shown a fairly steady growth throughout the year had it not been for a certain pandemic-induced springtime lockdown. A lockdown that shone a sudden bright light on our digital offerings as even the locals had to go online to find the art.
On average, these intrepid online guests viewed 2,3 individual artworks per session totalling 288.000 artwork views.
Of these visitors, 78% were in Denmark and a remarkable 72% were on desktop (mobile 23%, tablet: 6%).
43% came through the front door, i.e. their “landing page” was the front page of the website and the most popular artwork, by far, was Danish painter Erik Henningsen’s social realist Evicted Tenants from 1892 (see the top ten).
By the definitions of Google Analytics the “acquisition distribution” was (rounding up):
- Direct: 46%
- Organic search: 38%
- Email: 6%
- Referral: 6%
- Social: 5%
Nothing in these numbers may be utterly surprising, but the prevalence of desktop use (and the strong popularity of Evicted Tenants) strongly suggest an educational bias – the site appeals to students and their teachers.
What we’ve been doing
They say, depressingly and not untruthfully, that the day you launch your digital product is the day your works starts and there’s no denying we’ve been busy working out the kinks.
Fortunately we’ve also managed to add quite a few features.
Just after launch we added Themes, collections of artworks tied together by an SMK editor — such as this one on “The Danish Golden Age”. We kept them simple on purpose, but may opt to include special descriptions on how individual artworks relate sometime in future.
We also rushed to add 3D models, that are embedded directly from our accounts at MyMiniFactory (327 models) and Sketchfab (9 models).
In the same vein, we connected audio and YouTube video files to artworks. Now, a video like the one below shows up directly on the artwork page of the painting The Fall of the Titans.
Worth mentioning is also that we tell the user, if the artwork is currently on display with a link to a map highlighting the relevant gallery.
Mainly, though, we’ve been wrestling with data. As we built the site, the SMK collection management system became scheduled for retirement as Danish museums were headed for a new, nation-wide solution: The SARA system.
This left us in something of a dilemma. Work with the old system and expect trouble up ahead. Aim for the new, unbuilt system and work partly blind-folded with very airy specifications. Boldly, we chose the latter and being an extremely early user (indeed we’re still the only user) of an API of a system utterly consumed by the noble, if Herculean, effort to include all Danish museums has not been a rose garden. It’s really no-body’s fault, but it does create a little too much excitement sometimes.
Nevertheless, data does flow, and it does move directly from the fingertips of SMK staff, through SARA and onto SMK Open. In this way, we have managed to add around 15.000 new artworks to the site since launch, with 93.495 works currently searchable (48.785 with photos). For instance this fine etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi:
The open road ahead
We have plans, big plans. As is only natural, there are design decisions that we now wish to revisit and so we’re planning a major interface overhaul in early 2021. We’re also eager to turbocharge our search features to facilitate more fine-grained research into the large collection. And we’re considering ways to enhance our IIIF viewer to pave the way for more curated “storytelling”.
In parallel, we’re working with data visualisation and a range of partnerships. For instance, we’re using location data to place all artworks on a map of Denmark to show favourite spots of Danish artists and to let users see art from their home town.
Oh, and we’ve also played around some more with machine learning. For instance, we’ve trained tireless machines to generate “original” art by studying a particular genre of painting. On that note, here’s a flying tree.
So much to do, so little time!
With the current pipeline of ideas we have enough to keep us occupied for at least a year. We hope you’ll follow os on our art data journey, and we appreciate every little suggestion, comment, and retweet!
SMK Open is kindly supported by Nordea-fonden
