Overview

City of Subiaco
Subiaco Argonauts:
Digitising the exhibition and making it accessible on the City of Subiaco website

A project for the City of Subiaco web site that will focus on a collection of handmade books and the two Subiaco boys, Jim Phillips and Alec Choate, who produced the books in the 1920s and 1930s.

The project will provide broad and engaging access to the above collection and communicate its significance without compromising its conservation. It will attract, inform and engage viewers of diverse ages and interests.

Our proposal includes the innovative use of:

• digital interactive ‘turn-the-pages‘ books,
• HTML pages (for Google and Yahoo indexing) containing the text for the virtual exhibition one per book, making them suitable for inclusion on Pandora, the National Library of Australia’s digital archive,
• audio and transcribed oral histories (2004 oral history interview with Alec Choate),
• presentation of family and childhood photos,
• pencil portrait of Alec Choate by Jim Phillips

The project progressed and:

• the City of Subiaco have a photographer available to produce the images and appropriate budget corrections will be taken into account,
• text for the virtual exhibition will be developed from the present exhibition with further historical research as necessary,
• GMG worked in partnership with the City of Subiaco’s web professionals in regards to the development of the virtual exhibition

Screen grabs and the live web site are nearing completion. Details soon!

Design

Proposed site structure (to be developed in the discovery phase):

• Home
  • Book 1
    :
  • Book 17
  • Oral history
  • Photos

Each page includes (as a minimum) curatorial interpretive text, links to the other pages, and the interactive digital books (one viewable at a time).

• Create interactive digital books of the 17 books
  • Each page to have full zoom functionality to show the fine detail of the book’s illustrations and calligraphy
  • Where transcribed text is available, it will be presented as a pop up window over each page
• Create a full HTML version of the site
  • Makes the whole site available to screen readers for accessibility
  • Makes it available to Google and Yahoo for indexing and searching
  • Create separate pages per book for indexing in Pandora
  • Each page has its own interpretive text
  • Include full text of the books where this text is available from the Museum
    • Needs to be manually transcribed – can’t auto transcribe hand written books
    • Lets Google fully index the content of all the books
    • Suitable for screen readers (accessibility)
• Create a presentation of the family and childhood photographs
  • Needs to be sensitive to the curatorial context
• Add the audio from the oral history to the site
  • Include full transcript (already existing)

So far we have 16.3 gigabytes of material processed into digital books, transcribed, and curated. Should make for an interesting read!