We have several "stories" (as they now call them) up and two more in production.
The platform is fairly easy to input and attractive. One interesting thing is you can link materials from other museums and collections, unless they have forbidden it. We have used photos from the Life magazine collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You do have to have the overall presentation approved by Google before it goes live. We've never had a problem with this, and you can make edits after the exhibit is live.
There are some basic guidelines that might be limiting, depending what you want to do. Google's concept of the exhibition is compact, in terms of number of slides and amount of text, which may be why they are called stories now and not exhibitions. The interface will flag text that is too long but usually not stop you from keeping it that way (the viewer may have to scroll to see it all). When our Google A&C rep suggested that we cut some slides in one of our programs, they mentioned 15 slides is ideal. We did cut that one some. Most of ours have been about 25 slides, and Google has approved them all.
In conclusion, I think it's a great platform, but not really conducive to translating a large existing exhibition to the cloud. We were using pre-existing material for these, and even for the smaller exhibitions, modified them to fit better into the Google format. It required a bit of work, but we are very happy with the results.
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Laura Vookles
Chief Curator of Collections
Hudson River Museum
Yonkers NY
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-23-2020 10:37 AM
From: Tiffini Bowers
Subject: Google Arts & Culture: pros/cons
Is anyone using Google Arts & Culture for exhibitions? Any pros/cons.
Thanks,
Tiffini
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Tiffini Bowers
Head, Exhibitions and Engagement & Curator for Visual and Ephemeral Collections
John Hay Library - Brown University
Providence RI
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