A template for the future?

Ben Lobo, Phil Blume,Nick TysonThe Regency Town House

Abstract

This paper focuses on a researchprogramme to develop simple to usemultimedia software authoring toolsdesigned specifically for use inmuseum environments and by museumstaff. It is argued that the developmentof such tools represents a viable wayfor museums to help meet visitorsaspirations for interactive media basedpresentations and that this approachcan limit the costs normally associatedwith providing such facilities.

Introduction

home of the mid 1 820s, The RegencyTown House is a developing heritagecentre and museum focusing mainlyon the evolution of Brighton and Hoveduring the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries. At this time inhistory, broadly defined as ‘TheRegency’, the Brighton area came toenjoy an unrivalled position as aseaside spa resort for ‘fashionable’society, a development that is todayreflected in the towns’ richarchitectural and cultural heritage.

The project aims to raise publicawareness and appreciation of thisRegency legacy in three principleways:

Refurbishing The Regency TownHouse to provide visitors with theopportunity to explore a traditionallyrefurbished historic home.

information about the period to thelargest possible audience.

By using computer systems toprovide public access to the records,documents and products of theRegency era.

This third area of our work currentlyinvolves digitising archives ofhistorical texts and images; evolving aweb site through which we can deliverhistorical information; buildinginterpretative interactive presentationsfor kiosk and CD-ROM; and designingmultimedia authoring tools that allowsuch interactive products to be quicklyand easily assembled by inexperiencedusers. It is this latter area of our workupon which this paper is focussed.

Before progressing further, animportant point should be emphasised.Whilst our in-house work programme

By staging traditional outreachsuggests that we are a well-funded

Located on the South coast of activities such as exhibitions,institution with significant levels of

England, in a Grade 1 Listed terraced demonstrations and lectures that takehuman and technical resource, we are

Figure 1: The Regency Town HouseFigure 2: ‘A Regency Promenade’. Screenshor of the main interface oi ‘firstlevel’. Note that the instructions for use of the system are provided below thelarge scroltabte panoramic picture and that the area of the panorama on view inthe main window is indicated by the boxed area within the miniature panorama.

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in fact a small project working withvery low levels of financial support.This factor, more than any other,provided the impetus for us to developlow-cost and easy-to-use authoringtools.

Early Work - Promenade

During the early to mid 1990s we builta number of software presentationsdesigned as possible front ends to ourdatabase of historical information. Indoing so, we explored a wide varietyof interfaces including natural

language, command line andiconographic systems. The purpose ofthis exercise was to determine whichwas most pleasing and informative forour different experimental user groups.

By far the most successful of thesystems we designed and tested was‘A Regency Promenade’. Thispresentation was based on a 3 metrelong panoramic picture, produced in1833, showing Brighton’s sea-frontbuildings and a variety of individualswalking and riding along thepromenade. Users were able to scrollthe picture left and right and, byclicking on the characters in theforeground of the image, they couldhear them speak. As well as playing asound file, the system displayed eachcharacter’s statement as text on thescreen. This text contained a hyperlinkto further historical information atsecond and third levels of thepresentation.

This playful and serendipitous‘browsing’ system of informationaccess proved to be extremely popularand led us to develop severalspecialised forms of the presentationfor in-house purposes. Over time, thepopularity of the product led otherinstitutions to ask that we producemodified versions that couldaccommodate their picture and soundfiles. An example of such a derivatisedprogram is ‘Festival Promenade’. Thispresentation, about the influence oforiental art in the Georgian house, isexhibited on touch screen displayswithin two museums in the city ofBath.Unlike ‘A Regency Promenade’ whichused a historical print as its centralimage, ‘festival Promenade’ employsa modern drawn image produced toshow the architectural facades of keystreets through the city. Furthermore,while the original ‘Promenade’ systemhad only one main panorama,‘festival’ employs three, with the mainimage being interchangeable for asecond showing a timeline and a thirdproviding an alphabetical searchfunction.

After producing several variations onthe ‘Promenade’ theme we concludedit would be useful to have a

Figure 3: ‘A Regency Promenade’. Clicking on the central character group in thisscreen shot elicits the spoken narrative ‘Stop. Thief’ and the display of thesewords, as text containing a hyperlink, on the monitor Clicking on the hyperlinknavigates the user to a ‘second level’ of the system.

Figure 4: ‘A Regency Promenade’. At the ‘second level’ a text based introductionto the character group’s ‘topic’ is provided, in this case, the subject of ‘Crime’.Beneath this the user is offered a selection of buttons that will navigate to a ‘thirdlevel’.

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A template for the future?

‘templated’ software authoring tool,that would simplify and speed-up themaking of such presentations. It wasclear to us that software of this kindcould not only assist our own workprogramme, but might also havesignificant and far wider implications.

Template Toots

A problem facing many museums andgalleries is that they lack the resourcesneeded to commission interactivemultimedia presentations or to trainstaff in the use of commerciallyavailable authoring packages. Even

larger institutions often find it difficultto develop interactive media thatsupports short-term exhibitions andevents. A simple-to-use multimediaauthoring tool that would enableinexperienced users to createinteractive presentations quickly andeasily could be of great value to manyin the museological community.

This concept became the foundation ofa successful grant bid to theDepartment of National Heritage (nowthe Department for Culture, Media andSport) who provided us with thebalance of the funds we needed topursue a research and developmentproject into the viability and use oftemplated authoring tools.

With funding in place, we began byconducting interviews at museumsaround the country to determine theacceptability and practicality of ourproposal.We asked museum staff and visitors toaddress a number of critical factors,including:

• The level of computer literacy andthe computer resource withinmuseums.

• Opportunities for museum staff toaccess expert advice from externalsources.

• The enthusiasm of museum staff tomake and deploy multimediapresentations.

• Visitor interest in such presentations.

During these sessions, intervieweeswere shown different types ofinteractive media ranging from simple,low-cost products to presentationsbuilt for major international galleries.The visual content, navigationalsystems and underlying structure ofthe different examples were alldiscussed, and we asked whichelements they found appropriate foruse within their own institutions. Mostagreed that graphically rich and‘playful’ presentations with logicalnavigation and not too many layers ofinformation were preferable. They alsonoted that, if they were to be involvedin making presentations, largeinformation systems were undesirableas there assembly would prove too

Figure 5: ‘A Regency Promenade’. This screenshot illustrates one of the sourcematerials available to the user at the third level of the system. Besides text basedsources the user can look at pictures and listen to extracts from diaries of theperiod being read, by using the buttons on the ‘second level’.

Figure 6: ‘Festival Promenade’. This screenshot of the main inte,face illustratesthe system’s similarity to the Regency Promenade presentation.

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demanding of their availableresources.

Following this initial informationgathering process, we embarked on aprogramme of testing, evaluation anditeration with a selected group ofmuseums to refine different prototypeauthoring systems. These ranged fromones offering considerable flexibilityof functionality and layout, to othersthat were tightly constrained, althoughvery simple and quick to use. In time,we evolved better systems, includingones that used scrolling images andpanoramas, for which most of the testgroup expressed a strong preference.They found them visually attractive,easy to comprehend and straightforward to navigate. Importantly, manyof the group were reasonablyconfident that they would be capableof building these types ofpresentations when we described howthe authoring system might work.Not long after this period ofconsultation and while our softwarewas still at its early stages ofdevelopment we learned of a grant callfrom the Scottish Cultural ResourcesAccess Network (SCRAN). Thisproject is digitising cultural andhistoric records and making themavailable to schools across the internet.We approached SCRAN with a view

to developing a templated authoringtool that could be used to makescrolling image presentations fromtheir digitised records. The experienceof building this was clearly going toenhance our understanding oftemplated authoring systems in generaland our ability to make them.

Following the success of this grantapplication we evolved our first fullyworking version of a scrollableauthoring tool for use within theSCRAN network while thereafter, wepursued and refined the developmentof a similar product for use in Englishmuseums. This final version of oursoftware, called ‘Conveyor’, wasintroduced to the museum communityat a series of events through the springof 1999. These included South EastMuseum Service sponsored traininginitiatives, the Museums ComputerGroup spring conference in June ofthat year and several BBC broadcasts.

Conveyor

In keeping with the originalPromenade concept, Conveyor createspresentations that are three-levelinformation systems. The first levelconsists of the main navigation

window containing a long, scrollableimage, onto which up to 40 interactiveareas can be defined. Clicking in oneof these areas causes a sound file to beplayed and a text file to be displayed.‘Hot links’ in the text take the user tothe second level of information,known as the Topic Screen. From eachTopic Screen, the user can access up to5 examples of third level informationdisplayed on ‘Source Screens’.

Building a Conveyor presentationcould hardly be easier. Once thenecessary digital assets have beengathered and sized appropriately, thestep by step instructions of thecarefully designed ‘Wizard’ interfaceguides the builder through the entireprocess, providing a full visualoverview of the product being built.

Within a couple of hours of workingwith Conveyor for the first time, thebackground, main moving image andnavigation buttons can all be in place.Following this, Topic Screens, SourceScreens and sound files are added. If ascreen doesn’t look appropriate oncein place, it is a simple matter toreplace it with another. Indeed, inexperienced hands, Conveyor enablesa simple presentation to be assembledin minutes, as was demonstrated at thisconference.

Digital Books

During the early stages of our work ontemplated authoring systems we beganto consider the implications of thisapproach for a second researchinitiative we were pursuing, theproduction of digital books. Theconcept behind this work wasstraightforward. The world’s librariesand archives hold countless rare andfragile books that scarcely see the lightof day. Although comprising a culturalresource beyond compare, access tothese works is often difficult forscholars and all but impossible formembers of the public. We wereseeking to design a software productthat would enable low-cost digitalcopies to be distributed on CD-ROM,played on ordinary desktop computersand which would allow the user to

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Figure 7: ‘The Conveyor Wizard Window and behind that a Presentation in-build’. This screenshot iltustrates step 4 of the ‘Main’tabs routine beingundertaken. The user progresses through each routine on alt four tabs to completea presentation. The system can be played ‘live’ throughout the build process.

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A temptate for the future?

interact with the book as though itwere a real object open on the desk infront of them. If we could acceleratethe production of such books using thetemplate approach it would clearly beadvantageous.

As we began our research our initialconcerns were:

To determine whether it wasfundamentally practical to representa printed antiquarian work on thescreen while retaining the ‘look and

feel’ of the historical documentrather than losing it in a text editorwindow.

• To asses whether we could enhancethe presentation of the book withuseful technical features such as aword search function.

• To evolve easy-to-use interfacedesigns that would encourage use ofthe books by the widest possibleaudience.

following initial experimentation wedecided to make a complete one-offdigital book in order to evaluate theseand related concerns. This product wasintended to provide us with feedbackthat would help shape the design ofthe digital book authoring system weplanned to evolve later.We selected the 1814 publication‘Costume of Yorkshire’ by GeorgeWalker and built a presentation inwhich the user is able to switch backand forth between two differentviewing modes, ‘archive’ and‘modem’.

In archive mode the book is presentedas if open on a table in front of theviewer. If, in the original work, thetext was slightly skewed or imageswere placed sideways on the page, thisorientation is maintained. Becausepreserving an authentic layout doesnot necessarily make the content easyto assimilate, the user can access analternative modern mode. Thistransposes each page into a simple‘card’ format with any associatedimages rotated, if necessary, forupright viewing.

Whichever mode the user is in, thefunctionality remains much the same.Pages are turned by using the cursor tomimic the action of turning a physicalpage, or by using a slider control bar.The plates and text can be zoomed forcloser inspection, electronicbookmarks can be inserted, a wordsearch of the text can be executed, andtext and pictures can be output toanother document or a printer. If, aswas sometimes the case, a book wasbound with the text translated intomore than one language, there is themeans to switch simply between suchtranslations. To add further versatility,

Figure 8: ‘Costume of Yorkshire’. This screenshot shows the ‘archive’ interface ofthe Costume digital book. On touch-screen and mouse-driven systems the pagescan be turned by mimicking the flicking action associated with turning a realpage.

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Figure 9: ‘Costume of Yorkshire’. This screenshot shows the ‘modern’ interfaceof the Costume digital book. The menu options in this mode are permanentlydisplayed on the screen whereas in archive mode the menus display ‘edgefunctionality’ so as not to detractfrom the users appreciation of the book.

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a facility to play back a spoken textnarrative and expert commentary hasalso been included.

This digital book, known simply as‘Costume’, was immensely wellreceived in user testing. Moreover, thebenefit of a templated authoringsystem capable of making similarproducts quickly and economicallywas obvious to many in the archive,library and educational communities,including representatives from thePublic Record Office.

Shortly after Costume was completedwe were fortunate to obtain a HeritageLottery Fund award, a portion ofwhich was to make a second digitalbook based on the published works ofthe Regency architect, C A Busby. Wehave been able to begin thedevelopment of a templated bookauthoring system while completing the‘Busby Book’ and we hope to receivefurther grant aid during the year 2000with which to finish the production ofthis software authoring system whichwe have named ‘PagePlayer’.

Conclusion

Since its launch in April 1999,Conveyor has proved to be anextremely popular product. As thispaper is delivered, some 65 copies ofthe software have been distributed toEnglish museums and the firstcompleted presentation is due to beunveiled to the public in February2000. While this will focus on thearchitectural history of a country townother Conveyor presentations currentlyin-build are known to be based uponarchaeological digs; ceramic, coin andcostume collections; and immigrationroutes into Great Britain.

From the success of Conveyor and theinterest in the PagePlayer concept, it isclear that templated authoring toolsenabling the rapid and inexpensiveproduction of digital products havemuch to offer the museological world.They can provide interactive media tosupport in-house exhibitions, producepowerful and marketable educationalpresentations and, in some instances,

offer the conservation benefitsassociated with providing digital‘access’ to the rare and fragile itemsheld in museum collections.

As visitor’s expectations rise we arefaced with an ever greater demand forentertaining and informativeinteractive presentations, yet thefinancial constraints within which wework make meeting these expectationsincreasingly difficult. We believe thatone solution is to empower museumstaff with the means to producepresentations, quickly, simply andeconomically, and that templatedauthoring systems of the typedescribed here offer a practical way toachieve this.

We will continue to seek funding forConveyor so that we can further refineand upgrade the software to provideusers with a more powerful andversatile authoring tool. In the longerterm we would also like to establishcollaborative arrangements withfunding agencies and institutions inother countries so that we might‘regionalise’ the software and makeConveyor available to museumsaround the world.

In this paper we have talkedprincipally about a single productcalled Conveyor. In closing we wouldlike to express our belief that a familyof Conveyor-like ‘assembly’ toolscould and should be built. Suchprograms would fulfil specificpresentational needs as described bymuseologists but could beeconomically produced for use inmuseums by sharing commonelements of their underlying computercode. With such software at theftdisposal museums would be wellplaced to embrace some of the majoreducational challenges we will face atthe start of the 21st century.

Postscript

Since this paper was presented inSeptember 1999, the BritishBroadcasting Corporation has adoptedConveyor as a part of its History 2000initiative; the software itself has been

upgraded to version 1.3; some 1,100copies of Conveyor have beendistributed to British museums and weare arranging its distribution tomuseums in several other Europeancountries. Furthermore, the PagePlayerinitiative has received funding fromthe Esmee Fairbaim Charitable Trustwhich will ensure that the momentumof this project is sustained.

Conveyor and PagePlayerdevelopments can be followed at:www.regency-town-house.org.uk

Enquiries about the systems should bemade to:nick@regency-town-house.org.uk

We are grateful to the following forassistance with our template research:

The Headley Trust, the Department forCulture, Media and Sport, the ScottishCultural Resources Access Network,the Heritage Lottery Fund, the EsmeeFairbairn Charitable Trust.

Apple Computer Inc., PhilipsElectronics, Iomega Co., MacromediaInc. and Adobe Systems Inc.

A special thanks also to Emma Pruntyand Alan Morris for their R&Dcontributions and The Trustees of TheBrunswick Town Charitable Trust fortheir ongoing support.

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