Digital Object Labels

Client: National Museum of Australia, Canberra

As part of redeveloping their main gallery space, the National Museum of Australia also digitised their approach to object labels with a goal to making them flexible, localizable, and engaging. 

I was the core developer on the Digital Object Labels project. I  built a React app that can display any kind of object label, based on data pulled from an external API. Around this I built an Electron wrapper to handle in-gallery display, and added caching via a Service Worker to reduce load on the API provider.

Digital Object Labels needed to function off the Museum’s network, so I built an “offline” mode and an export feature that downloads and writes the label data and assets locally.  Additionally I built a robust solution for analytics tracking; events are sent to Google Analytics via a intermediary tracking app on the museum’s network, or written to disk in offline mode. This helps museum staff answer questions like “Which object do our visitors find most interesting?” in a quantitive way.

Toolbox

React, CSS components, REST, Electron and the Service Worker APIs. Ruby and Roda for the intermediary analytics tracking app.