What I have learnt from creating Culture Victoria: Eleanor Whitworth

Arts Victoria Senior Arts Officer Eleanor Whitworth talks about how Culture Victoria came into being, its successes and failures and what she would differently next time.

The Culture Victoria (CV) website is a space where cultural content from venues across Victoria are brought together to provide an immersive and focused entry point to Victorian collections using rich media. The objectives we set for CV are to: showcase the collections of Victorian cultural organisations; tell stories about Victorian communities and cultural collections; expose behind-the-scenes activities that the public does not usually get to see; and promote visitation to stakeholder websites.



The audiences we set out to target are: the education sector (specifically teachers and students accessing the Victorian education portal FUSE; Victorians and tourists interested in Victorian culture, community, and cultural collections; and communities of interest (e.g. Antarctica).

On the collaborative process CV was a group effort – from inception to production. It arose out of the Victorian Cultural Network (VCN) project, a collaborative partnership between Victoria’s major cultural organisations: the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Museum Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of Victoria, The Arts Centre, and Federation Square, facilitated by Arts Victoria. The VCN commenced in 2003. We began planning CV in 2004, and established a collaborative working structure where all VCN members participated, and some took a ‘lead agency’ role for the delivery of specific production elements (e.g. design and development of the content management system). It was inspiring to have a group of highly skilled participants from across the agencies working together. It did, however, soon become clear that this complex project would become an unwieldy beast if it were not reigned in. Reflecting on the collaborative process brings a quote from Karl Kraus to mind: “Democracy means the permission to be everybody’s slave.” Whilst this is a cheeky exaggeration, we did find that in the context of project delivery some centralised management was essential for a successful outcome, and we subsequently engaged a project manager.


Arts Victoria, Senior Arts Officer, Eleanor Whitworth at the OBJECTS FACES PLACES exhibition currently on display in the Arts Victoria foyer.

On access, stories, and storytelling
The underlying purpose of CV is to increase access to Victorian cultural collections. ‘Access’ comes in many forms – from exposure of raw data, to sharing the knowledge and expertise of curators and artists.

When we commenced planning CV, broadband was rolling out across the globe and it was agreed that CV would focus on media rich content (video and high resolution images) to provide an immersive experience for the user.

It was also agreed that CV content would be ‘story-centric’, where the story provides a contextual narrative connecting collection assets and shedding light on some aspect of Victorian culture, heritage or art. The stories are the engagement point for the public, each one forming a mini virtual exhibition where the aggregation of content from different collection domains provides the user with a multi-faceted experience of a particular topic.

A content management system (CMS) was designed with a ‘Story Builder’ function (using EpiServer). In the Story Builder, a story home page is created. Objects related to the story are created separately and attached to the story. Objects can be contributed by multiple authorised organisations. For example, William Barak includes content from the Koorie Heritage Trust, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the State Library of Victoria, creating a picture of Barak the man, his legacy, and Wurundjeri culture.

The story includes:
• A video of Joy Wandin Murphy discussing her family relationship with Barak, life on Coranderrk, and the cultural meaning of his works;
• A video of Nerissa Broben, Senior Curator at the Koori Heritage Trust, showing the unexpected findings of conservation work on one of Barak’s paintings, and talking about Barak’s use of traditional and contemporary tools;
• A video of Judy Williams, Librarian at the Koori Heritage Trust, talking about Barak’s time as a member of the native police searching for the Kelly Gang;
• A video of Judith Ryan, Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, talking about Barak’s position within the State collection, how his work came to be collected, his role as an innovator, and the legacy of Coranderrk as the first Aboriginal arts centre;
• Sixteen high resolution images from the three contributing organisations.

The CMS also enables management of intellectual property rights, and for organisations to attach branding to their content. The initial tranche of CV content was funded through the VCN and we engaged a content producer to facilitate and create contributions from VCN members and metro-regional partners (Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, Koori Heritage Trust, Mildura Arts Centre, and the West Gippsland Library Corporation). CV stories are presented under a series of themes relevant to Victoria’s history and culture.


2008 Monster Petition Head Project Banner, signed by the Premier of Victoria and the Minister for Women’s Affairs, from Women’s Suffrage.

Each story fulfills at least one of the following:
• Showcases Victorian collections previously unavailable on-line (The Ross Sea Party)
• Shares the expertise of curators and reveals ‘back-of house’ activities (Restoring Shearing the Lambs)
• Reveals the creative process (In My Day)
• Reveals aspects of Victorian communities (Women on Farms, Digital Stories of the Mind and Body, Walhalla: fires, floods and tons of gold)
• Keeps archival material in the public domain (Kylie’s Costumes arose out of the 2004 exhibition at The Arts Centre)
• Celebrates significant events (Women’s Suffrage)

Project partners
During the development process, we worked with Collections Australia Network to develop a database of over 700 Victorian organisations that hold cultural collections.


We also worked with the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts which made their open search client available to enable us to offer users a search function across the websites of selected cultural organisations.

In hindsight
Some of the key challenges and learning that came out of the project:
a) Given the rate of change of technology, we found that by the time the website was complete a new suite of applications and approaches to online usage had arisen (e.g. Web 2.0 functionality. See Art Babble for a Web 2.0 bigger quasi-equivalent of CV). If we wanted to incorporate these applications we’d have to find more money. As such, if you want the flexibility for your website to adapt to new technologies, it is important to view it as an evolving entity, and to budget accordingly.

b) Another trend occurring alongside the rollout of broadband was the uptake of ‘Good Enough Technology’: cheap and simple tools (such as the Flip) that produce low-fi results which are not only acceptable, but are embraced by the general public. We positioned our production values at the high end, which presents two issues: 1) users need to have the bandwidth to display the content; 2) the expense of producing the media may prohibit smaller organisations from participating. We will continue to assess the trade off between high production values and accessibility, and also look out for middle ground options.
c) The CMS is a valuable shared resource that provides smaller organisations with the opportunity to increase the visibility of their content without investing in the underlying infrastructure. The tool does, however, come at a cost. Creating the content and the metadata is resource intensive, and the benefits of contributing to CV need to justify the time spent. Ultimately, it would be great to have an automated date exchange system in place, but this is outside the scope of our budget. Instead, we are testing and refining the upload process and assessing where support will be best targeted to assist content contributors.

d) Building the CMS presented several challenges. We always intended for CV content to be relevant to education audiences, but when designing the CMS, metadata for the education portal FUSE was not yet confirmed. We went ahead and incorporated standard education metadata fields. It turned out that these fields are not in the format required for FUSE. In hindsight, it would have been easier to wait until the education system was confirmed. That said we’ve also found value in ‘over-building’ the CMS, as it is easier and cheaper to cut it back than to bolt more on.

e) Due to our focus on media rich content, we built the initial version of CV in Flash. We did not sufficiently consider the implications that this would have on the accessibility of the content – both for W3C standards and search engine optimisation. We’ve subsequently rebuilt the front end in HTML, resulting in a dramatic improvement in the visibility of CV content in search engines, as well as the ability for people to link to specific stories.

e) We are currently thinking about the long term sustainability of the website and its content: What do we do post 2011 when the VCN project comes to an end? What is the legacy of CV? Is there value in a centralised CMS? What is the value of a story-centric approach?


Villers-Bretonneux, image courtesy of the Keeper of Public Records, PROV.

Where to from here
Since reducing the amount of Flash in the front end we’ve been able to more accurately track visitation. The improved indexing in search engines is returning over 900 unique visitors a month. This is without any publicity. The statistics are also showing that the media rich content has achieved an immersive experience for users with the ‘average time on site’ peaking at over six minutes and settling at about 3 minutes. We’ll continue to monitor usage and tailor publicity and content accordingly. We’re also continuing to refine the functionality and design of the site, including plans to minimise the remaining Flash wrapping around story content so that individual assets can be indexed, linkages can be made between assets, and videos can be embedded in external sites. We’ll also consider Web 2.0 functionality, such as enabling comments on stories and assets and, budget and copyright issues permitting, enabling users to create their own stories. VCN members continue to add content to CV and we plan to open contributions to organisations across Victoria. We are currently running pilots with the Public Record Office Victoria, The University of Melbourne, and the goldfields region (coordinated by Karlie Hawking out of the Department of Planning and Community Development) to refine the upload and ‘light-touch’ moderation processes (see the Villers-Bretonneux and OBJECTS FACES PLACE stories).

As part of the broader VCN project, we are also looking at federated search functionality for VCN members, and exposing agency APIs. Applications resulting from these projects may well find a home in CV. It is empowering to have a playground, even if it’s a small one!
For more information about CV contact Eleanor.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.