Hello, and welcome to our World Plone Day session. I'm Sally Kleinfeldt. I'm with Jazz Carta, a US-based company specializing in open source web technologies, including Plone, of course.

And with me is Kathy Sparks, who is the director of publications at Dumbarton Oaks, which is a research institution of Harvard University. Lane Wilson, who is a digital content manager at Dumbarton Oaks. Tom Elliott, who is the associate director

for digital programs and senior research scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, which is a research institute of NYU. And Alec Mitchell, who is one of the developers here at Jazz Carta, a former Plone release manager,

I might add. And he has been involved with both these sites. So just from me, Kathy and I have been working together on the Dumbarton Oaks website since its beginnings in 2011. So that goes back a while. And Lane joined the Fray in 2013.

Tom and I have been working together on the I Saw a Plone site since it was redesigned in 2014. So we also have a long history. And I'm so excited to have everybody here together because these two organizations have a lot in common. Academic institutions, ancient world oriented,

among other things. And yet, we've never all been in a chat together. So this is exciting. Their garden is a lot nicer than ours. That's true, that's true. OK, so I'm going to kick things off by just suggesting, why don't we start with you, Kathy?

And Lane, you chime in and just give us a little overview of your institution and the purpose of your website. I'm going to show a screenshot while you're talking so everyone can see the URL. Well, I really just, when I started at Dumbarton Oaks,

there was just a basic HTML website. And it wasn't really serving the needs of the community. And our community is postdoctoral scholars and postdoctoral research, but also the public. Because we do have a public facing aspect. People come to the museum. They come to visit the gardens.

So we really have a dual purpose website, which serves the community with information. And then also serves the scholars with resources for research and other things. So we really needed something complex and that could present the objects and information

in a way that was fairly loose. And we can do it in different ways. And we had a lot of constituents that had different, as you both remember, Alec and Sally, that wanted a lot of different things and a lot of different ways. And the only way to really accomplish that was an object oriented database type website like Plone.

And we looked at several different similar, well, basically Drupal and Plone. And I think there were a couple others at that time, but we settled on Plone mainly because A, it was open source and the stuff that we could develop that could be shared by other people

in the wider worldwide community and things that they were working on, we could also share in, which happened several times, didn't it? While we were working on our website. So, and that's just us like the five nickel tour of why we chose Plone and in our audience

and the way that's developed over time. I'll let Lane speak to a lot of that, but at the beginning we were more focused inward on our community in the institution. And over time we've turned that more outward, but Plone has allowed us that flexibility as well, so. Great, Lane, do you wanna chime in here

with any other thoughts about that? Yeah, I mean, I think the website has, Kathy mentioned that it provides the flexibility to address changing institutional priorities and expanding audiences.

And that's something that I think we've really focused on over the last decade in building out new research projects, in building out online exhibits that are meant to present information to both scholars and people in the know about the content, but also to introduce,

to provide an introduction to a more general public who's interested in what we do, what we have and what we can offer. We've been really blessed to be able to build a great communications team internally

who have presented our research and resources to multiple audiences through our online newsletter that's presented using the Plone News item content type. And that's been a really great improvement as well

that's been facilitated by the content management system. Great, all right, shall we switch over to Tom and get a brief idea about the ISO set? I'll put up a screenshot again for the same reason so you all can see the URL.

Right, so I can probably be pretty brief because there's quite a lot of commonality here, Sally, as you indicated at the beginning, both in terms of the nature of our institution, although we're smaller than Dumbarton Oaks, but we have the same kind of graduate, postgraduate research and teaching focus.

And we also have a strong outreach component that we don't have a permanent collection and we don't have a big facility, but we do a lot of public facing programming. Prior to COVID, we had as many as 15

to 25 public lectures a semester. And we also had on the order of two exhibitions a year, these are always sourced externally, so we're bringing material in from outside. These exhibitions are meant for the public

in the first instance, they're free. And our focus is on trying to bridge that gap between public interest and scholarly engagement. And so you'll see the difference when you visit one of our exhibitions in person, when you look at the labels, the kinds of things we put on them,

the kinds of themes and materials that are addressed. It's all part of this idea. And in particular, our kind of unifying research focus at ISAW is on comparative and connective overlaps between different ancient cultures,

whether they're in kind of the broad Mediterranean basin or as you move eastward across Asia and North Africa. So that's kind of the institutional footprint, a lot of commonality there. We chose Plone for our website

prior to engaging with Jazzcarda. We'd selected some years before and we had a part-time staff developer who did the initial build out for us and some of our initial customization. And we turned to Jazzcarda when we were ready to get serious about a major redesign as well as a bunch of upgrades.

Our selection of Plone early on was actually conditioned by the fact that we already had a project that used a Plone site. This is the Pleiades gazetteer that Alec and I did a paper about at the last Plone conference. And we had selected Plone there for reasons

around customization and workflow management that were very important to that project at the time. And that was 2000, gosh, we chose Plone in what, 2005, 2006 for that. So we already had this investment in Plone

and I didn't want the cognitive and work challenge of having to manage two different platforms. And I've been very happy with what Plone could do for us. We did have a big commitment to openness and we knew that we didn't, for various reasons, didn't fit into the overall kind

of one size fits all content management framework that NYU at large had. And it's an institution where you don't have to be part of that bucket if it doesn't make sense to you. So we picked Plone and that's been our, the maybe one difference from Dumbarton Oaks

is that our focus with the website itself has been primarily external from the beginning. That was the, I mean, it began its life as a bunch of HTML brochure ware effectively in 2007 when the Institute was founded.

And it has kind of grown then to serve as our external face and increasingly internal as well. So all of our resources for the forums people have to fill out for financial management are all of the forums and guidelines

and things that govern our graduate program and so on. All of that is served to our community internally. So we do now make use of that kind of intranet functionality, if you will, as well as our external face. In terms of the exhibition stuff we've done,

and we maybe can talk about that more in a minute, but the, prior to this Galen exhibition, which is the one that's advertised now and which is actually done entirely outside the Plone by directly between our exhibitions department and a third party. So the digital team was not involved in that.

Prior to that, we've sort of done our digital exhibition stuff as adjunct to the items and exhibition that's in person. And of course now, like in so many areas, like our public events and so on, the forcing factor of a global pandemic

has really brought us to a moment. We're now contemplating what does it look like when yeah, we're back in the building and we're back to doing things in person, but we've done all this digital stuff too in new ways, or we've at least seen the attraction of them. And how do we bring that back together? And I think that the Plone gives us a lot of flexibility

to explore that and to build out technological affordance in support of it. And that's a good moment to pause and maybe let Lane and Kathy chime in on the question. Exhibitions have been important in the Dumbarton Oaks Arena, both in person, but also it was conceived as an important part

of the website from the beginning. You wanna talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I can take that. I think the nature of the institution is a public facing museum and gardens, but then also a research library and other related collections that are available only to researchers.

So making available in a publicly accessible and digestible way, some of the materials that are usually only available to researchers was an early aim of the online exhibits online. So these would oftentimes be some cases in the library that members of the public would just never see.

And a really great way of showcasing small thematic selections of rare books or archival objects. And then both allowing that to kind of persist in an online environment, but also just to be more widely available. So early online exhibits really,

we took advantage early on of the online exhibit capability, which Jazz Carter developed for us to present those materials. Also useful, the online exhibit product was useful for displaying objects that were a little bit out of left field.

So Dumbarton Oaks has a fairly substantial collection of lead seals, 17,000 of them, which were used by Byzantine people and officials to secure and authenticate documents. So I spent a lot of time with lead seals,

so I really liked talking about it. But we've used the online exhibit product for two features, ways of showcasing these pretty small objects, oftentimes pretty difficult to use, and highlighting the benefit that they have to research. And in some cases, their inherent beauty as objects and as artworks.

So that's been, having a digital presentation has been really key to showcasing what is actually a fairly fundamental collection at Dumbarton Oaks. And I would also say when we first started, we, again, coming from the curatorial aspect

and the different curators, we had library curators and we had museum curators and we have people with different kinds of collections. So we sort of started from the thing of online exhibits and online publications and sort of siloed in the same way. But as we've moved through,

we've changed sort of, we still use that terminology a little bit, but it's all sort of now a big mishmash. So we might use different products, but we can call them things in a public facing way, but they all interact in really interesting ways. And there's a lot of crossover. And two of the things,

one of the things that Lane has developed recently was an exhibit of textiles of Byzantine textiles and their textiles and textile fragments. Things that cannot be exposed to the light cannot be handled. They're very delicate. And the catalog slash exhibit that he developed online

is now available to researchers worldwide. And we're doing the same thing. We're replacing some of our print catalogs with on, we're working on an online catalog of Olmec objects that we have in our collection. So it's sort of grown and pushed out in different ways

and even text. We have, it's called a manuscript and micro, for microfiche, we're putting actually text online so that people can see things that again, wouldn't be available unless they came here. And that's kind of been our focus is not just repeating the museum exhibits

as online exhibits, but also adding value in a lot of cases and giving entree to things that people wouldn't otherwise be able to get to and allowing it just to have its own life online. Yeah. I think that one of the things

that's enabled Dumbarton Oaks just speaking from a perspective and maybe Alec, you could add onto this just from the sort of what has been good about the sort of clone environment for your two organizations. One thing that jumps to mind for Dumbarton Oaks is the ability to create these really complex custom content types,

essentially like a database of these objects, these different types like the Byzantine seals. Oh my gosh, I remember when we started working on that project and we're presented with a schema that had roughly what? 250 fields or something like that. It sort of gets people to calm down a little bit, but it's still, it's something like- Were they all multivalues fields?

Yes, and Rare Books was the same way because the librarian was working from a particular set of terms that she, I forget the terminology, but and she had a list of, I don't know, 50 things that had to be in there

and it was very complicated and now that's been dialed way back, right? Right, right. Because people don't, that information is available on WorldCat basically. So yeah. And it's a question of curating that information online, how big a job do you want?

Anyway, the ability to create fairly, fairly easily these different kinds of content types for the different types of materials. I think it's been a big win for Dunbar and Oakes and then to bring them together and mix and match them like you talked about. I mean, Alec, do you have any other thoughts about that? Other things that seems useful,

especially from Plone to the organizations? Well, for Dunbar and Oakes, particularly with all of these custom content types that have a large amount of metadata that ends up being kind of searchable or facetable, we've found it really useful to use the EEA faceted navigation product

to filter through particularly the seals and the coins, but there are also these large collections of photographs and drawings and other sort of documents that the various types of site search and faceted navigation have been really helpful for building kind of different types of navigational tools

for those large databases of content of museum objects. Yeah, that's right. Those faceted search views of the different objects are really, really helpful and really fascinating to play with also, I have to say.

One of the interesting things, Tom talked about internal use, kind of intranet use. Dunbar and Oakes started out being very focused in that way. It seems like just a different group of people that didn't take off particularly for Dunbar and Oakes, like it did for ISAW. It seems to me like the capabilities

have flown in the area of workflow and different kinds of fine-grained access permissions so that different people can do different things on different parts of the site has been quite important for ISAW. Was originally conceived to be important to Dunbar and Oakes, but people decide to offload their editing too.

I would say there were three developments there. So we started out with an intranet similar to what Tom talked about. And primarily because the original vision was to have everybody had active logins

where they could go in and edit and be active contributors to the website. And that ended up being with very few exceptions, something that wasn't a model that we could really continue with. So the vast majority of staff and fellows

at Dunbar and Oakes never ended up logging into the website. So if you say, hey, finance forms are available in the intranet, they had no idea what was going on. So the second development was our adoption a few years ago of Salesforce as a customer relation CRM.

And management of a lot of workflows and historical data within Salesforce. So that then became an opportunity to build out a community site there. So we migrated all of the various internal documents

over to that, which was then, it was all available through a single sign-in through our web portal. So that ended up working better for most people. But we were, I guess our, the experience is kind of the reverse of what Tom talked about it. I saw where we started out very internally focused

in how do we build up, how do we build out the website with tools that are gonna be useful to the community? And we found that more and more the external audience and building those up and cultivating those communities is what's the priority of our public facing website.

And also our IT department had a big role to play there with the Salesforce, with bringing Salesforce forward. And some of the things that Tom mentioned like graduate applications, and we have our administrative office uses proprietary software.

I don't even know what it is for that that's developed specifically for that. And then we also have our events department that uses some other software, proprietary software for booking rooms. And I mean, it's complicated for what they do. So we could have developed that in Plone, but they just, that commercial package

was sitting out there and we had the budget. And so they just preferred that, which was fine with us. And I should be a little clear. I mean, we're, I think the magic sauce for the internet piece working for us is right where Elaine was talking about. We invested a huge amount of time and money and Alec and Sally's hair being pulled out

in integrating with NYU single sign-on solution. So that, because we, though a commitment was made at the, you know, at the ISO level to use our website in this way, it was very painful for a lot of our users

to have a separate login and all that jazz, which is how we began things because it's just one more thing to keep track of in a world where there are a bazillion things to keep track of, and you only need it once a quarter, so on. And so the single sign-on does two things for us there. It takes away that mess. And the way the single sign-on solution works at NYU

is once you've signed into one property in a given web session, you know, ahead of expiration, you don't have to keep entering credentials as you move from one NYU property to another. So it's a very, it's a very clean handoff from being on the page that summarizes what you need to do about X and the academic program

to the various NYU systems, you know, that are implemented for that. And so it makes it a pretty seamless experience once everybody got used to the single sign-on solution and the multi-factor solution that came after that, you know, that got added onto that and so on. So that, you know,

we don't have a ton of business process applications that we've built out inside Plone. No, I mean, we just link to the things that are used across the institution. We have a fair bit of our processes documented there, example filled out forms for people to compare where there's still, you know, an old school kind of PDF form experience,

that kind of thing we do have quite a lot of, you know, how do you sign up for lunch? You know, all that kind of stuff is in there. And with that single sign-on in place, you know, people are comfortable checking it and we can control access when necessary.

Well, this has been a really great little compare and contrast between two similar but different institutions. Is there anything that we haven't kind of covered that anybody wants to, anything that you had in your mind, oh, I want to talk about this, that you still want to talk about? I just, you know, I just want to reiterate that Plone turned out to be an excellent solution for us.

And I think for any academic institution, because every place is different, every place is going to have, you know, different quality and different types of needs for their, you know, their objects and their different materials

and their different experiences. And the Plone just makes it easy to customize in a way for people and for both the constituents and for the content that you just couldn't do with, or you could, but you would pay a lot of money for.

And I like paying the money to development rather than to a company that's proprietary because that development then gets shared with other academic institutions. And that to me is, it builds a community and it builds a way of, like a syntax for us all to use.

And I really liked that. And so I've always been very happy that we chose Plone. I've never looked back and said, oh, why didn't we use Drew? I just chime into that bit. And they said, oh, we can give you this way. And I talked to people at Harvard and they're like, no, don't, don't, don't do it.

I just chime in and with a thank you to Dumbarton Oaks because some of the things that we have developed for them, such as the exhibitions pack add-on package for Plone and the timeline package and other things, Dumbarton Oaks gave us permission to develop that as open source projects. So they are available for anyone to use.

We couldn't have done it without Jeff Skarda. Oh, thank you. You guys have, and you both have been with us since the beginning. So you know all the, you were just very gentle and kind to us, so. Any other final thoughts anyone, Tom? I was just gonna say that this is one of the real reasons that we like the open source community.

It's not just because of stuff we can get for free, but for the ways in which collaboration can occur around plugins, around different kinds of things. And that's, I think more our experience with Pleiades than with our website in terms of that kind of

sharing reuse, GeoJSON being one of the big outcomes of our early work with Pleiades, so not a Plone thing, but an open source format that's got wide uptake thanks to Sean Gillis' work. But yeah, Plone, the other thing I like about Plone as a Python developer myself is that occasionally

I can cause trouble for you and Alec by making and pushing my own modifications and scripting content changes, right? That's a big thing for us is being able to load things in bulk on the backend. And every system has that kind of capability. I like the fact that I can do it in Python.

So there you go. Yeah, great. All right, well, for any of you listening to this who have not visited the Dumbarton Oaks website and looked at some of their fabulous collections on online collections, I encourage you to do so.

I encourage you, if you are in the Washington, DC area to visit them in person, it is just- It's open. Right, well, we assume- Planning your trips, you know, with enough lead time. Yeah, it's definitely worth multiple visits in my opinion. Yeah, it's an amazing- Yesterday, by the way. Ah, nice, the gardens are spectacular.

And similarly, for those of you who live in or are visiting New York City, I saw the Study of the Ancient World, their exhibitions, they also have publicly accessible libraries and things like that, but their exhibitions are really stunning. Right around the corner from the Met. Right around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum.

All right, well, thank you so much for this conversation and yeah, off to Dunbar Nooks and NYU. Happy Plunday, everybody. Yes, indeed. Happy Plunday, thanks Sally. Thank you.