Creating a Collection Gallery Activity

This section contains CLIO documentation.

This section requires photographs, illustrations or screenshots.

Overview

The Collection Gallery activity type displays a list of objects, such as collections artifacts, that opens a full-screen gallery of images of that object with captions. This activity is designed to draw connections between a museum’s “home” collections and the objects on display in outreach programming.

Read More: Collection Objects (activity type)

Creating the Activity

We have provided a template for the configuration file, which is used by the CLIO interface to set up the activity. We also include a content drafting template created in Microsoft Word that can aid collaboration when creating activities as part of a development team.

Define the Activity

All CLIO activities, regardless of their Activity Type, contain many of the same configuration settings.  These are used to configure the screen and load the correct content.  By defining this information, we can begin to draft more specific activity content.  This information is included in both the drafting template and the coding template provided with each activity type. These are the most common settings:

Setting	Description
Title	The name for the activity.
Description	The description for the activity shown to visitors.
Preview	The image displayed for the activity in Exhibit Mode.
Introduction Video	The video displayed under the Activity Menu to provide a video introduction to the activity.
Audience	Each Program can have custom audiences groups, which are included as a way to help sort activities for predefined demographics.  When setting up the kiosk as part of their pop-up exhibit, facilitators have the power to configure which activities they think would best fit their audience and what they’re trying to achieve. Read More: Defining CLIO Audiences
Theme	Each Activity can have a configured theme that allows each activity's aesthetic to vary slightly from the primary interface. Read More: Creating CLIO Activity Themes
Attributions	Notifications for copyrighted content used within the activity.
Acknowledgements	Notifications of appreciation for content creators.

Read More: Defining a CLIO Activity

Drafting the Content

Download the template.

Open the provided Content Template for drafting the Collections Objects activity.  First, we must decide on the basic descriptive information for the activity, such as the title, description, preview image and theme.  This information is required because it is used by the CLIO interface to properly display the activity.

Next, we can start to write the content needed for the Collections Objects activity type.  This activity type is used to display a list of objects from the museum’s collections, such as a fossil specimen, an archaeological artifact or life sciences sample.  Each object can contain a full gallery of images, each with a descriptive caption.

If we are making a Collections Objects activity with three objects, we would create a duplicate of the Collections Object Content template.  Once we open this file, the first thing we would do is select and copy all of the text related to Object 1, as displayed in the template.

After the text has been copied, paste it to the end of the document and rename it to Object 3.  Now that we have templates for three objects, we can begin to draft the content about each object.  Each object requires a title, a subtitle (such as department or collection name), the preview image of the object, and a description about it.  

Each object can also have as many images related to it as you would like.  If you have four images you would like to have related to this object, duplicate the template text until there are four images for you to fill out.  For each image, you can provide a link to the desired file, as well as a description of the image.

Coding the Activity

Download the template.

Edit the template.

The next step will be to take the content that was created in the Content template and begin to migrate it into the Configuration template.  We will need to open the provided Configuration Template for drafting the Collections Objects activity.  This can be done in a plain text editor, but for the purpose of this manual we will be using jsoneditoronline.org/.  

This is how the configuration file will appear once opened within JSONEditorOnline.  Our first step will be duplicating the necessary fields to ensure that we can enter all of the data that we’ve spent time drafting.  In our previous example, we decided to use three Objects within our activity, so we should start by making sure we have three Objects within the configuration file.

Within this configuration file, the first object within the activity is labeled as ‘1’, underneath the Content object.  If we click on the small box to the left of ‘1’, we can choose to duplicate it as many times as we need to create enough specimen objects.  

We have three objects we would like to add to the activity, so we will need to duplicate this field twice.  After this is done, we will need to rename the fields we just duplicated.  Currently, they will be named “1 (copy)” and “1 (copy 2)”.  It is important that these keys be numeric and unique.  We will rename them “2” and “3”, respectively.

Now, we start to copy over the information we drafted earlier and provide more information to the interface about these objects we’ve created.  Using JSONEditorOnline, we can simply click on the values to edit them.  Copying text from your drafting template, you can paste it into the title, subtitle and description fields.  

Once we’ve provided descriptive information about the object, we can define the images we want to show in that object’s gallery. Similar to the way we needed to duplicate our object to make two more, we need to duplicate our image field to add additional images to the gallery.

We have decided that we want the gallery associated with this object to have three images.  This means we will need to duplicate the image field twice in total.  Just like before, we will also need to rename these from “1 (copy) “ and “1 (copy 2)”, into “2” and “3” respectively.

Now that we have added enough images to our object, we can continue to copy over the information we wrote in the drafting template.  Remember that the location of each image, which is stored in “Image”, is relative to the @Media folder of the Program containing this activity.  This means that the location should always start with a /, such as “/relative/location/to/image.jpg”.  It should be noted that fields will require proper character escaping.  When using JSONEditorOnline, this is handled automatically.

Repeat this process for all of the desired objects and images.  Once you are finished, you can download the finished JSON file by clicking ‘Save’ and then ‘Save to Disk’.  This file can be copied to the Program’s @Activity folder, and the media can be copied to the Program’s @Media directory.

Options

Object

The collection can have an unlimited number of objects.

Property	Description	Expected Parameters	Examples
Title	Name of the object that you are displaying.	Plain Text
Subtitle	Additional signifying information about the object, such as the department or collection it’s from.	Plain Text
Description	Textual information about the object that is shown beside it’s preview image.	Rich Text

Object Images

An object can have an unlimited number of images.

Property	Description	Expected Parameters	Examples
Image	Image file to be displayed.	Image File
Caption	Description about the image that is displayed alongside the image.	Plain Text

Documentation
Installation	Look and Feel
Interaction Modes	Developing Activity Types
Creating an Interactive	Framework
Integrating CLIO	Contribute