Museums have a problem: it’s hard to get young people interested and engaged with their collections. And they can only show so many exhibitions at once, meaning most of their work goes unshown and hidden from the public eye most of the time. We propose CRTR, a social curation tool, that allows anyone to view a museum’s full body of work and from it curate their own collections. This will allow young people to experience more of the museum’s art, and provide valuable inspiration to the museum when it comes time to curate new shows – by looking at the collections created in CRTR, they can better understand the public’s interests. By using these collections to gauge public interest, they can curate their own, more engaging, shows.

CRTR is a curation tool with a strong focus on just that: curating. Existing tools like Omeka are hard to use and are lacking the powerful searching, filtering, and tagging tools necessary to actually curate a collection from a much larger group of possibilities. CRTR will focus on solving these problems by automatically extracting metadata from images and providing intelligent suggestions using machine learning techniques, all wrapped in a UI focused specifically on curation, rather than presentation. Curated collections can be shown to the public, and we will provide simple social tools for commenting and liking, further incentivizing public engagement. The public response to the different collections can be used by the museum to gauge the public interest.

We have two target audiences. One is museums, specifically their public outreach department: CRTR is a tool for them to better understand the public. The second is the public: CRTR is a tool for them to better understand the power and beauty of the art in their museums.

You may view our full presentation here.