Talk: Agile Publishing

This talk was part of a panel called “Print and Digital Media, the Museum’s 21st Century Storytellers”. For my part I focused on what I termed “agile publishing”. When publishing tools and processes tools are agile they don’t require a lot of additional funding, or training, or staff time. Agile publishing fits in to your workflow where it can. Agile publishing can also lead to agile reading experiences. Reading for less cost, on more devices and in more locations, with a greater range of choices.

And as with other talks I did around this time, I created the presentation as an EPUB rather than PowerPoint slides, and presented it directly from an iPad.

Panel Description

For decades, museum publishing efforts have focused on the scholarly exhibition catalogue and its variants. Today, digital publishing technologies are providing unprecedented opportunities to explore new models for presenting our collections, exhibitions, research, and scholarship, and to reach—and interact with—our audiences. Digital publishing is not only a question of which tools to use—e-book or app or web—but also an answer for the many stories we want to tell. Harnessing the methods and culture of digital media and the traditions and discipline of print is allowing us to rethink and experiment with standard assumptions about format, narrative structure, and authorship. How do we engage our audiences with art on a deeper level? How can we best share the wealth of information we generate about the objects we collect? How can we tailor our stories for multiple audiences?   Determining how content can be used to its fullest potential is an exciting challenge, but equally important are the new processes we are forging for collaboration and teamwork. Working in cross-departmental teams like never before, museum staff are redefining museum publishing for the twenty-first century. Join the panelists who are working on the front lines of print and digital publishing as they share their thoughts and projects on the new stories being told by museums.

Other Speakers/Participants

• Liz Neely, Director of Digital Information and Access, The Art Institute of Chicago
• Kara Kirk, Publisher, Getty Publications