Posts Tagged ‘web’

The CCCB Lab Blog, nominated for the “GLAMi Awards” at the Museums and the Web conference

April 4th, 2016 No Comments

Museums and the Web is one of the annual events par excellence for cultural sector professionals from all over the world interested in research and innovation. It has been held annually since 1997 in various cities in the United States and Asia and brings together cultural managers, developers, students, researchers, technology experts, etc., to present practical cases and digital tendencies.

This edition of the MW conference is held in Los Angeles. Thomas Pintaric. CC BY-SA

Museums and the Web has become an important network of knowledge regarding the most outstanding museum projects of recent years thanks to its online professional forum, the papers presented at the conferences and its “GLAMi Awards”, previously known as “Best of the Web”. The name of the awards has been changed with the idea of reaching beyond the web and being able to award prizes to any project responding to the initials GLAMi (Galleries/Libraries, Archives and Museums Innovations).

At the twentieth edition of the MW conference, which is to be held in the first week of April in Los Angeles, the CCCB Lab Blog has been nominated for the GLAMi Awards, together with 95 other international projects. The nominees represent interesting practical cases of how museums are working with education, the opening-up of archives and collections, participation and relations with audiences or scientific and cultural outreach, among other subjects.

The CCCB Lab Blog, a window on cultural innovation

The CCCB Lab Blog has been running since 2009 as a window from this department of the CCCB specifically devoted to research and innovation in the cultural sphere. Over the years it has become consolidated as a digital magazine with an editorial and art-based approach, with a professional community of followers behind it. Every Tuesday it publishes an article specialising in subjects such as new audiences, open science, the digital transformation in museums, expanded education, etc.

The Blog has two possible routes to winning a GLAMi Award:

  • People’s Choice. Registered members on the website of Museums and the Web can vote until 7 April 2016.
  • Through a judging committee formed by specialists at the Conference who decide on the winning projects. These will be announced publicly on 8 April in Los Angeles.

In the year 2011, the CCCB was awarded a prize for the exhibition project “The City of Horrors” and in 2009, the Picasso Museum and the MACBA won prizes for Social Media Strategy and for the MACBA Web Radio project respectively. You can see a list of MW winners from previous years on Wikipedia. This project is one of the four Spanish projects presented to the awards. The other three are the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Museo del Prado and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

CCCB to participate at Museums and the Web Los Angeles

This year, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona will be represented at the Los Angeles event, thanks to a scholarship awarded by the event’s sponsors to Lucia Calvo, journalist and contents editor of the Centre’s website. Ultimately, if the CCCB is lucky and the CCCB Lab Blog is chosen as a winning project, she will collect the prize.

The CCCB Website Has Been Redesigned

July 9th, 2015 No Comments

In January 2013 I took on responsibility for the CCCB website. An exciting and simultaneously terrorific task which I set about at the time with great enthusiasm. I am no digital native and to execute this new undertaking with guarantees, I needed to surround myself with people familiar with the digital environment who would be able to help me when making decisions on this new area of my professional responsibility.

I didn’t hesitate to form the CCCB Website Committee – a cross-disciplinary, fluid, efficient and high-spirited work group — nor in deciding who should form part of it: Sònia Aran, Lucia Calvo, Maria Farràs and Edgar Riu.

Old website

The first thing that we did was to analyse the Centre’s website. It is essential to have a diagnosis before any decisions can be made. The website, it must be said here and now, was promoted by our colleague Teresa Roig, and it has become an operational and very highly valued tool since 2007 and up to today, as we are on the verge of presenting its redesign.

In the very first work sessions we realised that the website was in need of many improvements. The digital world is so supersonic that six years are an eternity. But work on what was originally intended to be mere changes soon showed up the glaringly obvious: we needed a new website.

Breaking down, dissecting and deconstructing the website architecture, we gradually drew up a parallel architecture that was much better suited to the new needs. But this new structure had to respond to certain objectives. And this was the first milestone that we set ourselves.

Why did we want to redesign the website and what goals did we want to accomplish? We obtained the answer after many hours of work and it can be summarised in the following four points:

1. Increase the number of visits (virtual and real-life) to the CCCB. To achieve this, we had to improve the website architecture, interrelate many more of its contents, simplify and clarify the service information, improve the website’s positioning and present a design that would adapt to all mobile devices.

2. Promote in-house contents converting a website-agenda into a space that would give higher visibility to the different types of contents and that would give added value to the archive.

3. Improve the corporate image and the transparency of the CCCB website by simplifying the corporate texts, unifying the channels for contact with the public and creating a unitary, simple and clear image, based on the new CCCB logo.

4. Boost the income of the CCCB through an increase in and greater visibility of online ticket sales, growth in the number of Friends of the CCCB, plus an increase in and heightened visibility of CCCB venue hire.

So we had the what and the why of the website redesign. Now we needed to establish the roadmap. Firstly, we needed the complicity of the management, which we found immediately in the then director of the centre, Marçal Sintes, and its assistant director, Elisenda Poch. Elisenda was the person who gave absolute priority to the project, who placed at our disposal the Systems team, led by Gerard Bel, and who allocated the necessary budget.

New website

The foundations were thus settled and secure, and we could now start to construct the building. It was the time, also, to hire the services of external professionals who would guarantee the results that we were seeking. This led us to choose the team of designers at DOMO-A, plus the company LaMagnética to carry out SEO analysis and guarantee good positioning of the new website in search engines such as Google, and finally, the usability company Estudio Torres Burriel which was to guarantee that any decisions taken would facilitate the navigation of users around the website.

Following their work, the adaptation of the contents manager began. Starting from zero with a new contents manager was beyond our budget, but it was necessary to adapt to the new architecture the manager that the company Inte created in 2007. And this program adjustment was carried out by the company Sonicon hand in hand with Adrià Vila and David Berruezo.

Meanwhile, the day-to-day work in-house at the CCCB was captained by Iñaki Sainz, the Centre’s new Head of Systems, accompanied by Edgar Riu and Lucia Calvo, the project’s webmasters. Later, Rosa Puig took over the reins with regard to the static texts on the website substituting Lucia, who took maternity leave.

Two and a half years after taking on the challenge of the CCCB website, its redesign is finally complete. What was a project is now a reality, and, therefore, no longer belongs to those of us who have been its guides and mentors. Now the baton is being passed on to the entire team at the Centre, which will be responsible for looking after it.

But the CCCB’s website, above all, belongs to its users. This redesign is intended to facilitate navigation and searches for contents. It is designed to highlight the agenda and service information. It aims to be clearer, more graphic, more relational, more transparent. And it has to be a responsive website that can be consulted from any mobile device. In short, it has to be the instrument that will allow the CCCB to continue to stand as a reference point among the cultural centres of the 21st century in Barcelona, Catalonia and the world.

“The City of Horrors” receives an award at the Museums and the Web Conference

April 12th, 2011 1 Comment

The CCCB’s online exhibition project receives an honourable mention in Best of the Web

“The City of Horrors”, the interactive web/mural in the CCCB’s exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma”, received an award in Best of the Web, organized annually in the United States as part of the international conference on museums and new technologies, “Museum and the Web”. The jury gave an honourable mention in the Exhibition category to “The City of Horrors”, as it did to the MOMA’s website, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century”. The complementary nature of the virtual online exhibition, the effective use of multimedia formats and the level of participation of visitors are the criteria taken into account by the jury when evaluating candidates.

Website “The city of horrors”

A total of 108 projects by museums and arts centres round the world took part this year, 26 of them in the Exhibition category. The list of winning museums and centres is available for consultation on the conference website. The CCCB was also nominated in the categories of Social Media for its Kosmopolis Bookcamp wiki and Museum Professional for the CCCB Lab’s blog.

“The City of Horrors”, a project created in 2010 as part of the CCCB’s exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma”, was organized into two spaces: presential (the exhibition space) and virtual (a website). By means of virtual participation, users of the Internet could send in and vote for photographs of ugly spots in Barcelona, Valencia and Palma. The images to receive most votes on the website were chosen for the physical space, where they were projected as part of a mural that changed every day according to voting. This mural represented “The City of Horrors”, a mixed metropolis, the result of combining the least attractive places in the three Mediterranean cities.

Interactive mural showed in the exhibition

The city of horrors, exhibition space

Thanks to this initiative, an idea of the CCCB’s developed by the designer Ignasi Rifé and the firm Enfasystem, the exhibition included 477 photographs submitted by visitors. It was the visitors themselves—over 3,600 visited the website during the exhibition—who decided, with their votes (a total of 84,704), which images would be projected in the mural at the show. (Read article about the outcome of the participatory project)

The Museums and the Web Conference, which took place last week in Philadelphia, is one of the foremost international meeting places for producers and managers of cultural and museum websites. It has been held since 1997 in various cities around the United States and marks out the principal future trends in the field of museums and technology.

Three of the CCCB’s projects nominated for the «Best of the Web Awards» at the Museums and the Web conference

March 29th, 2011 No Comments

Museum and the web logoThe CCCB Lab blog, the Kosmopolis Bookcamp collaborative platform and the interactive City of Horrors web-mural from the exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma” are the CCCB’s three candidates for the  «Best of the Web» prizes. These prizes are awarded every year at the Museums and the Web conference, one of the principal international meeting points for everyone involved in developing and managing cultural and museum websites.

A jury made up of specialists from around the world will be selecting the best museum projects in areas such as education, audiovisuals and exhibitions (see prize categories).

All members registered in the Museums and the Web platform can vote for their favourite project from this year’s 109 candidates, between 25 March and 7 April. The CCCB is taking part in Exhibition with “The City of Horrors”, Social Media with Kosmopolis Bookcamp, and Museum Professional with the CCCB Lab blog.

The results of voting will be announced during the conference, which will be taking place from 6 to 9 April in Philadelphia (USA). Museums and the Web is one of the foremost meeting points for the culture sector because it deals with the principal trends for the future of museums.

In 2009, Barcelona’s Picasso Museum received the Best of the Web Social Media Prize for its strategy and use of 2.0 tools, and the MACBA was awarded the prize to the best podcast for Radio Web MACBA.

The city of horrors web-mural

CCCB Lab blog

Wiki Bookcamp Kosmopolis

The CCCB Lab blog, the Kosmopolis Bookcamp collaborative platform and the interactive City of Horrors web-mural from the exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma” are the CCCB’s three candidates for the Best of the Web prizes. These prizes are awarded every year at the Museums and the Web conference, one of the principal international meeting points for everyone involved in developing and managing cultural and museum websites.

A jury made up of specialists from around the world will be selecting the best museum projects in areas such as education, audiovisuals and exhibitions (see prize categories).

All members registered in the Museums and the Web platform can vote for their favourite project from

The CCCB Lab blog, the Kosmopolis Bookcamp collaborative platform and the interactive City of Horrors web-mural from the exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma” are the CCCB’s three candidates for the Best of the Web prizes. These prizes are awarded every year at the Museums and the Web conference, one of the principal international meeting points for everyone involved in developing and managing cultural and museum websites.

A jury made up of specialists from around the world will be selecting the best museum projects in areas such as education, audiovisuals and exhibitions (see prize categories).

All members registered in the Museums and the Web platform can vote for their favourite project from this year’s 109 candidates, between 25 March and 7 April. The CCCB is taking part in Exhibitions with “The City of Horrors”, Social Media with Kosmopolis Bookcamp, and Museum Professional with the CCCB Lab blog.

The results of voting will be announced during the conference, which will be taking place from 6 to 9 April in Philadelphia (USA). Museums and the Web is one of the foremost meeting points for the culture sector because it deals with the principal trends for the future of museums.

In 2009, Barcelona’s Picasso Museum received the Best of the Web Social Media Prize for its strategy and use of 2.0 tools, and the MACBA was awarded the prize to the best podcast for Ràdio Web Macba.

this year’s 109 candidates, between 25 March and 7 April. The CCCB is taking part in Exhibitions with “The City of Horrors”, Social Media with Kosmopolis Bookcamp, and Museum Professional with the CCCB Lab blog.

The results of voting will be announced during the conference, which will be taking place from 6 to 9 April in Philadelphia (USA). Museums and the Web is one of the foremost meeting points for the culture sector because it deals with the principal trends for the future of museums.

In 2009, Barcelona’s Picasso Museum received the Best of the Web Social Media Prize for its strategy and use of 2.0 tools, and the MACBA was awarded the prize to the best podcast for Ràdio Web Macba.

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