B.

This project won the 2012 Museums Aotearoa Innovation Award

MyGallery is an innovative tool that allows website users to collect, share and discuss anything that appears on our website, and to enrich that discussion with their own images and text.

Users create sets of images or text, from our website or elsewhere, and then save them, share them or publish them on our site. You are looking at a MyGallery set right now.

We began with the idea of allowing people who use our website to curate their own show. This, we thought, would involve selecting collection items, forming them into groups, writing labels and publishing the resulting virtual exhibitions on our site. We wanted to encourage web visitors to look hard at our collection online and compare works by placing them alongside each other, commenting on what they saw and sharing their impressions.

However as we developed the brief for our design partners Sons and Co., we soon realised that we could usefully expand this original idea to allow users to select and manipulate any page on our website: pages relating to exhibitions, staff, services, our shop, our library, our audio and video presentations or our print publications. We further expanded it to allow users to add images and text of their own as we realised that works from other Galleries, or users' own works, or indeed any image at all, could provide valuable context and illumination for the works in our collection. While making MyGallery as flexible as possible we also realised that we could not predict the uses to which it might be put and we have been delighted at some of the imaginative things that have been done with it. We particularly had our education department in mind when we created MyGallery and hoped that pupils and teachers would create exhibitions either before or after visiting the Gallery.

The ability to mark and save favourites into a personalised list is not particularly unusual, but we believe this is the first time a New Zealand public art museum has enabled its collection to be freely manipulated in this way and to be integrated with users' own content.

By allowing our community to manipulate pages from our website and to mix those pages with text and images of their own, we knew there was a risk of sets being created that were either offensive or which did not fit with our collecting policies or our very uniform and fairly serious web style.

We therefore require users to agree to general conditions of use when they first sign up. In addition, at the head of each MyGallery page there is a disclaimer to indicate that although this is the Gallery site, not all its content is supplied by the Gallery.

We also knew there would be sets which we were happy for people to create and share, but which we did not want to make public. Our clever designers came up with the elegant solution of **featuring** sets. Unfeatured sets exist but will not be found unless the URL is known; featured sets are listed on the MyGallery start page.

Images and blocks of text can be freely moved around on the screen. To make managing sets easier, users can also insert dividers (the red lines above and below) to anchor MyGallery elements together.

These dividers can themselves have labels so that they act as sub-headings.

Every element can be made larger or smaller to achieve the most pleasing effect on the screen.

[**_You can see all the sets we have featured here_**](/mygallery/)

We launched MyGallery by exposing it on our website, talking about it on our blog, on our Facebook page and on Twitter.

We also seeded MyGallery with a few sets of our own, and we invited major figures in the cultrual sector in New Zealand and overseas - curators, commentators and artists - to lend us a hand by creating sets of their own

To further distinguish between the Gallery's own work and that provided by our community of users, the title of each set indicates whether its creator is a staff member or not.

For example the set that you are now reading carries the heading **Selected by Gallery staff member, Tim Jones**.

Other people have said nice things about MyGallery too.

[**_Listen to what art commentator Courtney Johnstone said_** on Radio New Zealand National's Nine to Noon programme](http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2509369/arts-with-courtney-johnston).

On our Facebook page Christchurch Press reporter Charlie Gates said "Impressive, most impressive".

Moata Tamaira who created a set that really made us smile, blogged: "Finally, my genius has found its medium. But seriously, I'd love to see other folks have a go at this, particularly collecting things together with a pop culture twist. It was a lot of fun to do"

Gallery curators have used this tool to assemble possible future exhibitions and we have also used MyGallery to re-create exhibitions from the past - while our Education staff have created sets to be used as a classroom resource.

Our volunteer guides can consult sets - written by Gallery staff - that discuss topics relating to the interpretation of art such as line, composition, space or colour.

Sets have been created that are entirely serious and there are others that are entirely frivolous.

We have been amazed at the imagination that our web visitors have used to create thought-provoking and creative MyGallery sets. Here is one that takes a Collection item - Raymond McIntyre's Ruth - and from it spins the story of **Star Wars**.

We loved it so much we blogged it.

[**_Here for example is conservator Edward Sakowski's description_** of the work he carried out on Leo Bensemann's painting St Olaf](/mygallery/6uyfl/).

Again MyGallery is used to assemble a mixture of images and text, some from our own website and some from elsewhere.

MyGallery is built on a backend of Django. It uses HTML5, CSS, javascript to arrange and display items. All collections use a dynamic layout called Masonry, which 'intelligently' creates column-based layouts, but also enables a person to change the size, order and placement of items. A drop-and-drag jQuery system makes for creative layout control and easy editing. This gives each MyGallery set a unique appearance, but maintains the site design and typographic styles. It's a highly interactive user interface using modern, non-Flash standards based web technologies.

With the real Gallery closed by the earthquake, MyGallery has been more useful than we could have imagined as it allowed our community of users and staff to continue to see and interact with our collection, with us, and with each other.

It has been used in wonderfully imaginative ways which we could never have predicted.

Best of all it has been fun: fun to create and even more fun to use.

[**_Start by having a look at all our featured sets._**](/mygallery/)

[**_Or why not sign up and make a set of your own?_**](/mygallery/)