GLAMi nomination: Vastari Exhibitions (VTEN)

Vastari Exhibitions is an HTML5, Angular2 application using Azure Search and state of the art servers to improve the sharing and finding of available travelling exhibitions.

There are many existing travelling exhibitions systems. We surveyed our existing members and the wider museum community (with over 67 respondents) to figure out exactly what information museums and venues need to understand whether they are able to host an exhibition.

Particularly for younger museums or those less experienced in bringing in touring exhibitions, they were interested in hosting shows but felt it was difficult to understand whether the shows they found online were appropriate for their budget, space, facilities and potential audiences.

In September 2016 we completely re-launched our platform to have more information that is required for museums including:

Climate Conditions

Information about Climate Conditions required

Content

Information is added via an easy online form, but the members can also add PDFs of relevant information that may be required:

Spacial and Budgetary Requirements

Information about space required, the number of exhibits and what was exactly included or not in the hiring fee:

Availability

A clickable Availability Calendar helps the potential host identify gaps in the schedule and where in the world the show will be held:

Security

Information about Security Requirements is also very clearly defined, so that venues can ascertain if there will be extra costs required:

Past Venues

Further, all Past Venues the exhibition has travelled to are clickable to the Vastari Institutions database, where museums are able to find out more about the other venues who have hosted the show and compare resources:

Results

We are working on many further improvements to the system, but the feedback from 2016 has been clear: from August 2015 to August 2016 we facilitated 6 exhibition tours, while in the 3 months between September to November 2016 after the launch of our new platform, we had 11 matches, and in February 2017 alone we facilitated 6 matches.

Our team is really proud of these results… but it’s only the beginning!