The Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 2 million pieces in the permanent collection, viewed by around 8 million people each year. They needed a better label workflow to maintain and improve the continuous sharing of information about each piece to the viewing public through the labels by every item.
Think Design was engaged by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discover the state of the label production process as it stood, and to envision a future system.
“Think Design paved the way for the labels system, making the procurement process and specification of the future system much clearer” –Matt Morgan.
We began by interviewing the stakeholders in the system, including IT managers responsible for the sizeable federated database systems that support curation, curators from different departments, writers, editors, and designers.
Label Automation System Workflow
We then synthesized a report based upon our findings, detailing how an optimized workflow could be achieved with minimal technological intervention, all the while carefully building consensus and support for Labels Automation within the museum.