This week the NMC Spotlight shines on one of our newest NMC members, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The museum wanted to make its collection more accessible, and so set about designing a custom tool that would allow them to build rich interactive experiences with layered interpretations and meaningful interactions. The goals for the project were to:

•	Enable highly interactive screen designs;
•	Use a range of multimedia assets (high resolution image files, audio, and Quicktime™ movies);
•	Be publishable to the World Wide Web, kiosks in the museum and CD or DVD for distribution to teachers;
•	Be maintainable by museum education staff.

The solution they developed with partner Idea Integration is a custom authoring and publishing system that works with their existing FileMaker Pro database of content, as well as with a special SQL-based content management database developed as part of the project. Pachyderm publishes ready-to-use interactive experiences as Flash shells. Fourteen different Flash shells provide a rich variety to the look and feel of the system.

The content SFMOMA has produced using Pachyderm illustrates the potential of this approach in quite a compelling fashion.. Explore these examples of published content produced using Pachyderm:

For those interested in how Pachyderm works and in learning about the more technical aspects of the components, see this article published in Spectra, the newsletter of the Museum Computer Network:

The Why, What, and How of a Custom Authoring and Publishing System: The Creation of Pachyderm