MEMA

The system is built upon a collection with approximately 80,000 photographs by Charles "Teenie" Harris, a photographer for an influential local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. This collection illustrates a 40-year period of Pittsburgh history through the eyes of an African-American photo-journalist and amateur historian. MEMA stands for Museum Exhibition MAnagement. It is a system with mobile and Web features. To be completely compatible for all mobile devices, we designed a mobile website with flexible views for various mobile phone screens. Users with handheld devices could post their ideas and feelings at any time in the exhibition, with a Wi-Fi connection provided by the museum. This mobile site is custom built for the exhibition “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story” at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It provides a friendly and intuitive navigation structure to assist users to visit the exhibition (see Figure 1). Visitors can navigate the mobile system by four categories including “HOT!”,”Theme”, “Date”, and “Ex. No”. The “HOT!” category could lead visitors to the most popular items that are getting the most feedback in the gallery. In addition, visitors can search for a specific item by entering the exhibition number displayed under each of the photographs on view. Four types of interactive feedback are provided: “like”, “comment”, “tag”, and feedbacks on Twitter and Facebook. This functionality is available for every item displayed in the gallery.