Events Calendar

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, together form the national museum of Asian art for the United States. In addition to many exhibitions throughout the year, the two galleries jointly offer visitors special events, tours, talks, lectures, films, and performances. To help online audiences plan their visits, Second Story developed an events display system that dynamically publishes to an online calendar, with links to corresponding in-depth description pages. Visitors already at the Freer+Sackler galleries view current events on a large plasma display in the lobby. Here, relevant exhibitions and events cycle through an engaging animated screen with imagery and text descriptions, informing audiences of museum offerings in a timely manner.

The modular development of the events system allowed for the database-driven components to be seamlessly merged with the front-end visual design of the Web site already created by the museum staff. Information is updated via custom, Web-based administration tools allowing the staff the ability to easily maintain the calendar. This same database-driven feature also publishes data to the animated events display screen that is located on the floor of the museum. The system allows for one integrated database to publish the same information to different display platforms.