Taking Teaching by the Tusks: Introducing Pachyderm 2.0

Larry Johnson, NMC: The New Media Consortium, USA
Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA
http://www.nmc.org/pachyderm/

Session: Introducing Pachyderm

The Pachyderm 2.0 Project is a partnership led by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with counterparts from five major museums to create a new, open-source authoring environment for creators of Web-based and multimedia learning experiences. The new tool is based on Pachyderm, the authoring and publishing tool used by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art (http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma).

Developed by SFMOMA to make the publication of modular and updateable rich media an easy task, the original Pachyderm toolset allowed non-programmers to create a variety of engaging resources that draw from, and build on, the collections of SFMOMA. The paper provides an overview the history, new open source specification, and the collaborative processes that have made Pachyderm 2.0 possible. A final section describes how museums and other interested institutions can participate in the project and in the planned Pachyderm user community.