2014

Balboa Park is a 1,200-acre urban cultural park in San Diego, California. In addition to open space areas, gardens, and trail paths, it contains museums, theaters, recreational facilities, restaurants and a Zoo. Placed in reserve in 1835, the park’s site is one of the oldest in the United States dedicated to public recreational use. The Park welcomes 12 million visitors per year.
Founded in 2008 to serve 17 organizations in Balboa Park, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) collaborates and leverages the economy of scale to help museums, art, science, and cultural organizations make cost-effective, sustainable and strategic technology decisions with a range of technical and support services, digital production, website and in-gallery development, online marketing, and digital strategy. While BPOC supports the broader museum community, its focus is on cultural organisations within the Park where their physical proximity and physical collaborative efforts present a solid foundation for digital collaboration. To date, the focus of BPOC’s efforts, outside of providing core technology services and support, has been in the production of institutionally-specific, in-gallery interpretive installations and websites, but its emerging strategy is to create a unified information architecture manifesting as a single encyclopedic content instance. Online, this would be expressed as an institutionally-agnostic view
of content with rich facets based on connections such as themes, subjects or personal interests. In the Park, this would be expressed as a personal, guided experience, where connected themes, subjects and interests translate to a playlist of physical cultural and social interactions with collection objects, architecture, animals, science, art, music, dance, theatre and fellow visitors.

Given the range of cultural offerings and destinations in the Park, a unified view of Park content would be unparalleled in its scale, diversity and richness. But there are many challenges to realizing this vision. The cultural organisations in the Park represent a microcosm of the museum field not just in terms of their subject diversity and subject matter expertise, but also in terms of their digital proficiency. Consequently, realizing this vision represents a solution for the field, but it requires rethinking the traditional cultural models and approaches to information management and current practices and philosophies in the development of interpretive content.
This is a data architecture challenge, a content development challenge and a visitor engagement challenge, both physically and online.