As one of the first museums to fully digitize its collections and make them available online for the public, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian has embraced open source tools to empower its audience and staff to discuss and experience art. We are counting to leverage this open attitude by working with a small group within Automattic to research, plan, and design the Freer and Sackler site. As a team, we are developing custom plugins and code in-house that will be made available to the public and other cultural institutions on GitHub in hopes of furthering open source within the cultural environment.

During the presentation, we will briefly discuss the democratization of art, review our planning and design process and how we are working to make sure the tools we develop are usable by others. We will finish with an open discussion on how cultural institutes can maximize their use of WordPress. While the case study will focus specifically on a visual arts museum, the lessons learned and tools used can be applied to any WordPress-driven website rollout.