Rachel Smith

Pachyderm: From Multimedia to Visual Stories

THIS PAPER provides a history of thePachyderm 2.0 Project, a partnership led by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMONA), 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 six major museums to create a new, open-source authoring environment for creators of Web-based and multimedia learning experiences. The new tool is based onPachyderm, the authoring and publishing tool used by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art (www.sfmoma.org/msoma).Developed by SFMOMA to make the publication of modular and updateable rich media an easy task,Pachyderm has allowed nonprogrammers to create a variety of engaging resources that draw from, and build on, the collections of SFMOMA. The paper provides an overview of the projects history, a description of the development process and the collaborative processes used, and a discussion of the features that makePachyderm effective as a tool for teaching and learning. A final section describes thePachyderm user community and mentions how interested institutions can become involved.