on exhibit at the Florida Museum's exhibit building. Finally, the scanned image files for

the slides and catalog cards needed to be cropped and edited using Photoshop

software, and were resized from 6.8MB to 78.3KB for use on the web. The files were

then individually uploaded to the wiki website.

"Florida Museum Project" Wiki Overview

       I was surprised by the length of time it took to compile and digitize the object

information from the various museum sources. This challenge reinforced my realization

of the wiki's importance, because it would organize the data in a central online location.

The central online location materialized as a Web 2.0 tool, a wiki, for inviting community

participation. While there are a number of sources for free, user-friendly website- or

wiki-building software, I chose to use www.pbworks.com because of its ease of use,

comparatively large amount of free storage (2GB), range of security, and adjustability of

contributor editing levels. With no prior experience in creating webpages, I researched

the approaches used by other museum websites for elements of attractive design and

intuitive organization. Two strategies I found helpful on other websites were color-

coding sections of the collection for easier way-finding, and displaying only a small

number of objects on each page to avoid overwhelming the viewer. The complete wiki

can be accessed at www.floridamuseumproject.pbworks.com.

       I produced over 350 pages for the wiki, highlighting more than 300 Seminole/

Miccosukee artifacts in the Florida Ethnographic Collection. The following is a

description of the types of pages and site organization from specific objects to general

information. On the wiki, each artifact page (Figure A-5) includes a comment box at the

bottom, an image of the object and a datasheet displaying information organized into

ten categories: