The Future Of Digital Exhibiting - The Next Step

Morning all,

After two successful single frame digital exhibit competitions, PDR 2016 and PDR 2017 (exhibits available for viewing under exhibits on his web site) , Richard has put out the following call for additional exhibits:

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Posted Oct 11, 17 17:08 by Richard Frajola (frajola)
Digital Exhibiting

I am going to add a separate "space" for single frame digital exhibits, another for exhibits of 8 pages or less, and a third for exhibits by those under 21 years of age.

I am convinced that the digital format works well for all exhibit sizes and having a "heritage" habit of 16 pages really should not inhibit digital showings. 

So, additional exhibits are hereby solicited and are welcome. I may experiment and do single page exhibits as HTML on a more narrow format if the HTML work to covert a PDF file, or image file to HTML is not too cumbersome for me.

Thank you! [Richard]
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This is the next step in the development of this digital exhibiting experiment. Hopefully, additional collectors viewing this board will enjoy participating in this adventure.

Best regards,

Russ Ryle

I definitely applaud what Richard is doing here. I believe that it is very good for the hobby.

I think it would be appropriate to include a link to Frajola's site:

http://www.rfrajola.com/exhibits.htm

A lot of great content on display!

Indeed, Richard is blazing a trail which has been almost completely ignored. Unfortunately there are many challenges with digital exhibiting that have not yet been fully explored.

There needs to be a 'standard' developed not simply for a single exhibit submission but for all philatelic exhibits across the board. (This is the equivalent of standardizing on the frames for traditional shows.) Moving forward we would not want 15 different technical specifications for 15 different site/venues which host the exhibits.

This specification should include the requirement for the exhibits to be cross platform and 'responsive' in design so that they can be displayed on any internet enabled device. It would also define the file formats and most importantly how the pages are displayed. Ideally the standard would be something a bit more than just displaying the pages. A 'flipbook' format with finger navigation, 'pinch' and zoom capabilities and other features which establish a foundation for the future. Off the top of my head I would suggest an 'open source' tool like WOW Slider. It is free, develops responsive code, supports all kinds of page transitions, and can be installed and used by a typical stamp collector with basic technical skills.

Digital imaging also adds a new level of vetting required over traditional stamp exhibiting. Anytime competition is involved 'cheating' is sure to follow. A person with digital image experience could easily manipulate images before submitting them to an exhibit. As such, people with digital competencies and image forensics will need to be developed before online stamp exhibiting goes mainstream.
Don

I know that today, in exhibiting, there are certain requirements for items that need certificates.

One possibility for high-end competitive online exhibiting would be to have many items certified by the PF (for example). All judges could search for the PFC's at the PF's site. That gives a 3rd party validation for the nicer stuff, at least. Of course it doesn't prove ownership, just the existence of an item as described.

Beyond that, you're right. Not only will I have several plate blocks of inverted Jenny's, all of my toned covers will be cleaned up nicely!

I would love to see more of this, not that I ever intend to competitively exhibit, but because more exhibits will be captured for posterity.

I lament all of the wonderful traditional exhibits that have been broken down without ever being imaged as research resources for the future. In my collecting area, for example, I would love to have had images of Mike Morrisey's 2nd-3rd issue exhibit before it got broken up and scattered to the wind.

I'm so glad that Bruce Baryla had the foresight to image his Civil War Sun Tax exhibit and place it online before he sold off the contents. It's a wonderful resource.

Richard Frajola's website is an excellent resource.

I thought I had posted this earlier inthe wrong thread.

I am not sure how active it is. It has been around 10+ years.

http://www.exponet.info/index.php?lng=EN



The key aspects is that exhibiting is usually competing about what you physically. For me, I would prefer to see a better story rather than just artifacts.

Morning Don and all,

Don, your technical points are very valid. Let me add we need to format each exhibit so it will display properly in any future technical standard however that may be required? That would be a good hat trick.

Exponet and Richard are a great and needed service to collectors like me who are somewhat digitally challenged. Our personal technical limits no longer prevent the preservation and sharing of our efforts.

One would think that all exhibits at any show could be seen online for all to see. It could be a requirement.

I would think a good start would be the requirement that the Exhibits which win an National CoC Show Grand Award, and thus are entered into the annual Champion of Champions competition should be accompanied by a digital version, which the APS would post permanently on their website.

Perhaps the Exhibitor could be given the option to replace that exhibit with an updated version if he continued to upgrade the exhibit during the following year(s). It should be simple enough to include a "Date Revised" along with the Exhibit.

Morning all,

Personal opinion: I doubt if the APS or FIP or any traditional group is ready to require exhibits prepared for the show floor must also be submitted digitally for public viewing at this time. The best we can hope for today is that the individual exhibitors share their efforts digitally to our the ever increasing audience for this material.

Best regards,
Russ Ryle

I suspect it would take someone to be ready to capture these them just prior to framing as not every one has scanner, etc.

This topic has come up before, but I think trying to do a scan "capture" of exhibits at a show prior to mounting would be an utter disaster in terms of the time involved and image handling, not to mention wear and tear on exhibits. Having scanned exhibits for digital presentation previously, I have to say it's a big, time consuming job. After all, you can't just send it through a feeder. Quality may or may not be impacted scanning through a page protector, there are issues associated with oversize pages and materials, etc.

This said, I think the CofC is a great place to at least encourage (but not require) digital versions of exhibits - exhibitors will have more time to obtain the images and I think most CofC exhibits don't undergo any sort of significant transformation between their grand and their CofC showing. Perhaps there is a way to incentivize sharing of digital exhibits in the CofC context.

I recently transformed how I do my own exhibits (which I assemble using Microsoft Publisher). In the past, I would draw boxes to approximate the size of material and wind up doing a lot of fine tuning. For my last two exhibits (which were in Richard Frajola's PDR 2017) I first scanned the material and then simply dropped the images onto the pages, which allows for much easier fine tuning of spacing and writeups. It's not perfect - unless you spend some time fine tuning each image you have a lot of potential for slightly crooked scans and unless you are good with a cropping tool you have some borders around your cover images - but it avoids a fair amount of remounting when you have to fix pages, and as a side benefit you wind up with a good quality scan of every item in the exhibit for future reference and insurance purposes. I anticipate continuing to pursue this path going forward, at least for postal history heavy exhibits.

There are one or two shows (ROPEX comes to mind) that seek PDFs of title pages and put them online before the show, which I think is a benefit.

Morning all,

Probably traditional exhibits will not be consistently made digitally available until their submission to the show jury of judges becomes a requirement. This probably would add to the time burden of judging a show; but, afford judges a chance to become more familiar with the material being shown.

Personal note: I could never considered becoming a philatelic judge as I am in a wheelchair. This gives me a very limited view of the top two rows in a traditional exhibit frame. As our collecting population ages more and more folks have physical and sight limitations making physical access to an exhibit frame an increasing problem.

Best regards, Russ Ryle

Like Matt, I start with a scan of the item and then do all of the layout around it (in PowerPoint). I pull out the game mages when I print to paper. From there, I can save as .jpgs, pdfs or whatever. I have an online template that I can duplicate and drop the page images into and publish online. Whenever I change a page, I can just replace the .jpg.

All my past and current exhibits are at http://cgpostal.com

"Online" exhibits could add links to background information, other resources, etc. for anyone who wants to explore an item in more depth (or to a scan of a cert).

...and Russ, most judges don't seem to bend down to look at the bottom two rows. Your presence on a jury would be an effective complement.

Chip