Exporting your visits

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Starting today you can export the items you have collected or created during your visits to the museum. When you export a visit we will bundle up all the objects you’ve collected and all the items you’ve created in to a static website that is then compressed and made available for you to download directly.

A static website means that you can view all of your visit items in any old web browser, even when it’s not connected to the Internet. It means that if you have your own website you can copy your visit export over it and host it and share it and, well… do whatever you want with it.

Where “whatever you want” means “so long as you comply” with the Smithsonian Terms of Use or assert your rights under Fair Use if you are based in the US.

We think that this is of particular importance to educators who may not have unfiltered or functional internet connections in their classrooms.

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A visit export doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles that your visit on the Cooper Hewitt collections website does but everything you need to view an export (except a web browser obviously) is contained in the file you download. There is a landing page, and a paginated view of everything you’ve done and a page for every object collected and each one of your creations.

Visit exports also come with a friendly and detailed JSON file for every item you’ve collected or created. If you don’t know what that last sentence means, don’t worry about it. It just means that everything you’ve done during a visit also has a file containing structured metadata about that activity which your developer friends may get excited about.

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Visit exports use are very own js-cooperhewitt-images library to manage square-cropped thumbnails that reveal the complete thumbnail when you mouse over them, just like on the collections website.

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Images for loan objects are not included with your visit download. That’s because they’re loan objects and we only have permission to host those images from our own collections website. Instead of including the images locally in your visit download every time there is a loan object we link directly to the image hosted on our own website.

If you’re not online (or your web browser hasn’t already cached a copy of the image on your hard drive) then your visit pages are smart enough to load a placeholder image for that object. Like this:

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We do the same for individual item pages too:

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online
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offline

Visit exports are deliberately minimal, by design. They contain a small amount of HTML markup that’s been enhanced with a little bit of JavaScript and CSS to create a minimally elegant export that people can easily tailor to their own needs. Some people may quibble with the idea that including both the jQuery and Bootstrap libraries is not really a “little bit of JavaScript and CSS” but we hope that we have done things in such a way that it’s easy for people to change if they choose to.

Visit exports are currently only available for visits that have been “paired” with your Cooper Hewitt account. A visit that has been exported is cached on our servers but it can be regenerated when something about your visit changes – you delete an item, or add a note and so on – not more than once per day. Each one of your visits (remember: each one of your paired visits) has a handy export button at the bottom of each page and you can see a list of all your exported/exportable visits by going to: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/you/visits/exports/

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The exports themselves are generated using our own API and the recently released cooperhewitt.visit and cooperhewitt.visit.items family of methods. There is a bunch of bespoke code that we’ve written to manage how exports are scheduled and stored but the part that actually builds your export is a plain-vanilla API application using the same public API methods that you might use to generate your own visit export.

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In time we may open source the API application we’ve written but for now we’re going to keep putting it through its paces to make sure that it works consistently, as expected, and to force ourselves to use the same tools we’re making available to people outside the “hula hoop“.

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Finally, a little bit of administrivia: Your visit exports are made available under the Smithsonian Terms of Use agreement. You can read the entire document but the short (and relevant) bits are:

The Smithsonian Institution (the “Smithsonian”) provides the content on this website (www.si.edu), other Smithsonian websites, and third- party sites on which it maintains a presence (“SI Websites”) in support of its mission for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The Smithsonian invites you to use its online content for personal, educational and other non-commercial purposes; this means that you are welcome you to make fair use of the Content as defined by copyright law. Information on United States copyright fair use law is available from the United States Copyright Office. Please note that you are responsible for determining whether your use is fair and for responding to any claims that may arise from your use.

In addition, the Smithsonian allows personal, educational, and other non-commercial uses of the Content on the following terms:

You must cite the author and source of the Content as you would material from any printed work.

You must also cite and link to, when possible, the SI Website as the source of the Content.

You may not remove any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices including attribution information, credits, and notices, that are placed in or near the text, images, or data.

In addition to copyright, you must comply with all other terms or restrictions (such as trademark, publicity and privacy rights, or contractual restrictions) as may be specified in the metadata or as may otherwise apply to the Content. Please note that you are responsible for making sure that your use does not violate or infringe upon the rights of anyone else.

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Enjoy!

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