SECOND STORY
The Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center houses an extensive collection of items from Alaska and northeast Siberia that reflects the culture of over 150,000 indigenous residents living there today. The National Museum of Natural History’s Alaska Native Collections project makes these objects accessible to the public and puts rarely exhibited or seen items on view. Drawing on commentary from elders in indigenous communities, this project communicates the historical, material, artistic and cultural aspects of these objects, while introducing the cultures and languages to which they belong.

Objects in the Arctic Studies Center collection will soon migrate to a new museum under construction in Anchorage, Alaska. Second Story was enlisted to help bring the collection within reach of the public during this transition. “What’s exciting about this project is the multiple pathways we helped create to access the collection,” says Second Story creative director Brad Johnson. “Essentially, we built in both a mediated tour to help the uninitiated get acquainted with the collection, and unmediated access for researchers who are working on specific cultures.” As Johnson points out, visitors to the site can navigate through a thumbnail overview at the home page, then at any point pick one of the native cultures to explore in depth. Interface design was calculated to work equally well for both casual viewers and professionals.

An important additional factor was the site’s appearance: It’s meant to live on once the Anchorage museum is completed. “We worked very closely with the museum’s exhibition designers, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, so type treatments, the color palette and navigation via themes—Community, Ceremony and Environment—would create a unified brand for the museum-to-come,” Johnson says. The vast collection, both broad (because it spans many cultures) and deep (because of the large number of objects) demanded a flexible, user-friendly content management system. “Researchers at the Arctic Study Center are putting a lot of effort into restoring these objects and reinterpreting them through commentary from native elders,” Johnson notes, “and the site is only going to keep growing.” Tom Biederbeck

SECOND STORY | CREATIVE DIRECTOR: BRAD JOHNSON | DESIGNER: KEMP ATWOOD | PROGRAMMER: ZACH ARCHER | STUDIO DIRECTOR: JULIE BEELER | PRODUCTION ARTIST: LOREN VAN WIEL PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: SHANE FARRELL | CLIENT: ARCTIC STUDIES CENTER, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION | WWW.SECONDSTORY.COM