Coast Guard Idlers ~ Online Museum
Edward Beale
edbealesdsu@rezonate.com
6-26-06
EDTEC 541, Summer 2006, Online Section

Problem, Need, or Opportunity

The Coast Guard Idlers have been entertaining around the world since 1957, and have accumulated a vast array of memorabilia, including printed material, audio recordings, and video. Recorded media are sitting in storage boxes, unused and unappreciated. It is impractical to develop a brick-and-mortar display for the memorabilia. Online presentation is ideal, as it can be accessed from any location with a computer display, and the material need never decay or be lost to the ravages of time.

Audience

The main audience members for the Idlers Online Museum are over 200 Idlers Alumni and other friends of the group. Secondarily, sea chanty enthusiasts and military historians could learn much from the extensive touring and performance experience of the Idlers 50 year history.

Users Needs

Over 50 members of the Idlers Alumni were interviewed, and most have expressed a keen desire to see the following material made available for internet retrieval:

  1. Historical playbills and programs. Many of these documents describe performances for Presidents, Kings, and international dignitaries.
  2. Past musical recordings. Musical selections have changed with the times. Vocal recordings of the same song but recorded decades apart can be instantly compared in the browser window.
  3. Video records of performances and rehersals. Video is available of goodwill performances at high-profile venues, such as Disney World and the West Palm Beach Polo Club. Offline distribution to the geographically scattered target audience is cost-prohibitive. Online distribution is ideal.
  4. Historical photographs. Photographs of Idlers in action are currently sitting in dusty file boxes, and should be made available to interested Alumni.

Each need will be spectacularly filled by online distribution. The material will be freed from the confines of geographically isolated storage and made available to any internet user at the time and place of their choosing. Furthur decay will be prevented.

Navigation systems will include heirarchical menus, HTML links, and a search engine.

Environment

Users will interact with multimedia through a personal computer web browser. Multimedia will make up a large part of the museum experience. Color photography will be prominently displayed. High speed connections are desired, but low-bandwidth content will be available, such as written histories, sheet music, and transcriptions.

Resources and Limitations

Updates to the site will necessarilly be incremental - it will take several years to catalog the existing memorabilia, with more coming in all the time. The goal of this site is to develop the framework or "shelves" for the online museum. The site language will be English. Some musical recordings have copyright still in effect, and if not already in the public domain, some selections may require permission to reproduce for the museum.

General Solution

The Idlers Online Museum will provide asynchonous access to 50 years of memorabilia and multimedia, and preserve the rich history of the group for past, present, and future Idlers and other vocal music enthusiasts.

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