Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Kelvingrove Museum opened in 1901 and today remains a firm favourite with local people and visitors. It has stunning architecture and displays an astonishing 8000 objects including natural history, arms and armour, art from many art periods and much more.

Challenge: Like many organisations, legacy IT architecture was getting in the way of creating and delivering engaging digital guides for visitors. Kelvingrove needed an easy-to-use and flexible tool that could sit alongside the existing collections management systems and support the creation of narratives in multiple languages.

Our solution: Smartify integrated the collection of 8000 objects in a matter of weeks. Our cloud-based software catalogued and organised the collection making it easy for staff to add additional content such as Youtube videos, hyperlinks to the museum website, maps and audio guides. The intuitive design made it easy for users to understand and we also ran training sessions for staff and volunteers to get them set-up and running with the software.

The results: Kelvingrove uses the Smartify platform to deliver tours in French and German, as well as working with community groups to create tours with interpretation from local people. With such a diverse collection spanning everything from a huge elephant ‘Sir Roger’ to a Spitfire plane hanging from the ceiling, Kelvingrove has relied on Smartify’s flexible software to present each collection item in its best light.

Councillor David McDonald Chair of Glasgow Life said:

“More and more people have a smartphone with them when they visit. Smartify allows you to scan a favourite piece of art and read a little more about the work, it’s really easy to use and you can re-look at the painting once the gallery has closed for the night.”