National Gallery of Canada

Lord Cultural Resources and Nordicity Group Ltd. undertook an Evaluation Study for the National Gallery of Canada in 2005–06. The objectives of the study were to: develop a framework for evaluating the National Gallery’s Shawinigan Space, one of its outreach activities taking place at the former Alcan national historic facility in Shawinigan, Quebec and then to evaluate the results achieved in the first three years of the Shawinigan Space project, relative to alternative means of attaining the same of similar objectives.

The framework that was developed, presented objectives of the Shawinigan Space within the context of the NGC’s overall objectives for its outreach program and strengthening the collection and contributing to research and scholarship. The goals of the Gallery’s outreach program were set out in a logic model and the framework also included a design for ongoing monitoring performance measurement and evaluation of the Shawinigan Space. The evaluation strategy identified the issues, questions, indictors, data sources, data collection methods, and the timing for the data collection.

In 2018, the National Gallery of Canada(NGC) engaged Lord Cultural Resources in association with Nordicity to conduct and environmental scan and best practices review and develop recommendations for the Gallery’s online collection.

As part of the scope of research and analysis the consulting team undertook research to develop an environmental scan of the digital landscape and the cultural and creative industries. Lord Cultural Resources researched trends in online collections of other GLAM’s in Canada and in other international jurisdictions and audited comparable scale galleries online collection functionalities. Research included an evaluation of online collection landing pages, role and target audiences, search functions and features, metadata and linked data, enriched features, funcions and content, and other notable online collection initiatives. This research was conducted through both primary and secondary research.

Nordicity additionally conducted internal stakeholder and key informant interviews, and deployed an online audience survey to solicit feedback on how the online collection was being used and to understand what features audience would like to see as part of their online collection experience.