The Challenge
At its core, building a collection is an act of organization that helps us make sense of our world. This process begins by gathering a diverse range of subjects—from physical artifacts and digitized archives to born-digital files and abstract concepts—transforming simple administration into a creative commitment to deeper understanding. Traditionally, we relied on limited channels such as physical exhibitions and print publications to share this work; however, these formats often operate in silos, disconnected across media and time. By contrast, the contemporary digital landscape thrives on integration, where assets are constantly uploaded, shared, and reimagined. Today’s digital tools bridge the digital and physical worlds, offering a more fluid and intuitive way to organize what matters most.
An Opportunity
An emerging digital system, Objects and Order, offers an opportunity to address the challenge of organizing objects using contemporary, agile, flexible, and scalable digital tools. Objects and Order is an object and exhibition software for collectors, content creators, cultural institutions (e.g., archives, libraries, museums), and scholars to build collections and projects that utilize structured data, embedded digital media, and citations, and provide usage analytics to creators to help discern the impact and resonance of their works with users. The software is available as a SaaS (software as a service) system, with a free tier and subsequent advanced tiers via subscription, each offering increasing levels of features and storage. Users are supported through a centrally managed dashboard that organizes all your content, “Guides” that provide practical how-to tutorials for using the system, and email support.
Potential Use Cases
As an adaptable, dynamic, and scalable digital system, Objects and Order empowers a diverse range of users to leverage its capabilities for both complementary and independent use cases:
1. Archives: This tool provides a flexible, feature-rich environment for showcasing primary sources—such as documents, images, and ephemera—enhancing the utility of existing databases with a more discoverable, intuitive, and user-friendly interface.
2. Collectors: The system enables collectors to transform their connoisseurship and passion into a resource, facilitating the direct sharing of specialized insights and objects with peers, galleries, and cultural institutions.
3. Exhibitions: The system provides a practical solution for institutions whose current collections management systems or marketing websites lack specialized rich-media features by offering a block-based approach to digital exhibition design. Users begin by selecting a design type that establishes a cohesive visual direction—encompassing typography, color palettes, and block styling—and then build their content within that framework, adjusting layout and aesthetic settings as they go to create documented exhibitions fully integrated with performance analytics.
4. Exhibition Contextual Features: The system enables artists, authors, and scholars to create adaptable, media-rich contexts for their exhibitions that can be updated as new research, edits, and insights emerge. For example, a user can include catalogue essays and provide longer catalogue entries for objects, moving beyond basic label text toward a scholarly publication.
5. Future Applications: Through direct dialogue with users and developers, the founders will refine the product and push its boundaries into new applications and use cases, including those not yet identified at the system's inception, as the roadmap progresses.
Highlighted Features
Objects and Order offers a comprehensive feature set, but the following attributes are especially compelling:
1. API: The API provides read access to base, object, blueprint, and dataset data, with full write support (insert, update, delete) for objects—enabling custom reporting, backups, external synchronization, and the development of custom interfaces.
2. Bibliography: Creators can add a Bibliography page to provide a comprehensive overview of the resources and research informing an exhibition. By documenting the project's scholarly foundations, this feature—alongside Notes—positions the system as a sophisticated hybrid of exhibition and publication tools.
Bibliographic resources for The Miseries and Misfortunes of War digital exhibition
3. Exhibition Analytics: A built-in dashboard provides privacy-focused insights using a lightweight beacon that collects anonymous, aggregated data. No cookies and no personal data collected. Engagement metrics such as top pages, popular objects, and traffic sources are tracked over time. These data views, exportable as CSV files, allow creators to refine their exhibitions based on visitor engagement.
Analytics page for The Dragonfly digital exhibition
4. Guides: These helpful tutorials, available as a quick reference on the right-hand side of the dashboard while building features, are written in plain language to help you learn features quickly, test them, and implement them yourself.
5. Notes Block: This feature enables you to embed citations and notes directly into your text. By adding a Notes Block at the end of a page, the tool automatically collects, sequences, and formats all entries into an organized list. This eliminates manual numbering, supports external links, and supplementary context with reference materials that add value to the text.
Adding a note to a Text Block (notes added here will appear on hover in the published exhibition)
Display options for the Notes Block, which collates and numbers notes on a page
6. Roadmap: Driven by internal product direction and user requests, the actively maintained public roadmap tracks completed, in-progress, and upcoming features since launch, providing a transparent, top-level view of the system's long-term growth and sustainability.
Objects and Order Roadmap showing upcoming, in progress, and completed milestones
Resources
Objects and Order has created example content that demonstrates features and gives potential directions for content types and variations that users could develop.
1. Museum of Objects: This demonstration environment uses open-access institutional collections and placeholder text to illustrate the system's versatility, providing a visual "look and feel" of how different exhibition layouts can be structured. Collection pages use the Objects and Order API to retrieve data and images.
Museum of Objects homepage (museumofobjects.com)
2. The Miseries and Misfortunes of War Exhibition: A showcase of scholarly exhibition-making, this project features Jacques Callot’s etching series alongside an essay, bibliographic resources, thematic explorations, and a side-by-side image slider for a print-state comparison. This model serves as a cost-effective, citable digital publication with embedded references and its own dedicated URL.
The Miseries and Misfortunes of War exhibition homepage
3. Demo Video: This pre-recorded overview provides a high-level introduction to the system, offering a guided tour of the interface and navigation.
Exploring Objects and Order (4 min., 45 sec. video)
Conclusion
By integrating scholarly rigor with digital agility, Objects and Order transforms static collections into dynamic, contemporary, and lived experiences. The system elevates organizing collections from a back-end task into an immersive, citable, and analytical process for collectors, content creators, institutions, and scholars alike, making content more engaging for audiences. As the boundaries between exhibitions and publications blur, this infrastructure provides an advantageous way to document and share the objects that matter most. Through iterative development and user-driven innovation, Objects and Order can empower a new generation of creators to capture the inherent dynamism of human knowledge and bring clarity and organization to their subjects of inquiry.
Links
Guides
Roadmap
Explore Objects and Order
Museum of Objects
The Miseries and Misfortunes of War
Text © Neal Stimler. All rights reserved. This content is published on Objects & Order's website with permission.