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Conversation with Anne Beamish

Winner of the 2004 IITAP Best of IT Collaborative Award, Anne Beamish's Archnet project is making waves in the architecture community. It is an online collaborative tool, but also a personal and professional content management system, and a digital library and archive. Archnet is the result of collaboration among several countries, universities, professionals, and academics; it is the product of resources at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

The Archnet project began in Boston in 1998. His Highness the Aga Khan and then Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning Bill Mitchell discussed the possibilities of using the Internet as a collaborative tool for supporting architects, planners, designers, and practitioners, not just here in the U.S. and Europe, but also in developing countries, Islamic countries. Archnet would be a free online collaborative workspace and digital library used to build bridges across otherwise isolated professional communities, nurture local expertise, and foster growth and development in universities around the globe.

Dr. Anne Beamish was completing her doctorate at MIT when the idea for Archnet was conceived. Her experience working in developing countries and her research interests in digital communities, information and communication technology, urban design, and international development aligned with the goals of Archnet. "When I first went to grad school at MIT in the early '90s, I was interested in using the idea of the Internet for developing countries to connect people. I had worked overseas for a long time and felt professionally isolated. You don't have connections to other people who are doing similar things; there was no way of sharing information, no conferences or journals. It was so obvious that connections were needed." She soon joined the team as managing director, guiding the growth and development of the emerging collaborative environment of Archnet.

The main source of content for Archnet was initially drawn from both Harvard and MIT whose large slide libraries, donated by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, were only available in the physical world to people who happen to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Archnet digital library is a repository for these digitized slides in addition to several special collections, such as the archives of prominent architect Hassan Fathy. This large-scale digitization project has made rare works available to the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people from 157 countries around the world to date. Archnet boasts the world’s largest online collection of architectural materials, due in no small part to the vast resources held by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Recently, Beamish left the daily responsibilities of maintaining Archnet as managing director and instead serves as Archnet's research director, concentrating on the iterative design of the site. Recently she and programmer Patrick McCook redesigned the group workspace. According to Beamish, “if two or three people in different parts of the world are writing a book chapter, they have different needs than a design studio, whose needs are different from a lecture class, whose needs are different from people organizing a symposium.” Beamish and McCook added a media strip and image collection function to the Archnet group workspace and fine-tuned the site architecture and customization features, adding flexibility to the design and functionality of the group workspace to meet the various needs of the diverse populations accessing it.

At UT Austin, small design studios of approximately forty students were common users of the Archnet group workspace; Beamish was looking for a larger user base to test the redesign. She found her pilot study in Dr. Larry Speck’s undergraduate survey class. Dr. Speck teaches a three hundred-student, media-rich undergraduate survey, Architecture and Society. He presents a hundred architectural slides per class accompanied by detailed information on each piece. Students’ access to the slides was limited to the brief period each is projected in class; and before tests, the original slides were put on reserve in the Undergraduate Library for all three hundred students to reference. The magnitude of both the number of slides and the number of students viewing them called out for a change in medium.

Speck agreed to use his class as a test case for the Archnet group workspace redesign, and the project resulted in the 2004 IITAP Best of IT Collaborative Award. The update to Speck’s course began with the digitization of slides, which were then uploaded to a password-protected Archnet group workspace. Additionally, his lectures were, and continue to be, digitally recorded and uploaded to the same group workspace.

These changes in the availability of course materials have had a profound effect on student performance in the course. Students now have access to the slides and lecture audio from any Internet connection. Archnet provides layout options for printing the slides, so students can bring copies of the slides to class and concentrate on Speck’s comments instead of sketching each slide in their notes. Speck wondered if, with all the course materials at their fingertips, students would continue to attend lecture. They did. In fact, removing the physical barriers to viewing the slides resulted in higher test scores and relatively no change in attendance.

Archnet’s group workspace emerged victorious. It served media-rich content through a custom interface and to a large user population. Beamish and McCook plan to continue to refine the group workspace and other areas in Archnet based on the needs of its users. According to Beamish, long-range plans include sharing Archnet. She has received several inquiries from professionals in other fields commenting on their need for a collaborative tool like Archnet. McCook will convert Archnet’s programming language from complicated TCL to Java. Beamish hopes to release a shell version of Archnet, in Java, stripped of architecture-related material, in two years. Their goal is to make this shell version freely available for non-profit and educational purposes.