At the end of November 2012, the V&A’s new Furniture Gallery opened up on our 6th floor. Alongside the great pieces on display, there are some novel approaches to interpretation and labelling.

One such development was the replacement of printed labels with touch screen software, developed by the V&A Digital Media team. Today, we are releasing this software as open source on GitHub (where else?) under a permissive BSD License.

Our Digital Labels software is a Django app, which delivers the following features:

• optimisation for 1024x768 touchscreens
• hammer.js implementation for swipe
• robust interface intended for heavy public use
• designed for iPad with Home Screen installation
• automatic thumbnailing and resizing of large images
• static HTML build scripts for deployment—no need for a web server or Django installation in-gallery.
• half-decent documentation and installation instructions
• versioning of labels
• fancy administration interface

It’s designed to work with the V&A’s API but you can build your own objects from scratch using the admin.

Here’s a few screens of getting the application up and running on the iPad home screen:

DULL DISCLAIMER: This software comes with no warranty or support, although we will endeavour to engage with users wherever possible.

We provide installation instructions and user documentation.

We are indebted to other fine open source projects, which are required to get the our app working.

• Hammer.js
• Django Grappelli
• Django Reversion
• sorl-thumbnail

Finally, and most importantly, I credit the work of my colleagues Luca Carini, Santino Puleio, Eric Bates and Andrew Lewis, who helped make this project a success.