About Pachyderm

Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author’s website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

How can I get a Pachyderm account?

Individuals can sign up for yearly subscription accounts. Hosted servers are also available for larger organizations. For more information, see the Pachyderm Services Sign-up Page.

Can I install Pachyderm myself?

Yes! The code is available free of charge on SourceForge. Pachyderm is a server product; individual authors do not need to install Pachyderm, only to have an account. Installation is best done at the institutional level by a system administrator. For assistance with questions related to installation, please see the PachyForge developer community (www.pachyforge.org).

What development work is happening now?

Pachyderm is now a fully open source project. Developers are working on new templates; templates for touch screens, handhelds, and other formats; the installation process and package; and bug fixes. If you are interested in becoming a Pachyderm developer, please visit the PachyForge developer community (www.pachyforge.org).

How did the Pachyderm Project start?

The Pachyderm 2.0 Project began as a partnership led by The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The project brought software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with counterparts from six major museums to create a new, open source authoring environment for creators of web-based and multimedia learning experiences. The new tool is based on Pachyderm, the authoring and publishing tool developed by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art.

Central to the Pachyderm 2.0 Project has been the design and development of an interoperable, robust, easily distributable version of Pachyderm that is open-source and includes a wide range of pedagogically useful templates. Learning materials created with Pachyderm 2.0 are optimized for Internet delivery, easily reusable, and conformant with key search, archival, and cataloging standards.

The design phase of Pachyderm took place between October 2003 and through 2004, and was followed by several iterations of testing and refinements. The authoring environment went into early beta testing February 2005. That first round of testing, on a very bare-bones version of the application, was limited to the members of the development team, about 30 testers. In April, a second round of testing opened to about 150 NMC members. A third round of testing, which included museum personnel and others, took place in the summer of 2005, when the authoring system became feature-complete, and saw the testing communtiy expand to nearly 250 people.

A final development push led to the final beta test and automated stress testing in October 2005. These tests documented the stability of the system, and the full and complete Pachyderm 2.0 authoring system was released to NMC members in early November 2005.

Current Status

Pachyderm 2.0 is currently in release as a server-hosted, browser-based authoring platform. The server version of Pachyderm 2.0 is freely available for download from SourceForge and the development community thrives at PachyForge. Pachyderm now runs on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms.The Pachyderm Council now directs the project. An annual Pachyderm Users Conference has brought together authors, developers, the Council, and others each year since 2006.

I still have questions.

Please write to info@nmc.org and we will do our best to help!