About
Two sites, one set of rules, and we would rather admit that than dress it up
University Gallery is built and operated by Stanley Studios. It shares every rule with our college site, because our own system does not distinguish the two institution types. What it does not share is the office, the timescale, or a single one of the hard problems.
Why an advancement office gets its own front door
Because the rules being identical does not make the work identical, and a page written for both would have been written for neither.
The office this site is for works on a timescale of decades. It retrieves by class year, which nothing else in higher education does. It holds material from before the institution kept records of asking anybody. And it has a relationship with the people in the photographs that is ongoing, financial, and considerably more sensitive than a student-life office’s relationship with this term’s cohort.
Not one of the four hard problems on this site — unreachable subjects, missing historical records, the reunion-attendance assumption, imagery in a giving appeal — appears on the college site at all. That is what a different site means. It does not mean a different colour.
Who builds it
Stanley Studios, which ran the studio side of institutional photography before it wrote software for it. Standing behind the camera first is why the awkward parts arrived early: the person who was not on the list, the understanding that changed after the shoot, the request that arrives years later from somebody you photographed once.
It also produced the two decisions that look conservative from outside. Correctness rules live in the storage layer rather than in screens, so a refusal applies to a feature whether or not its author thought about it. And where a clever mechanism is optional, the dull one wins — an identification made by a person who was there beats one made by a machine that was not.
The plain inventory
Software marketing describes planned work in the present tense and lets the reader sort it out. This is the whole picture, and every other page here is written to agree with it.
| Area | State | What that means exactly |
|---|---|---|
| A person's decision attached to the person, not the photograph | Working | One withdrawal covers every year of material about them |
| Refusal on a missing, unverified or withdrawn agreement | Working | The same refusal in all three cases; no review queue |
| Class-year and reunion retrieval | Working | Gathering a cohort across years, gated per person |
| Composing material from the gated library | Working | A rebuild excludes somebody who withdrew; no copies to chase |
| Digitising a physical archive | Not turned on | Specialist archival work. Not a capability of this platform |
| Gifts, pledges, receipts, donor records | Not turned on | No money moves through this platform at all |
| Proving a face template was destroyed | Not finished | The cleanup raises a standing alarm rather than pretending |
No adoption figures, no institution names, no testimonials and no giving statistics. A product at this stage that displays those has usually manufactured them.
Questions about us rather than the product
What does it cost?
The platform is free to the institution. There is no per-person fee and no seat licence, so there is no purchase to route through a budget holder, and nothing to buy in any case because live payment is not turned on.
Do you work with two-year and community institutions?
Yes, and if you are one, college.gallery is written for the office you are probably in. The rules are the same either way; the material there is about this term rather than about four decades.
Where do the bound yearbook volumes fit?
The book is an artifact rather than an institution type, and it has its own site at yearbook.gallery. A university yearbook and a middle-school yearbook are the same object with entirely different rules around them, which is a different axis from this one.
What happens to our material if we leave?
It comes with you. Because the imagery lives in the same system as the records rather than with a separate vendor, leaving is an export and a wipe rather than one negotiation per vendor.
Who reads it when we get in touch?
A person at Stanley Studios. There is no form on this site because nothing here collects anything from you. What a first conversation looks like is on talk to us.