Airtable Curator Fields

This runbook covers the optional curator-voice fields — the short bits of text a curator writes for a placement to give the museum app a wall card. Today there is one: Curator Note on the Curation table. This page documents what it is, where to write it, and what the museum app does when one is missing.

Curator Note (Curation table)

A 1–2 sentence wall card that surfaces in xl+ list view as the italic line in the museum-mode plaque, beside or beneath the photograph. Per-placement: lives on the Curation row, not on the underlying Photo or Photo Set, so the same artifact placed in two rooms can carry two different notes.

Where it lives

Table	Field name	Type	Required
Curation	Curator Note	Long text	Optional

The field belongs to whichever item the Curation row references — a single Photo or a Photo Set. Both surface the note the same way in the museum app.

Note

Why on Curation, not on Photo or Photo Set? A curator note isn’t metadata about what a thing is — it’s what the curator wrote for this placement. A wall card in a real museum belongs to the wall, not the painting. Putting the note on Curation means: single photos and photo sets can both carry notes with the same field; the same set placed in two rooms can carry two different notes; and the artifact records (Photo, Photo Set) stay focused on the artifact instead of accumulating display-layer fields.

When to write one

Write a curator note when the visitor would benefit from a sentence of context that the photograph itself doesn’t already carry. Specifically:

• The placement matters. “This room shows the workshop years; the next one shows what came after.” A note on the first photo of a room can frame the sequence.
• The subject would be invisible otherwise. “Edward had been ill for the entire week before this photo was taken.” Captions describe the scene; curator notes describe the moment around it.
• The set has a unifying voice. “A decade of seasons in the back garden — from the first roses Edward planted in ’72 to the autumn the apple tree finally fruited.” A photoset that’s more than the sum of its photos earns a note.

Don’t write one when:

• The photograph and its caption already say everything that needs saying.
• You’d be tempted to repeat the date or the photographer (the museum app surfaces those automatically in the caps meta line).
• The set is self-evident — “five photos of the kids by the lake” doesn’t need explaining.

The right pressure is some placements are richer than others. A room with notes on every set looks busy; a room with notes on the two pieces that genuinely need framing looks curated.

What the museum app does when it’s missing

Field state	Museum app behavior
Curator Note is set with non-empty text (after trim)	Renders as an italic line in the museum-mode plaque, in the heading typeface at 18px, color rgba(255,255,255,0.78). For single photos: capped at max-width: 560px so it reads as a wall card, not a paragraph. For photosets: sits inside the 360px plaque between the meta line and the View-the-story CTA.
Curator Note is empty, missing, or whitespace-only	No italic line is rendered. The surrounding margins collapse cleanly — there’s no visible gap where the note would have been.

There is no fallback. The museum app does not:

• Generate a note from photo captions
• Use the Photo Set’s Description field as a fallback
• Call any AI service to draft one
• Render a placeholder (“No note available”) of any kind

This is intentional. Curator notes are the curatorial voice; auto-generation undermines the entire StoryKeep value proposition (see Curated, not collected).

Where it shows up in the app

View	Behavior
List view, < 1280px container	Compact mode. No curator note rendered (the compact card has no plaque to host it).
List view, ≥ 1280px container	Museum mode. Curator note renders in the plaque (centered below the photo for single photos; beside the constellation for photo sets).
Grid view, all viewports	Not rendered. Grid tiles are visual, not textual.
Gallery (parallax) view	Not rendered. The wall view uses titles and captions, not curator notes.
Lightbox (single photo + set modes)	Not rendered today. May be added later if curators ask for it.

Rollout per museum

The Curator Note column is added to each museum’s Curation table when that museum is ready to use it. The column is optional and additive — a museum without it simply renders no curator notes until the column and the notes exist, and its gallery is otherwise unaffected.

Caution

Demo boundary. Only the public demo museum (Ashworth) is for demos, testing, and exploration. Curator notes on a real family’s museum are written by that family’s own curators — never by the engineering team.

Future curator-voice fields

This page exists to document all curator-voice fields once there are more than one. Today there’s just Curator Note. Likely future additions:

• Room introduction (on the Rooms table) — a short paragraph the museum app could surface in the room header above the gallery.
• Photo wall position note — once the wall (parallax) gallery view is reworked for mobile, a per-photo positional note (e.g., “This photo lives at the far end of the porch, after a long pause in the wall”) could enrich the spatial experience.

These are not built. When they are, document them here following the same format: where the field lives, when to write one, what happens when missing, where it surfaces.