Setting Up a Room

A family’s museum is a set of rooms. Each room is a row in Airtable with a type that decides how it behaves — a wall of photographs, a screening room, a collection of stories. This page is how a room comes to exist and how you bring it online. For what to write into an existing room, see Airtable Curator Fields.

How the museum finds a family’s rooms

Rooms aren’t hard-coded — the museum follows a short chain of pointers, so a family’s structure lives entirely in Airtable and can change without an engineering release.

1. The family has a config base — its home in Airtable. (The Ashworth demo’s is named “The Ashworth Collection — Configuration”.)

2. In it, a Collections table lists the family’s galleries and points at where each one’s content lives (each row carries the Base ID of a gallery base).

3. A Rooms table — in the same config base, alongside Collections — holds one row per room, each with a Type. This is what the lobby is built from.

Note

Because the museum reads this chain, adding or renaming a room is a curator action in Airtable, not a code change. The one thing to remember: a gallery has to be marked active for its rooms to show — see Bringing a room online below.

The room types

The Type field on a Rooms row decides everything about how that room presents. Pick the one that fits the material:

Type	For	Deep dive
Photo Gallery	A wall of photographs and photo sets	Photo Gallery
Cinema Gallery	Films / screenings	Cinema Gallery
Story Collections	Written or spoken stories grouped into collections	Story Collections
Family Tree	Interactive genealogy	Family Tree
Map	Places, plotted	Map
Timeline	Events across time	Timeline

Each type reads its own content and ignores the others — a film room never touches the photo machinery, and vice versa. Adding a room is choosing its type and filling the fields that type expects.

Bringing a room online

1. Add the room. Create the Rooms row, set its Type, and give it a name that reads well on the wall (legibility first — see How Curation Works).

2. Add its content. Fill the fields that type expects — photos and sets for a gallery, films for a cinema room, and so on (each room-type page in the table above lists the fields it uses).

3. Set it live. Flip the Collection’s Status to active (only active collections are served), and set the Room’s own Status to open. A collection left un-active, or a room left hidden, shows no tile — visitors simply don’t see it.

4. Wait for the refresh. As always, you’ll see the room in your own curator view immediately; visitors see it after the next scheduled refresh (see How Curation Works).

Showing a room as “under construction”

A family’s museum can open with some rooms finished and others as tasteful teasers, rather than hiding the unfinished ones entirely. Set the Room’s Status to under construction and it shows as a public “coming soon” tile instead of a live room. Use this to open a museum early with its strongest room, and let the rest arrive over time.

Where to go next

• How Curation Works — the working model and the refresh rhythm.
• Airtable Curator Fields — the fields you write into an existing room.
• Room Types & Content — the design intent behind each type.