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Rich content or quantity in your collections online | 3 comments (3 topical, editorial, 0 pending)

[new] Worry about the framework before writing content (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous Hero on Tue May 20th, 2003 at 06:00:09 PM GMT

I'd second this call to make a solid framework first.

A good framework is one that can accept items with any level of description, and can make sensible use of this content. This will quite possibly mean supporting both "exhibit" and "catalogue" level views onto the database; the main site for most of the visitors shows only those with a good description available, but there's also a terse catalogue that's a near-complete listing. Your users will have many reasons for browsing, so don't assume that a minimal description is of no use to anyone.

The target ought to be to make the IT side of the publishing costs trivial, in comparison to the editorial cost. With some modern techniques, this is quite achievable. Most of the cost is in building the system to support the first exhibit. The incremental cost of adding others is minimal. Most organisations will already have a machine-readable database of exhibits, just for collection management. This ought to be easily importable into the public listings. The great thing about IT systems is their ability to deal with large volumes for no extra cost - feed them everything you can !

There's also the metadata issue (I'll bore you all on this topic later). Designing your metadata model first saves a lot of time in the long run, and it lets you use the benefits of it from the start.

Rich content or quantity in your collections online | 3 comments (3 topical, editorial, 0 pending)

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