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Rich content or quantity in your collections online
By 7mary4, Section Websites Posted on Thu Apr 3rd, 2003 at 10:35:15 PM GMT
For those with database driven presentations of your collections, have you created web sites full of content or are you going for the entire collection? We have only a small percentage of our collection on line, but each piece has detailed information. I'm curious about others and why they chose their route.

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

[new] Museum of English Rural Life collections (none / 0) (#1)
by jonathan (jonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk) on Mon Apr 7th, 2003 at 11:56:45 AM GMT
(User Info) http://www.jpbowen.com/

For an example of a small museum with government funding to increase online access, see INTERFACE from The Rural History Centre, Reading, UK. There are three different interfaces for schools, the general public and advanced researchers.

For a paper, see:

On-line Collections Access at the Museum of English Rural Life, Jonathan P. Bowen, Roy Brigden, Mary Dyson and Kevin Moran. In David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (eds.), Proc. MW2001 Museums and the Web conference, Seattle, USA, 14-17 March 2001. CD-ROM. See abstract.

Prof. Jonathan Bowen

[new] They key is to have a solid frame work (3.00 / 1) (#2)
by iworkwithyou (cesar@intermediacv.com) on Thu Apr 10th, 2003 at 03:11:59 PM GMT
(User Info) http://www.intermediacv.com

As long as you have a solid frame work you will be able to keep posting work on your own way.

A solid frame work means something that allows you to post work no matter what platform you are working on or connection speed you have.

If you can upload images and type (or paste) some text, you will create a page. Then you need a system to create a hierachy and that´s all.

I have work in some pieces where everything was posted at once and then no one updated a single line. Is better if the system is integrated in the "company" slowly and gradually.

Hope this helps.
Cesar.
Think, design, produce http://www.intermediacv.com

[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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