The Development of the Ceramics and Glass website

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The Development of the Ceramics and Glass website

• Mia Ridge
• Museum Systems Team
• Museum of London

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Topics

• Designing and developing the website
• How to get the most out of the site
• Questions

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Designing and developing the website

• In-house development
• Site Goals
• Design Challenges
• Site Infrastructure
• Design and development

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Museum Systems Team

• In-house IT team
• Design and develop bespoke application for
  recording, analysing and presenting
  archaeological or museum information
• Design and develop database-driven websites

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Site Goals

• Enable access to the collection
• Provide for specialist and general audiences
• Increase knowledge and understanding of the
  collection

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Design Challenges

• Different audiences, different goals
• General public
• Researchers and specialists
• Dynamic content
• Complex relationships between
• Categories
• Object records
• Other records

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Site Infrastructure

• Static content
• extended texts (stored externally)
• Regional study
• Site report, about section
• Dynamic content
• object records
• subject authority records
• images
• publications

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Technical Infrastructure

• MM server (database)
• day-to-day Collections Management System, holds
  data in own format
• Staging server (database/web server)
• runs extraction scripts as queries against MM
  database, holds development version of data
  structures and scripts and static pages
• Live server (database/web server)
• the version you see on the internet

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Extraction Process
Extraction scripts (SQL queries)
MultiMimsy Server (Oracle)
Staging Server (SQL Server/web server)

• Staging server runs extraction scripts against
  MultiMimsy server
• Scripts are a set of SQL queries,
• Results stored in database tables on staging
  server

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Website processes

• User requests a page
• ASP scripts receive request, translate into
  queries into site database
• ASP scripts filter, collate and present results
  of queries as web pages

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Design and development

• Consultation with target audiences
• Consultation with cataloguing team and curators
• Design site architecture and navigation
• Iterative process, taking into account audience
  needs, structure of data
• Design presentation of objects, categories,
  publications, images, and their relationships

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How to get the most out of the site

• Browsing
• Catalogue
• Publications
• Searching
• Object search
• Subject search
• Publication search

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Future Directions

• More links to similar collections
• Regional study reports
• Exchange links with similar collections
• Information on makers
• Individuals, manufacturers, designers
• Glossary
• Featured or type reference objects
• Audience evaluation and feedback