The Development of the Ceramics and Glass website Mia Ridge Museum Systems Team Museum of London

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

Designing and developing the website In-house development Site Goals Design Challenges Site Infrastructure Design and development

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

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

Design Challenges Different audiences, different goals –General public –Researchers and specialists Dynamic content –Complex relationships between: –Categories –Object records –Other records

Site Infrastructure Static content: –extended texts (stored externally) –Regional study –Site report, ‘about’ section Dynamic content: –object records –subject authority records –images –publications

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

Extraction Process MultiMimsy Server (Oracle) Extraction scripts (SQL queries) 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

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

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

How to get the most out of the site Browsing –Catalogue –Publications Searching –Object search –Subject search –Publication search

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