‘opac 2.0’ and design hub web 2.0 enabled Emu collections sebastian chan manager, web services powerhouse museum sept 2006 lynne mcnairn emu administrator registration powerhouse museum
2005
work starts on a permanent design gallery
proposed exhibition designer is based in Italy
Emu commissioned to build a narratives pilot
collect, order, display objects for designer and curators
exhibition ends up being designed inhouse
web team modifies the narratives pilot
database kiosks for exhibition
kiosks were intended to go public in a modifed form for the web
concern over rights and permissions on some objects
next step for narratives was a public microsite
hedda morrison project
two previous exhibitions of images
curator and intern rewrote and compiled content
new images taken
site took nearly 6 months of curator rechecking before launch
opac 2.0
museum contributed ~50,000 records to AMOL in 2001
never able to be updated since
AMOL replaced by CAN
CAN seeks PHM materials for harvest
why on CAN but not on Museum’s own site?
june 2006
opac 2.0 launches
previously the museum had 150 key objects online plus a few specialist collections
now ~70% of active collection online
extensive user tracking and realtime analysis
built entirely in-house
modular
flexible
able to quickly respond to user needs
greatly reduced future cost of similar development and microsites
‘amazon-like’ recommendations and serendipitous discovery
object and subject thesaurus links for education users
plus user tagging (folksonomies)
extensive google integration
opensearch enabled
also allows CAN to search without needing to harvest
opac 2.0 is popular
museum website traffic has massively increased
~30,000 object records viewed daily
~13,000 successful searches daily
~7,500 tag cloud searches daily
95% of all available objects visited at least once in first ten weeks
1.8 million individual objects viewed in first ten weeks
each user views on average 5 objects per visit
over 1,500 user tags added since mid June
tripling of public collection enquiries
public is helping correct old records
subject terms being improved from selected folksonomy terms
success is prompting organisational change
reinvigorating the collection
how does it work?
frontend built in PHP, with heavy use of CSS and AJAX
backend database is MS-SQL with full text indexing
MS SQL was an institutional choice MySQL considered
uses Emu narratives module to organise objects to be presented
periodic harvest of relevant objects from Emu to MS SQL
only selected fields
import is from parsing XML output from Emu
SQL database also contains tracking and tag tables
separate to prevent data corruption and increase speed
this allows for more granular control and safeguards
more detail on our emu setup?
accessioned objects with valid storage location
generally whole objects except coins
only harvests selected fields
PHM thesaurus is used to aid discovery
object name, object category and subject fields
images and rights?
what next?
still refining search
building up user profiles to inform and weight search results
interface and usability improvements
integration of department of education thesauri
rebuilding to create an internal version for quick Emu browsing and image management
experimental browsing and visualisation tools
we are at the beginning, not the end
design hub launched august
part of 3 year ARC project with UWS and UTS
new audience- specific front end
for same collection
aim to add 30 design collections worldwide by 2008
smart aggregration service
online design magazine (storytelling/context)
same ‘did you mean’ search intelligence
deep collection linkages
same collection different audience one datastore
more statistics & analysis?
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