Collections sit at the very heart of The Museum Platform. We know that getting web pages online is relatively easy nowadays, but getting collections online is much harder than it looks.
To help showcase the options available to you, we’ve created an online collection featuring some of the objects in our homes. It’s an …eclectic… selection of objects, to say the least, and so far is quite small (our digitisation program is not terribly well funded…!), but we hope it gives some feel for how a museum collection can work using the Platform.
Here are some of the things we’ve been concentrating on:
Simple, accurate searching
Providing really accurate, solid search is key. This is actually a pretty hard problem, but one that we’ve solved on the Platform using a cool bit of technology called Elastic Search. We’ve enabled keyword searching over your entire database: all fields are searched, and results are returned in milliseconds, no matter how many records there are.
The database we’ve provided here is tiny, but results can be returned from huge datasets in exactly the same way, and with virtually no lag.
Here are some examples:
- See the whole collection
- Search for drinking
- Narrow down your previous search by only showing “drinking” records that have been tagged art deco
That last example is important. This is called filtering or faceting and it’s a way of doing advanced search but without the usability nightmare that advanced search forms create. Instead of giving people a bewildering array of form fields to fill in at the beginning of the process, faceting presents all the results for a search and then allows the user to show less results according to their preference.
Why is this good? Firstly, pretty much no-one understands or uses advanced search. Second, it’s an increasingly familiar interface – you’ll have seen it on shopping sites like Amazon, for example. Third, it doesn’t require the user to know what they’re looking for before they’ve found it – in other words it is predicated around the notion of serendipity and browse, and thus encourages users to spend more time engaging with your content. Which, after all, is probably why you’re doing all of this.
