There are my notes from the presentation 'Rhagor – the collections based website from Amgueddfa Cymru' by Graham Davies at the MCG Spring meeting.
This paper talked about the CMS discussed in Building a Bilingual CMS.
'Rhagor' is Welsh for more – the project is about showing more of the collections online. It's not a 'virtual museum'.
With this project, they wanted to increase access to collections and knowledge associated with those collections; to explain more about collections than can be told in galleries with space limitations; and to put very fragile objects online.
[He gave a fascinating example of a 17th century miniature portrait with extremely fragile mica overlays – the layers have been digitised, and visitors to the website can play dress-up with the portrait layers in a way that would never be physically possible.]
The site isn't just object records, it also has articles about them. There's a basic article structure (with a nice popout action for images) that deals with the kinds of content that might be required. While developing this they realised they should test the usability of interface elements with general users, because the actions aren't always obvious to non-programmers.
They didn't want to dumb down their content so they've explain with a glossary where necessary. Articles can have links to related articles; other parts of the website and related publications, databases etc. Visitors can rate articles – a nice quick simple bit of user interactivity. Visitors can share articles on social networking sites, and the interface allows them to show or hide comments on site. Where articles are geographically based, they can be plotted onto a map. Finally, it's all fully bilingual. [But I wondered if they translate comments and the replies to them?]
In their next phase they want to add research activities and collections databases. They're also reaching out to new audiences through applications like Flickr and Google Earth, to go to where audiences are. If the content is available, audiences will start to make links to your content based on their interests.
The technology itself should be invisible, user has enriched experience through the content.
Questions:
Alex: to what extent is this linked with collection management system (CollMS)? Graham: it's linked to their CMS (discussed in earlier papers), not their CollMS. They don't draw directly from CollMS into CMS. Their CollMS is working tool for curators, needs lots of data cleaning, and doesn't necessarily have the right content for web audiences; it's also not bilingual.