MW2010: Richard Morgan, How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum

by museums and the web on May 03, 2010

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A presentation from Museums and the Web 2010. ...

A presentation from Museums and the Web 2010.

Large, complex, technical projects which require input from many stakeholders in a large, complex, bureaucratic organisation are difficult to run and even more difficult to keep to budget and schedule.

In September 2009, the V&A released a beta version of its new collections search site. More than one million catalogue records are now available on-line, and the site boasts a beautiful design, powerful faceting and cross-linking, a fast, scalable search and an API.

We had to take brave strategic technical decisions and adopt new, more agile working practices to deliver the project. The purpose of the paper is to describe the processes we went through, how we took the decisions we did, and how we persuaded stakeholders of the merits of our approaches.

The paper is intended to be far more than just a description of what we did and how we did it. It presents techniques for project management, technical strategies, and frameworks for making technology decisions which will be generalized and could be applied in any museum. It presents practical and pragmatic methods which work in the reality of a museum context and can achieve a radical shift in culture and practice without the need for top-down organisational change.

Session: Collections: Tag / Search / Deploy - Part 2 [access]

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MW2010: Richard Morgan, How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum — Presentation Transcript

How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum Richard Morgan, Victoria and Albert Museum @rmorg Thursday 15 April 2010

What is Search the Collections?

http://collections.vam.ac.uk

A working database with over 1 million records containing every catalogue record in the V&A's Collections Information System

~165,000 images where those out of copyright available to the public as high-resolution downloads

Design

Google

Openness

A summary

Make the project like projects your museum is good at

Be realistic to the point of pessimism but positive – what can you do today?

Think about when you are building a thing and when you are building operational capacity

Dependencies are the worst enemy

Iterate to create confidence

Don't use things that don't exist

You work in a museum. It's ok. It's not your fault.

Organisational realities: big projects

Organisational realities: the demand for service

Organisational realities: the place of the web in the organisation

What we did: breaking into smaller, parallel projects

What we did: create a focus for iterative production

How we did it: agile in parts

How we did it: resourcing

How we did it: loosely coupled technical architecture

Jquery + Symfony + Drupal

Django + Sphinx + MySQL

XML exports from Collections Information System

Downloading of images from Digital Asset Management System

Scalable virtual server infrastructure

The outcome: what we did next

Google

Mobile

Crowdsourcing

The outcome: what we learned

The power of agility and production

The limits of agility and production

A summary

Make the project like projects your museum is good at

Be realistic to the point of pessimism but positive – what can you do today?

Think about when you are building a thing and when you are building operational capacity

Iterate to create confidence

museums and the web , the international conference for culture and heritage online at Museums and the Web The full text of the paper related to this presentation is available on-line:

Morgan, R., How to Manage and Build a Web Collections Search Project in a Museum. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted May 3, 2010. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/morgan/morgan.html 2 years ago

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MW2010: Richard Morgan, How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum

by museums and the web on May 03, 2010

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MW2010: Richard Morgan, How to manage and build a web collections search project in a museum — Presentation Transcript