Website showcasing the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery's extensive
Pre-Raphaelite collection—the largest in Europe. The site is aimed primarily at researchers, students and lecturers; we developed a suite of tools to empower this target audience. These tools were refined through a series of paper-prototyping usability sessions conducted by us at the museum. These sessions optimised workflow and we discovered what each audience expected from the site.
The site was built in-house from the ground up using the latest version
of .NET within the MVC framework. Extensive data importation routines
were custom built to bring in the vast amounts of data covering the
entire history of each and every artwork.
With over 3000 artworks in the archive, we developed
a powerful search engine to enable users to finding specific works quickly. We avoided the often intimidating 'advanced search' approach. Instead users build their own search request from a series of simple filters—the search can be as simple or as complicated as each user requires. Above all, the engine searches through all records and delivers results within a fraction of a second.
Every work features a complete history and can be viewed in great detail through the development of a Silverlight application. The result enables the user ability to examine work at
unprecedented levels of detail, indeed a level of detail which they could not achieve if viewing the work in person.
The ability to create personal collections of work enables lecturers to create teaching resources and students to create research references. These can be made public for visitors of the site to enjoy, or can remain private for sharing with friends or study group. Dynamic personal collections can also be examined in detail.
An inline glossary completes the suite of functionality and highlights key words and phrases unique to the Pre-Raphaelites and art in general. Glossary keywords are highlighted around the site and links to a full definition assisting both new students and the general public.
For more information please
read our press release and
visit the site.
Awards