Museum Victoria's Collections Online: a visual approach
Timothy Hart, Museum Victoria, Australia
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections
Provision of access to Museum Victoria’s collections and the rich information and stories held within forms part of Museum Victoria’s Strategic Directions 2008-2013. A key consideration was the belief that our users needed a visual interface and not an endless series of highlighted text and search boxes to navigate and discover the collections. This first version includes approximately 20,000 objects.
The demonstration will take people through our thinking with the design solution and development of the website. It will be about the approach as much as the design and implementation. The site was developed entirely by our in-house team.
The Collections Online program has:
- provided access, via MV’s public website, to the majority of objects, specimens, images, information, interpretation, and multimedia resources in the registered collections, across the disciplines of History and Technology; Sciences; and Indigenous Cultures
- provided access to other holdings that provide valuable information, such as the Library and the Museum’s Archive.
- provided ways to navigate to the other online resources offered by MV, such as Infosheets, education resources, subsites of the main website, exhibition-specific subsites.
- used current best available technologies to provide ways for the community to interact with the collections, resources and expertise of the Museum’s staff
- provided ways for Museum collection data to be disseminated to external, online collaborative projects, such as OZCAM, the Learning Federation, Picture Australia, Collections Australia Network and others.
Demonstration: Demonstrations - III [Close Up]
Keywords: collections,history,technology,online,museum,victoria
