Redeveloping Culture Victoria: Simon Sherrin

Culture Victoria relaunched its website earlier this month so that it can be more easily indexed by search engines and viewed on mobile devices. Victorian Cultural Network (VCN) Manager Simon Sherrin shares the redevelopment process with CAN Partners. He offers insights into best practice for putting collections online and makes suggestions on how Victorian organisations can work with Culture Victoria.

What was the main reason you redeveloped the Culture Victoria site?
There were a couple of reasons. A lot of the content of the site was contained within Flash, and it wasn’t possible to directly link to an object within a particular story. For example, you might be browsing the site and Herbert Schmalz’s “Too Late” particularly moving. You can direct a friend straight to that image by sending them the URL. On the old site, if you wanted to share that with a friend, you could only give someone a link to the story, and tell them to click on the images link and look at the 5th, sorry, 6th image in the slideshow.

In addition, the Culture Portal providing our cross-agency search was closing on the 1st of July, giving us a deadline for getting that functionality up and running.

We are also expanding the ways that you can access and explore our content that wouldn’t have fitted with the old design.

What is the benefit of using HTML over Flash?
As a general rule, it’s easier to make content accessible with HTML than Flash. It’s also easier for Google and other search engines to index your content. For example, with the old version of the site, we had 161 pages in Google’s database. While Google hasn’t finished crawling the new version of the site, there are now 3680 entries in Google’s database. By the time it finishes, we’ll have over 4000 distinct entries. The upshot of that is Culture Victoria results will appear in more search results. The ability to directly link to objects will, hopefully, increase the amount of external sites linking to Culture Victoria, which will improve the rank of our pages within search engine results.

How has the collections search been improved?
The previous version of the site didn’t have collection specific search results. Cultural organisations in Victoria are now offering the collection search on their own sites, for example:
• NGV Collection,
•Museum Victoria Collection,
•Geelong Gallery.

Initially we’ve been working with the core Victorian Cultural Network (VCN) partners to provide OpenSearch formatted result sets from these searches. This allows us to query their search engines and display those results as separate to website results. We’ll be adding collection searches from them as their OpenSearch responses come online.

Are there plans to separate the collection search from the web search?
Beyond having collection search results on their own tabs, we don’t have any immediate plans to separate collection search results and web search. That may change as the number of Victorian organisations providing OpenSearch increases.

Do you have any future plans for Google Maps within the site?
Over the next couple of months we’ll be adding geo-location data to our stories and objects. Combined with a Google Map, users will be able to see stories and objects related to particular cities and regions.

How will CV Partners upload content? What type of material will this be?
We have developed online software (story builder) that allows partners to directly upload content. We will moderate uploads initially until we are comfortable with the process. Currently we have 16 metro-regional content partners who are developing an exciting range of stories about their collections and activities. Subject range from Aboriginal culture, Burke and Wills expedition, choral music, RSL collections, textile manufacturing, through to Victoria’s distributed craft collections.

Do you have plans to build an iPhone or iPad application for CV?
We are working on making all the content on the site available on smartphones and other mobile devices. One part of that was re-encoding videos into H.264. We’re also looking at how we can use the location-aware nature of those devices, to highlight near-by organisations for example.

As for plans for a specific iPhone/iPad app, yes, yes we do, but we’re going to play that close to our chest for the moment. ;-)

Do you have any advice for an organisation starting to research putting their own collection online? What are the main issues they would need to take into account?
There are two pieces of advice I’d give to an organisation putting their collection online. The first is that all the data you use should feed out of your collection management system. That’s not to say the website is accessing the collection management system database directly, but rather any change made to an object record should appear automatically in the online collection. Separate systems will get out of sync almost immediately.

The second is that all images/videos of collection items should all be stored at their original resolution, which should be as large as possible. Disk space is getting cheaper and automatic resizing of images for a website is straight forward.

With hindsight, would you do anything differently?
The only thing that I’d do differently would be to have briefed the graphic designers about one or two weeks earlier.

How do you measure web traffic? Do you compare notes with your Partner organisations in terms of how people come into the site?
We use Google Analytics to measure visitation to the site. We also use Google Webmaster tools, which gives more information about who’s linking to the site and also how our pages appear in Google’s search results. We don’t have a problem with comparing notes with our partner organisation if that’s useful to them.

Leave a Reply