Wordpress integrated into News section

The News, Blog and Spotlight sections of the NZMuseums website now run on top of Wordpress. This has allowed us to provide several new features:

- News Search

- Browse articles by categories, recent posts and author

- RSS feeds by category and author

- Automated notification of comments to both authors and commentors

You can see these features on the News page.

Object detail page enhanced

- new icons for object type (art, photography, history etc)

- better layout

- new image slider and zoom option

- Share button to share the page on social networks

You can see an example of this with Raglan Museum’s carved tobacco pipe.

Museum directory page enhanced

- search a museum’s collection from the directory page

- better layout

- new image slider and zoom option

Here’s Raglan Museum’s new directory page.

Eventfinder integration

In Feb 2010 the NZLive events website was merged with Eventfinder. We’ve reworked the What’s on search page and museum directory page events to use Eventfinder. All event information from NZLive has been migrated to Eventfinder.

Explore options extended

The Explore page now brings up a mosaic of object images, with options to explore by most interesting objects (ranked by comments, numbers of images, amount of cataloguing detail, numbers of tags and view count), most popular (by view count), and by tags. The tag cloud now gives an option to expand the tag view to the top 1000 tags.

Technical changes

The site has been reviewed to make the layout and styling more consistent and to improve the HTML markup.

Web addresses within the site now use shorter search friendly URLs, with redirects from the old addresses for each page.

eHive enhancements

NZMuseums is built on top of the eHive online collections management system. There have been many enhancements to this over the last few months, including additional cataloguing fields, better tools for managing pick lists, an image cropping tool and new administration reports. The next feature to launch will be new screens for managing object acquisitions.

Upcoming changes

This is the first phase of the NZMuseums redevelopment. In April we’ll be launching a new home page designed by McGovern Online and integration with DigitalNZ to show suggested related items in the DigitalNZ repository when you’re on the NZMuseums results page.

By Paul Rowe
Vernon Systems Ltd

On Monday I presented Discovering New Zealand Museums at the Museums Association conference in London. The presentation was about the NZMuseums project, DigitalNZ,NZLive and eHive and how all the digital initiatives have worked so well together.

70 people attended the session with a very positive response at the end. Some generously commented that it was the highlight of the conference. As yet, there is no aggregation project with a similar scale of contributors in the United Kingdom. People were impressed with the grassroots promotion and support that had been provided by National Services Te Paerangi to get small museums on board.

There were several presentations at the conference on sharing of content around the Internet, but it was clear that in most countries the vast majority of volunteer run museums were still struggling with the first step in the digital life cycle: the creation of the content. Without the initial support to begin digitisation, many museums won’t have content to share on NZMuseums.

Andy Millard from Te Papa was on hand to give some enthusiastic comments about the impact of the website from Te Papa’s perspective and many people sought me out later in the conference to find out more information.

Thank you to all that played a part in NZMuseums to this point, including the museums and their collections, National Services Te Paerangi for driving the project, McGovern for the graphical design and layout of the website and DigitalNZ for their ongoing work shaping digital cultural content in New Zealand.

View the Discovering New Zealand Museums presentation