On 16 Aug 2011, at 09:13, Perry Bonewell wrote:
>
> If you could build the perfect museum web CMS what would it look like? What features would it need to have straight out of the box to make it a viable option for your next web site?

I suspect you need to define the question a little further.

I think the responses are showing that people are thinking more about the output, than the input side of things.

If you focus on that, then you have objects, interpretations and metadata. (and stuff I missed)

Perhaps the question should revolve around what's missing from Drupal, WordPress etc that needs to be added to make it Museum and Gallery Friendly.

One of the issues I see a lot is how to define the granularity of the content management system.

The conclusion we came to is that everything that can be content managed is a single file, but an object could be more than one file, (e.g. an image or images, a 3D view, the sound of the thing and maybe some video plus whatever interpretation is attached to the object)

Content management tends towards articles, and not the individual 'files' so that would be where I'd be looking - something that has good metadata management for a file, yet is able to easily combine those fully described files into an object.

Then you need to manage interpretations with editorial control at easily manipulated levels (author, editor, subeditor, super editor and flavours in between)

Ideally you'd be able to group objects quickly and simply to form collections, keeping all the individual file metadata and adding metadata for the object and the collection.

Then you'd want to be able to publish collections in a variety of themes and formats, with as much or as little metadata as desired (drilling down for research, dumbing down for browsing)

And I guess you'd also want a good search tool, both at the back end and the front, with some pre-built reports in the back end, for *management*

Taking it further you'd want a way for the presentation of your collections to be easily adapted and changed depending on browsing device, time of year, mood etc and a way for visitors to the site to add interpretations and information back into the editorial process.

All of this is about one small part of a Museum & Gallery - the collections.

You then need to content manage the real life visitor stuff like opening times, events etc.

My 2p worth.

Does the question mean you're thinking about redoing the Bolton site again?

:)

****************************************************************
       website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
       Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
      Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
 [un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************