Dear all,
Here at East Lothian Council the heritage services (Archaeology, Archives, Museums and Local History) are teaming up in a new centre currently being built in Haddington - the John Gray Centre. We'd like to be able to make their individual databases (Historic Environment Record, CALM catalogue, open source database and various small databases, some on Access, respectively) all searchable online through a single 'portal' or gateway, and we'd like users to be able to choose an individual database to search, or to search all simultaneously. I've recently joined the Museums team to try and help make the portal happen, and I'm looking for any advice or tips from others who've done something similar.
We've seen some examples online - Exploring Surrey's Past, Norfolk Heritage Explorer, Highland Historic Environment, Cambridgeshire and University of Stirling CALM archive searches, and many more. They all look very impressive.
If anyone has a brief/spec that they've used with some success for this type of thing and wouldn't mind sharing it, could I have a look? At the moment, our brief bears some resemblance to a long letter to Santa, and we really need to refine it down into the essentials of what we really need, what's less essential for the first stage, and what we'd ultimately like to be able to achieve - but also to focus it more on the procurement process, and what potential tenderers really need to know. It would be helpful to hear people's experience of user-generated content with this kind of project too - how useful is it, is it difficult or time-consuming to moderate, etc. Has anyone come across something they've tried to add to this kind of gateway that really didn't work or caused tremendous headaches? Or found something that worked really well?
One of our main concerns is that the databases and their tables/fields are all quite different, and the different services have over time used different thesauri for classifying content - it will take some fairly sophisticated search methods to search them all effectively.
Other issues we're thinking about are:
- where is the portal to sit - on a bells&whistles website for the John Gray Centre (one of the things on our ultimate wishlist), or on its own simple site, with the main JGC website separate? We plan to build up the JGC site gradually over time and eventually to make it quite an interactive, lively site, so will need a good base for it from the start, whether it's home to the portal or not;
- what are the pros and cons of internal/external hosting (Council is happy to explore either, and we'll ask potential tenderers their options);
- we do plan to use regularly updated copies of our active databases for the portal, and need to consider how we upload the data (it needs to be straightforward and not too slow).
I hope some of you can help! I'll be very interested to read your responses.
Kind regards,
Helen
Helen Bleck
John Gray Centre Heritage Resources Development Officer
East Lothian Council Museums Service
Library and Museums HQ
Dunbar Road
Haddington
EH41 3PJ
Tel: 01620 828210
Fax: 01620 828201
Visit the East Lothian Museums blog at http://www.eastlothianmuseums.org/wp/
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