Pre-Raphaelites project wins award
The Pre-Raphaelites online resource has won the BETT Award for best digital collection and resource bank after being recognised as one of the UK’s leading educational websites.
Further details of the award can be found on the Birmingham City Council’s website.
This latest accolade follows earlier victories in the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) and DADI (Drum Award for Digital Industries) Awards.
This continued acknowledgement of the websites design and usability helps highlight the importance of making these areas an integral part of a projects planning and execution.
Key features of the site include:
• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
International award for JISC-funded Pre-Raphaelite resource
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource , funded under the JISC Digitisation programme, has been awarded the first prize in the Arts/Culture category of the Interactive Media Awards.
The Interactive Media Awards™ recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement.
The project was led by Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, which has an unrivalled collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and has digitised more than 2000 images of paintings, tapestries, drawings, sketchbooks, and other material relating to members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.
The web site was beautifully desinged by TAK! and includes detailed information on art works, a powerful zoom-in functionality provided by Silverllight, learning resources and a personal collection area, where users can create their own theme-based Pre-Raphaelite collections of images, a useful tool especially for teachers and learners.
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource scored increadibly higly in pretty much all that is important for a serious web site - Design, Content, Feature functionality, Usability and Standards compliance, reaching a total of 492 out of 500.
Improve your online presence: free workshops
The Strategic Content Alliance has just announced aseries of workshops across the UK that will look at the digital content lifecycle from creation to curation.
Details of the workshops can be found below, with further information on the Strategic Content Alliance’s blog.
These FREE workshops from the Strategic Content Alliance and Netskills introduce simple and inexpensive search engine optimisation techniques to improve your online presence, web visibility and website traffic.
Topics include:
• Maximising access and removing barriers to your content
• The importance of a structured approach to preparing content
• Content integrity and reaching the right audience
• Metadata and its significance
• Sustainable content and future proofing
• The social web and marketingThe workshops are aimed primarily at delegates from universities, archives, museums, health, public service broadcasting, schools and cultural heritage. No particular technical knowledge is required as a prerequisite.
Dates, locations and registration
Belfast
10:30 Monday 29 June - 15:30 Tuesday 30 June 2009
The Mount Conference Centre - register for this workshopEdinburgh
09:30 Thursday 2 July - 16:15 Friday 3 July 2009
Grosvenor Hilton Hotel - register for this workshopLondon
09:30 Monday 27 July - 16:15 Tuesday 28 July 2009
JISC Meeting Rooms, Brettenham House - register for this workshopCardiff
09:30 Thursday 30 July - 16:15 Friday 31 July 2009
Hilton Hotel - register for this workshop
Europeana asks for Feedback
Europeana, the portal for the cultural collections of Europe, is now fully functioning and looking for feedback.
The ups and downs of Europeana have been followed by this blog in a number of past posts, so it is good to see it in full working order, and looking to improve the user experience.
Tell us what you think and win the latest iPod Touch!
All Europeana’s features are fully functioning now and we would like to know what you think about the site. We’re currently running a survey in all 27 EU languages. Your feedback is important for the future development of Europeana, so let us know what you want.
Thanks,
The Europeana Team
Funding Opportunity: Rapid Innovation Grants
The Information Environment team has just released a new call for Rapid Innovation Grants. Further details of the call are below:
JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for grants to fund technical rapid innovation projects addressing priority areas.
Proposals are sought under the following priority areas:
- Mashups of open data
- Aggregating tags and feeds
- Semantic web/ linked data
- Data search
- Visualisation
- Personalisation
- Mobile Technologies
- Lightweight Shared Infrastructure Services
- User Interface Design
Bids for projects dealing with other areas that are relevant to the Information Environment are also welcomed.
Funding of between £15,000 - £40,000 for 6 month projects for up to 30 projects is available
The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon on Wednesday 22 April 2009.
Funding is available for projects starting in early-mid June 2009 for 6 months. All projects must be complete by 30 November 2009.
Further information can be found in the full Call
Commercial Images Means Better Websites
A previous article on another digi blog illustrated how the commercial arms of the British Library and British Museum seemed to produce more efficient and innovative websites for users to browse and buy their digital wares.
Following on from this, Christie’s the Auctioneers have an excellent website which allowed potential customers and interested bystanders to browse the collections they sell, such as the the recently sold Yves St Laurent collection of art. You can visit the various lots via the Christie’s calendar of events.
As well as being well designed, there are plenty of easy-to-use functions to allow buyers to navigate through the images, including a slide rule which allows them to determine the price, and a plenty of meaningful categories (eg. painting, jewellery, furniture) which make it simple to navigate through the many thousands of images in each collection.
Again, certain public sector sites, for whatever kind of digital content, could take a leaf out of commercial sector’s book.
Make sure collection names are obvious
The British Library’s Sound Archive has some fascinating collections but they tend to have some quite obscure names.
For example, the St Mary-le-Bow public debates have contributions from Iris Murdoch, Peter Cook and Enoch Powell.
A previous version of the Sound Archive website replicated these collection names - and quite possibly put off users who failed to understand what may actually have been in each collection.
However, a new browsing structure has now been created.
It is much more obvious - collections are organised organised according to subject name giving users a more immediate understanding of what might be available.
The Long Tail of Usability
The Stormont Papers resources makes available the debates from the parliament of Northern Ireland (Stormont) from creation in 1921 until the end of Home Rule in 1971.
It’s been available since 2006 and some statistics from the website are available. Of most interest is graph showing the spread of search terms entered by users
There are two interesting points from this
1) The bulk of your users may not be looking for the things you expect them to be looking for.
2) Pre-arranged hyperlinks on your home page can provide a user-friendly way of letting users get to know a resource’s contents.
Web usability tested
In the development of a Web resource, ideally usability testing is an iterative process that is carried out throughout the development of a resource and can be conducted both internally (expert review) and with outside users (user testing).
The second meeting of the JISC Digitisation programme partly focused on Web usability issues and user interaction with digital resources.
Gemma Richardson, from the Cabinet Papers digitisation project, gave an enlightening presentation on the First steps to usability and user centred design. Subsequently, in a hands-on session delegates tested two different methodologies for carrying out an expert review, the Cognitive Walkthrough and the Heuristic Evaluation. Although different, perhaps unsurprisingly the two methodologies unearthed similar problems with the web site being tested.
Claire Warwick’s presentation also provided projects with insightful and practical tips on key features that the ideal digital humanities resource ought to include, based on the findings of the LAIRAH study (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities), which she conducted as part of a team at University College London.
Librarians on the way out?
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects.
- That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google.
- It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb down in front of a computer terminal - we all skim over the surface of the web’s voluminous content
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The now-ingrained hyperactive approach to skimming Internet content means that any kind of barrier to access (payment or passwords for instance) means sacrificing the attention of many potential users
It’s worth reading.