Art for Everyone: The National Galleries of Scotland collections website
Our transformation of the new National Galleries of Scotland website (www.nationalgalleries.org) began in early 2016 in response to the Digital Engagement Strategy 2014–2018 which focuses on improved digital access to the collection and services. The previous website had limitations, with only 6% of our collections online, and a complete overhaul was required so our main digital platform was fit for our audiences.
Although the new website was in development for 14 months, we’ve released new functionality often, as part of our user story based Agile approach. The first major deployment was the collections part of the website.
With our old website still live we launched our collections website under the URL alias, art.nationalgalleries.org.
Collections Website Development (July 2016 launch)
Our main focus initially was to get the full national art collection published online to be enjoyed by the public.
A complimentary project at the Galleries focused on the digitisation of our artworks. With this digitisation project underway in 2015 we were able to plan for the inclusion of the art collection online as well as a significant number of digital images. As artworks are photographed they are ingested into the digital asset management system where they go through the rights clearance process. Some are flagged as ok to go online.
Two years ago, before the digitisation project started, we had circa 6,000 artwork records from our collection online, where each record included an image. When we launched the new collections website in July we were able to publish over 92,000 records, exposing our permanent collection and long term loans. By that point in the digitisation schedule we were able to include images for 30,000 records. With the continuation of the project, this number continues to climb daily and currently we have over 55,000 images online.
Underlying Architecture
We were keen for our new systems architecture to be based on free open source technologies wherever possible giving us the flexibility to keep the technology up to date and ensuring a high degree of portability.
In the end we built the system using a Drupal install for our middleware, a separate Drupal install for the front end website, on the Acquia platform, as well as Drupal Commerce, CiviCRM, Amazon S3 cloud storage for our dissemination images, and Apache Solr search sitting between the middleware and front end.
The National Galleries of Scotland systems include Mimsy XG, our cataloguing database, which provides the LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) XML. This uses the OAI-PMH protocol to present new and updated artwork records.
We also have our Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) which holds all of our newly digitised images and has a JSON API to feed out new and updated assets, corresponding metadata, and copyright flagging.
The Middleware
The middleware pulls the information over from Mimsy and creates any new record entries. The DAMS lets the middleware know when new assets or information is available to be grabbed; the middleware then pulls this through and processes the images using libvips to create OpenSeadragon Deep Zoom tiled images and which are stored on AWS S3.
The middleware therefore allows us to marry up the images with their catalogue records. Furthermore the Galleries Digital team enters longer form content and media to the middleware to enhance the artwork records displayed in the front end.
We required a fast search interface that could handle the queries on our 92,000+ records as well as tailored faceted filtering queries as selected by the user. This information is all indexed and stored in Apache Solr with a rich set of faceting, weighting and free search capabilities.
Services were also built to accommodate images changes. If an image is replaced in the DAMS it communicates this to the middleware which fetches the new image from source, re-processes it, and tells the front end CMS to invalidate any image styles and related metadata.
There were various reasons why we felt a separate middleware layer would be the way to go.
With all of the processing undertaken by the middleware we were keen to keep this separate from the front end CMS to ensure optimal performance for our flagship website.
Another reason for the middleware is that we have an ambition to provide our artworks out as a service to be consumed by applications other than our own website. By building an API onto the middleware we can answer queries directly from partnership websites like Art UK and Europeana. This will avoid manually passing over data and eventually this duplicate data becoming out of sync.
The Front End
We wanted a simple-to-use administrative interface with a high degree of front end flexibility to allow us to create beautifully designed custom pages.
We were very interested in focusing on colours in the new website and wanted to use them carefully but at the same time we didn’t want to detract from the artworks themselves. The new design uses colours to complement the artwork pages by programatically identifying the colours from the images as they are processed.
For the new development we took a user and data driven approach to design the interface and functionality for the public. Focusing on user journeys and user experience we considered analytics gathered from our old website as well as user testing on any new developments underway.
We designed a mobile first responsive site, reflecting the changing behaviour of users, to ensure that the website is performant and responsive on handheld devices.
The user can free text search or explore artworks by selecting tags such as artist, artwork, subject.
We also included a browse facility to let users select a series of filters to hone in on particular artworks of interest. This faceting filtering allows the user to select multiple tags across several categories including artist, subject, century, colours, and so on.
On an individual artwork page you can access deeper contextual information like audio and video content, and explore different avenues through related information. Artwork images can be shared, downloaded, and favourited. Due to our high resolution imagery, users can also use the zoom tool to get a close up view of the images.
The collections website also included the option for users to order artworks as prints. This meant the development of a print selection tool which lets a customer select the artwork they want, the size, the print paper, and frame colour. This required the development of a simple-to-use basketing system and checkout process.
What Came Next?
In July 2016, with the main collections website deployed, it was now time to turn our attention to building the “rest of it” so we could turn off the old website. We were keen to stick with both Agile and UX, data-driven processes during this next phase of development.
How we designed and developed the rest of the National Galleries of Scotland website….
