We’ve been working on a web site for the
National Parks – allowing access to some portion of the parks 30
million plus objects. It’s an extraordinarily diverse collection
that includes lightly described objects without images and some objects
with paragraphs of descriptive text.
Cristiano Bianchi comments reflect the challenge in
designing the site. We know from traffic patterns that on the current
version of the site people stop on the home page. The search box
(supporting a great back end search engine provided by Re:Discovery) acted
as a brick wall for a lot of users.
We wanted to create access to lead visitors into the
site. But we also approached the idea through the lens of trying to create
context – collections are accessed through parks, but also through
collection highlights. Collection Highlights allow the imposition of
thematic groupings of objects, described as a collection –
potentially, at least, allowing some of that story telling.
But the site isn’t an exhibit. I think
there’s value in putting collections online. The ability to search
the collections serves certain audiences. The search box is on every page,
it just isn’t the focal point.
Mark Freeman
Research Assistant University of
Tennessee
