National Maritime Museum

Client Profile

The National Maritime Museum is the largest maritime museum in the world. Situated in Greenwich, its collections comprise an estimated 2.5 million items, many on loan to museums elsewhere in Britain.

Background

The NMM had built up an established web presence over a number of years. A dedicated team had been put together to develop and maintain the growing sites, including the main museum site, the Royal Observatory Greenwich site and the Journal of Maritime Research. The sites were developed using a mixture of HTML and small databases.

The sites had grown rapidly over time and in an ad hoc fashion, and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Without a structured workflow process, site content could not be administered and controlled. The process of updating and adding new content had become a laborious task; a disincentive for the Museum to use the site to its full potential. Another side-effect of this ad hoc development was inconsistent design, combined with inconsistent navigation and page structure. Usability and accessibility had become serious issues.

Visitors to the site also suffered, due to the inconsistent design and the lack of an intuitive navigation and search facility.

Solution

Box UK proposed the implementation of Amaxus, its roles-based Content Management System, in order to facilitate the publishing and management of content across the domains of the NMM. An important aspect of the suggested solution was the use of XML. The NMM had an extraordinary amount of content and using XML would enable the content to be tagged from a set list of 'keywords and phrases', effectively placing the content in context. This would have a great and immediate impact. Content would effectively become 'intelligent', enabling users to find it more easily via a variety of mediums.

One issue with using XML is that existing content needs to be 're-versioned'. This entails extracting the text from the existing HTML code, uploading it o the CMS, and then applying the relevant metadata. With more than seven thousand pages, this could quickly become an arduous and expensive task. In order to minimise the amount of manual intervention, Box UK used its content extractor application to spider the existing NMM site and extract its content and images. This was automatically inserted into the CMS, ready for tagging.

The implementation of a CMS gave the Museum the following immediate benefits:

• Expand publishing access to contributors within the museum, removing the current Webmaster bottleneck.
• Create consistent navigation across the domains of the NMM.
• Introduce advanced levels of functionality, to both the back-end Content Management and front-end website systems.
• Create a flexible, extensible system.
• Enhance the accessibility and usability of the sites for the end user.
• The ability to integrate interactive elements (such as Flash, movies and audio) into the standard site template.

Working closely with the Museum, Box UK addressed the issues surrounding the poor Information Architecture and the accessibility and usability problems. The result is a site that is clearly structured and easy and intuitive to use. A clear layout, using text alternatives for non-text elements and a low graphics version of the site are used to help achieve high standards of accessibility for all. The accessibility of the site has been recognised with a Visionary Design Award presented to the Museum for the site. The nationwide scheme recognises and celebrates the very best website design for visually impaired people and promotes the importance of creating web content for all.

Roy Clare, Director of the National Maritime Museum said:

'The National Maritime Museum holds the largest and most important collections of maritime-related objects in the world and it is extremely important to the Museum that everyone is given the opportunity to access these resources in order to understand more about the sea, ships, time and the stars. Our website plays a vital role in this process.'

The roles-based content management system allows the Museum to maintain and develop three individual sites via the same interface. Through the allocation of roles, each with specific privileges and capabilities, users can be granted access to edit and amend restricted elements of the sites. Through the integrated workflow process, all content can be moderated and pass through an approval process before it is published live on the relevant site. This gives the Museum control over the published content, ensuring accuracy and consistency without the need for a complex and time-consuming audit of work.

The site was launched in October 2002, and provides on-line access to thousands of items relating to seafaring, navigation, astronomy and time measurement.