There have been a number of major changes at the National Maritime Museum in the last few months – some physical, with new buildings and infrastructure as part of the Sammy Ofer Wing and new galleries, and some virtual, with new websites and gallery interactives.
The changes to the Collections website are significant. We launched this as part of the new wing in July and have been running it as a live beta. It has a vastly improved visual interface, driven by a desire to make it easier to experience some of the amazing works of art, objects and records we have.
We’ve improved the search behind the scenes so that we can hopefully get you to the right object or record you are looking for quickly. We also hope it directs you to related content and lets you see how the object is part of other exhibitions, personal collections, themes or related publications.
We now have more than 250,000 records available and will continue to release more. This means making content available where we don’t have full records. All of the research showed that doing this was the priority, even if we had some gaps in our knowledge.
Help improve our records
This is where we hope you can come in. If you have information that you feel is important or key to a record then we would be very glad to hear from you. Each record now has a ‘Share your knowledge‘ feature, where you can contact us and help improve the information we have. We have already had a significant number of records updated, and these records now feature a credit to the person who has helped us.
Other important features are the ability to save searches, create your own collections, download images and add tags. We hope that the ability to share and add collections to your own websites and social networks will also prove useful.
Opening up our data
One of the primary reasons for changing the collection website was to enable the data to be used in more flexible ways, both by the Museum and by software/application developers. Providing our content with an API (Application Programming Interface) means that other people can use our data and find new contexts for our content – whether that is another museum, university, public body or just someone with a good idea and some understanding of developing web services. We’re using it to help do new things in the Museum’s galleries and to bring you more of our vast collection.
The new site is helping us discover parts of the collection that were perhaps a little hidden before.
We have switched over to the the new site permanently now and hope it works for you too. We are making lots of changes as we go and we’re always looking for feedback, so do let us know your thoughts.
I’m afraid that I think the collections website is an absolute nightmare. Before, one could easily navigate to your catalogued holdings of personal papers. For example, before, if I wanted to look at the papers of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry B. Jackson, I could go to http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/archive/catalogue/record.cfm?ID=JAC and navigate from there to each catalogue entry.
Now, however, one has to laboriously hack one’s way through the links from the search engine. Before, each catalogue entry had its own individual url, whilst now they’re identified by sequential but anonymous numbers. The new site may look prettier than the old one, but for a researcher like me it’s a lot more difficult to use.
Comment by Simon Harley January 7, 2012 @ 12:46 pm
Hi Simon
Thanks for your comments, but we’re obviously sorry you feel that way about the website.
Integrating the Archive catalogue and the Collections website was a tough decision, but overall we felt that having them contained in the same space made sense.
We definitely take your point about the navigation and that is being addressed. We will be launching the new online ordering system in the next two weeks and we have been improving the navigation with this in mind.
So if you searched for JAC in the catalogue and selected any of the results you will then be able to navigate from within that record, as the full hierarchy tree will be displayed.
The new ordering system, AEON, will be up from January 17 – http://www.rmg.co.uk/researchers/library/update-on-caird-library-sammy-ofer-wing,-national-maritime-museum – so the changed navigation will be in place for then.
We hope this makes things easier.
Many thanks
Lawrence
Comment by Lawrence Chiles January 9, 2012 @ 10:30 am
Your new website has a vastly improved visual interface, but the data it contains is vastly inferior in some very important respects. For example, the maximum resolution of your maps and charts has been greatly reduced, which makes the images much less useful, and sometimes useless, to researchers. What good is a historical map if one cannot read the toponyms? You should increase the maximum resolution of your maps to their former level so as to get the best of both worlds.
Comment by Vincas Steponaitis January 11, 2012 @ 4:22 am
The Collections search engine is returning nothing.
Also the collections expandable menu on the left is not there any more.
Comment by Robert legge January 13, 2012 @ 3:09 am
As a university instructor and researcher, I find the new website extremely frustrating.
Robert Iegge’s comment applies to me, too; the general search engine returns nothing.
When I try to narrow the search to specific collections, I do not get the actual sources: for me, oil paintings, watercolors, pencil drawings, etc. dealing with specific topics. Instead “pre-digested” essay-ettes, sometimes illustrated, pop up. My students and I do not want to be informed by secondary sources. We want to conduct our own research into your excellent resources.
Would it be possible to offer your old Collections website, which served me vastly better than your new one?
Comment by Jan Ewald January 13, 2012 @ 1:23 pm
Hi Robert
Apologies for this, we’ve been having some problems over the last 24 hours. We think we’ve resolved these now and the site is functioning again.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Lawrence
Comment by Lawrence Chiles January 13, 2012 @ 5:01 pm
I applaud in general your efforts to improve on line access to the NMM collections, but must agree with others that the new version is frustrating in the extreme.
In particular I have for years made use of your wonderful sub-site dedicated to the charts of the Atlantic Neptune, so much so as to have it bookmarked in my web browser. That appears to be no longer available, which has rendered the material far less accessible and to have entirely neutered some of the most valuable aspects of the old site.
In particular, one used to be able to call up every available state of a given chart, with high-resolution images for each state and cartobibliographic notes describing the differences between the states. Now one must laboriously look through each returned search item (e.g., all hits for “Boston” + “Des Barres”) with almost none of the ability to compare the individual charts.
I have hitherto referred many friends and colleagues to your web site with the highest praise for its utility, but will no longer do so. This appears to have been a major and inexplicable step backwards, at least in my particular area of interest.
Regards,
Michael Buehler
Southampton, Mass., USA
Comment by Michael Buehler January 15, 2012 @ 5:41 pm
I am writing this after certain improvements have been implemented.
The Museum possesses a very good collection of early sailing charts (portolan charts) for which high resolution images were formerly available. Unfortunately, following alterations to the website, it is no longer possible to access a browsing list of those, nor can the images any longer be enlarged so that the place-names are legible. Whatever the reason for this change, it renders that formerly significant collection of images useless for serious analysis. Perhaps this was not thought important, as I could not see, in the reasons given above for those changes, any mention of the research community.
Even a casual visitor, interested in a pretty picture, will now have great difficulty in locating it,
given the removal of the previous special Collections category devoted to these items. The best advice I have been able to obtain is to search for ‘vellum’. This brings up over 400 items and refining by century will remove images such as telescopes. It is not conceivable that anybody would be able to intuit that way in, which still leaves a lot of sifting afterwards.
Even if you know what you are looking for you can no longer search for it readily under its call-number, because the alpha-numeric mix is too complicated for the new software.
Presumably the responses to this blog are the tip of an iceberg. Assuming that this leads to a major reappraisal can I request that, as well as restoring legibility to the scans of charts, it becomes possible to rotate the images. The place-names on early sea charts are written at right-angles to the coastline and therefore have no consistent orientation. The sailor simply turned the chart. Today’s researcher has to do the same but is faced with standing on their head in front of a fixed screen. Such a move would not only get us back to where we were before but represent a genuine improvement. Since most other online collections of maps allow that facility it does not seem too much to ask.
Comment by Tony Campbell January 21, 2012 @ 4:17 pm
I’m a nut for portolan charts, and have happily spent the last year wrapped in a study of a hitherto undescribed portolan atlas, circa 1500, held in Italy. Undecorated and anonymous, there are few overt clues as to its actual date and provenance other than a lot of very careful comparison of handwriting, scale bars, outlines and, crucially, place names, against other maps and charts of the period.
This is an awkward enough task as it is, but thanks to a growing number of libraries with online digitized collections (Beinecke, Yale, Huntingdon, Stanford, BnF, BNP, Marciana and several others), at least I don’t need to be a millionaire.
NMM was, until the end of last year, among that merry bunch, but the decision to restrict high-resolution images to commercial transactions now means that, as Tony Campbell notes above, the academic and research value and potential of NMM’s extraordinary collection is very much diminished.
Incidentally, I note that Mr Campbell rather humbly omits to mention his own rather extraordinary work (maphistory.info) regarding portolan charts in general and Benincasa’s work in particular, none of which I daresay would have been possible had he had to pay for access to high-resolution images of every chart studied and inventoried. The same probably applies to Ramón Pujade’s pioneering work on portolan charts.
In short, this is a plea for the restoration of high-resolution imagery, at a time when other collections – notably the BnF in Paris – are noticably improving the resolution of their own imagery (the stunning Caverio planisphere is now fully readable!)
Jens Finke.
Porto, Portugal.
Comment by Jens Finke February 6, 2012 @ 3:55 am