Hello!

As we reach the end of the year, and version 5 rolls out, we wanted to forego the usual yearly roundup and instead tell you about a project close to our hearts. We’ve just launched a completely new version of the South West Collections Explorer.

SWCE aggregates eleven varied collections from across the South West of England (and more are joining). It’s been run by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter since 2016 and TMP came on board in 2022.

This latest version includes streamlined data updates that use the Museum Data Service, a nice new design and UX, user collections to support research and share favourites; and mobile tours to take collections with you on the go.

Data, updated

If the Museum Data Service hasn’t set your collections world alight this year … why not? MDS is the UK’s collections data aggregator. At its simplest it’s a big pot of public museum data. Any data structure can be uploaded, and mapped for consistency.  And we like consistency! If you’re interested in being part of MDS, get in touch.

All our SWCE partners are signed up to the service. This means we can use MDS data in the Explorer, and partners only have to upload their data once. Even better, the data is all mapped to the SPECTRUM museum standard, which means that we know exactly where to find each field (like makers and dates).

And then there’s the CIIM. That’s the middleware software that sits at the heart of TMP. We’ve got a brand new installation in order to pull data from MDS – and it’s not just for SWCE. So as well as all the core data you get with a TMP installation, SWCE now also has filters, maps, and multimedia resources from the richer set  of fields in the MDS data. Finally, we add the images, and marry them up with the MDS data.

It’s smoother all round, and we think this is the first full website built on top of the MDS infrastructure. We’ll leave the last word on that to Professor Ross Parry, director of the Institute for Digital Culture at Leicester University, where MDS is hosted:

“So impressed, and so excited to see South West Collections Explorer go live. Huge smiles, and a huge sense of things now starting to happen.”

Design you can use

Our design Associate Adam Wilson came up trumps again with a clean new look and feel for the site that supports users getting where and what they want but which also gets out of the way and lets the amazing collections stand out. Clean cutouts and the hint of waves give it a flavour of Devon and Cornwall.

And a nice logo with a subtle south-west pointing highlight gives the project a separate identity from the contributing museums.

Usable user collections

The original SWCE offered users a collecting facility, where they could also choose to make certain collections public. Rebuilding this, we decided to make it radically different for several reasons.

Firstly we wanted to keep the management of personal data to an absolute minimum. So logons are all done through Google or social accounts like Facebook. We retain no information about users, only the content.

Secondly we built this into an API instead of the WordPress CMS. The tool lives on its own page separate from the website which means it works faster and more securely.

Lastly, it supports collections, but the privacy-friendly mechanism can be extended to support commenting, annotations, games, or other kinds of user-generated content. Watch this space, and let us know if you’d like something like this on your own site.

Mobile tours

With everything else in place, the next step seemed obvious: take it on tour. We built a way to build mobile tours around the collections that you could use inside or outside a museum, even crossing over between different SWCE collections.

It’s built for interactive mode on a mobile device, with a map and optional audio commentary, but there’s also a desktop-friendly mode, and it prints out nicely too.

We built it as a WordPress plug-in, so with a little design customisation we can do this for you too!

That’s it

Please do go and check out the SWCE website, we’re very proud of it.

Enjoy your festive break, and we’ll see you in 2026.

Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.