Whether you’re looking to get your collections online into an existing website, want to create a totally new and bespoke online experience or looking to get deeply into writing rich narrative exhibitions, The Museum Platform has got a powerful, user-friendly suite of tools in place ready for any modern museum.
Collections Online
Fast. Flexible. User friendly. Beautiful. Museum collections online haven’t looked this good or worked this well ever before!
At the core of our collections online system is the astonishing power of KInt’s CIIM, the middleware used by more than 9 national museums including The Science Museum, The British Museum, National Gallery and Imperial War Museum.
We ingest your collections records from any format you provide (MODES, CSV, EMu, AdLib and many more), automatically process media including zooms and more, augment with additional contextual data if required, and then we’re ready to go. Faceting, lightning-fast search, referenceable URLs, machine-readable object representations, and much more.
Start with our standard design or make your own. Do it on your existing WordPress site or on one hosted by us. Consume your data in totally custom ways – do it JAMStack style, on-gallery, however you need…
Web pages
All the power of WordPress including the new block-based Gutenberg editor
As an authoring environment, The Museum Platform is “just WordPress”. It has a whole heap of magic sauce on top of that, but it’s based on the familiar, open source and easy to use web content platform used by the vast majority of the modern web.
Our system is a platform so we take care of everything for you: backups, maintenance, theming, plugins, updates and more – with 10+ years of WordPress experience (and more than 20 years in museum web technologies) we’re experts in this world, and understand the technology and ecosystem as well as anyone.
If you’re keen on understanding more about the underlying technology, take a look at the relevant pages on this site – or get in touch if you need further information.
Storytelling / exhibitions online
Start telling rich, engaging stories using your collections records. Drop in timelines, maps, sliders, galleries and more…
Once we’ve got your collections online functionality up and running, you can then choose to draw on it in a myriad of different ways. Here are a couple of examples:
You’re writing a blog post and want to feature a number of collections items in a feature section. Here you’d just choose our “featured item” or “story” blocks, choose the record(s), and we then automatically fetch all the details (image, title, description, link to object page) and insert them into your post.
You want to create a detailed set of educational resources that take all kinds of sources and bring them together into a particular context. The Museum Platform makes this easy – just make pages as you would normally, and choose the layouts and blocks you need. Mix and match “normal” WordPress blocks and our specially integrated museum ones. Drop in a map, a timeline, object galleries, 3D Sketchfab embeds and much more, all from one easy to use interface.
Read more about the blocks we currently have available – the list is growing all the time!
objects onto a map, timeline or gallery
We’re a platform, and that’s important…
There’s one more important thing about working with us that we should mention.
Because we’re a Platform (ie a hosted service where the underlying technology is shared by all our museum clients rather than a stand-alone single website or plugin) then every time we make an improvement or add a new feature for one museum, all the museums using the system get to use it, too.
This means the features you get to see are being improved and extended all the time. It also means we want your help as members of our amazing museum community to help us choose what to prioritise. Get in touch and let’s chat.