Cultural Content - content strategy for online collections
Slovak National Gallery's Head of Digital Collections and Services Michal Čudrnák on building a new collections portal
Hi Cultural Content-ers,
This week we’ve got a really thoughtful post from Michal Čudrnák. Michal is Head of Digital Collections and Services at Slovak National Gallery (SNG). Whilst at SNG he’s taken an active part in transitioning the gallery into the digital realm – from cataloguing of works of art, to digitisation, development of online catalogue of Slovak art galleries and several other websites. In this post he talks about what he’s learnt testing and evolving a new collections portal that aggregates artworks from across Slovak and Czech collections.
It’s been almost ten years since we’ve started to work on Web umenia (”Web of art”) at the Slovak National Gallery (SNG).
Web umenia is an online catalog of artworks from the collections of Slovak and Czech galleries, developed inhouse by lab.SNG – an R&D unit at the Department of Digital Collections and Services. The on-line catalogue runs on top of our collection management system (CMS) CEDVU (Central Registry Of Works Of Art). An heir to the tradition of central planning of the Czechoslovak socialist state, CEDVU is both a collection management system used by all state-registered galleries in Slovakia, developed and maintained by Slovak National Gallery and an external company.
Web umenia covers not only Slovak galleries, but a rising number of Czech ones too - broadening our scope, both in terms of collections covered and content development. It mainly consists of artwork and artist records, harvested from the CMS along with the images. Although artwork and artist records vastly exceed other types of content on Web umenia in numbers (more than 170,000 artworks and 9,900 artists), there are two other important types: articles and collections (”original content”).
Original content
Articles are dealing not only with art-related topics such as architecture, industrial heritage, or even broader ones such as religion and identity. What binds them together is the focus on artworks and artists from the gallery collections.
Their reading time ranges between 5 - 15 minutes and they are either written by our small internal team of writers (Lukáš Štepanovský, Zuzana Koblišková), colleagues from SNG, East Slovak Gallery, or Central Slovak Gallery, or external contributors.
Collections, another content type, has a slightly different structure: introductory text with artworks curated in a certain order on a grid, selected according to an exhibition, art-historical term, or non-art-historian-readable topics such as sailing, winter, or orient.
Copy-wise, collections could easily be confused with gallery collections - inspired by Art UK, we should probably change the name to “curations”.
Neither articles nor collections are translated to English - you can get an idea about the “text content” on Web umenia from the user interface copy and SNG artwork metadata.
We are not planning to extend or localize the original content to English at the moment, but the internationalized artwork metadata on the CMS side allows us to place our English language collection metadata where our English language audiences are. Examples include Collections on Europeana (Impressionist paintings from the Slovak National Gallery) or Google Art Stories (Slovak Sceneries).
Content formats
Artwork in detail is a content format with most articles published to this date, not least because it is historically the first format we’ve started in 2015 when Web umenia was publicly launched.
The articles zoom in on one artwork (in a few cases; a series of artworks by one artist). Our research looking at the motivations of SNG visitors (executed during the research phase of the new SNG website) has shown that the visitors look out for artist names, searching the web for mentions, in relation with the planned gallery visit and in other contexts.
The pageviews of articles from this content format prove that this is true also when searching on Google and landing on Web umenia - articles on Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia or Messerschmids series of heads rate among the most visited ones.
Artist in detail is an expanded take on this content format - dealing with an artist and one aspect of his work, or series of his/her artworks.
The first part of the format covers both a short artist bio and introduction to his work, the second deals with one specific aspect of his/her work (see “Bazovský’s hamlets”).
One of the most successful content formats is “Art warm-up” - based on a series of videos commissioned and produced by SNG education department, aimed at younger audiences, parents, and teachers, dealing on topics such as Humanism, Peace and Conflict, Architecture in a city, or Religion and Art. The article contains the embedded video, along with the instructions for the teachers in schools . The artworks featured in the videos serve as the backbone upon which teachers might build during the school classes or assignments for the students.
Another original content format is “Picks from Web umenia by…” where artists, curators and other cultural actors are invited to select a number of favourite artworks from the collections covered in Web umenia and write a few lines about them. The artist names in SEO-friendly page titles prove again to be a reliable source of traffic, but that in itself wouldn’t necessarily mean that the visitors stay on the page and read it. With the selection being quite modest and texts snappy and lively, this format rates among the successful ones (judging from the average time spent on the page)
Some content formats such as “artist interview” don’t work that well - they were made for another (print) medium and published online. The average time on page is much lower than estimated / expected reading time (as calculated from the number of words), pointing at the fact that this long-form content format is not suited for a website which structures the attention of the visitor along a more fast-paced sequence of page visited, where the article (visited from Google search) serves as a springboard to explore collections.
Search engines
Make sure all your content is properly indexed on search engines. For better or worse, two thirds of our traffic comes from organic search. If our articles and collections don’t show up in the search results, direct traffic wont make up for the loss. Last year we found out collections are not indexed on Google, making their pageviews low. Fixing this takes time - it’s better to avoid it and not wait for the pages to be indexed by Google, even if you submit a fixed sitemap to Google Search Console.
Look for cues in the most visited Site Content on Google Analytics, or other tool of your choice. Top performing searches and pages on your site will be a hint for the editorial plan. Seeing that the Art Nouveau in Slovakia performs well thanks to the SEO friendly title (Secesia na Slovensku), we decided to prepare a format covering the well-known art movements from 19th and 20th century in Slovakia, with the “Cubism in Slovakia” following. Look at the source of traffic for particular pages to see what content performs well and try to find out and scale that content
Anticipate and scan the Internet for meme-worthy art that you could use as a source of inspiration. We’ve seen a steep rise in pageviews of one of our articles, dealing with Saint paintings by Dorota Sadovská, a well-known painter from Slovakia. Her painting of Saint Francis of Assisi, printed on a dinner plate was given to Pope Francis by the Slovak president Zuzana Čaputová during her recent visit. This present was widely discussed by the public and media, making it the subject of memes and subsequent Google searches, making the article Dorota Sadovská - Svätci a Svätice the most viewed articles of last year.