Hello team Cultural Content
This week I’m switching focus from cultural social media to web content.
In particular, I’m looking at Explore the Collections.
What do I mean by ‘Explore the Collections’?
Search the collections interfaces typically look something like this:
This works just fine for specialists who already have a reasonable sense of what collection you hold. But it can be a bit baffling to be faced with a search bar if you don’t have that knowledge. What if you’re not after something specific – but wanting to browse, immerse yourself, and find out more? That’s what a good explore the collections section does.
Designing content to stimulate curiosity or encourage exploration is trickier than designing for a specific search enquiry. I’ll take you through a few examples of cultural websites that have done this well in the context of their collections.
V&A: Explore as a gateway into collections
In 2021 V&A layered the more immersive Explore the Collections on top of their existing Search the Collections. In speaking about the change Head of Digital Media, Kati Price, said “We hope it’s a bit of a rabbit hole to get lost in the collection because there are so many wonderful stories that can be told.”
This user pathway through the site is essentially:
This is a step above a typical Search the Collections user journey, which looks like this:
The key differences with V&A’s Explore the Collection are:
Adding a series of themes beneath the search bar on the collections search page
Building new collection theme pages which aggregate gallery information, objects records in that theme, and related articles and multimedia.
These differences are important because they turn collections search away from being a tool for the initiated/specialists into a tool for serendipitous discovery – a gateway to countless immersive rabbit holes through the V&A’s collection.
British Museum: Explore as a way of promoting the in-person visit
The British Museum has a slightly different starting point to meet a similar user journey.
At https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/ you choose a particular Museum gallery page from a list.
Each gallery page here is really rich; providing users with a map, virtual tour, facts about the gallery, highlight objects, a timeline, videos, blog posts and a link through to collections online.
Nestling browse-able content under your gallery structure is quite a neat way of organising your ‘rabbit holes’ of discovery through the physical site. It’s neat because the number of galleries is more finite than the number of possible themes (so it’s less work). But also because while people are explore online they come to tacitly link their discoveries with specific rooms and galleries on site.
I’m under no illusions about how much time, resource and expertise it takes to create either of these examples of Explore the Collections. The V&A has 1,009 people registered as working for it on LinkedIn, the British Museum has 949. The resources organisations of this size can deploy are correspondingly larger than for most cultural organisations.
Peace Museum: Simple (but effective) collections explore
The Peace Museum in Bradford lists just four paid staff on their website.
During lockdown they created a really simple but effective way to explore 100 objects that they digitised while closed.
It can be a bit dispiriting to look at the web content a much larger institution can put together. What’s refreshing about the Peace Museum is that they haven’t been afraid to create Explore the Collections content with 100 searchable collections items. Sure, 100 is a much smaller number than the tens of thousands - millions of objects the national museums can digitise. But in being very strategic and curated about which objects they would digitise, this museum has been able to present their collections in a coherent narrative, and design a simple set of pages that effectively guide users through what collections they hold (and by extension – what they stand for and the themes that guide their collections policy).
The user journey through to collections records on their site is:
It’s essentially very similar to the V&A and British Museum examples, just on a smaller scale. But with that smaller scale they’ve got a high level of focus; choosing representative objects from across the collection and concentrating on the messages and thematic themes they want to communicate in this selection.
That’s it for this week 👋
We’re always looking for new voices and contributors working in cultural content. So if you’ve feel like you’ve got a good story to tell, and would like to share it with the cultural content community, drop me an email (georgina@onefurther.com).
Keep creating great content 👍
Georgina