OK so far on our tour of Collections Online we’ve covered Objects and Topics. These wouldn’t exist without people.
People and organisations
Artists and makers, collectors, historical figures; basically people and organisations that are related to the objects or topics in the collection.
At these pages you can see basic biographical information, and all the topics and Collection Objects that relate to the person in question. You can filter objects by relationship such as see those that depict the person, or the objects the person made, or once owned, and so on. You’ll also see other instiutions or organisations content that relates to that person via the DigitalNZ results at the right of the page.
We’ve also got a few plans on how better to link to sources of info on artists and historical figures.
More interesting people to try out:
Next entry in this Collections Online introduction series: Places and Categories
Continuing our tour of the new version of Collections Online, today we look at topics. As well as making our collections accessible online, we’re also trying to make more of our knowledge and research available. One way we are doing that is through topics.
Topics
Topics range from simple groupings of content we want to highlight, through to more “authored” hierarchical narratives. They could be something that has come from months of research or simple an idea a curator had at lunch.
As well as creating new topics from current research, we’ve also gathered up some texts that were scattered around in disparate places, added them to Collections Online, and relating them to objects, people and other topics. This makes information that was previously difficult to find, or maybe only available if you could find the book, available to a wider range of people. It also enables us to share this content with collaborative projects such as DigitalNZ.
Take a look at a few examples:
And don’t forget, all these topics are linked to collection objects, parties, categories and other topics. Browse away!
Next entry in this Collections Online introduction series: People
Our new version of Collections Online has much more content, types of information, and browsing possibilities than before. There’s a bit too much to explain in one post so we’re going to break it up over a series of posts. First up, the obvious, Te Papa’s Collection.
Objects
Of course a primary goal of ours is to provide access to our collections. The Collection objects currently available on Collections Online come from the range of Te Papa’s collections, with some areas represented better than others. Objects and works from the entire Art, History and Pacific collections, and much of our Taonga Maori and Photography collections, have at least a basic record online, with many having images and extended descriptions. We also have many records from our natural environment collections. Currently there are over 150,000 records, with over 40,000 of those having images. We release more objects, images and upgraded information every day.
In this new version of Collection Online we’ve added a few features to better describe our objects:
- Multiple images, e.g. the Peugeot , or John Reynolds’ Cloud, and most of these are zoomable. We’ll be looking to add other types of media soon.
- Down the right hand side you’ll see related People, Places and Categories. We’ll talk about these individually in more detail later but in short, they add context and help you browse through to related objects and content
- Related objects, for example images from a Photograph album
- Just for fun, we’ve also added a randomiser. You can access this from the Collections Online home page, and we’ve also got a random object on the main Te Papa homepage.
Next entry in the Collections Online tour: Topics
