The magic of small databases
I run a little agency in the UK who works with museums to help them with digital. A large part of this is getting collections online.<p>Some years ago we commissioned a developer to make CultureObject[0], a free and open source WordPress plugin to make it easier to ingest collections data for display on the web. At the heart it's a glorified data importer, and many people just use the CSV mode to sync and import collections data.<p>It requires some dev effort - we've built an add-on which makes this easier but there's no denying that search, faceting and display needs knowledge of wordpress development.<p>Three years ago we then launched The Museum Platform[1] which is a more SaaS based model - we take away the need for dev skills and ask clients to just send us a CSV and any related media and we do the hard work. It's WordPress again but a modified version where we also facilitate storytelling and narrative around the ingested collections.<p>The interesting thing about this journey is that the requirement to "get a collection online" is apparently and theoretically easy. But the reality is it gets hard quite quickly as the need for search / filtering appears, and it gets harder still as scale comes into it. 1000 records is fine. 100,000 gets quite a bit harder.<p>There are also many subtleties - particularly with museum collections. "Location" of a record could be where it was collected, or where it is now, or where it's on display. Relational stuff is hard, as are taxonomies and authority terms. It's hard to generalise and it's hard to scale.<p>[0] <a href="https://cultureobject.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://cultureobject.co.uk/</a>
[1] <a href="https://themuseumplatform.com/" rel="nofollow">https://themuseumplatform.com/</a>