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Introducing Culture Object

November 14, 2014 - Rachel

I’ve just knocked up an extremely rough video capture introducing our latest thing – Culture Object.

TLDW: it’s a WordPress plugin which pulls in museum object records from various sources, including AdLib and Culture Grid.

Why might you want it? 

1) It bridges the gap between the “really easy but almost always horrible” plug and play option which the collections management companies tend to offer and the “we have lots of time and money to build a thing that interfaces with the CM API” option.

2) By bringing in the object data into a local store, you can have unprecedented control over how it appears on your site, and how you embed your objects into stories, blog posts, newsletters, sidebars and so on. We get very, very sad when we see museum collections online “over there” on a separate part of museum website – sometimes even on a separate site.

3) It provides the means – easily – to optimise for mobile, kiosks on-gallery, provision of API – and can do this with SEO and usability right at the heart of the process.

4) We believe very passionately that WordPress has huge potential for museum website content management. It’s open source, amazingly easy to use if you’re an editor, great to build for if you’re a developer, and has a world-wide community of people working on it. As such, we are building tools which will help provide routes into WordPress for museums and other non-profits.

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments. If you’re interested in using Culture Object on your site or are a collections management vendor who wants us to build a connector for your system, get in touch.