British Museum blog

Searching the British Museum collection

Badges in the British Museum collection


Matthew Cock, Head of web, British Museum

When the British Museum first opened in 1759, free admission was granted to all ‘studious and curious persons’. In 2007 we took that idea a step further with the launch of our collection online. A gradual process has seen this facility grow since then from about 300,000 objects available to over two million.

Badges in the British Museum collection

Badges in the British Museum collection

We know from looking at visitor statistics that many thousands of people use the collection online, accounting for about a third of our web traffic – around 15.5 million page views a year. As well as building on this amazing resource by releasing a semantic web endpoint and creating online research catalogues that tap into it, we’re working to improve and update the search itself to make it easier to use.

Through surveys and talking to regular users inside and outside the Museum – and of course, using it ourselves – we are very aware that the current search could be improved. So a team of staff from the web, programming and collection documentation teams, together with Museum curators, have been working on improvements to the interface.

This process has coincided with a re-design of the whole website that incorporates several strands – wider pages, larger images and bigger text for example. We’re currently half way through the process of updating the collection search, and have made available a Beta release to give you the opportunity to try it out alongside the old version, and let us know what you think.

You can let us know whether you approve of the changes (or not!) and if there are any bugs in what we have done. We’d like your feedback so we can make adjustments to improve it before we finalise it.

But, it’s important to note that the release at this stage only shows about half of the overall work we’re undertaking. So far we’ve updated the search results page, with larger thumbnails and a revised design; the object record page, with a revised design and – again – larger images, and we’ve added an image gallery for when an object has more than one image.

These pages are currently only available from a straightforward keyword (“free text”) search, and there are no sorting options for the results at the moment. Work is currently ongoing to develop the interface on the “advanced search” facility and to add the sorting options that users can currently apply to their results.

We’d like your feedback as comments to this post, so that you can see what others have commented already – and we can feed back if useful on comments and questions for the whole user community to see.

The beta release of the new Collection online is available here: britishmuseum.org/system_pages/beta_collection_introduction.aspx

The current version that it will replace is available here: britishmuseum.org/collection

If you’d like to email any comments, you can send them to web@britishmuseum.org with COL BETA in your subject line.

If you would like to leave a comment click on the title

Filed under: At the Museum, Collection, Research

6 Responses - Comments are closed.

  1. Putalia says:

    Amazing! Congratulations for the initiative!

    Like

  2. [...] The British Museum have released their new collection online interface (in beta). This initial release includes the free text basic search, search results, object details page, and a new image gallery.  Here’s my search on Roman Spoons.  I love how they have improved the images in the search results. And the object-page layout is pretty swish.  You can check out Matthew Cock’s a blog post about it. [...]

    Like

  3. Rosina Buckland says:

    All very exciting! On the results page, the larger thumbnails and arrangement in horizontal rows are a big improvement. In the object record, I really appreciate having the image gallery (especially useful for handscrolls and Japanese illustrated books).

    The Advanced Search is already very powerful, so I look forward to seeing the improvements to that. The provenance search seems to have disappeared at present, but on that it would greatly help for the results to be displayed as in the normal search (i.e. with thumbnails), and not in a list.

    Keep up the good work!

    Like

  4. Ryan Wallace says:

    The new interface looks very clean. Nice work.

    Are there plans to include links to images in the semantic endpoint? I’m hoping to use it to integrate items from your collection into the Reciprocal Research Network (http://www.rrncommunity.org/).

    Like

  5. Rosina Buckland says:

    Is it possible to have an ‘AND NOT’ option? This would be useful for narrowing down results.

    Like

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 10,260 other followers

Categories

Follow @britishmuseum on Twitter

British Museum on Instagram

This is Room 56, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Mesopotamia 6000–1500 BC. It's the next in our gallery series for #MuseumOfTheFuture. Between 6000 and 1550 BC, Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (now Iraq, north-east Syria and part of south-east Turkey) witnessed crucial advancements in the development of human civilisation during the evolution from small agricultural settlements to large cities.
Objects on display in Room 56 illustrate economic success based on agriculture, the invention of writing, developments in technology and artistry, and other achievements of the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians, who lived in Mesopotamia at this time.
Objects found at the Royal Cemetery at Ur are of particular importance, and you can see the Royal Game of Ur in the foreground of this picture – the oldest board game in the world. Our next #MuseumOfTheFuture gallery space is Room 55, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Mesopotamia 1500–539 BC. The civilisations of Babylonia and Assyria flourished during the first millennium BC. Political developments resulted in the incorporation of the entire Near East into a single empire, while increased international contact and trade influenced the material culture of the region.
Room 55 traces the history of Babylonia under the Kassites and the growth of the Babylonian state and empire until it was taken over by the Persian King Cyrus in 539 BC.
'Boundary Stones' carved with images of kings and symbols of the gods record royal land grants. The development of the Assyrian state and empire, until its fall in 612 BC, is illustrated by objects excavated in its palaces. Mesopotamia’s highly developed literature and learning are demonstrated by clay tablets from the library of King Ashurbanipal (r. 668–631 BC) at Nineveh, written in cuneiform script. It's time for Room 54 in our #MuseumOfTheFuture gallery series – the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Anatolia and Urartu 7000–300 BC. Ancient Anatolia and Urartu form an important land link between Europe and Asia and lie where the modern Republic of Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and north-west Iran are located today. Objects in Room 54 show different cultures from prehistoric to Hellenistic times.
Examples of Early Bronze Age craftsmanship on display include a silver bull and cup, and business archives of Middle Bronze Age merchants illustrate trading between central Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Delicate gold jewellery and figurines date from the Hittite period, and Iron Age objects from Urartu include winged bulls and griffins that were used to decorate furniture. Next in our #MuseumOfTheFuture series of gallery spaces it's Room 53, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Ancient South Arabia. Ancient South Arabia was centred on what is now modern Yemen but included parts of Saudi Arabia and southern Oman. It was famous in the ancient world as an important source of valuable incense and perfume, and was described by Classical writers as Arabia Felix ('Fortunate Arabia') because of its fertility.
Several important kingdoms flourished there at different times between 1000 BC and the rise of Islam in the 6th century AD. The oldest and most important of these was Saba, which is referred to as Sheba in the Bible.
Room 53 features highlights from the Museum’s collection, which is one of the most important outside Yemen. The display includes examples of beautiful carved alabaster sculptures originally placed inside tombs, incense-burners and a massive bronze altar. You can see the East stairs in the background of this picture. We've reached Room 52 on our #MuseumOfTheFuture series of gallery spaces – the Rahim Irvani Gallery of Ancient Iran. Iran was a major centre of ancient culture. It was rich in valuable natural resources, especially metals, and played an important role in the development of ancient Middle Eastern civilisation and trade. Room 52 highlights these ancient interconnections and the rise of distinctive local cultures, such as in Luristan, during the age of migrations after about 1400 BC.
During the 6th century BC, Cyrus the Great founded a mighty Persian empire which eventually stretched from Egypt to Pakistan. Objects on display from this period include the Cyrus Cylinder (in the centre of the picture) and the Oxus Treasure (in the case to the left of the picture). Monumental plaster casts of sculptures from Persepolis are also displayed in Room 52 and on the East stairs.
The later periods of the Parthian and Sasanian empires mark a revival in Iranian culture and are represented through displays including silver plates and cut glass. The next gallery space in our #MuseumOfTheFuture series is Room 51, Europe and Middle East 10,000–800 BC. Farming began in the Middle East around 12,000 years ago, making possible the social, cultural and economic changes which shaped the modern world. It arrived in Britain around 6,000 years ago bringing a new way of life. This change in lifestyle meant people competed for wealth, power and status, displaying these through jewellery, weapons and feasting.
The objects on display in Room 51 show how the people of prehistoric Europe celebrated life and death and expressed their relationship with the natural world, the spirit world and each other. The object in the centre of this picture is the Mold gold cape, found in Flintshire in 1833 and dating to around 1900–1600 BC.
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 10,260 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2012/08/31/searching-the-british-museum-collection/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=ca8cc7cdd9
blog.britishmuseum.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-49
89930
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:EDTOICX6HVQWTCOFW2OKO7HCUGXS5EAT
<urn:uuid:82ba1131-9096-4ac5-909d-1faddbedebc9>
2014-11-24T03:42:27Z
192.0.78.12
sha1:KVK65I4J24VF2XS5FZI3GWSLRMFGHNIP
<urn:uuid:a4a870f6-735d-4e43-9007-a0f99819b6d9>
http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2012/08/31/searching-the-british-museum-collection/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=ca8cc7cdd9
length
response
<urn:uuid:d1efff67-cfe0-4307-a998-341cd13d36f7>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-23-156.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-49
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for November 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf