Museums and the web logo

The Portable Antiquities Scheme website, which I rebuilt over a period of around 10 months from 2009 – March 2010 has just won an award at the international ‘Museums and the Web’ conference held in Philadelphia. I originally entered the Scheme’s website just to try and get it a bit more exposure in the international museum sector and it came first in the ‘Research/online collection’ category against some quite stiff opposition (last year’s section was won by the V&A!) Surprisingly for me, it also gathered votes in the people’s choice award, which makes me feel very humble. I actually found out that the site had won, via twitter whilst checking in on foursquare to the Ghazala beach bar in Sharm el Sheikh. Power to the web!

Other entrants included:

• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
• New York Botanical Gardens
• J. Paul Getty Trust
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• National Museum of American History
• Museum of the City of New York
• Windsor Historical Society
• the STERNA consortium
• Steve in Action Project Team
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum Victoria
• Powerhouse Museum
• Centraal Museum
• Queensland Museum
• The Strong (National Museum of Play, Toy Hall of Fame, ICHEG, National Toy Hall of Fame)

The site was created using Zend Framework (started around version 0.7 and now runs on version 1.11.3 – needs upgrading) and uses Ubuntu, Solr, MySQL and extensive use of YQL to power the various features that you’ll find. I’m really pleased that the site was recognised at such a prestigious conference and it is testament to all the people who contribute towards the Scheme’s success.

ICOMON Homepage

The design is pretty sparse and the colour scheme is simple as well. However, it is another website that I have constructed on the textpattern platform. However, I think that this might be the last time I use that as the basis of a website as it seems to be getting left behind a bit by the competition. Shame, as fundamentally it is rather good.