British Museum leads development of World Timelines project.
The British Museum is about to go live with a web-based exhibition
to enable visitors from around the world to view artefacts from its
collection and 12 other UK museums.
The World Timelines exhibition, developed with £900,000 from the
Government's Capital Modernisation Fund, aims to engage visitors
from around the world with artefacts and information that they
might not otherwise have access to. Users can access areas of
interest through clickable interactive timelines.
The key technology challenge was to create an interface that made
all the artefacts and references easily accessible to the user in
ways that stimulate exploration and make the connections intuitive.
This meant that an effective user interface and a robust content
delivery system were vital.
Matthew Cock, project manager for World Timelines at the British
Museum, said, "We have a project manager, an editor, and two
designers working on the project. The design of the site has been a
collaborative effort, with numerous design workshops and meetings
to develop the site from concept, through prototyping and testing
to finished architecture and visual designs."
The museum awarded development contracts to Line Communications and
its technology partner Simulacra. Line helped the museum to develop
and design the web content, and Simulacra provided its Harmonise
content delivery software, which can run on a range of operating
systems, including Solaris and Windows.
The website will divide the globe into regions which can each be
drilled down into to find particularly periods of history.
Cock said Line was chosen after a lengthy selection process that
saw more than 60 initial expressions of interest. "As well as
offering a strong technical solution, we were impressed by their
creative approach to solving the tricky problem of presenting
timelines on a website," he said.
Tom Scott, research and development manager at Simulacra, said the
main technology challenge was the management of thousands of
meta-objects (code in a database to make web searching easier)
within a system that makes them instantly accessible.
"To encourage people to pull the information out of the system,
according to their own interests and agenda - rather than push the
information out of the system, according to someone else's
hierarchy - requires an advanced system that will catalogue, store
and deliver anything from the collection on demand and in context,"
he said.
Andrew Joly, Line' s director of production, said, "From the design
aspect, this project is all about helping the viewer make relevant
relationships between objects in the quickest and most intuitive
way. These relationships can be chronological, thematic or
geographical. The point is that the design must make these
relationships instantly clear, enabling the viewer to use the
navigational tools intuitively."