Ashmolean Museum Collections

The Ashmolean, the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, has embarked on a major project to digitise its vast collections, comprising over a million objects spanning 10,000 years. Keepthinking developed the Ashmolean Collections website to support the digitisation project, with the Qi CMS used for collections management as well as website content management.

The museum commissioned Keepthinking to improve upon the successful Jameel Centre Eastern Art Online website, released in 2010, to create a new site that could hold the complete Ashmolean collections once the digitisation project is finished. Updates to Qi and a brand new look and feel, in line with the museum’s main website, were also requirements of the Ashmolean team.

A fully responsive website with a strong focus on searching, bringing together (for the very first time) material from across the museum's curatorial departments. The wealth of objects and time periods called for creative ways of making searches easier. A ‘Browse’ section allows searching by keyword for users looking to browse the collections, whilst more specific searches made by advanced users such as archaeologists and experts can be performed through a comprehensive search engine on the ‘Search’ page.

The ‘Search’ page has been designed with the needs of multiple users in mind. Users looking to browse the collections can perform broad searched based on keywords, whilst in-depth searches made by advanced users such as archaeologists and experts can be performed through a comprehensive list of fields, including period, material, technique, weight and depth. The results page allows a user to easily refine their search further by using the timeline.

The individual object page presents the visitor with a high resolution image of the object which they can open in a lightbox and zoom in to see minute details. The amount of information about each object is varied - with some having inventory level information only, whereas others have very detailed cataloguing. The design is very adaptive to this. The catalogue information about each object also contains hyperlinks, and these keywords and names allow users to continue exploring and browsing the collection.

The integrated collection management and website solution have proven a great tool for the Ashmolean team. Having started from a million objects documented in paper records, a solution like Qi supports the ongoing digitisation work by disseminating newly digitised items every month, as the website and collections database are completely synchronised with Qi.