Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections

Gems of Earth and Air

February 2015 – May 2015

Brief: Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections had amassed numerous separate PostgreSQL databases with limited online access. They were in the process of migrating all into a single instance of the EMu collections management system and needed a new unified web interface. Initial attempts had proved unsatisfactory in design and functionality. This beta site, aka Gems of Earth and Air, was to prove the viability through a subset of collections, according to readiness of collections data.

Roles: Consultant, systems architect and developer.

Solution: This was a bespoke solution using a full-stack development process. Working with the Heads of IT, Library and Archives, and digital collections at the Museum, I delivered a new, unified online system that brought together three collections (Life, Earth, and Archives), with narrative-driven browsing and fine-grained search. Following requirements elicitation in Balsamiq, I conceived a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture using the IMu API and Twig templates with Bootstrap for a responsive web site. Each stage was documented.

URL: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/collections/ (via archive.org)

Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections Online home page, beta: access to Life, Earth and Archives collections, together with a separate 'Featured' section — OUMNH Collections Online home page

OUMNH Features page showing thumbs for 'Gems of Earth and Air', a fossil, the Corsi Collection, Flying Icons and William Smith Online — OUMNH Collections Online: Features

OUMNH page for 'Gems of the Air' Feature comprising a main image (lepidoptera butterfly) and associated material (various lepidoptera thumbs) and a further section with thumbs to find out more — OUMNH Collections Online: Gems of the air

Advanced Search of MNH Collections comprising a web form and help text alongside. Some of the form fields themselves contain hints. — OUMNH: Advanced search of all collections

Advanced search of Life collections with 13 fields ranging from object number through order and higher classification to collection date — OUMNH Advanced search of Life collections

OUMNH Search results for the term 'Smith' (showing the last of 31 pages) with thumbnails, record titles and descriptions — OUMNH Collections Online: Search results for Smith

OUMNH lepidoptera specimen record (Hesperidae family), with photos — OUMNH Collections Online: Record for entomology specimen

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Jones’ Icones

Date: Sep 2014 – Oct 2014

Brief: Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History Archives & Library had received a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to make more widely available a rare collection of Lepidoptera paintings. This comprised an informational website and a crowdsourcing system to help identify hundreds of moths and butterflies from scanned images of 18th century paintings.

After initial attempts to develop a solution in-house had failed, I was approached as a consultant with the project on a tight timescale of about a month and a half.

Solution: For the website I first implemented a static site based on a responsive house style, with variations in colour and some differences in sections and content type. Most of the effort was on the second part: a customisation of DIYHistory, a system developed by the University of Iowa to crowdsource transcriptions, based on the Omeka CMS + Scribe theme + Scripto plugin + MediaWiki. I supplied documentation describing the development process, mainly in HTML, CSS and PHP, together with various issues for consideration such as watermarks and improving performance for hosting accounts.

The project was successfully completed on time and budget. Significant crowd-sourced contributions were subsequently made.

URL: www.jonesicones.com (via archive.org)