(Deze blogpost is ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands op de Pure Sign website.)
On February 25th, the Flemish Art Collection (Vlaamse Kunstcollectie) launched a virtual museum about the Belgian artist and painter James Ensor on www.jamesensor.eu. This website was built using popular open source technology such as Drupal, CollectiveAccess and Apache Solr.
The implementation of the collection management backend system and public website was done by Pure Sign in collaboration with Koba.
The Flemish Art Collection is a structural partnership between 3 museums in Flanders: KMSK (Antwerp), Groeningemuseum (Bruges) and the MSK (Ghent). The launched website about James Ensor is the first in a series of websites planned by the Flemish Art Collection, to promote Flemish artists internationally.
Collection management
For the implementation of the collection management software that powers the website, CollectiveAccess was chosen. CollectiveAccess is open source webbased software for managing catalogues, collections and archives. All data and images for the artworks of James Ensor have been exported from the variety of software packages currently used by the different museums, and subsequently imported into a central CollectiveAccess repository.
For the public representation of the works, the open source CMS Drupal was chosen for building the website. To connect both systems, Drupal modules were written to fetch the data from CollectiveAccess through SOAP webservices, and integrate that data into Drupal nodes. Part of this integration functionality is already made available as a module on drupal.org. Meanwhile we are working hard to expand the functionality and possibilities of this integration module, as well as making it more user friendly towards non-technical users.
Collection on the website
Website visitors kan explore the work of James Ensor through the "Collection" menu item, and this in various ways. The search functionality was built using the open source search software Apache Solr. This powerful search engine technology integrates very well with Drupal through the ApacheSolr Drupal module and related modules.
By using the Faceted search features of Apache Solr it is possible to narrow down on the search results by museum or keyword. It's also possible to sort the results.
Apart from the search functionality it's also possible to discover the work of Ensor through the thematic collection presentations. The visitor can select one of the 10 available themes. This gives the user an overview of the most important pieces and more information on the importance of this theme on Ensor's work.
A third way to explore the work of the painter from Ostend is through the selection of Ensor admirers. A couple of prominent Ensor admirers created a selection of their preferred works, including more information on their choice.
Interactivity
Besides showcasing the paintings of this great artist, the website also provides interactivity to the visitor: they can create and save their own personal collection of preferred artworks. Apart from that the visitor to the website can also share his or her favorite piece through the best-known social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Drupal modules
Below is a list of some of the most important Drupal modules or module groups that were necessary to create this website:
- Views
- CCK
- Filefield / Imagefield / Imagecache
- CollectiveAccess integration modules
- Display Suite
- Apache Solr
- Internationalization
- Flag
- Content profile
- Nodequeue
- Service Links
- WYSIWYG
- Quicktabs
Besides those, a lot of other useful modules were installed to provide supporting functionality.
Press
The launch of this website has been covered extensively in the (Belgian) media and newspapers:
More info
For more information about this project you can contact Sven Decabooter or leave a comment below.