MCN 2024

With the approaching end-of-life of Drupal 7, our ongoing challenges of managing separate websites for museum visitors and online collections, the construction of a new physical museum, and an impending rebranding, it was clear that we needed to reevaluate the overall architecture of Gilcrease's online ecosystem. In this session, we will present a case study and share the lessons we've learned from the decoupled migration of the Gilcrease Museums Online Collections.

You might be wondering, what exactly is a decoupled website? What benefits, drawbacks, and compromises did we encounter during the transition to a new website architecture? What are our plans post-launch? We will address these questions and many more.

We'll share relatable experiences and obstacles that small to medium-sized museums often face, demonstrating the strategies we used to “lift and shift” the website migration while balancing innovation with budget constraints and timelines. Throughout this process, we aimed to minimize technical debt and adhere to a reasonable timeline, despite the temptation to add new features. Sometimes, we resisted; other times, we had to compromise.

We will also share key technical highlights such as:
- A brief high-level overview of the Gilcrease collections systems architecture including TMS, Library, and ArchivesSpace custom integration with DAMS and collections website.
- Overview of the Piction to Drupal integration and delta sync.
- Building, serving, and presenting IIIF manifests with Drupal and Clover IIIF.
- Enhancing performance and SEO with decoupled architecture.

In August 2022, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) at Newfields was awarded a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the comprehensive redesign of their online collection, including a complete overhaul of the underlying infrastructure. The project, Open and Integrated: Redesigning Newfields’ Online Collections, will be completed in August 2024, resulting in the expansion of Newfields’ existing online art and historical collections into a single, integrated collections portal (https://collections.discovernewfields.org/). In addition to the delivery of art collection data and assets, the integrated collections portal will serve as an access point to the IMA’s full exhibition history, archival collection descriptions, item-level information, and digitized audio and visual materials from the Indianapolis Museum of Art historical and exhibition files, the Indianapolis Museum of Art archives, and Stout Reference Library artist files. The goals and deliverables of the collections portal redesign—led by a cross-departmental team—considered a variety of technical approaches, ethical considerations, and sustainable practices that have been central to this two-year project:

In this session, Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property, will provide attendees with an introduction to Local Contexts (https://localcontexts.org/), whose Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels “offer Indigenous communities a tool to add cultural and historical context and cultural authority to cultural heritage content in their own local digital heritage archives as well as in digital archives, libraries, museums and other digital repositories globally.” Following this introduction, Anne will detail Newfields’ implementation of Local Contexts’ Notices and Labels within the museum’s CMS and how that cataloged information is presented to increase understanding and respectfully care for the IMA collection while grounding Indigenous rights.