Keepthinking | Content/Collection Management System & Digital Design for Museums | London & New York

The homepage leads with imagery, and highlights several key entry points for the visitor to access the website pages. Rather than starting with the search, instead key types of content are highlighted: images and documents. The homepage also features entry points to content items in the archive (categories by images and documents), news articles and social media feed. Key topics and stories are shown, as well as key pages from the website. The homepage finishes with the same footer as used throughout - which highlights the social media activities of the official Chaplin channels.

A search is an important feature of any archive, and the search for this archive includes several different filters and fields through which a search can be refined. Once a search has been performed, the user can also sort the order of their results and choose between column view or a row view, focusing on images or details. The importance of the browse is also clear. Key content types are highlighted below the search bar, to enable browsing and discovery. In addition, key series types (with highlighted records) are picked up on this landing page for user perusal.

Collated, curated series of records are gathered into Topics. These are designed to serve as another entry point into the collections, grouping together key objects on key themes of Charlie Chaplin’s life.

Stories are another way of theming content around key archive objects and records. The stories landing page shows the stories available to read, with previews of the content as well as a filter of the subjects through which the stories are organised.

The single story is an image led piece of text-based content. The integration of images and records within a single story breaks up the content for the reader, and allows for immediate quoting and referral. Related content prevent users from hitting a ‘closed door’ and helps them to keep progressing throughout the collection.

A single object is a visually led page. The image of an object can be zoomed in and examined in more detail, and high resolution imagery can be requested from the team. Users can request a login for research/publication purposes, enabling them to access private content, high-res images and in-depth content hidden from the public web-collection. Social media sharing is a key option offered to the visitor, and a selection of fields from the object

Another example of a single object.