Sector(s)
Team Members
The tiny town of Lewes, Del., is a mighty hub for our nation’s history. Founded in 1631, it’s the first town in the first state of the United States. That’s why, when The Lewes Historical Society at historiclewes.org needed help in organizing its extensive collection of artifacts, they needed to entrust an agency who knew how to handle valuables like this with kid gloves.
Historic Lewes also needed Drupal’s robust content management platform, in tandem with its flexibility and scalability, to reliably handle the museum’s collection of more than 25,000 artifacts. Inclind Inc. helped the Lewes Historical Society painstakingly preserve history on a site that would serve as the access point to their collections and databases spanning hundreds of years to students, researchers or anyone with a hint of curiosity for history.
About the project
This project required a huge time investment. Since 1962, the Historical Society has collected objects, archives, photographic images and library materials that document life in Lewes and on the Lower Delaware Bay. From works of art, furnishings, papers and photographs, to small wooden crafts, books and everything in between. Their oldest piece dates from c. 1580, but memories continue to be catalogued from just the other day. Regardless, Historic Lewes sought a faster, faceted collection search experience that included map-based results, so Inclind designed a responsive website, featuring a mobile walking tour experience that was content manageable.
Drupal 8 was the solution for the Society’s demand for a hosting platform that would streamline site maintenance and deliver speed, reliability and security. Drupal also delivered the more robust storytelling and events capabilities needed to connect the site to real-time visitors to town in need of purchasing tickets for museum tours or self-guided tours throughout Lewes.
Flexible Content
Inclind implemented a set of paragraph formats to allow content managers the flexibility of producing pages, events or blog posts with sections of engaging responsive layouts.
PastPerfect Synchronization
Inclind implemented a feeds-based solution to pull data from PastPerfect into Drupal. A custom feed parser was developed to ensure data stored in the Drupal system was appropriately massaged. PastPerfect is the leader in collection and contact management software that’s used by more than 10,000 museums worldwide. The software sorts search categories into: photos, archives, graves, artifacts, buildings and library; tens of thousands of items could then be further filtered by year.
Faceted Collection Search
An Apache Solr-based faceted search experience was designed / developed. This experience provides visitors access to seeing a diverse amount of collection information stored, including:
- Graves
- Buildings
- Artifacts (Books, photographs, objects)
Thanks to diligent custom facet work by Inclind, visitors are now able to filter their search by year range, keyword and many other attributes, depending on their type of search. The search experience is now blazing fast and completely friendly to any device visitors might be using to browse through some of America’s earliest history.
Mobile Walking Tours
Visitors to Lewes can now conveniently enjoy the ability of taking a historic walking tour via their phone or tablet. Content managers also have the convenience of setting up artifacts as mapped waypoints and complementing that information with audio or video media to provide an even more engaging experience. These walking tours can be easily managed in Drupal and benefit from some slick geolocation magic. If you happen to be in town, take a mobile walking tour.
Project Outcome
Inclind’s starting point was the Society’s existing site that was a bit clunky, cumbersome and dated. It was in need of a good dusting for an easier historical collection search experience. After we integrated Drupal 8 and the PastPerfect software, a historical item can be selected and easily located via Google Maps where the item once took place or once existed in the area today. The integration and redesign of historiclewes.org now makes the site mobile-friendly, allowing visitors to take their own self-guided walking tour, door to door to quaint buildings in town, cemeteries in the historic district and more.
In addition to organizing and managing the massive historical collection, Inclind also helped to add funds to the Society’s ecommerce, selling museum tickets, event tickets, posters and more fundraising items online; Inclind also improved the overall organization of the calendar feature on historiclewes.org for a more streamlined search and convenient connection or notification onto each visitor’s calendar.
Why Drupal was chosen
Because Historic Lewes was already comfortable with the Drupal 6 platform, a migration to Drupal 8 was a natural fit. Drupal was also the best choice because the site is used as a content hub for interactive museum exhibits. This way, all content on historiclewes.org, as well as any edits, exports and updates, rolls through as the single source on this hub to enable interoperability between diverse applications.
Historic Lewes also wanted history to come to life, so to speak, with more robust storytelling features that could also be mobile-friendly, allowing visitors to map each building, artifact, gravesite, artwork and more to the actual geographical site throughout the town of Lewes. Drupal was also the answer for Historic Lewes’ desire to integrate with Shopify for vital ecommerce profits that funds the organization via museum tickets, event tickets, posters and more fundraising items online.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
These Drupal 8 modules were critical to migration from Drupal 6, synchronization of external data sources, faceted search experiences and delivery of content to external digital experiences.
