Posts by theme: Museums
Museums and cultural institutions make up a large part of Palantir's business. We like working with them because we support their mission and they tend to have fun, twisted problems to solve. They like working with us because we tend to have fun solving twisted problems.
And we both like it because Palantir uses the industry-leading Drupal Web content management platform, and Drupal rocks for museums. In fact, it rocks so much that we'll be giving a workshop on Drupal at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver April 13-17th.
Palantir is proud to unveil the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's latest masterpiece: their new Web site built in Drupal 6 with a design by Studio Blue. This comes on the heels of the new Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts site, which Palantir launched earlier this year.
At Palantir, we frequently work with museums and universities that need to integrate large legacy data systems.
In the case of museums that's usually a Collections Management System and/or a Digital Asset Management system (DAM) of some kind, holding information on thousands or hundreds of thousands of works in the museum's collection. In the case of a university, that's usually course information and availability coming from a registrar system. As a result, we've gotten a disturbing amount of experience integrating with oddball 3rd party systems. At last week's Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis, Tiffany Farriss and I ran a workshop on remote data strategies based on the work we've done on several different museum sites. Of course, as a pre-conference workshop attendance wasn't that big (even though we did fill the room), so for those who weren't at the conference we decided to put the information up online. The slides themselves aren't that useful, but consider this the novelization of the presentation.
For those playing our home game, there's sample code provided at the end. It uses Amazon as a remote data source, and requires just the base amazon.module.
Much to the chagrin of every teacher I had in elementary school, I have always loved to talk.
And, like many of the traits that seemed negative during my youth (math nerd, sci fi geek, computer dork), my gift of gab has definitely come in handy as an adult. As such, it should come as no surprise that I'm still talking and, of late, it's been around content management.
We have a brand-new writeup on the Art Institute of Chicago’s Collections site for your consumption at Drupal.org.
It provides insight on the steps Palantir took in creating their new Collections site. In particular, it highlights how Palantir went about integrating the AIC’s vast existing collections data into their new Drupal platform.