Cogapp celebrates launch of the new Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Technology

The construction of the new website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been a major technical undertaking.  As well as a database of over 340,000 artworks, the new website has had to integrate with numerous existing systems for ticketing, membership and donations, and email, as well as new systems for media hosting, analytics and image-zoom functionality. To achieve this, we undertook a twin-track approach, whereby our development team conducted technical discovery and exploration, while our design and user-experience teams designed and tested the approach for the new site. They maintained consistency across the work tracks by full weekly progress and planning meetings.

A major part of the website redevelopment has been a new content management system, Sitecore, chosen after an extensive research program because of its ability to separate content from presentation, thus providing support for multiple platforms, such as web and mobile, easy-to-use editor tools, such as workflow management, previewing and inline editing, and developer features such as APIs. Sitecore’s functionality has enabled customisation and integration with external systems, which was vital for this project.

We also provided new systems for working with information from the Museum's collections: a custom 'data processor' provided automatic matching of items against standard vocabularies to add categorisation terms for all artworks. This extra metadata provides detailed ways to search and filter items based on materials, techniques and location information, and can be fine tuned by curators using an editing interface.

A further component has been a new Solr search system, which provides a powerful faceted collections search, the general site searches, and helps showcase relationships between artworks, adding rich contextual links to further work in related areas.

Finally, we worked to make sure that the overall system was secure, resilient and performant. The clustered series of servers also integrated with a variety of backend systems, both internal and external to the Museum, including a bespoke system for user registration and login, Tessitura for event management and ticket booking, and Brightcove for storing video and audio content.