AMHERST — The Five College Consortium launched a major update of a website that gives students, researchers, and art lovers around the world access to over 100,000 objects from the shared collections of five campus art museums and nearby Historic Deerfield. The website — Five College Museums: Collections Online — is the public portal of a new collections management system that significantly improves how these institutions identify, track, and share information through simplified searches.
The new system is the result of a collaboration among Five Colleges Inc. and the Hampshire College Art Gallery, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Smith College Museum of Art, the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, as well as Historic Deerfield, an independent museum closely affiliated with the campuses. London-based software agency Keepthinking carried out the design and development of the system.
The previous system, a breakthrough for its time, was developed more than 30 years ago and had become outdated and increasingly inaccessible. John Davis, president of Historic Deerfield, and Tricia Paik, director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, co-chair the museum leadership council that oversaw the redesign effort.
“When Five Colleges in the 1990s embarked on this unique and ambitious initiative for six separate museums to share a single database, options for collections management systems were limited,” Paik said. “It was finally time to harness the best of what today’s technology has to offer. With this new website, our shared collections are more easily searchable for our campuses, our Western Massachusetts communities, and from anywhere across the globe.”
Added Davis, “our consortium of six museums has created a powerful resource that would have been impossible for any of the individual museums to accomplish on their own.”
The effort became an opportunity for reimagining the way museum collaborations can share their online collections with each other and the world.
“We can now feel the personalities of each of the six museums coming across to the public in a way that wasn’t possible with the earlier system,” said Lorenzo Conte, director of the Hampshire College Art Gallery and leader of the team that designed the Collections Online website. “The online interface is much more intuitive and won’t require specialized knowledge for people to find what they’re looking for. It’s designed to help people more serendipitously discover things.”
For example, a search for ‘sport and athletics’ returns images of dozens of art objects, ranging from ancient sculpture to 21st-century photographs. Click on the picture of a woman swinging a golf club, and the user will find that it’s a pastel on paper, created by James Champney in 1897 and part of Historic Deerfield’s collection. The accompanying text offers a biography of Champney and a description of the image and how it was received at the time of its creation. Also included are images and links to works by Champney at the other museums, as well as information about Historic Deerfield and its collection.
“This is truly a groundbreaking model for how a variety of museums can work together to connect, leverage, and facilitate access to collections data,” said Sarah Pfatteicher, executive director of Five Colleges Inc.
Collections Online is underwritten by Five Colleges Inc. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities supported the work of museum staff members in the early phases of planning and helped them prepare their collection data for the new system.
