Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.
Building Better Search
By: Scott Williams
Have you ever searched for ‘Buddhism’ only to find records which contain exactly ‘Buddhism’ and not ‘Buddhist’, ‘Buddha’, or related concepts like ‘Maitreya‘ or ‘Bodhisattva‘? Frustrating, no? Problem Like many museum’s online collections, the Penn Museum’s first online collection site (launched in January) worked like the previous example and matched the terms a user searched for […]
Collections Website 2.0
By: Michael Condiff
In December 2011 we launched the Penn Museum Collections Website which gave the world access to more than 665,000 objects. It was the culmination of a massive effort from museum collections staff, I.T. staff, the Registrars Office and upper Management to get the data migrated from one collections management system to another and have it […]
One Search to Rule Them All
By: Michael Condiff
Over the past couple of months the I.T. department had received several inquires about not being able to find specific content on our website. After getting some time to test the Search Functionality myself I had to concur that what had been implemented at the launch of the website two years ago was not going […]