ArtsConnectEd
I wrote the bulk of this site that combines the assets of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center into a single education gateway. It’s been a few years since we wrote it and traffic has skyrocketed leading to some poor response times on aging hardware. Be patient, we’re rewriting it for Web 2.0 on modern hardware.
What works
This is the third iteration of this site. The collection features were really advanced at the time. No museum site offered the ability to collect and comment on works of art and I’m happy to have written one that’s really taken off. I wrote some really complex heavy database lifting that happens behind the scenes to get data out of the proprietary collections management system into a web accessible datasource.
What I’d do differently
This site has sat untouched for quite some time. We are taking the time to rewrite it for Web 2.0, but it would have been nice to have a site that could have scaled better. For a while, we were really suffering from success. It would have been nice to plan for the integration of other museums’ resources.