Today we launched Design Hub.
Design Hub represents another of the Powerhouse Museum’s next generation approaches to exploring museum collections integrating a magazine format with a detailed collection search (based on the museum’s recently launched OPAC2.0 project).
Design Hub aims to become the first place to look for design related resources – for designers, design students, and design enthusiasts. The project is the result of a 3 year Australian Research Council grant with the University of Western Sydney and University of Technology, and seeks to make accessible and meaningful the design collections of the world’s great design museums. The first museum design collection to be searchable is the Powerhouse Museum’s own and others will be progressively added over the next two years.
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The collection search currently utilises the same backend as OPAC2.0 but you will notice that it has a few features that are not yet implemented in the OPAC2.0 search (but will be shortly). The first of these is the ‘related searches’ which appears in the top right pane when search results are shown. ‘Related searches’ are search terms which retuen similar results, based on popularity.
The second feature is the ‘related objects’ which I am considering re-titling as ‘popular objects’. This displays the most popular object for that search term – which may not actually be amongst the first 5 or 10 object displayed in the main search result area.
We are still optimising the display of these features, but they are working reasonably well and will only get better and more ‘accurate’ as more searches are performed and more objects browsed.