Our Client

Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History is dedicated to increasing knowledge about the past, present, and future of the Earth’s plants, animals, people, and their cultures. Its collection of millions of objects includes some of the rarest and most popular artifacts ever to be found in a museum. The Field Museum is also the permanent home of Sue, the worlds largest, most complete, and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever to be unearthed.

With hundreds of anthropologists, zoologists, paleontologists, activists, researchers and educators working across the globe, the Field Museum is constantly making significant advances in many scientific fields, helping to advance human knowledge, and increase public understanding and appreciation of the world in which we live.

What They Needed

Virtually unchanged for nearly a decade, the Field Museum’s existing website was no longer able to deliver the functionality, presence, and versatility required by the museum. Not only did it have a dated look-and-feel, but content editors and contributors faced a bottleneck when attempting to update information on the site or create microsites for visiting exhibits because only a small number of staff were able to modify pages on the site.

As part of the new site, Field wanted to open up access to information about millions of items stored in its collections management system. In addition to sharing its collections with the public, the museum also wanted the scientific community to be able to access specific data relevant to their areas of study. Scientists and researchers at the museum needed a consistent, resuable, and maintainable set of tools to share and collaborate with colleagues around the globe.

How We Helped

Palantir collaborated with the Field Museum and interactive agency Manifest Digital to develop not just a new website, but a whole new online strategy for the museum. Palantir and Field developed ways for workflows to be more streamlined and democratic, for the site to be easily expandable with cohesive microsites, and for content to be shared across all departments and users.

The site was built using Drupal 7, the latest version of the leading open source content management platform. When work began, Drupal 7 was still almost a year away from stable release, but given the the project’s requirements, it was clear that in order to solve the institution’s current issues and be able to avoid future problems it was necessary to use the most current technology available. During development, Palantir monitored code changes in Drupal core, and helped port a number of essential Drupal 6 modules to Drupal 7.

Members of the Field Museum’s Web team worked out of Palantir’s Chicago office several days a week during the peak of the development process to help build the new site. This collaboration provided an unprecedented level of insight to the members of the Field team responsible for maintaining and extending the site.

To make it easier for more people within the Field Museum to upload, edit, and publish content on the new site, Palantir implemented the Workbench suite of Drupal modules. Workbench can be configured to provide either default editorial workflow states (like Draft, Needs Review, and Published), or custom states as needed. Using Workbench, a student intern working in the Botany department can now create content for a new exhibit page and upload it to the site, where a department chair or senior scientist can review or edit the content, and then publish it to the live site. Researchers and scientists can also maintain their own personal pages on the site.

To enable the Field Museum to create small, independent microsites for their headline exhibits, Palantir developed a Drupal 7 installation profile that not only includes the necessary modules and libraries, but also configures each microsite based on information collected during the install process, aggregates media from other sites, and provides a pair of themes to serve as the basis for per-site customizations. With this installation profile, the Field Museum’s Web team can quickly download, install and create microsites dedicated to individual exhibits that fit within the overall site architecture and look and feel. While these microsites are designed to be created and installed quickly, they are not necessarily “temporary” - the Museum plans to keep these sites active even after the exhibits close.

Palantir also made it possible for millions of items in the Field Museum’s collection to be accessed outside of the museum’s internal network for the first time. Collection data in stored in Field’s EMu collection management system is now indexed using the powerful Apache Solr search platform, which is able to perform full-text search, faceted search, rich document handling, and geospatial search.

This collection data can be integrated with Drupal-based tools to navigate, display, aggregate, and map the data compiled by researchers around the world. Much in the same way that the new website removed the content publishing bottleneck, the EMu integration makes it much easier for researchers and staff to share information about different collections at the Field Museum. Collection data can be accessed by other sites or software applications, creating a powerful tool for scientific researchers to search and share data related to their specific fields of study.

The Upshot

The Field Museum’s new site, launched in March 2011, is not only a showcase for the institution and its collections, exhibitions, research efforts, and educational outreach, it’s also a platform for future growth.