Reviewed by:
Matthew Garklavs, Electronic Resources Librarian
Pratt Institute Libraries
mgarklav@pratt.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/xewy-fa52
The Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London launched Explore the Collections in February 2021. This dynamic new platform was a project two years in the making. It’s an ambitious endeavor that brings together silos of information from the V&A’s collection, online editorial content, holdings from the National Art Library, and the museum archives.
Explore Collections was largely driven by user feedback. A usability study published on the V&A website in 2019 explains a lot of their design decisions. From a user experience standpoint, Explore the Collections is very intuitive and easy to navigate. A new user can easily get oriented by simply browsing within the various categories on the landing page. Experts can utilize search tools, facets, and filters that are germane to library research databases.
The landing page is like a museum lobby, prompting you to explore new exhibitions and engage with the permanent collection. For instance, their current exhibit on Beatrix Potter, the renowned English children’s book writer, has a dedicated section rich with resources that was recently featured on the homepage. Users who go down this rabbit hole (pardon the pun) will find highlights from the exhibition and learn more about the artist through interactive materials.
The Beatrix Potter exhibit exemplifies how seamlessly Explore the Collections interoperates with the V&A’s catalog. If you click on the “Search Collections” option below the highlighted materials in this section it generates a catalog query for “Potter, Beatrix”. That button redirects users to an interface where they can explore the collection by performing searches and utilize facets to navigate through results.
Explore the Collections is a work in progress. Only half of the V&A’s collection is discoverable in the system as of Spring 2022, so it’s difficult to assess how well it will scale to the items from their library and archives. Based on the limited bibliographic materials accessible now, there are several discrepancies between the metadata available in the National Art Library’s catalog and the new system. For example, one of the resources users can discover in Explore the Collections is William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World. What the user won’t learn in this instance is that there’s a corresponding catalog record for this book in the National Art Library’s OPAC (hosted on Worldcat Discovery). This omission is unfortunate because the OPAC record offers a robust description that is rich with subject headings, local notes about unique physical characteristics of the book, and an external link to a digitized copy that is openly accessible on Internet Archive.
One of the key takeaways from the aforementioned usability study is the importance of making the V&A more transparent with their digital assets. In fact, it specifically mentions the need to share “further relevant information in the archives or the National Library.” Hopefully the designers working on “Explore the Collection” will continue collaborating with their colleagues in the library and archive to ensure that project achieves its vision while fulfilling the needs of stakeholders from the libraries and archives.
Overall, “Explore the Collections” stands out as a promising proof of concept. The project still has a long way to go, but it provides a digital foundation for the V&A can build upon and optimize. For those of us who cannot visit the museum in person, “Explore the Collections” is a viable way to view a collection of valuable resources “that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.”