• Solution & Case Studies
• Worthing Borough Council
• National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
• University of Portsmouth
• OPW Heritage Ireland
• Specsavers Optical Group
• Bahrain Ministry of Information

Creating an Interactive Heritage Resource

www.heritageireland.com

The Office of Public Works’ (OPW) chief responsibility is the ownership, upkeep, and maintenance of Irish Government public and historic buildings throughout the Republic of Ireland. The OPW Heritage Services are essentially conservation and presentation orientated with core functions centred on managing, maintaining and preserving over 750 national monuments in Ireland.

The Requirement

Heritage Ireland is the website for Visitor Services, and one of nine OPW sites powered by Site Manager.The Heritage Services website is required to target Irish web users as well as foreign tourists visiting Ireland. Key to its success is be the ability to provide the public with interactive maps, photographs, detailed descriptions and visitor information on historic sites, buildings, gardens of seven different regions in Ireland. Other key requirements centre on multilanguage functionality and Web 2.0 features.

Process, challenges and solution

OPW recognised that such a large project needed specialist skills and technology in order to successfully collate the masses of information contained within hundreds of heritage locations across seven regions in Ireland. The Heritage Ireland site would function as a main site to hundreds of micro sites on various heritage locations, national gardens and historic buildings. Examples of micro sites include sites for Castetown House, Battle of the Boyne, Kilkenny Castle and the Phoenix Park. A robust and scaleable solution proved to be of paramount importance.

With a core requirement on user interaction and increased traffic, multilanguage and web 2.0 functinality such as interactive mapping, extensive calendar functionality and user collaboration features were vital. Site Manager forms part of a select group of content management systems that are able to successfully manage large multilingual websites. Its scalability ensures that Site Manager can successfully manage a vast volume of content with minimum effort. Its full multilanguage support streamlines content management on large multilingual websites. When a piece of content is added to the system in one language, it is possible to link the content with its language ‘twin’ so that any changes in one language, will automatically be reflected in its language twins. Following a public procurement process and consultation, TERMINALFOUR was chosen to deliver a high quality, scalable and flexible enterprise web content management solution. As a company with around sixty government and public sector customers, many in the heritage field, TERMINALFOUR offered the technology and government know-how to streamline the process of bringing the complete heritage archive online. The solution is based on TERMINALFOUR’s Site Manager content management system. This easy-to-use CMS provides OPW with a very practical and efficient platform to meet its evolving requirements.

The outcome

The website has proved to be a great success for the OPW. TERMINALFOUR’s innovative yet practical approach ensured that the new website gave contributors an easy-to-use interface for keeping content, including events information, constantly up to date. The new site is targeted at Irish viewers and international tourists visiting Ireland, thanks to Site Manager’s multi-language functionality. The site is published in eight languages: English, Irish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Polish. The system capability to expand the number of languages allows the site to adjust as the source of foreign visitors changes over time. The new site boasts an extensive mapping facility, which allows users to find heritage sites by geographic region and locate places of interest near to particular towns or areas they will be visiting. The website also includes an extensive rotating photo gallery of all the listed historical sites, drawn from the OPW’s and Department of Environment, Heritage & Local Government’s archives.

Site Manager’s flexible platform with a growing number of modules is allowing for the introduction of more and more web 2.0 and user generated content features.An extensive calendar marks special events, and can be filtered by region, county or specific venue. Information can also be added, amended and published instantly, so that the records are consistently an accurate representation of current information. The Heritage Ireland site has already become an invaluable resource for researchers, students and history and architecture enthusiasts. The website experienced a marked increase in traffic (by more than 350,000 visitors in the last six months), 66% of those from abroad.