Case Study: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation made the decision to make their permanent collection of artwork available on the Web. In selecting a platform, they had a number of criteria.Any platform would need to be extremely robust, stable, and secure, because the collection site was expected to experience extremely high traffic. In particular, the site needed to be able to handle traffic "spikes," which were likely to be associated with media events.
Because the Guggenheim staff updates the collection frequently, they required that users with limited technical expertise be able to update the site without support. They also required that the updates go through an approval process, so that changes could be previewed and reviewed before being published.
Because the collection database contains extensive meta-information, users needed to be able to view the data in a wide variety of ways: by artist, title, concept, medium, date, or keyword. Full-text search was also a requirement, as was the ability to automatically establish relationships: for example, where an artist biography happens to mention a piece of work (by that artist or any other) the title should automatically link to that work.
Finally, because the visual requirements for the site were extremely exacting, any solution would have to be completely flexible - there was no ability to compromise the appearance of the site based on any limitations in the software.
The Guggenheim selected SPS to complete the site, and contracted with ARTiculate, who worked with CNH to perform the implementation. The project was completed under budget and before the scheduled delivery date. The site launched without any problems in January 2001, and can be seen at guggenheimcollection.org.
The Guggenheim staff routinely updates this site through the SPS interface. It includes over 5,000 pages of content.
In 2003, the Guggenheim expanded the ways in which SPS helps them to manage their own site. With Clever Name Here's help they created the Las Vegas site guggenheimlasvegas.org which includes works from the permanent collection; these works are administered through the same SPS interface, but are published to entirely different templates.
The Guggenheim has recently completed a project to place additional sections of their site, such as their calendar and education pages on the main New York site, at guggenheim.org under SPS control, so they can update them without needing a developer. Altogether, the Guggenheim now manages over 10,000 pages of content through SPS.
