Muzeums app update

A guest blog by Andrea Cioni, developer apprentice at Oimmei.

A project by Oimmei, an Italian agency for web and mobile development, the Muzeums app creates interactive, fun and educational user experiences for museums and art galleries. The app, available in iOS and Android, allows users to look for museums online, go through their catalogues and participate in experiences, such as trivia and scavenger hunts, related to the artworks in exhibitions.

Muzeums has recently added a new component to its functionality: an import tool that integrates Europeana content. This new tool was created during my internship at Oimmei, as part of my computer sciences studies at the University of Pisa.

The Europeana importer is primarily a tool for museum managers. It allows them to add information about the artworks on exhibition, sourcing existing data from Europeana Collections rather than creating everything from scratch. It enables them to search items on Europeana by applying a number of filters and to review and enrich an item’s data information. Once satisfied the user can import the new item into the Muzeums database and use it on the platform.

While developing the importer, we created two user interfaces on the web portal using the JavaScript library Polymer: the first one can be used to search for items, the second one for viewing, modifying and saving the information about a single item. Most of our work involved implementing the Europeana APIs on the server side in order to search the Europeana database, parse the results and display them to the user.

The importer is out of beta stage, and it will be published with the next version of the Muzeums web portal by end of April.

For more information, contact [email protected]