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Background

The Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) is a federal, not-for-profit museum that produces exhibits and information related to nature, wildlife and the environment.

Their online real estate includes more than 4,000 highly informative web pages. CMN engaged non~linear creations (NLC) to aggregate and categorize this vast array of information so the public can better access the museum’s rich, online resources.
 
.NET, faceted search

 

  Where the natural world takes centre stage
 

Solution

After thoroughly researching user behavior on the CMN site, the NLC team developed a custom built meta-tagger application that was seamlessly integrated into CMN’s internal web content publishing workflow, which:

  • Provides the structure to effectively categorize information so that queries consistently return relevant search results
  • Ensures consistency of classification and tagging in both new and legacy content
  • Sorts search results by file type, such as image, article, video or game, so that users don’t waste their time exploring irrelevant content types
  • Allows users to search by broad categories of interest (i.e.: birdwatching) as well as by highly refined requirements (i.e.: images of birds native to Quebec).

Outcome

In developing custom technology to re-categorize the museum’s legacy content, NLC delivered significant value to the organization without having to re-invent the wheel. The meta-tagging tool our team developed integrates seamlessly with the faceted search functions of the site, making the back end as easy to navigate as the front end.

Users get satisfying search results and easy-to-navigate pages; content authors get a structured and intuitive system that guides content creation and classification.